Michelle Grabner

Brad Kiliam

Michelle Grabner
1962 born in Oshkosh, WI

Brad Killam
1964 born in Park Ridge, IL

Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam have collaborated together since 1992.
They operate the exhibition space, The Suburban, in Oak Park, IL

They have curated numerous international exhibitions with artists from North America and Europe

Grabner has written extensively in exhibition catalogues and periodicals such as Frieze, Art Text, Tema Celeste and XTRA. Killam has contibuted to New Art Examiner, Tema Celeste and NU

They both teach at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Grabner is also Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin

Picnic Table/Two Gardens

In 1997 Chicago artist Dan Peterman created a 100-foot long picnic table with recycled plastics as a public art exhibition in Chicago's Grant Park titled Chicago’s Front Yard Picnic. Its absurd length gave visual form to the social and cultural values of community, togetherness, shared meals and outdoor gathering. This table, although functional and readily used by park-goers was more effective as a metaphor, representing these ideals multiplied onehundred times.

Our project, »Picnic Table/Two Gardens« embraces the very same ideological convictions Peterman's table evokes but in a more modest and plausible manner. In the abstract, »community« and »togetherness« are virtuous forms of hu-manity's social potential, but in practice these ideals are riddled with obstacles that spring from our individual, autonomous nature. By creating a picnic table that is shared by two garden properties we will redirect these sociological issues from the abstract to the local, from the ideal to the specific.

Bird Conversation

»Bird Conversation« is a tangential project that overlays these very same issues on the natural world. With an audio projection of neighborhood bird calls and songs from a suburb in the middle of United States, transposed to a suburban neighborhood in central Germany, we enroll the animal world in our perennial human dichotomy between the social and the individual self.

In addition, birds (crows, blue jays, house sparrows, cardinals) from the upper Mississippi are falling victim to the mosquito transmitted West Nile Virus. We are playing with the fictional idea that bird communication extends beyond the biological to the narrative. That territorial and mating calls are intermingled with stories and reports of a mid-western bird's life.

Übergreifende Installation im Garten Rischel/Heinz

Löwensternweg 5

und im Garten Kühl

Löwensternweg 7

Vogelfrei wird gefördert von der Schreinerei Artus, Darmstadt/Arheiligen