Though Rena Leinberger had never made a video, she had a strange thought while lying in bed in late 2003. She’d been diagnosed with mono, had had a migraine that lasted two weeks, and was sleeping 16 hours a day. Suddenly she flashed on the idea of making a potato video. “This is kind of nutty,” she thought. She didn’t do it–in fact she was too sick to make any art. When she started again she knit giant mismatched pairs of stockings that represented, she says, “the futility of domestic labor” (they reminded her of “the way things always get lost in the laundry”). When these were exhibited in a New York gallery, she knew something was missing but wasn’t sure what. Sometime later she bought some potatoes and “they found their way” under pieces of corduroy she’d sewn into a 15-foot-long strip. Then she knew what her work needed: potatoes.
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Leinberger’s current show at Zg includes potatoes “hiding” under the long corduroy strip (Unearth/Hallway), potatoes stuffed into five-foot-long socks (Close Enough, Squirreled Away), and a video of potatoes cascading down a stairway (Into the Cellar). There are ink drawings of potatoes, six photographs of potatoes arranged in the artist’s apartment, and an installation, To Fill, in which potatoes sit on the gallery’s window ledges and pipes. Blurring the boundaries between image and actuality, Leinberger has created a collage that includes potato shapes cut out of sandpaper (For Length of Days), a photograph of a wardrobe with the door open and potatoes stacked inside (Harvest), and a wooden bucket she carved with two potatoes at the bottom (To the Infirmary).
While studying at the School of the Art Institute for her MFA, which she received in 2002, Leinberger became interested in “interior spaces and common domestic things” in the work of Guillermo Kuitca, Rachel Whiteread, and Doris Salcedo. Seeking to translate spaces into different materials, she made a model of the floorboards in an Art Institute gallery using more than 4,000 sticks of gum. “I would tend to work completely in silence,” she says. “It was a meditative process, with the same kind of appeal that knitting holds for me now. I hoped I was altering things through materials and scale to make them a bit less familiar, a bit more psychologically uncomfortable.” At Gallery 400 she placed plaster casts of its hinges and doorknobs in an otherwise empty room. “I was interested in having the space itself spread and grow on its own, like a virus.”
Where: Zg, 300 W. Superior
