there is a line
it is invisible yet firmly located
at its best
it is between two people
it serves to divide them, yet join them
these persons willfully obey the line
these persons form groups
groups like us, you, and I

what you always thought was your reflection
was simply your initial encounter with an idea so grand
it could not resist the gravitational force of cliche
or some sort of emulation otherwise related

do not contemplate the nature of the newly discovered space
or why or how it is where it is
don’t question how it is that the furniture became so arranged
never mind that the shards mysteriously disappear
or that the entire wall appears to buckle upon impact
or that you know not of what these sentences refer to
just willfully obey the line

the one that exists between those observing and those observed
existing aside from the problem that there is no way to discern whom is which
or perhaps because of that
the one that exists between us, you, and I

-Benjamin Bellas

Anthony Lewellen
Brian Steckel
Chris Silva
David Cuesta
& John Heenan

As well as the playful art explorations of…

Chad Kouri
Laura Berger
Luke Ramsey

“When we come together to play and be, we are truly ourselves. When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.” – Brad Colby

About Art21: Season 6

Season Six includes 13 profiles of artists from four continents gathered into four one-hour thematic episodes. This season features pioneering artists who question tradition, create innovative forms, launch experimental media, explore natural phenomena, publicly test conceptual practices, and are amongst the most active and influential artists working today.

The exhibition featured in The Franklin will consist of work from Soto and Sullivan’s private collection. Artists included in the exhibition are Jeroen Nelemans, Ryan Richey, Ryan Travis Christian, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Deborah Boardman, Dana Carter, Kirsten Leenaars, Zachary Cahill, Ann Toebbe, Melissa Oresky, Alberto Alguilar, Corinne Halbert, Meg Duguid, Heidi Norton, Paul Nudd, Maria Gaspar, Mindy Rose-Schwartz, Eric Brown, Catie Olsen, and Michael Rea. The exhibition will open on Tuesday February 14th and run through Friday March 16th.

There will be a reception for the artists on Friday February 17th from 6-9pm. On Thursday February 23rd at 3pm Catie Olsen and Erik Brown will give a talk entitled Domestic Spaces and Alternative Venues followed by a discussion of artists as collectors by Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan. All events take place in the gallery and are free and open to the public.

Last year, the Serbian-born artist’s work was celebrated in a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the title piece, The Artist Is Present, Abramović sat motionless in the museum’s atrium every day for three months; the simple act of confronting her public for the exhibition’s duration, without uttering a word, captivated viewers and brought many of them to tears.

The Chicago Humanities Festival and the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art are pleased to bring one of the 21st century’s most widely-recognized culture makers to Chicago. In this event, Abramović will give a lecture on performance and its future, reflecting on this provocative and enduring art form.

The Smart Museum of Art will present a new version of a seminal work by Abramović and her longterm partner and collaborator, the German artist Ulay. Communist Body/Fascist Body will have its world premiere within the Smart’s exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, which runs February 16–June 10, 2012.

$15 / $10 Smart and CHF members. Tickets available starting January 16 at chicagohumanities.org.

Photography: Reto Guntli. Courtesy: Sean Kelly Gallery, New York.

Many Years After, On a Sunny Afternoon

Painting by: Zhenlei Jiang
Poem by: Chris Wright

Beijing, Tokyo, Sydney, Amsterdam, Chicago. From East to West, Asian American artist Ms. Zhenlei Jiang brings the viewer an impressionistic feminine journal from a typical young woman’s life and memory. Among her memories transfigured through art are her holding her mother’s hand on the way to her first day of school, her teenage dream of being a princess, then her first kiss, her pregnancy years later and subsequent motherhood, and her rebirth after a broken relationship and enjoyment of new love. From “First Day of School,” “Enchanted Kiss,” and “The Princess and the Peacock,” to “Blue Angel” and “Lover,” this exhibit embodies appreciation of the feminine experience and, more generally, contemplation of our universal humanity. Set from East to West, these paintings show the rich self-consciousness, the path to self-knowledge, of an Asian American. Poems from American writer Mr. Chris Wright have been paired to each painting to create a dialogue with the images, and to enhance the psychological and cultural meanings of this solo exhibition from the perspective of a Western male. So, on a sunny afternoon, the artists invite you, whether man or woman, young or old, to attend this exhibit, to taste the bitter sweetness of the past and know the present in a new light.

In this upcoming Valentine season, save some time to visit the UIC Art Lounge to enjoy a joyful romantic exhibition of paintings and poems with your loved ones!

Exhibition: Many years after, on a sunny afternoon
Opening reception: February 16, 2012, Thursday 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm
Free drinks and snacks provided in the opening reception!
Venue: Art lounge, UIC student center west, 828 south Wolcott, Chicago, IL
Exhibition runs from February 13 to March 15, 2012 gallery hour Monday to Friday 9:00am to 5:00pm

Every year, the art committee of University of Illinois at Chicago selects a group of artists to show their new works. From the day before Valentine’s Day and running one month, UIC Art Lounge happily presents the paintings of Zhenlei Jiang paired with poems from Chris Wright. This special event is a dialogue between femininity and masculinity, and the joyfulness and bitterness of life.

Zhenlei Jiang is a Chinese artist; She sees art as a way to promote the understanding of humanity and the communication of eastern and western cultures and values. http://www.zhenleijiang.com

Chris Wright is a writer and a Ph.D candidate in history. He has published the book Notes of an Underground Humanist, and multiple poems in literary magazines. http://assets.booklocker.com/pdfs/3908s.pdf

The evening features drinks with conceptual artist Tom Marioni as part of his social artwork The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art and a performance by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi.

Plus, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen (Food Truck) will be parked outside serving regional Iraqi cuisine on limited edition paper replicas of Saddam Hussein’s china all night long.

Feast surveys the history of the artist-orchestrated meal, presenting the work of more than thirty artists and artist groups who have transformed the simple act of eating together into a compelling artistic medium. Through a presentation within the Smart Museum and new commissions in public spaces, the exhibition will introduce new artists and contextualize their work in relation to other influential artists, from the Italian Futurists and Gordon Matta-Clark to Marina Abramović and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Feast addresses the radical hospitality embodied by these artists and the social, commercial, and political structures that surround the experience of eating together.

The evening features drinks served as part of Tom Marioni’s social artwork The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art and a performance by Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi.

Plus, Michael Rakowitz’s Enemy Kitchen food truck will be parked outside serving regional Iraqi cuisine on paper replicas of Saddam Hussein’s china all night long.

Image: Michael Rakowitz, detail of working sketch for the Enemy Kitchen food truck, courtesy of the artist.

Open Hours: Saturdays 2-5pm

Excerpt of a conversation between Sean Ward and Magalie Guérin at a kitchen table.

M: […] It’s like– you’re doing something and you want to know who you’re going to be in (my favorite word here) conversation with. The work is a meeting point. That’s what’s interesting about art– how it’s possible to communicate, via an object, one’s philosophy, one’s personal modus operandi on how to live this life.

S: Any words you can put to that philosophy?

M: For me it’s engagement, it’s presence, care; a desire to travel through the cracks.

S: Oh what does that mean?

M: Well I remember thinking about romantic relationships in that way, about having someone in your life. The most compelling thing about that for me is that this person is available for you to travel upon– literally travel– physically, emotionally, intellectually. You’re allowed to touch everywhere, to inquire about everything. You have this thing in front of you that gives you permission to go in all these mini rooms, all these cracks and nooks, in the dark corners. That’s what a relationship is– giving a person permission to explore you.
The work is that way for me– I’m constructing it yes but once there’s something there, then I have an obligation to go everywhere within it.

S: So you think of the paintings as an offer of that permission?

M: Yes.

S: Being attentive, giving permission– but you’re also talking about having a conversation with people through your paintings. Are you creating surrogates?

M: No, not really. But they are a vessel and a way of linking us. There’s a kinship I feel when I look at someone else’s art that I like. In the end, I don’t really care about the painting, I care about the painter. I go directly to the person; I’m curious about the mind at play. But the work is not only about the maker, it’s also about the viewer because it won’t exist for him if he can’t recognize it. And if he does recognize it– and I use the word ‘recognition’ purposely here– then that says something about him also, you know what I mean?

S: We’re going back to presence here. It makes sense– there’s always two people that have to be present. Even if the viewer is not there, there has to be two in the painting, two everywhere.

M: Two or more, yes.

http://minsong.info/

In the performance and installation ReBirth, the body is used, bruised, and scratched – yet remains strong. The dialogue it establishes points out the historical use and traces of human bodies in the process and products of architectural construction.

Roberta Lima was born in 1974 in Manaus, Brazil. After graduating with a degree in architecture in 2002, she moved to Europe where she now lives. In 2007, after earning a Master’s degree in Fine Arts, she began her PhD studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is in Chicago for a residency through the Austrian ministry of arts and culture. Fearghus’ major creative preoccupation has been the relationship between bodies and buildings in the context of urban regeneration, a preoccupation that has manifested itself in film and in live performance in Europe, the US and China. Learn more about Fearghus Ó Conchúir at www.fearghus.net and Roberta Lima at www.robertalima.com

On Friday February 10th from 7PM to 10PM, The Hills Esthetic Center hosts “Isaz: Ice is bark of rivers”, an exhibition of new painting by Aron Gent, Nick Ostoff, and Sophia Rauch. The exhibition closes on March 4th. The word “Isaz” is a German translation of the i-rune, the pre-Latin Germanic character meaning ice. Each character in this alphabet stands for a concept or object and is explained by a poem, the Icelandic version above serves as an abstract compass for viewing the works collected in this show.
Often considered a boring topic of small talk, weather conditions, particularly temperature, have an imbedded dialogic relationship within painting; its light, space and mood. The artists in this exhibition approach architecture, surfaces, color temperature and emotion from unique conceptual perspectives and varying artistic backgrounds. Uniting the work is a tactile sensitivity to the formal language of painting and the use of subtle difference to point in the direction of renewal.

- Aron Gent is a Chicago based artist, photography printer and art organizer. He received a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and recently opened a printing/exhibition space called DOCUMENT.

- Nick Ostoff is from Toronto, Canada, received his BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design, and is currently an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

- Sophia Rauch is from Berkeley, California. She received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2008 and is currently an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This collision of spectacles has it all:
* Attendees can challenge a pair of professional volleyball players
for the chance to WIN $100!
* Chicago’s best painters will display event-specific works on the
walls surrounding the court!
*!Muy Caliente! Imbibe exotic tropical beverages from the Cabana!
*!Muy Caliente! DJ set by wurkstep pioneers SICH MANG!
*!Muy Caliente! Sun Lamps, Palm Trees, Coastal Wildlife, Sun Block, and Sand!

