Art on the Mart has announced two new artists for the fall, both heavy hitters in the field of digital and video art. Projections by Yiyun Kang and a return of videos by Charles Atlas will play nightly from mid-September to mid-November.
For those who haven’t checked in on the popular public art display lately, Art on the Mart makes a video screen out of the entire south facade of the Merchandise Mart (or rather, The Mart, the landmark Chicago building formerly known as the Merchandise Mart). Obscura Digital of San Francisco oversaw the installation in 2018 of 34 projectors just across the Chicago River from The Mart, which deliver about a million lumens of light onto the building, a display of some 2.5 acres in size. Their multimillion-dollar installation was paid for by Vornado Realty Trust, which owns the building. All those lumens are precisely aimed so that they only illuminate building walls, not the hundreds of south-facing windows.
The free shows, which have accompanying audio, run nightly and are best viewed from the Riverwalk on Wacker Drive between Wells Street and Franklin Street.
In the announcement, Kang’s show, titled “Only in the Dark,” is described as a response to “the environmental crisis and the unfathomable power and intelligence of AI technologies.” The first scene suggests a shifting structure of The Mart, a second is about the coexistence of nature and humans and a final vignette depicts a human dancing in water.
Atlas’ projection, titled “The Geometry of Thought,” debuted for Art on the Mart in fall 2019, and is a combination of shapes and numbers that are revealed over eight chapters. (The Art Institute also will have the video artist’s newly acquired work “The Years” on display in December.)
Both works will play nightly at 7:30 p.m. from Sept. 14 to Nov. 15, best viewed from the Riverwalk on Wacker Drive between Wells Street and Franklin Street; more information at artonthemart.com