Kruger Gallery Chicago Hosts Artist Talk

Kruger Gallery Chicago announces its first ever Artist Talk in its newly opened 1,300-square-foot space in the City’s Lakeview neighborhood, located at 3709 North Southport Ave. On Wednesday, February 25th residents can meet local artist Heather Green from 6-8 p.m. and participate in a dynamic discussion regarding art, gender and race. Green will discuss the inspiration behind her current exhibition, Victims & Villains. Join Kruger Gallery and Heather Green as current social events regarding gender and race are discussed. Committed to an avant-garde ideal that art can be an agent for social and political change, Kruger Gallery Chicago represents emerging artists working in a variety of media ad design.

Victims and Villains explores two bodies of work. The first body of work is based on the mug shot—an archival image used by law enforcement, but disseminated to the public as a dehumanized portrait of a “criminal,” often before being tried in a court of law. Compelled to pursue justice, Green analyzes and re-imagines the mug shots of Marissa Alexander, George Zimmerman, and others, searching for the raw emotion behind each person’s eyes as representation of their inner experience. While the external signals villain, the disquieted, poignant expression of each mug shot also alludes to an internal paradigm of victim.

The second body of work, #yesallwomen, scrutinizes rape culture, specifically looking at the Steubenville rape case of 2012 and the subsequent conviction of Trent Mays and Ma’lik Richmond in 2013. Blurring the portraits of people who hide behind social media to judge and criticize, Green cuts from the page-stenciled dialogue from twitter feeds that were posted in the aftermath of the Mays/Richmond trial. The negative spaces of each cutout letter give pause to the undercurrent of misogyny and rape apologism that is pervasive in our society.