USSA State Farm
Zachary Cahill
USSA: STATE FARM
Illinois Weslyan University
Ames School of Art
Merwin Gallery
6 Ames Plaza West
Bloomington, Illinois, USA
August 31st - October 1st, 2015
Artist talk, September 3rd, 4-5pm
Reception, September 3rd, 5-6pm
“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimson-weed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping Charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother’s hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A Sunflower, four more one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”
~ David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
USSA: STATE FARM claims that farming is the primary scene of contemporary culture. The Farm is not simply a "site of cultural production" but a fundamental locus from which to consider our contemporary Lebenswelt.
Put plainly: there is no culture without cultivation.
USSA: STATE FARM brings together for the first time a selection of works from Zachary Cahill's USSA project. Works from The Orphanage Project at threewalls, Chicago (2011); The People Palace's Gift Shop at the Chicago Cultural Center (2012); and the Wellness Center at the MCA Chicago and the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014). Conceived as an ongoing narrative of nation building, the USSA draws on various media and forms to create meta-infrastructures that do not mimic past or present ideological systems, but sets forth to propose something else; with all the hopeful and problematic resonances that implies.
Curated by Ian Carey. They designed it.
***This exhibition is dedicated to David Foster Wallace
Gallery Hours
Monday-Friday 12-4pm
Tuesday evening 7-9pm
Saturday & Sunday 1-4pm
Free and open to the public
