For its entry in ABSOLUT VISION 8, A World of Art in Chicago, FLATFILEcontemporary will present THINK ART, featuring the visionary work of Dr. Audrius Plioplys, with a project room video installation by Cheselyn Amato. The exhibition will open with a reception from 5 to 9 on Friday, July 18th, and continue through noon August 22nd.

Dr. Plioplys’ work consists of colorful large scale (up to 10 feet long) digitally created and printed images on canvas wherein a brain scan is superimposed over a photograph. The thought processes of the subject are exposed in the seemingly random abstraction of the scan, which is then reversed and overlaid on the image that is the subject of the thoughts. The image shows through these scratchy lines, hinting at the genesis of the thoughts. Though far less imposing, this provocative work is also available as work on paper, which can be mounted or framed.

Interested in and creating art for most of his life, Plioplys, who prefers to be called “Andy”, began this body of work several years ago, and has watched it grow, morph and mature into the form it takes today. Born in Canada (he is a dual US/Canadian citizen), Plioplys has taken technology that is routine in his field as a Pediatric Neuro-Researcher, and bent it to the purpose of personal artistic expression. In his “day job” Plioplys is a well-known and oft-published researcher that tackles the likes of Cerebral Palsy and other neuromuscular disorders. His art provides a much-needed creative outlet for a man who spends his day dealing with the mystery and stress of such conditions.

Cheselyn Amato, who is a Chicago artist and adjunct professor at the School of the Art Institute, works with equal grace in various mediums. Although her small, delicately intriguing patterned paper collages are well known, Amato will fill the large project room at FLATFILEcontemporary with an installation of pillars constructed of paper balls onto which a video loop will be projected. The piece, which is part of A Temple in Honor of Life Lived Everyday - An Unfinished Song of Love, is a series of images with poetic names for prosaic spaces and events like Apparitions in the Backyard and Incantations at Home. Amato showed earlier version of the installation at the Chicago Cultural Center in 1996, at which time art critic James Yood stated in his review, “Amato’s complex installation is a highly evolved backdrop for a rumination on issues such as love, faith, thought and nurture - concepts that certainly can claim a right to enshrinement, celebration, and our attention.”