ANTIDOTE PROJECTS PRESENTS A SOLO EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY FRANK POLLARD AT CHICAGO'S MDW FAIR

ANTIDOTE at the MDW FAIR FALL CHICAGO SHOWCASE
Booths 301 & 312
October 21-23 at The Geolofts, 3636 S. Iron St.
Vernissage: Friday, Oct. 21, 8-11pm
Saturday & Sunday Noon to 6pm
$5 Admission

Join ANTIDOTE and Chicago's MDW Fair this Friday through Sunday, October 21-23, for a solo exhibition of works by Chicago artist Frank Pollard. The work presented by Pollard at MDW is an archive of artifacts and environments that Pollard discovered during lucid dreams. Pollard has had intense lucid dreams since he was young. Over time, the dreams have begun to form their own narratives. Often, Pollard will return to similar places and encounter people that he only interacts with while sleeping. The work is a documentation of the structures that were created in the dreams necessary to survive in a world without rules. Sometimes, like normal dreams, they can be introspective and fulfilling, complicated with riddles or actions that may seem like personal prophecies. “The Agency,” an unknown organization responsible for the system of survival in these dreams, is a possible combination of the artist's upbringing in the military and his Japanese family. The agency provides him with resources to continue his research, and exploration of this very dangerous landscape. In return for this support, all data gathered is filtered through a military-like bureaucracy with unknown goals. They betray some latent cold-war anxiety, as well as a love for science fiction, horror films and literature. Over the years, Pollard's dreams have become richer and more self-referential. Through this process, he is able to see them as funny, absurd, terrifying, disgusting, fascinating, and mundane.

Pollard's painting archives are a visual reference to the artificial life and memories that are as real to him as going to the corner store. The first painting archive is of “monsters I have spoken to.” The interactions with these beasts range from brief and simple to terrifying. The “objects of interest” archive is a collection of strange objects found in these dreams. Some are the crux of the dream narrative, while others may be important later in another dream’s narrative. The last archive is a collection of uniforms the artist saw being worn by The Agency and other outside organizations. Naturally, there is some visual discrepancy from memory to finished painting.

Pollard's sculptures are an attempt to construct replicas of the environments and objects from his lucid dreams in an attempt to make artifacts from an experience he did not physically have. The sculptures are miniature dioramas constructed like small movie sets. Many of these fake sets are photographed to provide convincing documentation of these unreal places. Similarly, the artist's video works serve as fabricated artifacts. The videos are made to look like videos made from the lucid dreams. Many of them are internal interrogation tapes that The Agency has produced. For these videos, Pollard dresses models in Agency uniforms and interrogates them needlessly. Pollard's other videos are documentation of these artificial diorama environments. Pollard's videos also operate as surveillance footage of these environments, or documentation of his explorations of these dream spaces. All of these works act like a visual exploration journal of an unknown frontier. Narratives intersect and diverge as the flora and fauna of this lucid dream world grows deeper and more visceral.

ABOUT ANTIDOTE
ANTIDOTE is a roving, independent curatorial and exhibition platform co-founded by Michael Workman and Berlin-based sculptor Edouard Steinhauer in 2009. Conceived as an occasional project-based initiative, ANTIDOTE takes a collaborative approach to the cultivation of unconventional formal approaches to audience engagement. ANTIDOTE serves as an independent curatorial platform to advocate for and disseminate the works of underrepresented artists from Chicago, Brooklyn and locations notable for their artist’s communities elsewhere, specifically through special presentations and exhibitions at art fairs, publications, educational programming, and other nontraditional forms of curatorial programming, with an aim to exploring unorthodox distribution systems for disseminating artist’s works. ANTIDOTE only showcases artists who have been carefully selected for visual work that consistently centers on the development of intricate imaginative world or system-based constructions, dematerialization of traditional forms, and/or whose work otherwise counters the purely object-based approach to art-making. As such, often these artists have been overlooked by the art world, since their approach often problematizes the conventions of or confounds audience expectations surrounding the industry’s cultivated preference for traditional object-based modes.

ANTIDOTE Facebook page

PRESS INQUIRIES
Michael Workman
michael@visualartnetwork.com
+1-312-754-8213