Carla Preiss

About the Exhibition

Carla Preiss is a Chicago-based artist whose work examines the intersection of art, fashion, and sexuality. Preiss is the first artist who has been invited by the MCA to create a work specifically for the museum’s atrium space. Her project will consist of mirrored plexiglass cut in a leopard-print design and affixed in a pattern that spreads across both walls of the atrium space. Preiss’s work often features a deliberate interaction between a specific design and an exhibition space. The material will not only reflect the natural light coming in through the windows of the space, but will also reflect the visitors’ images as they pass through the space. Her work also takes a familiar pattern and creates an abstract work of art from it by removing it from its expected context of clothing design.

Preiss has recently shown in solo exhibitions at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Museo del Barrio, New York in 1996, and the Hartnett Gallery, University of Rochester, New York, in 1995. She co-curated and exhibited in the exhibition Installation View at Art Chicago 1997, and was featured in a two-person exhibition with Arturo Herrera at Thread Waxing Space in New York in 1996. Preiss received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1994 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 1991.