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The photo gallery of Indi go Art Gallery, downtown Champaign. Photo by Lu Huang

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Indi Go artist co-op »
Address: 9 E. University Ave. Champaign, IL 61820
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From March 25 to 27, Indi Go Artist Co-Op will host an exhibition of photography-based projects by Valerie Oliveiro and Jeff Kolar entitled “Transient/Transmissions.” For the past year or so, Oliveiro has been interested in ideas of space and memory. Provoked by a new series of photographs, which she has titled “0-9,” Oliveiro decided to plan an exhibition. Oliveiro approached Kolar, whose work also addresses issues of social space, to show with her.

“She told me that this piece was what she had been searching for, for a long time, and that she finally found it with ‘0-9,’” Kolar said.

Abandoned interiors have become important sites for Oliveiro. “I’m interested in a space when it’s about to become something else,” said Oliveiro. “It’s never going to be this particular set of circumstances again.”

Oliveiro plans to include a small series of photographs she shot in Champaign’s Orpheum Theater, just three hours before renovations were about to start. These images of empty interiors provide a nostalgic, yet rather eerie, reminder that these spaces were once occupied and witnessed a build up of human activity.

“0-9” is series of 10 photographs taken in the empty New York apartment of the late John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Although this space once housed some of the most influential American artists of the 20th century, Oliveiro is more interested in the human aspect that the quiet and bare apartment interior reveals. Oliveiro’s hesitancy to disclose the element of celebrity that Cage and Cunningham bring to these photographs reveals the instability and impressionability of memory. Oliveiro would rather allow viewers an uninterrupted experience. “I am then very interested in that shift viewers may feel when they realize whose house that once was,” explained Oliveiro.

Kolar will exhibit two projects, “What Hath God Wrought” and “Balloon Creations.” Both of these pieces function as documentation of his interventionist strategies. Kolar works with sound and the idea of frequency to expose, interrupt and question pre-existing social systems.

The link between Oliveiro and Kolar’s work is the sense that the structures that compose and affect our lives are fragile and easily influenced. Both artists focus on the quiet moments of the everyday and allow viewers to ponder the build up of information both in a specific space and in their own imaginations.

The opening reception for “Transient/Transmissions” will be from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Thursday, March 25.