CHICAGO, IL.- As we are all enmeshed in the flow of time, we are all implicated in the making of history. Our connections to current conflicts occuring in distant corners of the world or even of our own city can feel just as remote as acts of mass violence in previous centuries – yet the logic and consequences of such situations reverberate through the power dynamics we experience on a daily basis. The artists featured in Weight of a World – Alison Ruttan, Deborah Stratman, and Orkideh Torabi – experiment within the boundaries of sculpture, film, and painting respectively in order to elucidate the tacit connections between ourselves and faraway others, between ourselves and the land we live upon, between ourselves and the power structures that propel our ways of being. In doing so, they subtly yet firmly suggest the possibility of destabilizing seemingly inevitable orders to reconfigure our world into an incrementally more just, more compassionate, more sustainable place.

Alison Ruttan's current works in ceramics function as aestheticized scale models of contemporary ruins caused by the destruction of war. Her sculptures of bombed out urban dwellings underscore the violence that civilians endure throughout the course of war. Her works look to recent devastation of Syrian cities in order to call into question the distance at which we as Americans survey international warfare – isn't it terrible , we can think, when seeing images through the bulletproof glass windows of our newsfeeds. Ruttan's sculptures concretize violence but keep it at a manageable scale to both emphasize and call into question the privileges of distance.

Deborah Stratman's experimental documentary film The Illinois Parables remains grounded in our home state while traveling through the centuries. These vignettes link the stories of diverse subjects, from indigenous peoples to natural disaster survivors. The common landscape connects these seemingly disparate stories of upheaval, violence, and struggle in order to illuminate the common threads of human endurance in the face of unimaginable difficulties. Even if they cannot readily be seen at first glance, our histories are etched into the land on which they unfold.

Orkideh Torabi's paintings, made using a unique transfer process of fabric dye on cotton, depict oafish men in garish, sickly colors. These caricatures incorporate lush patterns and imagery from traditional Persian miniatures in order to emphasize the connections between power dynamics of the past and the present. She renders her male subjects as goofy and goggle–eyed in order to rattle the patriarchal precedent of her home country Iran, and of contemporary society at large.

In concert with Weight of a World , artist and teacher Rebecca Keller will lead a group of creative thinkers in a generative project that adds to her ongoing endeavor Excavating History, a curriculum and collaborative practice that she has honed over the years. Excavating History has previously taken the forms of classes, exhibitions, and a book that question the ways that histories are inscribed and encourage participants to probe the metaphoric heft of objects. Keller's new iteration of the project will see three meetings take place in the gallery during Weight of a World . These sessions, Keller's artistic contribution to the exhibition, will yield responsive work from the group of participants.

Weight of a World is inspired by and presented in partnership with Facing History and Ourselves, an international nonprofit educational organization which engages students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. Through online and in–person professional development and their free library of classroom resources, Facing History and Ourselves encourages students and teachers to confront the development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide in order to make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.