Visiting artist Dan Devening has made tangible the layered and hindering atmosphere regarding both the physicality and process of stand-alone market places.

Devening is a mixed media artist coming to Eastern to display his exhibit.

“Kiosk” is open to the Charleston community beginning Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the Atrium of the Tarble Arts Center.

Devening said his exhibit is a creative interpretation of the functionality of kiosks.

“It’s inspired by the advertising kiosks that you see – where people post bills for bands so the work gets layered and it interferes with each other as it’s hanging from this pole,” he said.

Devening puts an emphasis on the assembling process of a kiosk in his exhibit, which incorporates the fetishizing of hooks and hand-sewn fastens.

“A lot of the work I do is about assembling all these different parts into something that is rather quick and trying to make something that is interesting formally and conceptually that doesn’t involve a lot of process,” he said.

Devening, an adjunct professor in the painting department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has been teaching for 30 years as well as directing and curating his own gallery, “Devening Projects + Editions.”

“I used to spend a lot more time making large abstract oil painting that were very process-oriented,” he said. “Since my practice has become this kind of mix of working with other artists and making my own work I’ve had to develop this kind of studio practice that takes place in between the cracks of doing all theses other things.”

The delicate hang of a small hook and the abruptness of interfering levels are what fascinates Devening about the apparatuses; he is interested in the way subjects attach themselves to one another.

Similarly, William Conger, a Chicago-based painter and professor at Northwestern

University, said something he admires about Devening’s work is the fluidity between media.

Conger added that the consistency in the concept behind Devening’s pieces is something to take note of.

“I think the interesting consistency in his 2D and 3D work is how he invites the viewers to examine the individual pieces of art from several perspectives and not just frontally,” he said.

The revealing of Devening’s exhibit will begin with a lecture from the artist on his creative process.

Since the artist works with a variety of media, he said he hopes to express what those platforms mean in relation to his work.

“I think it’s interesting when you find out from artists what they’re thinking about and what informs the work rather than what the work is about,” Devening said.

Regarding this particular exhibit, Conger suggests the intention behind

Devening’s work might have been an existential one.

“Even the smartly designed kiosks found in shopping malls and tourist zones excuse their confusing plethora of information with the ubiquitous ‘you are here’ arrow reminding you that your own self-conscious gaze is crucial in making sense of the world,” he said.

He believes Devening’s display of the purpose and build of a Kisok is a take on this mundane, but telling process of trying to make sense of things.

“Devening leads us to a resolution of the classic paradoxical question: is art in the object or in the viewer?” he said.

Katie Smith can be reached at 581-2812 or dennewsdesk@gmail.com.