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ANDREW RAFACZ is a leading contemporary art gallery based in Chicago. Founded in 2002, the gallery has presented—often for the first time in Chicago—prescient exhibitions by an international roster of artists for more than a decade. The gallery represents artists from a wide spectrum of backgrounds and identities working in many mediums, connected by their respective dedication to a thoughtful, defining practice. ANDREW RAFACZ is a proud member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA)
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If given the opportunity, even with increased knowledge around the progressive brain disease known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, most football players, when asked, would relive their time on the field. The works comprising #23, dating 2008 to the present, hearken back to the artist’s own experience as a football player and coach, and extend to his recent investigations on head trauma that are a consequence of playing the sport.
This body of work explores Leonardo’s memories of the rituals of violence embedded in football—utilized to foster team unity as players are forced to not only collectively exert a certain level of aggression, but also suffer the same pain. There is a fogginess to this memory, however. Leonardo’s own conflicted relationship with the sport being reflected with the two-channel film We Went Undefeated. He asks, why, as young men, would we commit ourselves to a rite of passage that necessitates violence as a means of obtaining a sense of belonging? What continues to draw us back to this concept of ‘team’ and its associations of honor and glory, even when all evidence shows that the punishment quite literally eats away at our ability to think… to be human? In its totality, the works in #23 ask, therefore, not only what it is that we remember but how, and for what reasons, do we remember?
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