Tony Tasset: Better Me

January 14 - February 23, 2003

Tony Tasset became known in the late 1980s for precision-crafted objects. Shifting medium and style to accommodate particular ideas for artwork, the artist has increasingly turned his investigation inward; he uses his own image and other elements of his personal life—his wife, his son, his garden—"to explore conflicts of the ego and the difficulty in expressing certain sentiments in a postmodern environment where truth is relative, and in a culture of consumption where emotion is a commodity." (Tasset, 2001).

Co-curated by Barry Blinderman and Bill Conger, Tony Tasset will consist of five sculptures, three videos, and five photo works. This exhibition is in accordance with our mission to provide a diverse and critical survey of contemporary art in all media, focusing particularly on artists who have produced significant bodies of work that have neither been shown in a museum setting nor documented extensively in a publication. Along with colleagues Jeanne Dunning, Gaylen Gerber, Joe Scanlan, and Hirsch Perlman, Tasset represents Chicago's first generation of conceptual artists, departing radically from the practice of Chicago Imagists such as Ed Paschke and Roger Brown.