Distance Intimacy

Stephanie Brooks

February 24 - April 5, 2009

Distance Intimacy focuses on artwork Brooks has created since 2002, supplemented by a selection of her earlier work for historical context. The title of the exhibition derives from a series of sonnets the artist composed using actual email sign-offs from personal correspondence.

As the exhibition title suggests, much of Brooks’ recent work occupies an interzone between distance and intimacy, personal and impersonal. Among the sources she transforms through formal reduction are love poetry, family photographs, cherished books, and other totems of ubiquitous sentimentality. While the scale and subject matter of her work are intimate, the artist subverts their welcome through abstraction, slyly distilling verses down to place-holding punctuation marks, or reducing books of love poems into blank wooden blocks which retain only their sources’ dimensions.

Stephanie Brooks lives and works in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Berlin, Chicago, Denmark, London, Los Angeles, New York, Vienna, and Phoenix. She teaches sculpture and writing classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her B.F.A. from Ohio University.

Curated by Kendra Paitz