Towering

April 16 - May 22, 2021

St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present Towering. Towering opens on Friday, April 16 in Monaco’s Main Gallery and features a mixed media installation by Monaco members and collaborators Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson.  The exhibition runs through May 22, 2021. Please e-mail info@monacomonaco.us to make an appointment to visit the exhibition. 

Imposing figures, and often overlooked.

Transmission towers dot the Midwestern landscape. Quietly working to connect. Collaborators Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson look to these familiar structures in Towering, a mixed-media installation at Monaco. Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson have worked as studio and curatorial collaborators since 2012. Their work ranges from immersive installation to works on paper – each outcome revealing how shared ideas that orbit anxiety, the Midwest, humor and vulnerability manifest as physical works. The collaborative process considers shared experience. They rely on the use of subjects or rituals that are familiar to an audience, but that also aspire to recalibrate how familiar icons are interpreted, taking one set of things and turning and transitioning them into something else.

Please e-mail info@monacomonaco.us to make an appointment,  we hope to see you soon.

Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson have exhibited collaboratively at venues that include the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago), E. Tay Gallery (New York), Museum Blue (St. Louis), Roman Susan (Chicago), Ski Club (Milwaukee), Outhaus (Urbana), Co-Prosperity Sphere (Chicago), The Franklin (Chicago), University Galleries at Illinois State (Normal), and Des Lee Gallery at Washington University (St. Louis). Their work has been featured in the New Art Examiner, NewCity Chicago, the Riverfront Times, Sixty Inches From Center, and Floor Magazine. They received a collaborative artist residency award from ACRE (Chicago) and  they have each, independently, served as HATCH Projects curatorial  residents with the Chicago Artists Coalition. In 2020, they were awarded with the Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council for their collaborative work. 

They both work at the University of Illinois Springfield where they co-curate exhibition programming for the Visual Arts Gallery. In 2013, they co-founded DEMO Project, a contemporary art gallery in Springfield, where they served as co-directors of the space until its demolition in 2018. They co-organized the Terrain Biennial at Enos Park, a large-scale exhibition of site-specific public art, in both 2017 and 2019, and they serve on the Board of Directors for Terrain Exhibitions in Oak Park.