Since she moved here in 1994 for graduate school at the University of Illinois, Helen Mirra has become one of the city’s best-known artists, with recent exhibits in New York and Germany and upcoming shows in Tokyo and Paris. But now, as happens all too often when a Chicago artist achieves recognition, she’s moving away, first for a year’s residency in Berlin and then to teach art at Harvard.
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Mirra’s art physicalizes things that aren’t physical in the usual sense. Her dad made educational films and videos, and he’d check out films from the public library and screen them at home. Handling 16-millimeter film and running the family’s projector herself as a child, Mirra was struck by the difference between the physical strip, with its individual still images, and the projected moving illusion. She loved Mr. Magoo, in part because of his accidents of vision. “He’s not dumb, but he misconstrues things, so he thinks he’s in a movie theater while he’s on an airplane,” she says. “It seems at least partly willful misunderstanding.”
Mirra’s belief in nonoriginality stems from a sense of interdependence with other people and the natural world. At a Unitarian summer camp she encountered “progressive ideas about equity and respect and cooperation,” and the Montessori school she attended encouraged students to observe cause and effect. By making pretzels, the kids learned “that snacks don’t come out of thin air.” By high school she was reading the Black Mountain poets, which led her to John Cage, who taught at Black Mountain College. Studying
When: Through July 16
