Isabelle Frances McGuire’s solo exhibition “Year Zero” spills out of the fourth-floor gallery of the Renaissance Society—continuing in display cases, stairwells, and the basement of the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall. Surreal, uncanny, and unrelenting in their interrogation of widely accepted historical canons, McGuire’s tableaus offer a blank canvas for consideration of how annals are created and amended. The Chicago-based artist uses cultural touchstones to emphasize play and critical consumption, exploring an expansive perspective on historicization and storytelling.

“Year Zero”
Through 2/9: Wed–Fri noon–6 PM, Sat–Sun 10 AM–6 PM, Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis, Cobb Hall, fourth floor, renaissancesociety.org/exhibitions/557/isabelle-frances-mcguire-year-zero

Imagine it is, as the title suggests, “Year Zero” and we are characters in a video game of McGuire’s making. The ruins (and the show is dystopian enough to suggest a social fracture) are loaded with vaguely familiar objects, and the artist asks us to examine the meaning in the “messy histories” they hold; for instance, she presents a life-size reproduction of a tiny reproduction of a reproduction—a fake that was presented as an original—of Lincoln’s birth cabin, Symbolic Birth Cabin Unit. Across the gallery, humanoid figures are dressed as Santa and Jesus. Lurking in what McGuire calls “the underworld” (vitrines and basements) are representations of vampires, zombies, and other nefarious characters. Time spent in this world reveals the juxtaposition of mythical “good men” (Lincoln, Santa, Jesus) with supernatural “monsters.” The silliness of these figureheads pokes fun at oversimplified binaries of morality: people are good or bad, pure or evil, and so on. 

Both curator Karsten Lund and McGuire cite Thomas Hirschhorn’s playful provocation “Energy: Yes! Quality: No!” as a prompt for this exploration; prioritizing the multistep, highly technical production process McGuire employs over a specific, neat, or “quality” outcome. Lund describes McGuire’s practice as one containing “feral energy,” with McGuire echoing that the goal is for that energy to be harnessed and “flung out as fast as possible.” To this end, the show will be activated by two forthcoming programs: an in-gallery performance by McGuire’s band, Suicide Moi, and an educational discussion with a Betsy Ross interpreter. 

Suicide Moi—which McGuire calls a “historical reenactment band”—is a collaborative art and music project with Julian Flavin and Liz Vitlin. The trio takes the (cabin) stage inside the gallery on Saturday, January 18 at 7 PM. Some of their songs are covers, others take their lyrics from films.  “Everything is stolen, including our name,” the artist says.

Elastic Arts curator Sam Clapp organized the band’s first show at the venue in March of last year. He was interested in hosting the band given the time-bending fluidity with which they integrate history with the absurd. He writes: “The band’s song ‘Jennifer 7’ is a piece of synth-pop with lyrics that drift from the personal to the historical. There’s something delightfully odd about hearing ‘1776’ whispered in the song’s chorus. For me, it’s a twist that evokes the political and psychic grandiosity of our moment.” Invoking the Revolutionary War, the romantic ballad culminates with vocalist Vitlin’s yearning “all I wanna do is kiss . . . 1776.”  The exhibition’s closing weekend will feature Philadelphian Carol Spacht, a renowned proxy for Betsy Ross, the sewist and designer of the first U.S. flag. The jingoistic legend of Ross is one of many contested histories in the exhibition, and will be further explored with a series of flag banners displayed only during special events. 

I interviewed McGuire about her practice using Gabrielle Zevin’s wildly popular book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow as a framework for the conversation. The novel traces the emergence of video game culture from the late 1980s through the present.

Erin Toale: What are the rules of your game/exhibition? 

Isabelle Frances McGuire: Rule 1: all in service of good art.

Who are the players/viewers you anticipate, and who are the characters inside the game?

I think my “game” world is one without players and isn’t aware of viewers. That absence is important. The characters/sculptures are like NPCs [non-player characters]. Everything is familiar but hollowed out. It’s a field of symbols. 

Gaming culture and discourse skew masculine—how did that inform the role gender plays in this exhibition? 

I find it difficult to stop myself from making women dressed in men’s costumes. 

What was it like world-building in three-dimensional space (physical objects in a gallery) vs. two-dimensional virtual renderings (source-coded on a screen)?

My practice began with videos and photos but I was frustrated by how contained the final pieces were. I wanted to be affected by my own work in a different way. Sometimes I still have this feeling with my individual sculptures. I want to be in their world. I don’t want small glimpses. Then I start to feel like I should go back to working with digital media.  

Does empathy play a role in your construction of these worlds? 

Empathy does not play a role in the construction of my worlds. My world is one of symbols decontextualized from their human origins.  

Playfulness pervades the exhibition, and your band is playing inside the gallery. Do you consider your practice playful and/or informed by play? 

Play is the foundation of my practice. It is important that my work is funny to me. That’s what I am looking for. When I finish a piece and say to myself, “Yeah, that’s stupid,” that’s how I know it’s good! I am an avid researcher so I already have all of my information organized before I start making a project. There has to be a point where all of that starts to fall apart. Because that humorous or stupid quality cracks things open into another realm. I’m able to have better conversations under the umbrella of play or games because those are safe spaces with low stakes. 

Video game characters are, in some ways, immortal. There are immortal beings (vampires) represented in “Year Zero.” Can you talk about your interest in immortality? 

This is an interesting question because I would say that I am interested in the limits of time. I haven’t thought about this in terms of immortality and have been more inclined to think about how I work using sculpture to model the limits of time, space, representation, and understanding. But yeah, as a byproduct of that, immortality is present in the same way a ghost is immortal. 

Video games and gameplay in general often facilitate escapism from particular traumas or offer a way to “check out” from daily stress and responsibilities. Is this show an escape? A fantasy?

I absolutely use narratives that people escape into but that isn’t how they function for me. My practice is more of a digging-in and a direct look at the usefulness of these narratives and why they continue to perpetuate. 

What video games informed this show, and what social commentary do they provide? 

The Call of Duty [COD] franchise. I model their strategies in my own work, like the repetition of American mythology, lazy historical reenactment that focuses more on power role-play than actual events, and realism that doesn’t fully hit the mark. The only thing I am missing is U.S. military funding. COD is effective military propaganda but that isn’t the only cultural purpose it serves. 

This exhibition has many supernatural elements—is the show or any of the objects within haunted? 

I work solely with haunted objects.  

Suicide Moi performance
Sat 1/18: 7 PM, Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis, Cobb Hall, fourth floor, https://renaissancesociety.org/events/1378/suicide-moi, free

Conversation with Betsy Ross
Sat 2/8: 3 PM, Swift Hall, 1025 E. 58th, third floor lecture room, renaissancesociety.org/events/1379/betsy-ross-talks-to-the-renaissance-society, free