Deposit is a participant-activated project during Byron Kim’s residency at Gallery 400. For this project, the public is asked to bring in a personal belonging to symbolically cast away over the top of the gallery wall via a tracked ladder. The wall stands three feet away from a bank of windows, which are visible from the street. Throughout the course of the exhibition, objects will accumulate arbitrarily, engaging the private and the public in a mutual process of art making that extends beyond the physical artifacts to include sound. Contributors additionally have the opportunity to describe the significance of the objects they deposit. Audio recordings of their words and voices will be catalogued as a continuous narrative that is projected into the gallery through speakers installed in the wall—a sound tapestry woven into the site that contributes an additional layer of meaning. As the exhibition continues, and materials accumulate, the results will increasingly collapse the gallery’s separate identities, blurring the boundaries between the makers and the receivers of art.

Students, faculty, visitors, art patrons, supervising artists, and facilitating artists drawn from the university and city community: all are invited to participate in the collaboration, resulting in the accretion of a collective memory manifested in physical form. This physicality—a product of singular gestures of release and relinquishment—remains hidden behind the gallery’s walls and visible from the street through windows, situating the viewer both inside and outside of the gallery. Full of playful inversions and blurred boundaries, Deposit works to complicate the relationship of public and private, galleries and communities, and creators and receivers of art.

Deposit is the second in the “Projects Series” of artist-in-residence collaborations that serve as a social and cultural bridge into the community. The series stems from relationships and resources sustained between students from UIC’s School of Art and Design and visiting artists.

Complementing its traditional role as exhibition and program venue, Gallery 400 is dedicated to partnerships with communities in pursuit of programming initiatives to expand and reframe the history, definition, and application of the arts.

Byron Kim

Deposit is made possible by the School of Art and Design, the College of Architecture and the Arts, and supported in part by grants from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the Nathan Manilow Foundation.