The sandy lines dividing spectators, artists, and athletes will be smoothed over by all feet that make their way to this one night event at Antenna.

Painters include: Adam Farcus, Adam Grossi, Alberto Aguilar, Alex Bradley Cohen, Angeline Evans, Brian Wadford, Caroline Carlsmith, Cory Glick, Edra Soto, EC Brown, Irene Perez, Jeriah Hildwine, Jim Papadopoulos, Kevin Jennings, Nicole Northway, Pamela Fraser, Philip
von Zweck, Thad Kellstadt, Vincent Dermody

For other upcoming contemporary art events this winter at the University of Chicago please visit: http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/opc/

This exhibition, originally organized for the The Center for Books Arts by Kyle Schlesinger, features books, paintings, collages, periodicals, and ephemera that explore fundamental relationships between form and content; seeing and reading; writing and drawing; and the extraordinary occasions when these things and activities fuse, introducing a third element.

Poets, artists, and collaborators in this exhibition include Wallace Berman, Joe Brainard, Robert Creeley, Jim Dine, Johanna Drucker, Philip Guston, Joanne Kyger, Emily McVarish, Karen Randall, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and many more. Together they share in the common objective of bringing bold new writing into print where commercial presses fear to tread, and to do so with imagination and intelligence.

*NEW EXHIBITION*
“QUAD CORE”
Theodore Darst, Paul Hertz, Selena Jones and Sabina Ott

Opening reception Thursday, February 9th, 2012. 5 – 8pm
Exhibition continues through March 10th, 2012.
Gallery hours Weds – Saturday noon – 5pm

Our first exhibition at the new space will be “Quad Core” a group show featuring Theodore Darst, Paul Hertz, Selena Jones and Sabina Ott. It opens on Thursday February 9th and runs through March 10th, 2012. “Quad Core” exhibits four different artists whose core processes connect aesthetically and conceptually in interesting and surprising ways.

Theodore Darst’s art works are an attempt to fight nostalgia by giving it some notion of physicality. He uses video gaming platforms to make interactive environments that serve as snap shots to his formative years. These cyberspaces are a time machine to a lost mindset that he is trying to recover. Drawing from remembered experiences such as church, playing basketball, video games and robotripping Darst creates fictive spaces that are at once mysterious and engaging. By appropriating 3d models from the Internet as “ready-mades” he taps into a collective unconscious melding his memories with our own interpretations of what these virtual objects mean and refer to. Paul Hertz works in digital and traditional media, with particular interest in intermedia, algorithmic composition, and performance. For “Quad Core” Hertz will exhibit “Tree Jive” a series of thirteen digital images created by algorithms he has written and implemented. The resulting images are printed on Hahnemühle Rag Bright paper. For Hertz his process is part scientist creating an experiment – establishing parameters and letting it go; and part editor, sifting through the outcomes, and culling a body of work from the many permutations the algorithms create. For Selena Jones the process of construction is vital to the character of her creature-like forms and totems. Often choosing to create pieces with materials that physically challenge her both in terms of scale or method. Jones intentionally selects materials that are ubiquitous and readily available in order to create a feeling of familiarity with these strange forms. Sabina Ott challenges the viewer with objects that are at once all things and none. Her sculptures, paintings, mixed media works and video installations draw upon many reference points and perspectives. Are they plants or paintings? Landscapes or topographical surveys? Ott is a neo cubist – using the Internet to synthesize many different viewpoints and perspectives into a single cohesive body of work.

Theodore Darst graduated from the School of the Art Institute (BFA 2011). Recent projects and exhibitions include “gli.tc/h-Birmingham” @ vivid, birmingham-uk, “notes on a new nature” @ 319 scholes, brooklyn-ny, “byob chi 2″ @ byobworldwide + museum of contemporary art, chicago-il. Darst is the curatorial assistant for Two Hundred and Fifty Six Colors a 16mm film that traces the arc of increased complexity and pointed use of the animated gif organized and produced by Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus.

Paul Hertz has exhibited his interactive installations, performances, and digital prints have been exhibited at many international media conferences and festivals. He currently teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A master digital printmaker, Hertz has recently started his own print studio, Ignotus Editions. He currently resides in Chicago, his home for over 25 years.

Selena Jones is interested in the relationships humans can have with art objects, and how objects can provoke thoughts and new experiences. She incorporates animal forms to help evoke a sensation based on generalizations or mythologies associated with that form. Selena Jones graduated from the School of the Art Institute (MFA 2011) recent exhibitions includes MDW Fair (with What It Is), “Weddings/Proms/Corporate Events/Beauty Pageants/Bar Mitzvahs/Quinceaneras” at Zhou B Center, Chicago. She currently teaches at SAIC and Westwood College.

Sabina Ott deploys a fundamental strategy of jettisoning logic by messing with scale, perspective and hierarchies of knowledge. She creates a fantastical landscape made from debased craft materials. The resulting pieces move between two, three and four dimensions, becoming plateaus and tables, cliffs and chairs, light, lamps and video projections. Exhibiting since 1985, Ott has participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. Her paintings and prints are in museum collections nation- wide while her installation work has been included in international exhibitions such as the first Auckland Triennial in Auckland New Zealand, the Australian Contemporary Arts Center in Melbourne, Australia as well as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland Ohio. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Grant and a Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University, Her work is in the collection of the Corcoran Museum of American Art, Washington DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, California, and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, California among others. She is Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL

Adds Donna is pleased to present The Field, The Mantel (Exhibition), Cupola Bobber’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. As an exploration of monumental duration the two primary works at Adds Donna will stretch to approximately 250 hours and two lifetimes, respectively.

The first, a video installation titled Reading the Library of Congress Classification Schedule to The Trees, (2010 – ongoing), shows the duo taking one-hour turns reading the 42 volume subject outline the Library of Congress uses to organize and arrange it’s collection. Each volume on view is read to a different natural setting. The first volume, A (General Works) is read to a forest in the afternoon. The second work shown, The Dictionary of Endurative Actions, (2009 – ongoing), is a participatory project developed to initiate endurative actions for every word on dictionary.com. The phrase ‘endurative action’ is open to interpretation, below the duo talk about the project.

“Within the more specific context of art which uses performance, endurance has come to mean something different than the word endurance can mean more generally. We are interested in the endurance of everyday more than the endurance of an individual’s will to create a single beautiful image, in spite of pain. Our project engages the idea of endurance in art in a different way. This project’s duration, or maybe the lack of a tangible conclusion, generates discomfort. No one is being heroic and overcoming all odds. The project only overcomes some odds by continuing, by persisting in spite of lacking a finish line.”

Cupola Bobber recounts the time-scale of the projects in The Field, The Mantel (Exhibition) as existing in natural time. So natural that garnering our participation can help realize the work. As seasoned performance artists Cupola Bobber confidently embark on new grounds of understanding with the ability to break down the subject and the outside world to a palpable, poetic, quip. The works presented at Adds Donna attempt to mine sense from the Field, while providing participatory license to collect for a monumental or Mantel conscious.

The performance duo known as Cupola Bobber is a collaboration between Stephen Fiehn and Tyler Myers. Founded in 1999 they have created four evening length performances; Subterfuge, 2001, Petitmal, 2004, The Man Who Pictured Space From His Apartment, 2007, and Way Out West, the Sea Whispered Me, 2009 commissioned by PS122, NYC, Links Hall, Chicago, and the National Performance Network. Cupola Bobber perform nationally and internationally and have been the recipients of numerous honors, fellowships, and commissions including a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, honorees at ACE International at Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster University, UK, fellows at School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s First Year Program, and Goat Island’s Summer School among others. The duo has also performed at the PAC/Edge Performance Festival, The Spare Room, Performance Works Northwest, Portland, OR, and have realized the durational work, Light Curve, in Chicago’s Millennium Park as part of the Great Performers of Illinois Festival. Published writing include A Conversation in 50 Jumps Using a Trampoline and a Cliff in JUMP, an anthology on jumping, and Internal Monologue for One Performer Taking One Step Slowly in SLOW. Their current project exhibited at Adds Donna, The Field, The Mantel, 2011 inspired by Flaubert’s unfinished novel Bouvard et Pécuchet, intends to explore the collective repositories of the sublime through a process the duo calls monumental duration. Cupola Bobber are currently living and working in New York City, NY.

ALICE FELDT is an artist living in Chicago. She received a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. She works in a variety of media (such as photography, video, animation, and poetry) and currently is exploring intimacy and sexuality through the combination of text and image.

More information about Alice Feldt can be found at alicefeldt.com.

With formal and ephemeral gestures of processing and repair, Rebecca Beachy’s sculpture recasts narratives of animal bodies as use objects: deer ground up by hand and returned to the site of collision as highway dust, repairing cracks in the asphalt; a muslin pillow accumulates the down from birds that collided with windows; the stain in a copy paper box is the evidence of having held an injured duck. The work, concerned with the damaged interstice between the wild and human structures, articulates physical engagement as an ethical gauge, positioning meaning as resting first in the material and the concrete. This sculptural presence is used to foreground questions regarding humans as animals, especially the question of the human relationship with gravity and mortality, and hopes to show the complexities in the interconnections between animals, people, and the ground on which both meet, collide, and dwell.

REBECCA BEACHY (b.1982) is a Chicago based artist, born and raised on a farm in Colorado, who works primarily in sculpture and installation. She is a recent recipient of both an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown in numerous locations including Edinbugh, Scotland, Dallas, Boulder and Chicago with recent and upcoming exhibitions at Gallery 400, SHOP (Southside Hub of Production), Roxaboxen and Eel Space in Chicago. She currently has an essay published in the latest edition of Puerto del Sol. Most recently, Beachy has been raising chickens and apprenticing as a taxidermist for the Chicago Academy of Scientists at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

More information about Rebecca Beachy can be found at www.rebeccabeachy.com

Musing on both the language of minimalism and an adolescent obsession, Jon Waites makes. Objects that allude to ramps and inclines, ollies and grinds. In sight of the work, one could start to pair labels: painting and/or sculpture, classical and/or adolescent, narrative and/or formal. The artist would rather we parse his approach and process. These works are first and foremost projections. Desired projections. Things that are made to be beheld with both the eyes and the body. Things that remind one of carefree yesterdays. Things that have to be made.

Often, work that one must make, is most convinced by, and loves, has a touch of the absurd. Waites ponders the contradictions between forming and impulse, and in forms and surfaces. What does one do with the seemingly ridiculous need to manifest these objects that marry art’s history and the personal, except maybe act on it? How should one tune an expression of restraint, and how can the minimal and mundane recall such pleasurable past times? Indeed, these are not just hollow forms.

Of course, the work might have a different resonance for the viewer, especially if one has not much experience sliding or airing. Perhaps the fact that we are left to observe clarifies what is more important. To think about the absurd repetition of the creative gesture itself, laboring at what has no concrete perfection. Scale, shape, material, color these may change as each singular work is built, the same way maneuvers are obsessively invented. And like these maneuvers, there are no real absolutes, magic formulas or golden means. The artist can only and wants to remember, re-imagine, rehearse and redo. Jon Waites works.

Jon Waites was born in Santa Fe, NM, and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Bert Green Fine Art exhibits contemporary artists of all ages in various media, with a particular focus on painting and works on paper. Artists exhibited by the gallery include Clive Barker, Elizabeth McGrath, Sandra Yagi, Barron Storey, Shane Guffogg, Jessica Curtaz, Scott Horsley, Jeff Gillette, Laurie Hassold, Jen Heaslip, John U. Abrahamson, Eduardo Villacis, David Hollen, Valerie Jacobs, Joe Novak, Carl Ramsey, Scott Siedman, Jerome Caja, Gabor Ekecs, and Carlee Fernandez.

Artists included in the inaugural exhibition include: Barron Storey, Elizabeth McGrath, Jeff Gillette, Carlee Fernandez, Laurie Hassold, Jen Heaslip, Shane Guffogg, Sandra Yagi, Clive Barker, Eduardo Villacis, Jessica Curtaz, John U. Abrahamson and Gabor Ekecs. There will be a public Grand Opening “Open House” on Saturday, February 4 from 12 – 7 pm. Gallery hours are Wednesday–Friday 11–7 and Saturday 12-5, or by appointment at other times.

This inaugural exhibition will be followed by a series of solo shows beginning in March 2012. The gallery has both a main room and a project room. Watch our website for the schedule, which will be posted as it is confirmed.

All gallery events are free and open to the public. Additional exhibition information, press releases and high resolution images may be found at the gallery website at www.bgfa.us.

Gallery Hours
Wednesday–Friday 11-6 pm • Saturday 12–5 pm

Bert Green Fine Art
8 S. Michigan Ave. Suite 1220, Chicago IL 60603
312-434-7544 • www.bgfa.us

In her first exhibition with CvsD, Zuckerman-Hartung continues a deeply inquisitive exploration of painting as a primary practice, investigating its material raptures, intellectual speed-bumps, and conceptual limits.  Zuckerman-Hartung, who was raised in Olympia, Washington, and now lives and teaches in Chicago, simultaneously has an adoring relationship with paint – its gooey, viscous, repulsive, sexy physicality – and is also instinctively skeptical of its fetishistic power.  Working abstractly, in relatively small scale, she reaches into a deep trick-bag, pouring, spraying, incising, collaging, assemblaging, linking, amputating, and otherwise thoroughly working
and reworking her canvases.  An earlier interest in modernist geometry has been subsumed in a much wider array of effects, blasting open cubist facets and placing them in an explosive array of textures, colors, and even images.

Ferociously original and intent on maintaining a permanent personal revolution, Zuckerman-Hartung has rapidly become one of the most visible artists of her generation to emerge in Chicago.  Very recent exhibitions have included Anna Kustera Gallery (New York) and Spazio Cabinet (Milan), and in upcoming months she will be featured in one-person exhibitions at Jacky Strenz (Frankfurt) in March, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) in May.

Negative Joy is accompanied by a 44-page catalog featuring full-color reproductions of the paintings and a conversation between John Corbett and Zuckerman-Hartung.

In the East Wing, CvsD is delighted to present the first Chicago exhibition of work by the maverick Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý (1926-2011).  Known for his materially distressed pictures of women in the artist’s hometown of Kyjov, taken on one of several handmade cardboard cameras starting in the 1960s, Tichý’s unique and hermetic images have a mystery and allure that is darkly leering, funny, and often strangely tender.  The New York Times called the work an “uncanny fusion of eroticism, paranoia and deliberation.”  For some of the prints – which are unique, not editioned – he created quizzical colored-paper frames, crudely decorated with ballpoint pen. Not quite like any other contemporary photographer, Tichý’s work only came to light in 2004, but since then he has been the subject of many solo exhibitions from Beijing and Tokyo to Paris and London.  His first U.S. exhibition was in New York in 2005; in 2010, the International Center for Photography (New York) presented an expansive solo retrospective.

ONCE, WE WERE GIANTS
In our era of super-technologies and hyper-infrastructures, the gap between body and mind seems to become exponentially smaller and blurred. The link between the physical world around us and ideology seamlessly blend into one another, as one is borne from the other in no discernible order. The niches we establish are formed by ever more calculated measures, which we perceive as extensions of our selves. In so doing, our person- our physical being – not only becomes one with external stimuli, but exists with infinite potential. It is possible now for us to immortalize our selves, not through God, but by becoming gods of our own.

The process for producing these works has been one of collecting and combining distinct visual elements from one overarching theme, and combining them in a collage-like manner. The elements presented in a piece, though visually cohesive, are meant to be brought together in the viewer’s mind in an intuitive manner. The shapes, colors, and objects brought together in these works exist through a kind of dream logic, whereby these elements ebb and flow between being singular parts and being a singular unit.

The primary conceptual concern was a term used by economists to describe excess consumption and over-saturation. This law of diminishing marginal utility was once described to Kim as follows:

“You purchase one whole cake for $5. It is a delicious cake and you are allowed to eat as much as you please. You are not, however, allowed to take any of it home. So you stuff your face with as much cake as possible. After the second or third slice, you will most likely not be enjoying your cake anymore. But you’ve paid for the whole cake and it would seem a waste to not get your money’s worth. What you do not realize is that the $5 dollars you paid is gone, and that there is only one peak point of satisfaction when consuming anything. Anything after this point is either dissatisfying and burdensome, or completely neutralized in its worth.”

Montgomery (Bum Joo) Kim works primarily with wood and pre-made objects. Kim explores themes of intercultural exchange and globalization and their effects on social consciousness. By looking at traditional imagery through the lens of contemporaneity, the objects and scenarios Kim creates are paradoxical attempts at nostalgia; they are memorabilia from a potential past, present or future.

MONTGOMERY (BUM JOO) KIM is a sculptor from Mexico City, Mexico. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute in 2011 with a BFA with a focus in Sculpture, for which he was awarded the Edward Ryerson Fellowship award. He is currently based in Chicago, and works for the Chicago Urban Art Society as a Gallery Assistant and Project Director for the same gallery’s THE LAND: Artist Residency Program.

More information about Montgomery Kim can be found at www.montgomerybkim.com

The screening will start at 6 p.m. in the Ferguson Lecture Hall across the hall from the MoCP at 600 S. Michigan Ave. Afterward, Murphy will answer questions from the audience.

ANNA CAMPBELL received her M.F.A. in art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.A. in studio art from the College of Wooster. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan and teaches courses on sculpture, installation and curating at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on queered representations of heroic masculinity through video, sculpture, and installation art.

More information about Anna Campbell can be found at www.annacampbell.net

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 28, 2012
6:00pm – 10:00pm

Curated by Karen Azarnia
January 27 – February 25, 2012
Opening Reception:
Saturday January 28, 5:00 – 8:00pm.

The Riverside Arts Center presents Living Large, an exhibition of new paintings by Maria Vergara.

Vergara’s previous work explores the public fascination with celebrity culture and decadence. As
painter Susanna Coffey writes:

“The playful aspect of Maria Vergara’s work begins with the not so playful cult of celebrity, a cult that seems to be in control of our public imagination today. She twists and turns the painted queens, princesses, heiresses and movie stars until they and the worlds they inhabit look as grotesque as they really are.”1

In her recent series of paintings, Vergara expands on themes of decadent materialism and excess. Depicting luxurious home interiors, she presents opulent rooms in the Baroque style. The viewer is invited into the Paris mansion of fashion designer Yves Saint Lauren, a museum reproduction of Marie Antoinette’s chambers, as well as King George IV’s bedchamber in Windsor Castle.

Working from photographic source material, Vergara carefully edits the interiors. She includes the objects she finds most appealing, inserting her own patterns onto the carpets, walls and ceilings. This culling and collaging of elements serves to indulge her own fantasies in an act of world-making, allowing the artist to create her own personal world of luxury.

At the same time, the patterns Vergara uses are intricate and compulsive, in an attempt to visually overwhelm the viewer. This use of pattern serves to signify excessive wealth and social status, or as Vergara states, to depict “expensive hoarders.” By referencing the art historical past, Vergara comments on current socio-economic issues. She also builds complex layers of meaning in the work, as the paintings embody contradictory impulses of pleasure, desire and revulsion.

This exhibition is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from 1 – 5pm. For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter or contact karen.racgallery@gmail.com.

1 Source: Coffey, S. (2010, December 26). The Unbeautiful. Susanna Coffey. Retrieved December 5, 2011, from http://www.susannacoffey.com/?cat=7.

Ms. Vergara received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2005. She is the recipient of a Merit Scholarship from SAIC and has exhibited her work both locally and nationally, including the Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), the Gaucho Social Club (Chicago), and Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts (New York).

Leggett’s show in Gallery 1 at Western Exhibitions opens on Friday, January 27th, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through March 10, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

David Leggett’s ultra-vivid canvases mash-up a love-hate fascination with both machismo in hip-hop culture and the unyielding influence of 1980s German painters in current contemporary painting. No one is sacred in Leggett’s work – from Precious to Rick Ross to Gerhard Richter to the artist himself – his satirical images are often punctuated by barbed comedic one-liners, a strategy influenced by the stand-up comedians he listens to in the studio. Leggett his manipulation of cartoon imagery and caricature reveals the influence of Chicago Imagists like Karl Wirsum and Jim Nutt. His use of craft materials, however, complicates his relationship to painting as googly eyes, rhinestones, pom-poms, felt, glitter, gold and silver leaf add a layer of absurdity to Leggett’s reverence for his painting heroes. In the past year, Leggett’s studio suffered a devastating flood, destroying some 50 finished paintings. States Leggett: “When I saw all my paintings damaged from the leak I couldn’t help but notice how small the paintings were. I felt I wasn’t challenging myself. It felt like what I was doing wasn’t important.” This show, post-flood, will feature Leggett’s largest canvases to date.

Melissa Steckbauer’s new photo-based collages are the visual remainder following a personal study in communication and intimate contact, a deviation from the overt sexuality seen in her paintings. Weaved, fringed, puckered, and diced Steckbauer diffuses the status and familiarity of her pictures by manipulating them with naive decoration. Pictures become images and objects; they leave the scope of family albums and are updated within a loose semiotics.

Steckbauer’s show in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions opens on Friday, January 27th, 2012 with a free public reception from 5 to 8pm and will run through March 10, 2012. Gallery hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11am to 6pm and by appointment.

Not Cool or Stoic

Colored theory. Not color for color’s sake, but named colors for linguistic associations.

Matthew Schlagbaum begins with greyscale, a faux grisaille, and slips in a technicolor magic schism. Unlike the filmic precedent, Matthew is invested neither in generating delight, nor affirming faith in humanity or individuality. More like Matthew is illuminating the shameless manipulations that drive familiar stories.

Glittering gold. Black and white and read all over.

Chuck, a gorillalike hulking man always decked out in Carhartts and work shoes, spins a yarn with earnest ennui. Deeply sentimental moments become meditational gems. But his laser focus meanders—the moment was truly heart-felt, but Chuck is open enough to respond just as deeply to the next. Follow his lead and you may end up with your emotional guard puddled around your ankles, not knowing the differences between true grit, heart-strings, or even what is funny.

Chuck and Matthew both reside somewhere shaken, somewhat glum. Not cool or stoic. Each embraces his own direct emotional responses, and calls upon a viewer to dive into a moment. But each is driven toward a view of reality that pulls back the curtain to reveal something as it is complete with contradictions, flaws and untidy conclusions.

“Society of the Spectacular” is an exhibition about our constant connection with the hyperreal.

Visual Simulcra:

Eric Fleischauer
Jesse McLean
Steve Ruiz
Doug Smithenry
Theo Darst
Todd Mattei
Morgan Sims
Aaron Orsini
&
Adam Rux

Musical Stimuli:

Volcano
American Draft
Turntable.fm

Curated by:

Jake Myers & The Octagon Gallery

This combination of fabricated sounds and eye candy will surely leave you in

skeptical awe of our spectacular society.

Guest Juror Frank Maugeri, Co-Artistic Director of RedMoon at 7pm, will announce “Best of Show.” The “Best of Show,” will go to one of the six honorable mention artists: Alvaro Amat, Bree Gomez, Jennifer Cronin, Jim Kirkhoff, Jim Jenkins and Sean Williams.

www.kellykristinjones.com

In 2003, D’Amato began photographing three public housing projects in Chicago: Rockwell Gardens, the Henry Horner houses and Cabrini-Green, creating a deeply moving portfolio of photographs. D’amato photographed residents of the projects as well as studies the remains of the buildings from shattered mirrors to peeling paint to a series investigating paintings and graffiti left behind.

Paul D’Amato currently lives and teaches at Columbia College Chicago. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded him a Fellowship in 1994 and a Subvention Grant in 2004, the Illinois Arts Council recognized his work with Grants in 1989 and 2005. He was also awarded a Pollock Krasner Grant and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy. His monograph Barrio, Photographs from Chicago’s Pilsen and Little Village was published by University of Chicago Press in 2006. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He is represented by Steven Daiter Gallery in Chicago.

Paul will be in conversation with Gregory Harris, the Assitant Curator of the DePaul Art Museum.

Before coming to DePaul, Greg was a Guest Curator and Researcher in the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he curated the exhibitions In the Vernacular, Of National Interest, and The Concerned Photographer. In 2011, he was a Guest Curator of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s MFA Thesis Exhibition. Greg received an MA in art history from SAIC and a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago. In addition to his work at DPAM, Greg also teaches history of photography at Columbia College.

Over the past decade, the volume of solo trumpet work has made it a field, one blossoming into a beautiful array of styles and approaches from lyrically sentimental to severely stark. It is a field thick with talent making it all the more remarkable when something stands out as clearly as Peter Evans’ 2006 release More is More. On this album, Evans managed to strike the full range of expanded techniques with a virtuosic attack that rendered the trumpet a hissing, whistling, gurgling cauldron of infinite possibilities. In addition to leading his own quartet, Evans has performed with the world’s leading improvisers. His solo gigs, however, remain legendary. He will perform in the gallery where he may finally have met his architectural match. This event will take place in the gallery.

http://www.myspace.com/peterevanstrumpet

Over the past five years, Irish artist Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966) has garnered international attention for her installations whose signature elements are set amongst, and outfitted with, accoutrements of an abject, quotidian nature. Wilkes’ highly subjective work consists of objects (strollers, soiled dishes, dolls, dried flower petals) that recur as symbolic leitmotifs. Her process of selection and arrangement of materials is measured and refined, drawing equally on a precise formal language and the most intimate of personal experiences to create a compelling autobiographical thread. The Renaissance Society will present “I Give You All My Money” whose title, like that of several other works, has a biblical reference regarding sacrifice.

This event is FREE and open to the public. For upcoming events presented in conjunction with this exhibition, see The Renaissance Society website – www.renaissancesociety.org

Over the past five years, Irish artist Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966) has garnered international attention for her installations whose signature elements are set amongst, and outfitted with, accoutrements of an abject, quotidian nature. Wilkes’ highly subjective work consists of objects (strollers, soiled dishes, dolls, dried flower petals) that recur as symbolic leitmotifs. Her process of selection and arrangement of materials is measured and refined, drawing equally on a precise formal language and the most intimate of personal experiences to create a compelling autobiographical thread. The Renaissance Society will present “I Give You All My Money” whose title, like that of several other works, has a biblical reference regarding sacrifice.

Reception for the artist: Sunday, January 22 2-4PM

All exhibitions at Terrain are visible from the sidewalk and street at 704 Highland Ave. Oak Park, IL. The artist’s receptions are indoors, lovely and warm.

Terrain is proud to present a site specific installation by Jefferson Godard The exhibition will be open on Saturday January 22 2-4 PM. Please join us for the opening reception. The work will be on display until February 13.

Utilizing the architectural elements of Terrain’s domestic site, Godard’s work plays with notions of inside and out, surface and depth, illusion and real space.

As an architecture student at the Dessau Institute of Architecture at the Bauhaus in Dessau+Germany, Godard turned to video and film because it adds an essential fourth dimensional element to space. After receiving his MA in Architecture, he continued his explorations in video art as both a collector and curator. He has curated exhibitions such as “Overkill” at Mission Projects Gallery in Chicago+Illinois featuring Manon de Boer, Candice Breitz, EJ Hill, Diego Leclery and Casilda Sanchez; “Performance Anxiety” co- curated with Alicia Eler featuring works by Rachel Feinstein, Kate Gilmore, James Murray, Jeroen Nelemans, Carlos Rigau, Greg Stimac and Stacia Yeapanis and “Our Great Show” at Nice and Fit Gallery in Berlin, Germany featuring Kate Gilmore, James Murray, Jeroen Nelemans, Michael Phelan, Robin Rhode, Mika Rottenberg and Kara Walker. Godard teaches architecture at Columbia College Chicago.

Featuring: Joseph Cassan, Julia Fish, Kevin Killian, Jessica Labatte, John Neff, and B. Wurtz.

Kevin Killian will read recently published essays and poetry in dialogue with the exhibition at the gallery on Thursday, March 1, 7pm.

Gallery hours are Saturday, 12 – 6pm, or by appointment.

In Global Cities, Model Worlds artists Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel, and Sarah Ross explore the spatial and social impacts of “mega events,” such as the Olympics and World’s Fairs. The host cities of these international spectacles seek to transform themselves into “global cities” through planning, architecture, and ideology. Locally, these events pave the way for redevelopment projects that can create new public resources such as parks, stadiums, or transportation infrastructure, but often result in significant displacement of residents or industry, reinforcing existing inequalities.

The World Finder investigates the 1893 engineer and dramatist Steele MacKaye who set out to build the Spectatorium, the world’s largest theater, for the world’s largest event, the World’s Columbian Exposition. Within this immense space, MacKaye intended to present The World Finder, an epic in four acts that told the story of Columbus’ voyage to America. However, the financial panic of 1893 deprived the project of funds and the Spectatorium was never completed. Pocket Guide to Hell revisits this story of big dreams and bigger failures with a selection of related artifacts and an abridged performance of The World Finder.

Opening Reception: January 20, 6-9pm
Exhibition Runs: January 20-February 10, 2012

Homa Shojaie presents ASCENT, an installation that investigates the material space of canvas to explore archetypal personas. Shojaie’s new work creates a meditative space that builds on the potential of canvas while metaphorically referencing the body. As the warps and the wefts of the raw canvas are methodically peeled away, layers of meaning reveal the subject’s emotional landscape. Hovering on the edges of painting, architecture, sculpture and text, Shojaie’s installation references a zone that never fully attaches itself to any one discipline. Instead, ASCENT is continuously shifting, carefully diffusing the boundary of the threads found in the frayed canvas, simultaneously revealing everything and nothing.

Alex Miller (b. 1987) originally from Alexandria, Virginia, is an artist living and working in Chicago. Alex came to Chicago as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his BFA in 2010. Focusing on sculpture, specifically in cast metal arts and fiber arts, juxtaposes the academic and natural environments. Exhibitions in Chicago include works at Tom Robinson Gallery and the Sullivan Galleries.

Lorraine Barger (b. 1988) is from Greenville, Ohio. She is currently as student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and will be receiving her BFA in May. She works primarily in the fiber arts with a focus in weaving and natural dyeing. Her next up coming show will be her BFA show in March.

BOLT Project Space
ASCENT
A solo exhibition by BOLT Resident Homa Shojaie
Opening Reception: January 20, 6-9pm
————
HATCH Projects
Quarterly Site #9: Support
A group exhibition featuring HATCH Project artists and Quite Strong Lust List designers
Presented by Twelve Galleries Project
Curated by Quite Strong
Opening Reception: January 20, 6-9pm

Chicago, IL. December 14, 2011–Chicago Artists’ Coalition is pleased to present two dynamic exhibitions: ASCENT, a solo exhibition featuring work by BOLT Resident Homa Shojaie AND Quarterly Site #9: Support featuring the work of HATCH Project artists and Quite Strong Lust List designers. Quarterly Site #9: Support is presented by Twelve Galleries Project & curated byQuite Strong. Both exhibitions open January 20th from 6-9pm at Chicago Artists’ Coalition (CAC), 217 North Carpenter Street and will run from January 20 through February 10, 2012.

BOLT Resident Homa Shojaie, installation shot, ASCENT, 2011-12

Homa Shojaie presents ASCENT, an installation that investigates the material space of canvas to explore archetypal personas. Shojaie’s new work creates a meditative space that builds on the potential of canvas while metaphorically referencing the body. As the warps and the wefts of the raw canvas are methodically peeled away, layers of meaning reveal the subject’s emotional landscape. Hovering on the edges of painting, architecture, sculpture and text, Shojaie’s installation references a zone that never fully attaches itself to any one discipline. Instead, ASCENT is continuously shifting, carefully diffusing the boundary of the threads found in the frayed canvas, simultaneously revealing everything and nothing.

In collaboration with CAC’s Hatch Projects, Twelve Galleries Project presents Quarterly Site #9: Support curated by female design collective Quite Strong. The exhibition showcases two communities of visual creatives-HATCH Projects artists and Quite Strong Lust List designers.

Featuring:

Installations by HATCH Projects Artists -
Amanda Greive / Renee Prisble/Brittany Ransom / David Wittig / Jim Zimpel / Marissa Lee Benedict

Art and design works by Quite Strong Lust List Designers -

Alanna MacGowan / Cave Party Collective / Firebelly Design / Elaine Fong / José Scaglione / Julia Stotz / Katherine Verhoeven / Linsey Burritt / Margot Harrington / Monina Velarde / Nancy A. Bernardo / Nancy McCabe / Nicole Lavelle / Renata Graw / Tinne Van Loon / Tonya Douraghy / Veronica Corzo-Duchardt / Veronika Burian / Zara Picken

Together, HATCH Projects, an initiative of CAC focusing on contemporary art and professional artist development, Quite Strong, a collective fostering the overlap of art and design cultures, and Twelve Galleries Project, a roving curatorial experiment exploring collaborative exhibition models, can reap benefits for the Chicago creative experience. Each respective group challenges its members to step outside their immediate communities to seek vast and varied perspectives and experiences. The result: the facilitation and implementation of a support system beyond what is merely essential and into territory that is rich and rewarding. In essence, Quarterly Site #9: Support connects the “support” theme central to the missions of Hatch Projects, Quite Strong and Twelve Galleries Project and to the success of artists of all kinds.

For more information please visit:

http://chicagoartistscoalition.org/coalition-gallery/upcoming-exhibitions/

http://support.quitestrong.com/

http://www.twelvegalleriesproject.org/quarterly-site-9

Through a partnership with the Chicago Loop Alliance and the Pop-Up Art Loop program, the show is located for preview at the 29 W. Randolph storefront space.

Ryan Griffis, of The Temporary Travel Office, will present their work as unsolicited consultants to the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in North Florida.

Lize Mogel will discuss recent counter-cartographic projects—maps and mappings that produce new understandings of social and political issues.

Sarah Ross will present work that engages common spaces such as bus benches, landscaping, and sidewalks, and that reveals subtle forms of control in architecture and urban planning.

Study for Convergence Performance (ice) is the second work in a series that seeks to conflate the artist’s studio as a performative site of production, the space of display as the reception of image, and landscape as site for epic but apathetic metaphor. It uses the devices of the theatrical stage and the green screen; both of which operate as a “non-space” that allows the conflation of multiple contexts or sites. She uses imagery from landscapes that shift in time, such as bodies of water including glacier fields. The title of the piece refers to Robert Smithson’s idea of “the range of convergence between site and non-site” whereas the land from the originating site is placed in the container of the non-site. In Study for Convergence Performance, the site of origin and the sign of site converge as they transpose in a collapse of time.

Durand Art Institute – Lake Forest College

Opening reception Jan. 19th 2012, 7:30pm
Complimentary exhibition catalog available
Refreshments will be served at the reception

January 19th – February 8th, 2012
M-W-F 2-5pm
Weekends 1-5pm

Lake Forest College
555 North Sheridan Road
Lake Forest, Illinois 60045
847-735-5194
goldberg@lakeforest.edu

Stefano Cossu seems anachronistic in his embrace of the slowness of pinhole photography, relying on pre-processing – decisions made as far back as the construction of the camera – rather than the skillful post-processing assumed synonymous with the digital photograph. Taped to poles, hidden in bags, or left in the street – his cameras merge with the environment he captures and the environment merges with his cameras, the basic mechanics of photography being the transformation of a material through its exposure to light.

This transformation is at the heart of Cossu’s Arson series. Living and working in Chicago’s West Loop district, Cossu became interested in the Great Chicago Fire – which, with its power to destroy and transform (not just the landscape, but the very foundation of a city and its culture), found an analogy in photography and the process of exposure…

- excerpt from the Arson catalog text by Shannon R. Stratton

Opening Reception: Sunday, Jan 15, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Jan 16, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

OTHER FLOWERS is made up of a series of manipulated cross-stitch patterns on paper. The patterns were found in a town near to the site of the ACRE artist residency in rural Wisconsin and were hand-sewn with embroidery floss, which was dyed using a variety of plants from the property. Using these patterns as a starting point, the work magnifies the tension between abstraction and representation present in traditional needlework. By repeating and collaging pieces from the larger patterns into new forms, the past is obscured but always present in the work. The muted colors mimic a connection to place and history faded by time and memory.

COURTNEY WEBER (b. 1982) is a photographer, embroiderer, and occasional seamstress. She holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Taught by her mother, the first thing she ever embroidered was a Christmas gift for her grandparents: a potholder with a snowman and a candy cane. She was raised in Missouri but now lives and works in Chicago with her husband and three cats.

More information about Courtney Weber can be found at www.courtneylynnweber.com

New York based Corydon Cowansage (MFA Rhode Island School of Design, 2011) will be exhibiting large scale, minimal abstraction paintings of the domestic environment. Aaron Delehanty’s (MFA San Francisco Institute of Art, 2007) oil paintings deal with the urban environment in his dreamy representations of fictitious landscapes. Brent Houston (BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007) minimal cube sculptures challenge perceptions of three-dimensional objects in space. Charles MaHaffee’s (MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007) large scale charcoal drawings of text or forms obliterate original meaning through their obsessive repetitions. MaryKate Maher (MFA Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 2004) references topography in the natural environment through her sculptures and drawings. Ryan Richey’s (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2008) small scale paintings based on narrative vignettes from the artist’s personal history.
_________________________________________
Located in the Ukrainian Village, Hinge Gallery presents a future forward vision for the culture of Chicago’s creative community. Hinge Gallery is dedicated to the exploration of multimedia arts through experiential discovery. Supporting programming includes artist’s talks, performances, panel discussions, workshops, and receptions.

The mission of Hinge Gallery is to support emerging contemporary artists of the highest quality from Chicago as well as around the world. Hinge Gallery is a commercial exhibition space featuring painting, mixed media, prints, sound, video, sculpture, and installation.

Opening Reception: Saturday Jan. 14, 6-10pm
Closing Performances and Lectures: Saturday Jan. 28, 6-10pm

In “I’m Here To Make Friends,” part of Happy Collaborationists’ ‘Nostalgia’ series, Aay Preston-Myint digs through eight years of friendships, roommates, lovers, spaces, and collectives to assemble a body of work for a “solo” show using collaboration as its foundation. This body of work explores the conceptual and ideological push-and-pull between ephemeral social practices and material-based, individual artistic practices, and then uses it as fodder for the artistic output itself. As the basis for working together, the artists navigate through the supposedly neutral territory of non-art objects commonly found in the apartment gallery (itself a site of nostalgia) – such as projection screens, pedestals, linens, furniture, and house plants. Infrastructures of domesticity, display, and performance are imagined as the ends, and not just the means, of aesthetic production. A consciously reductive, oblique approach reveals a tenuous grasp on shared experiences and identities, while at the same time providing new platforms (literal and figurative) on which acts of consumption, looking, posing/posturing, projection and reflection take place. More casually, the show could be described as a glorious failed attempt at visionary interior design and party planning.

“We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”

Moyra Davey, January 6 – February 1, 2012

Reception for the artist, Friday, January 13th, 5 – 7 pm

The Donald Young Gallery is pleased to present a series of exhibitions bringing together the work of contemporary artists and the writings of the Swiss author, Robert Walser (1878-1956). Each month a contemporary artist will present work inspired by Walser’s writings to be exhibited together with archival material including first edition books by Walser, facsimiles of his microscripts and photographs of the author. Participating artists include Peter Fischli and David Weiss (December), Moyra Davey (January), Thomas Schütte (February), Rosemarie Trockel (March), Tacita Dean and Mark Wallinger (April) and Rodney Graham and Josiah McElheny (Summer 2012).

Moyra Davey’s contribution to the series opened on January 6, 2012 with a group of new photographs and a video. Comprised of photography, writing and video, Moyra Davey’s practice encompasses varied philosophies and processes of communication. “Subway Writers II” (2011), is a selection of twenty-five c-prints the artist folded and sent to the gallery in the mail. Unfolded and bearing the marks of their journey with tape, labels and postage, the images hang delicately in gridded formation. The photographs mark Davey’s return to the figure, finding subject with underground riders caught in the act of writing. “Les Goddesses” (2011) is Davey’s sixty-one minute film that weaves a narrative between the 18th century writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughters with reflections from Davey’s own personal history giving entry to the artist’s personal interior and cerebral space. Together, the video and photographs exemplify the artist’s subliminal sensibility and refined sense of engagement.

Moyra Davey has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including: The Art Institute of Chicago; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Canada Art Bank Collection and The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. The artist lives and works in New York.

A symposium on Robert Walser will be held at the Goethe Institut on February 26, 2012 and the gallery will publish a book with contributions from the participating artists. The exhibition is in collaboration with Christine Burgin, New York and the Robert Walser Center, Bern and Konrad Aeschbacher, Erlach. Sincere thanks to Bernhardt Design (www.bernhardtdesign.com). If you would like more information please contact Emily Letourneau or Robyn Farrell at 312-322-3600 or at gallery@donaldyoung.com.

SOFT GROUND
Emily Clayton’s recent work began as a series informed by sunsets, occult photography and stage curtains. Charged with spacial impossibilities, each are asking the viewer for the same thing, to willfully suspend disbelief. Distilling from this a sense of illusion and visual deception, the works are reduced to an atmospheric gradient of color. The series examines the two dimensional plane of an artificial horizon in relation to the stage and studio photography. They are backdrops, scenery, simulated landscapes all void of subject or performer. Situated within the historical tenet of process driven practices the work aims to exhibit a calculated control of material and form.

Eileen Mueller’s work focuses on the material history of the photographic image and its role in confounding unwritten or inaccessible histories. Her latest work links her own practice within communal educational spaces and the historic progeny of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College. While making a pilgrimage to Black Mountain, Mueller sought out the vistas wherein the landscape served as an emulsion, fixing the ghosts of American Modernism. Through embedding her own images into an anomic archive that also contains material mined from historic materials she poeticizes existing histories to build a mythology of the artist.

EMILY CLAYTON is a Nashville based artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation and painting. After receiving her BFA from University of Tennessee in 2004 she spent several years in Chicago helping to organize exhibitions and events with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version Festival and Mule Magazine. Her work has been shown in Chicago, New York and Nashville.

More information about Emily Clayton can be found at www.emilyclayton.com

EILEEN MUELLER has studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently received her BFA. She is the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and the World Less Travelled Grant as well as a finalist for the Gelman Travel Fellowship. Eileen recently showed in Ceaseless Blooms in Jobless Colors at Johalla Projects and is scheduled to show at the Kohler Museum this coming fall. Eileen is the co-founder of GURL DON’T BE DUMB, a curatorial project that is currently based out of Chicago.

More information about Eileen Mueller can by found at www.eileenmueller.com

ROOTS & CULTURE The mission of Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center is to provide exhibition opportunities for leading-edge emerging artists and to develop the city of Chicago’s cultural community as a center for art production and a destination for artistic discourse. Through two person shows, curated group shows, lectures, community gatherings and time arts events, Roots & Culture aims to provide a platform for the inventive practices of young artists. This programming helps to develop a dynamic community for the arts in Chicago and dialogue with the international discourse of contemporary art. Roots & Culture is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Programming and general operating costs are partially funded by The Illinois Arts Council, a state agency and The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation.

More information about Roots & Culture can be found at www.rootsandculturecac.org

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org

Opening Reception: Friday Jan 13th, 6-9pm
Open Hours: Thursday Jan 12th 4-7pm, Saturday Jan 14th 12-6pm

Roots & Culture
1034 N Milwaukee, Chicago 60622

SOFT GROUND
Emily Clayton’s recent work began as a series informed by sunsets, occult photography and stage curtains. Charged with spacial impossibilities, each are asking the viewer for the same thing, to willfully suspend disbelief. Distilling from this a sense of illusion and visual deception, the works are reduced to an atmospheric gradient of color. The series examines the two dimensional plane of an artificial horizon in relation to the stage and studio photography. They are backdrops, scenery, simulated landscapes all void of subject or performer. Situated within the historical tenet of process driven practices the work aims to exhibit a calculated control of material and form.

Eileen Mueller’s work focuses on the material history of the photographic image and its role in confounding unwritten or inaccessible histories. Her latest work links her own practice within communal educational spaces and the historic progeny of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College. While making a pilgrimage to Black Mountain, Mueller sought out the vistas wherein the landscape served as an emulsion, fixing the ghosts of American Modernism. Through embedding her own images into an anomic archive that also contains material mined from historic materials she poeticizes existing histories to build a mythology of the artist.

—–

EMILY CLAYTON is a Nashville based artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation and painting. After receiving her BFA from University of Tennessee in 2004 she spent several years in Chicago helping to organize exhibitions and events with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version Festival and Mule Magazine. Her work has been shown in Chicago, New York and Nashville.

More information about Emily Clayton can be found at www.emilyclayton.com

EILEEN MUELLER has studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently received her BFA. She is the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and the World Less Travelled Grant as well as a finalist for the Gelman Travel Fellowship. Eileen recently showed in Ceaseless Blooms in Jobless Colors at Johalla Projects and is scheduled to show at the Kohler Museum this coming fall. Eileen is the co-founder of GURL DON’T BE DUMB, a curatorial project that is currently based out of Chicago.

More information about Eileen Mueller can by found at www.eileenmueller.com

Hosted by YAB, this exhibit features open subject matter with works in all mediums. 2011 Judges: Michael McNicholas & Dalton Brown.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Jan 8, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Jan 9, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

ACCUMULATIONS highlights the work of three artists intricately involved in the ACRE residency kitchen with disparate practices connected by a tendency toward collecting, obsession and re-assemblage. Melissa Damasauskas’ Fireplace Fetish is a hearth constructed of soft quilted bricks forming the “log cabin” pattern, a traditional quilt pattern centered around a red “hearth” and representing the log cabin “home.” The fireplace and the quilt are both symbols of warmth and home and have both become generally obsolete, rendered nostalgic remnants of a simpler past and reduced to elements of interior design and decoration. A fetish figure is believed to house a particular spirit which is often “awakened” by pounding nails or sharp objects into it. Fireplace Fetish is intended to house the spirit of home and community, inviting patrons to poke pins into it’s pin-cushion-like structure with the intention of awakening and renewing healthy community. Ashley Hudson explores ideas of imagination, inspiration and humor, creating a collection of fantastic and silly places constructed through collage and sculptural forms. She sees this as an ongoing investigation of her subconscious and her interest in the discarded. Leonardo Kaplan presents the newest piece from the ongoing series, The Gravity of Images involving the production of floor to ceiling, photographic dot pattern murals in various materials. Koala Porno continues his investigation of image reproduction presence through the layering and reproduction of appropriated imagery.

MELISSA DAMASAUSKAS is a fiber/sculpture artist working between Chicago and Northern California. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Her work investigates intersections between domestic objects and traditions with the esoteric and magical, often considering presence and absence, intentionality and belief systems. Her other projects include menu planning, program development and cooking for the ACRE Summer residency kitchen.

ASHLEY HUDSON lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2004. From 2008-2010, she attend College of the Redwoods in northern California, where she studied historic preservation. Her art practice often involves the obsessive compiling of found objects and images into structures and scenes. Some of her interests include strange and historic architecture, wood, foreclosures, the end of the world, national parks, the subconscious and food.

LEONARDO KAPLAN was born in Columbia and currently lives and works in Chicago. He is involved with various artist-run projects, including ACRE, The Hills Esthetic Center and New Capital Projects.

Chiara No (b.1981) is a Baltimore artist now living in Chicago, Illinois. Through installations, handmade books and objects, Chiara constructs an environment that is subtlety experiential and feral. She received her degree in Art History from Towson University in Towson, Maryland, studied environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland and has recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Post- Baccalaureate in Painting and Drawing.

More information about Chiara No can be found at www.chiaraforsale.com

Opening Reception: Saturday, January 7, 7-10pm

Open Hours: By Appointment Only

Rotating Exhibit Showcases Chicago’s Top Fine Art Students, Schools

Rosemont, IL (December 16, 2011) – The Art Museo at the InterContinental Chicago O’Hare (ICO) is inviting the public to experience the future of Chicago’s art scene. With Chicago: A Resource of Young Artists, works from recent and soon-to-be graduates of Chicago’s top schools of fine arts are hand-picked and featured within the same gallery space that boasts masterpieces from world-renowned artists.

A collaboration with Schneider Gallery in River North, Chicago: A Resource of Young Artists originally opened to the public in September 2011 with a presentation of eight extraordinary artists from Columbia College. Sponsored by Lulu B, the exhibit is rotating every quarter for one year, displaying a well-rounded taste of Chicago’s best young talent. Beginning December 30th and running through April 3rd, the exhibit platform shifts from Columbia to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

“With the art world of Chicago shrinking, losing talent consistently to New York and the West Coast, can these young artists be the future of our area, or will they find more fertile ground somewhere else?” asks chief curator Martha Schneider, who hand-picks the represented student talent. “This exhibit at the Art Museo rewards exceptional works from Chicago’s finest art students, encouraging them to remain here so we can benefit from their creativity.”

The featured artists representing SAIC in Chicago: A Resource of Young Artists are either graduates of the December 2011 class or May 2012, and they include:
Yo Ahn Han from Seoul, Korea, who gets inspiration for painting through a battle with disease.
William Joyce, who specializes in painting with video installations.
Minky Kim from Seoul, Korea, who explores her own self through photography.
Youjeong Kwon from Seoul, Korea, who focuses on portrait paintings.
Dyne Sophia Lee from Columbus, Ohio, whose tapestries reflect her childhood in Korea.
Eileen O’Donnell from Elmhurst, whose oil paintings depict observational narratives.
Nick Schleicher from St. Louis, whose paintings reflect the act of confrontation.
Noelle Sharp from Salt Lake City, who expands space and environment through fiber installations.

MORE ABOUT THE ART MUSEO:
ICO offers a unique cultural experience in the arts that sets it apart from anything in the local hospitality industry. The Art Museo concept showcases the hotel’s embrace of the arts – sculpture, canvas, architecture, photography, and music – enhancing guests’ stay and fueling a passion for experiencing culture.

From the hotel’s conception a few years ago, art was at the heart of the ICO. The property is essentially a series of art exhibition halls with meeting spaces and guest rooms built around it. A stay or visit to ICO includes a complimentary education in art. Guests are invited to immerse themselves in the artistic ambiance the hotel provides and are encouraged to roam the hotel to admire original works – most also available for sale. Complimentary gallery tours are available upon request.

MORE ABOUT ICO:
Touted as one of the “greatest airport hotels” by USA Today and Orbitz, the ICO offers a variety of entertaining and cultural experiences that set it apart from its competitors and increase guest loyalty. The design-forward, 560-room hotel attracts leisure travelers, business professionals and local residents alike. Home to a nationally-acclaimed art gallery cared for by two full-time curators, three on-site restaurants including McCormick & Schmick’s and The Capital Grille, and the Montrose Room live music venue, the ICO is in a league of its own among large hotels in the area and offers entertainment that rivals the best in the region. For more information on the ICO, visit icohare.com, facebook.com/icohare or twitter.com/icohotel, or call 847/544-5300.

(editor’s note:  this is the greatest press release I’ve ever read)

Anthony Elms’ lecture, entitled I want to lick this animal skin that falls, well cut, from your round shoulder, explores fragments of a reconnection between fashion and art, manifesting the possibility that “winter whites are a myth, and that’s a good thing.” Elms is Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and is also the Editor of WhiteWalls Inc. His writings have appeared in Afterall, Art Papers, Artforum, Cakewalk, Modern Painters, and New Art Examiner, among many others. He has also written essays for many catalogs. As an artist, Elms has been included in projects exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Mandrake in Los Angeles, Mess Hall in Chicago, and VONZWECK in Chicago, among others. He has independently curated many exhibitions, including: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-61 (with John Corbett and Terri Kapsalis); Interstellar Low Ways (with Huey Copeland); Can Bigfoot Get You a Beer?, and A Unicorn Basking in the Light of Three Glowing Suns (both with Philip von Zweck). He was the Assistant Director of Gallery 400 at The University of Illinois Chicago from 2005 to 2011.

Edie Fake’s lecture The Sexual Life of Patterns explores the concept of “the weave” in relation to textiles, gender, and the trans body. Extending the logic of intuitive herbalism, magic, and tarot into textile decoration, ornamentation, and repetitive pattern, Fake’s lecture will explore the physical meaning of patterns that are integral (woven in) and imposed (printed on). Fake proposes patterning as about the interaction of bodies—tessellating patterns as trans, stripes as individuals, paisley, plaid, checks, and so on. Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. His visual art work, dealing heavily with the confluence of love and fury in queer utopian visions, has been shown at LACE in Los Angeles, Dumbo Arts Center in Brooklyn, and Gallery 400 at UIC Chicago. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists and his drawings have been included in Hot and Cold and LTTR. His first book, Gaylord Phoenix, was released last winter and won a 2010 Ignatz Award for Best Graphic Novel. He currently lives in Chicago and works as a small press sommelier for Quimby’s Books.

In Andy Roche’s new lecture Do You Feel Like We Do, he will speak about verbal abstraction as both empathic and agonistic. With references to his own work, Peter Frampton, and use of an effects table, his talk aims to explain expression that uses “less than an idea”. Andy Roche is a Chicago based artist working in diverse media exhibited in both gallery and screening settings. In 2008 Gallery 400 at UIC hosted a solo show of his work. In June of 2012, Roots and Culture Gallery will host a solo exhibition of his work. His band Black Vatican released the album Oceanic Feelin’ on Locust Music in 2011.

The Center for Experimental Lectures is a platform for artists, theorists, and other cultural producers to push the boundaries of the public lecture format. The Center for Experimental Lectures curates and archives regular lecture events with hopes of providing occasion to think about not only the content of each unique lecture but also the possibilities of the lecture as a creative platform. The physical presence of the lecturer is a rich site for embodied and performed meaning making, and the Center for Experimental Lectures encourages the creation of new forms of experience-based information dissemination. The Center is directed by R. E. H. Gordon. Please visit www.experimentallectures.org or email info@experimentallectures.org for more information.

Jake Myers lives, works, and teaches in Chicago. Myers was a co-founder of the Pentagon Gallery and currently runs the Octagon Gallery in Wicker Park. His strange constructions have been featured at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco, the Current Gallery in Baltimore and many others.

Bring your game face because there will be a sculptural prize for the winner of Short Court!

The small drawings (Untitled, 2010-11) begin as a blizzard of marks on immense sheets of paper. Within this chaotic field of possible imagery, Lund searches for viable compositions and slices out these fragments. Finally, he adds new elements to each one—dense black shapes and vivid lines—in response to the more ethereal forms that are already there. In contrast, the collages (A Few Scraps from the Void, or The Last Days of Life, 2011), are produced using found images, specifically pages from old issues of Life magazine, dating from its last gasp as a weekly publication in the early 1970s. After affixing these images face down on a temporary surface, they’re covered over with a grid of masking tape. When the layer of tape is ripped away it brings the pages with it and turns into the crumpled substructure for a new constellation of ragged pictures.

So what do we see in any given image or take away from their accumulation? In late January, the exhibition will close with a gallery talk — a set of afterthoughts spinning out from the work, some borrowed from disparate sources or jotted down long after the fact. Might a body of work itself just be a wild system for generating ideas in its wake? Eventually, these ideas and departures may be all that remains, since masking tape and magazine spreads are bound to degrade, to fall apart and fade over time, or all too quickly if we leave the curtains open and let the sunlight in.

“Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers, time bears it away and leaves only shapeless shreds… A silvery spider web at the center of a black pyramid… Strange weather and vague suspicions. All rhythm, no rest. Noise and information. A line of flight in all directions forever…”

Karsten Lund lives and works in Chicago.

Grabner is also the founder and director of The Suburban, an artist-run project space in Oak Park, Illinois with Brad Killiam, internationally exhibited artist and educator. They also run The Poor Farm, a kunsthalle in Waupaca County WI.

Terrain is a unique outdoor exhibition space in Oak Park, IL. exhibiting site specific artworks.

The show features photographic, sculptural, and video works that explore the gap between visions expected and realities performed of self, sexuality, and pride. Through these collected works GURL DON’T BE DUMB makes the proposition that perhaps a true elegance is to be found within the pathetic.

The show features work by:
Jessica Dean Camp
Cole Don Kelley
LVNCHBOXX
Alistair Matthews
Casey Mcgonagle
Jamie Steele

and performances by:
Devin Bockrath
The Era
WiseSnatch
Carly Mandell & Co.
Velvet Rope

Join us this Friday December 16th at Upstairs Gallery at 5219 N Clark Street. The opening reception begins at 6pm followed at 8pm by 2 hours of all gurl improv comedy! After the performances stay for the after party where GDBD will be hosting a dance party and reception of pink champaign!

With films and videos by: John Latham, Alain Resnais, Toute la memoir du monde, Oliver Laric, Rebecca Baron, Michael Bell-Smith, David Gatten, Paperrad, and Eric Fleischauer.

It’s always early. Looking back at all the attempts, things become more clear. The room fills with light, the sun is rising. Whether writing an e-mail or stuttering before colleagues, we repeat ourselves. To talk, wave, and exchange at a phenomenal level: this is what we expect. A 66 inch proximity between our bodies makes us close, and lets us work together. Anything more would give us hands. I take 10, maybe 8 paces to the coffee maker. This unsteady moment of anticipation lets me stop and think back to what I lack.

Cole Pierce and Rusty Shackleford exhibition run through January 4, 2012.

So I relentlessly use graphite.

I find amusement within the work’s authoritatively primordial presence and the baroque, ethereal gravity of its implied character.

“But what is happening in the woman or the poor man’s mind is this: they’ve been raised to believe, and by now they helplessly believe, that no matter how terrible their lives may be (and their lives have been quite terrible), no matter how far they fall, and no matter what disaster overtakes them they have one enormous knowledge in consolation, which is like a heavenly revelation.” At least they are not naked.

Lewis will complete his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012

Chicago, IL, December 10, 2011– ANDREW RAFACZ completes the 2011 season with Periodic Split, a series
of new and recent mobiles and sculpture by Beth Campbell. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in Chicago. It also marks the beginning of an ongoing collaboration with Los Angeles-based gallery COUNTRY CLUB, we have partnered with to present many of its long-represented artists in Chicago. It continues through Saturday, January 21, 2011.

Reverent to a familiar history of art and design in which the mobile is ever-present, Campbell’s constructions nevertheless feel contemporary, occupying space in a way that is both meditative and ominous. They relate
to twentieth century modernist art and design in their prioritization of elemental shape and form and their relationship to space, but they also operate as part of Campbell’s drawing practice, which references willfulness and the human decision-making process in the often over-stimulating, easily distracting contemporary world we live in. They become a physical articulation of a life engaged— never linear, faced with possibility, but loaded with many potential results and consequences. As seemingly fragile objects, their incandescence is beguiling as the lightness of the structure gives way to a series of very serious metaphysical and ontological implications.

In her recent sculpture and installations, Campbell has been interested in the visual and philosophical possibilities of iteration, manifested literally in the mirroring and doubling of ordinary objects and environments, rendering them anything but banal. With Stereotable (2010) the quotidian notion of a dining table and chairs complete with vases, candles and evidence of the people seated at it (scarves and pens) is repeated and ultimately disrupted. The final piece is several tables (and its objects) in one that intersect with each other and appear to operate on different planes. The effect is to have this ordinary object and its setting existing in several dimensions at once. Like Campbell’s mobiles, the viewer is simultaneously calmed by a seemingly familiar scene and jarred by its reposition as something wholly other.

Table Parallax (2010), exhibited here for the first time, reflects similar strategies. A medium sized wooden kitchen table’s top (its primary and perfunctory identity) is covered by bended wire shapes and thus, immobilized. It no longer works as a table, practically or aesthetically, but becomes the base for another sculpture (very similar to the mobile constructions) that oddly mirrors the base itself. It’s as if two very different kinds of tabletops have been attached to each other, calling both ends into question with each other. Just as the wire sculpture seems like a practical extension of the table, the table base is no longer merely functional.

BETH CAMPBELL (American, b. 1971) lives and works in New York. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, a residency at Kohler Arts Center in 2010, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Fellowship in 2009. Campbell was very recently included in Speculative Futures, curated by Regine Basha at the Bloomberg Financial Offices, in conjunction with the Sculpture Center, NY. Her solo project Following Room opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2007. She has had solo exhibitions with Country Club in Los Angeles and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York, as well as numerous group exhibitions throughout the world. This is her first exhibition in Chicago and first with the gallery. She is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA, New Museum, and Bloomberg, as well as many private collections.

In his first solo exhibition in Chicago, ASSEMBLAGE showcases Wolfe’s unique works in glass created through a specialized technique, inspired by mineral and crystalline formations.

“I am producing forms that have the appearance of being built up – and are also fractured and coming apart.“

The ASSEMBLAGE series, Wolfe provides a distinct aesthetic link between the state of minerals and observing them in their relation to modernist sculpture and architecture. The angular sides of Wolfe’s creations have the appearance of naturally occurring circumstances of cubic crystallization but represent the careful curation of form.

Originally intending to generate the surfaces of pyrite rendered in glass, Wolfe devised his own system for synthesizing the naturally occurring form. The forms are first constructed in wax, clay and foam. The initial form is then dug out of the mold leaving a cavity into which the glass will be blown. The piece is then cooled slowly in a kiln, and when at room temperature the mold is cut away and discarded. The resulting glass form is then cleaned, cut and polished, using diamond tools. This type of fabrication makes each vessel a unique form.

The process of building up and breaking down can be seen in the erosive qualities that are evident in each finished piece. At first glance the collection of thirty pieces in ASSEMBLAGE reflect a material driven exploration in fabrication to mimic natural phenomenon, however the results are greater than the sum of their parts. Wolfe’s creations have a stunning visual complexity combined with an organic subtleness.

Thaddeus Wolfe:
Thaddeus Wolfe (b.1979) studied art and design with a focus in glass at the The Cleveland Institute of Art where he received a BFA in 2002. He has held artist residencies at Pilchuck Glass School, The Creative Glass Center of America in New Jersey and the Tacoma Glass Museum. His work has been exhibited in various group shows in New York at Heller Gallery, Matter and Still House. Thaddeus lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Volume Gallery Volume Gallery is an event-based gallery with a specific focus on American design, particularly emerging contemporary designers. Founded by Claire Warner and Sam Vinz, the Volume Gallery releases editions, publications and exhibits that showcase the work of American designers to regional, national and international audiences. Volume Gallery provides a platform for emerging American designers to engage with an international audience.

Visit www.wvvolumes.com for information and upcoming events.
For additional information and picture inquires: Sam Vinz T 414 841 3003 E sam@wvvolumes.com

Exhibition Location: 835 West Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL Hours: December 10th – January 21, 2012 11 AM – 6 PM, Tuesday – Saturday

CHUCK JONES will present a series of large ink drawings of fantasy landscapes with falling trucks and bad architecture.

http://www.babygorilla.com/

DANIELLE PAZ will collaborate with Catie Olson and EC Brown in a video, based upon the Empress of Fantastica from “The Neverending Story.

http://www.danpaz.com/

FRANK POLLARD will extend his long-running narrative based on lucid dreams, with a sculpture and a pseudo-surveillance video involving implants taken from field agents.

http://tinyurl.com/frankpollard

http://vimeo.com/user6540104

CATIE OLSON will be creating an interactive sculpture: a dome with the protruding heads of participants.

http://catieolson.com

EC BROWN will present a painting in which the near-death of the Empress from “The Neverending Story” will reveal its historical origins: a clandestine, candle-lit dinner between Johnny Ramone and a distraught disco diva.

http://www.ecbrown.org

About the FLAT series:
Catie Olson and EC Brown have conducted Floor Length and Tux exhibitions from their home since February 2009. These single-evening events are the result of an extended relationship with small selections of artists. Themes and threads are emergent, rather than concerted efforts.

http://www.floorlengthandtux.com

ARTIFACT presents work that emphasizes materiality. The material components of the wor…k are re-contextualized, subverted, and misused by artists as they co-opt these materials for their own purposes.

This exhibit is co-curated by the husband-and-wife team Jeriah Hildwine and Stephanie Burke. The exhibition will be on display at CAC Coalition Gallery (217 N Carpenter) and will run from December 9, 2011-January 13, 2012.

Come out to the show’s opening and celebrate with us that same night at our annual Holiday Party!

Coalition Gallery Hours: Monday-Thursday, 10pm to 5pm. Fridays, 9am-1pm. Saturdays, 12pm to 6pm. Or by appointment.
Ph: 312.491.8888

Free and open to the public.

For more information about this exhibit and other CAC initiatives, visit:
www.chicagoartistscoalition.org

$40 ($20 for students and acre alumni)

LIVE MUSIC
The Golden Horse Ranch Band
Eileen
Chances Dances goes Country

ART AUCTION (Silent Auction ends and Live Auction begins at 9:30.)
Bid on new art works by Chicago artists and ACRE alumni! Featuring work by Adam Grossi, Alex Chitty, Alyse Ronayne, Aron Gent,, Ben Driggs, Brandon Anschultz, Bryan Lear, Caitlin Arnold, Caroline Picard, Chris Meerdo, Dan Bradica, Daniel Shea, Jacob Chris Hammes, Jan Tichy, Jennifer Ray, Jeremy Bolen, Jessica Taylor, Julia Klein, Kelly Kaczynski, Kristina Paabus, Laurie Palmer, Leo Kaplan, Matt Austin, Michelle Grabner, Olivia Valentine, Steve Reinke, Tara Hills, Thad Kelstadt, Todd Diederich, Young Joon Kwak, Zak Arctander, and more!

CORNUCOPIA EATING CONTEST
Contestants compete in teams of two to gobble the most produce, chocolate and other goodies spilling out of five large cornucopias. The cornucopias are fair game too- they’re made of bread! Prizes will be awarded for total amount of food eaten, and crowd-pleasingest groups.

LIVE PORTRAIT DRAWING
Get a one-of-a-kind portrait by a talented emerging artist. Participating artists include Betsy Odom, Caroline Carlsmith, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Chiara Keeling-Gonzalez, Lauren Beck, Leo Kaplan, Liz McCarthy, Michael Hunter, Michael Kloss, Nick Wylie, Ron Ewert, and Virginia Aberle.

ZACHARIAS ABUBKER is a Chicago based artist, where he works as a freelance preparator and photographer. He attended Columbia College Chicago, attaining a BFA in Photography in 2009. He plans to return to Ethiopia early next year for an extended stay to develop ongoing projects.

More information about Zacharias Abubeker can be found at www.zachabubeker.com

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is a volunteer-run non-profit based in Chicago devoted to employing various systems of support for emerging artists and to creating a regenerating community of cultural producers. ACRE investigates and institutes models designed to help artists develop, present, and discuss their practices by providing forums for idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects. Each year, ACRE conducts a summer residency program in rural Steuben, Wisconsin, bringing together over 100 artists, musicians, and thinkers to make and discuss their work. Back in Chicago, ACRE provides opportunities for all of its residents to exhibit at either ACRE Projects, a storefront gallery in Pilsen, or one of over 10 partner spaces.

ACRE Projects is a new space in Pilsen presenting weekly art events every Sunday evening. Each of ACRE’s 70+ residents are given the keys to the space for one week to do with it what they will. Additional exhibitions will be hosted by a number of local galleries and alternative spaces.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Dec 4, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Dec 5, noon-4pm

I am The Queen takes a look at the often unobserved life of Chicago’s Puerto Rican transgender community. This film documents the Cacique Pageant, the first annual transgender/drag pageant held in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. I am the Queen follows Bianca, Julissa, Jolizza and Alayna as they prepare for the Cacique Pageant and negotiate being a teenager and transgender in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Chicago. The film exposes the restructuring of the family unit experienced by pageant participants who are often distanced from their biological family only to find kinship among others in their community. Q&A following the screening. Doors at 5:30pm, screening at 6:00pm.

The panel will move forward from that to assess the current state of art criticism in Chicago, both print- and web-based, and analyze the rapidly changing milieu for arts conversation in Chicago.

Panelists:
Kathryn Born (Chicago Art Magazine) and Terri Griffith (SAIC faculty), editors of the The Essential New Art Examiner
Jason Foumberg (Newcity)
Abraham Ritchie (ArtSlant: Chicago)
Steve Ruiz (The Visualist and ArtSlant: Chicago)
Lori Waxman (Chicago Tribune)
Ann Wiens (former editor, New Art Examiner)
Moderator: James Yood (former editor, New Art Examiner)

Apiary couples twin-bellows into a new musical instrument; a free-reed expression box. Similar to how a music hold perforated discs containing songs, the instrument holds up to two slides containing free reeds in various tunings. The instrument is activated by manually operating the bellows. You can read Andrew’s notes about the instrument here: http://www.futurevessel.com/coppice/factual/instruments/apiary

Donation-based admission.

The event will also include a performance of Seam as a trio with electro-acoustic cellist Sarah J. Ritch.

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Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer) is a Chicago-based duet of bellows and electronics. Since its formation in 2009 they have produced original compositions for stage, fixed media, and performed installation settings, recently presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, New Music at the Green Mill, New Capital, and ACRE (Chicago); Music with a View (New York); Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts (Minneapolis); McNeill Street Pumping Station New Music Festival (Shreveport); as well as internationally in Iceland and Sweden.

http://www.futurevessel.com/coppice/

•

Andrew Furse is directed in woodwork, graduate of applied trade problem solving; vocational touch and go. Piano tuner/ Reed organ repair/ Instrument builder in rubber, brass, cloth and wood. Experiments in natural mechanical sound mimicry/organic tone-noise/big-bang echo chamber-like; percussive table-tennis hegemony. No training for enthusiasm, well-practiced on the musical-saw.”

http://www.futurevessel.com/andrewfurse/

Lebofsky currently lives and works in Chicago.
His work has been exhibited at Western Exhibitions, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center, and Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago; Fecalface Gallery in San Francisco, and Sears Peyton Gallery in New York. He is also the front-man for the incredible two-piece band Avagami.

www.ericlebofsky.com

Mannis received his MFA from SAIC in 2005 and has since relocated to Los Angeles. He has upcoming solo shows in 2012 at Western Exhibitions in Chicago, Thomas Solomon Gallery in L.A., and Anthony Greaney Gallery in Boston. Recent shows include Kavi Gupta Gallery in Berlin; Thomas Solomon Gallery in L.A.; The Tate Modern Museum in London; and Small A Projects in Portland (Oregon).
www.joshmannis.com/

Organized by Jake Myers

Live Performances by:
Roy Ivy
E. Aaron Ross
Go Figure (John Myers, Traci VanLaarhoven Myers, Toni VanLaarhoven, Josh Myers)
Bill Myers
Allison Trumbo
Lara Stall
Austin Smith & Curt Schreiber

Tent Installations By:
Happy Collaborationists (Meredith Weber, Anna Trier featuring Claire Ashley)
Pentagon Gallery (Michael Garcia)
The Milk Factory (Jeff Prokash featuring Morgan Sims)
The Second Bedroom (Chris Smith)
Sam Sieger, Olivia Strautmanis, Bill Connors, Woobie Bogus, Mac Akin, Mary Clemens
Katie Schuering & Jesse Lee

Come and eat some smores between 730pm-11pm

Ricki Hill, an alumnus from UIC’s School of Art and Design, will share her catalogue of the Scrap Metal Collection featured in the exhibition Archival Impulse. Hill produced the catalogue, subtitled Relics of an Industrial Pathway, as a senior thesis project with Marcia Lausen. Created as a document of her travels on Hubbard Street between school and work, it features mappings of metal objects found along the route, image-making explorations using various processes, and a personal account of her acquisitions and experiences. Hill will also share other collections, including: vintage Life magazines, printed numerals, copper textural tests, handmade doilies, and cassette tapes with handmade packaging.