Contributing Artists

Linda Tegg and Brian M John

Exhibition Statement as Preserved in the SUGS/SITE Archives:

Mercury is an exhibition that playfully reconfigures the LeRoy Neiman Center Gallery as an active site of social encounter, aesthetic investigation and knowledge production. Linda Tegg (MFA 2016) gathers over 5,000 plants in the gallery through her living modular landscape titled One World Rice Pilaf. The Vital Light, a series of flourescent light sculptures by Brian M John (MFA 2016), acts as a source of sustainablility for the plants. With the gallery as a test site, these components will shift continually in response to each other in an exercise of coexistance and interdependence. Over the course of the exhibition, the artists will choreograph their interdependant works in a dance of varying proximities; the topography itself will become mecurial. The chemical mercury is a substance poisonous to humans yet at the same time it exists as an amorphis, animated, and metallic blob which invites play. John’s florescent tubing is composed of this active chemical element which in turn provides light to Tegg’s plants. The co-dependant elements are draen into symbiotic immediacy through this relationship. Tegg’s living, modular landscape re-imagines supermarket commodities as an inhabitable landscape. Driven by curiosity, Tegg propagates grains and legumes sourced from Chicago supermarkets resulting in a complex of dense biodiversity. One World Rice Pilaf tests the elasticity of our cultural conception of nature through an investigation of the perception of the naturalistic and utilitarian landscape. Throughout the exhibition, Tegg will embed herself within the work by arranging and care-taking. The artwork invites audiences to engage in a unique and phenomenal experience as common grains categorically shift from consumable product to a living plant community. While the organic matter in the wxhibition depends upin John’s light sculptures, the plants give The Vital Light meaning and purpose in return. The piece is at its essence an aesthetic exploration, but one imbued with necessity. These divergent priorites sometimes clash. The flourescent light bulbsare designed to emit frequencies of light tailored to plant growth. To the human eye, however, they are as eerie as they are beautiful, embodying the tension between the space’s human and non-human inhabitants.