flat pieces of paper with very straight borders, 2025
Wooden cabinets, shelf board, inkjet prints, manipulated
exhibition text, photo slides and negatives, clip frames,
archive envelopes, light strips, power cables, spiral
bound booklet, lamp, overhead projection
Slemmons collection
As a curator and educator, Rod Slemmons formed a
broad archive reflecting on the Pacific Northwest and
iconic photographs of his time by artists like Edward
Weston or Mary Ellen Mark among many others. Within
the same archive, an exhibition text by Slemmons states
that:
“We have come to place more confidence in the power of
photographs to invoke past and present realities than we
have in our own memories and perceptions.”
We can surely wonder about the diverse realities pictures
invoke these days, in times in which we seem to lose this
last bit of memory they seemed to hold—a memory that
is flooded by the vast manipulation, accessibility, and
recontextualization of visual meaning. How static is this
medium of reliability really? Where does time stop and
when does it pass through like light moving through a
photographic slide? And what does that mean for those
photographs that have been sitting in a box, tucked away
in a cabinet for the majority of their lifetime?
The material you see was pulled out of this box, and
brought back into view—performing relationships with
the structures they now linger in. The photographs
themselves shift their field of vision to be more
elaborately out of storage, now on stage. If structures
shape us, and we, in turn, build ourselves in images,
then images, too, become structures—ones we inhabit,
model after, and transform. In dialogue with words, they
shift in meaning and appearance, questioning their own
stability.
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim began to think of art as an ensemble of elements while he was painting backdrops for shows at the iconic “Staatstheater Darmstadt,”Germany. Being a part of theater productions, in which actors, props, and architectural forms play together crystallized the future path of his career. This transformative experience motivated him to think site-sensitively. He presented his work at shows like “And if we stand still long enough” at the Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany, “Voices Embodied” at the Design Museum of Chicago, and “Top 20” at the Kunstverein Heilbronn. He explores how to inform sites and vice versa via his curatorial work as co-founder of “sspatz” and “by bye” which unfolds in soon-to-be-gone factory buildings suffering from gentrification in Chicago. In the most recent years his practice and teaching at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago continues to reflect on our relationship with the environments built around us—those that shape our everyday life and are entangled with societal norms that they reflect and reinforce. In other words, the structures we inhabit and those that inhabit us. Jonas studied Media Art at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen and graduated in 2021 from The Art Academy Karlsruhe as a Meisterschüler with Professor Leni Hoffmann. From 2021 to 2023 he was awarded the DAAD – fellowship to continue his research at the Painting Department of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), from which he graduated with an MFA. In 2023 he was awarded a teaching fellowship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he is currently a Lecturer.