Logan Center Exhibitions presents Heather Kai Smith and Ali Feser: Pawing the Ground in Place

Heather Kai Smith and Ali Feser have both contributed new pieces to Pawing the Ground in Place. Feser and Smith investigate depictions of utopian dream and longing through drawing, projection, and installation. They experiment with photographic material transpositions and explore the associative potential of collecting and returning images through simultaneous techniques of figuration and abstraction. Pawing the Ground in Place will be activated and annotated further by a broader range of contributors, including C. Tai Tai and Whitney Johnson (Matchess).

Ali Feser is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural anthropologist from upstate New York. Her work uses photography’s chemical processes—manufacturing, image production, developing, and decay—as a metonymic language to conceptualize industrial capitalism and its ability to modify our senses, subjectivity, and the material constitution of the earth itself. She claims that film is the molecular “cell-form” of industrial capital, perpetually repeated through new modes of extraction and forms of desire, through text, installation, image, and performance. Feser is a University of Chicago Harper Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor. She is currently working on her book manuscript, Reproducing Photochemical Life in the World’s Imaging Capital.

Heather Kai Smith is a Calgary-based visual artist and educator. Her practice, which is rooted in drawing, investigates the medium’s communicative possibilities. The work employs graphic observation and iteration to refer to imagery of collective participation, history of communal living techniques, and organized protest. Her practice has extended itself to collaborative projects in animation, printmaking, and installation. Smith has participated in residencies in Canada, the United States, and Germany, as well as shown her work in a variety of institutional and non-conventional settings. Smith is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at The University of Chicago, where she teaches in the Department of Visual Arts. Recent independent and collaborative work has been shown at: The Vancouver Art Gallery, Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), The Walter Phillips Gallery (Banff), studio e gallery (Seattle), and The Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver).