Collected in The Shimmering Beast are Reinke’s best recent prose pieces. Hybrids of criticism, fiction, and personal essay, these pieces all engage—by pillaging, honoring, scrutinizing, cannibalizing—another’s work: the films of Frank Cole, the videos of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby, the photos of Doug Ischar, the writings of Dr. Paul Brouardel, and the psycho¬analysis of Melanie Klein, to name just a few. Funny, absurd, and tartly poignant, these texts document the process and reach of a truly artistic mind.

Co-published by Gallery 400, Coach House Books, and WhiteWalls, The Shimmering Beast accompanies The Tiny Ventriloquist—Reinke’s 2010 exhibition at Gallery 400, which featured a suite of videos commissioned by Gallery 400, as well as works in various other media and Reinke’s collaborations with artists Dani Leventhal, John Marriott, Jessie Mott, and James Richards.

The talk will highlight resonances between some of Stratman’s recent (and future) projects and that of Nancy Holt. In particular, the recent public installations “Desert Resonator” and “Augural Pair,” (collaborations with artist Steven Badgett), and the in-progress “Sinkholes” project. Nancy Holt: Sightlines will be on view at the Graham Foundation from October 7 through December 17, 2011.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems – and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationships between physical environments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about freedom, expansion, security, and the regulation of space. Stratman works in multiple mediums, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Pompidou, Hammer Museum and any international film festivals including Sundance, the Viennale, Ann Arbor and Rotterdam. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and she currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines.

Driven by a passion to explore more humanized and embodied forms of technology Gordon Kummel has been creating new media art for over ten years as an independent artist and technologist. Specializing in novel applications of video projection and interactive sensor-based installation art, he has worked at every level of scale, from constructing sensor dance floors and fully immersive video environments, to wearable video avatar helmets and Xbox Kinect-based art. Starting out in 2001 with a 7000 sq. foot interactive video/audio installation known as Mindfield/MFX1, he now works on diverse projects including 3D U—a “transforming mirror” implementation using Xbox Kinect— and Data Portraits, a data visualization collaboration with -artist Maria Scileppi that reveals the design narrative of movement as expressed by the GPS data generated by participants as they move within a defined canvas of real space.

This event is free and open to the public.

Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany (ZKM); Aarhus Kunstbygning in Aarhus, Denmark; DeVos Museum of Art, Marquette, MI; and Gallery 400, Chicago,IL, amongst other. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, the journal RETHINKING MARXISM, Proximity Magazine, and Artforum.com. Currently he is a Lecturer in the Department of Visual Arts & serves as the Open Practice Committee coordinator at the University of Chicago.

More information at http://three-walls.org/programs/threewallssolo/zach-cahill.php

Bill Fontana, William and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Professor

Bill Fontana is a world-renowned pioneer of sound art who has created monumental, site-specific, and experiential aural installations around the globe. His works engage the human and natural environment as a living source of musical information, interacting with and transforming our perceptions of visual and architectural spaces. He has realized sound sculptures and major radio sound art projects world-wide and exhibited extensively.

Autumn Space is pleased to present Brian Hubble’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. “Just Breathe Normally” is comprised of nine works that interweave themes of narrative, authorship, and the nature of the comedic in contemporary art.

More specifically, Hubble’s art plays upon the plausible through artifacts of narrative. Evidenced in the selection of titles, audio recordings, and other performative gestures, the viewer must shift between various descriptive devices to experience the particular story being conveyed. Humor is an entry point into several of the pieces, utilizing tactics such as the pun, pointing to lapses in our attention to language.

Questions of authorship underlie several pieces in the exhibition. Hubble critically engages the status of post-appropriation strategies in quoting artworks that defy documentation and within the gesture of appropriation itself. These works provoke the viewer to decipher the act of authorship as either a transfer or transformation of ownership, an operation that reveals that the criteria for the viewer, and perhaps the artist, may oscillate somewhere in between.

Brian Hubble (b. 1978 Newport News, Virginia) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His works have been exhibited internationally including group exhibitions in Canada and Hong Kong. Hubble completed his M.F.A. at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 where he was the recipient of the William Merchant R. French Fellowship.

Their interactive extravaganza follows the opening of Unfinished Business: Arts Education, a new community-curated, participatory art exhibition that explores the importance of the arts and insists on cultural rights for all. The exhibit features interviews with some of Chicago’s most scintillating teaching artists juxtaposed with profiles of Hull-House arts education reformers; the Hull-House Pop-up Print Shop, an installation co-curated by David Jones at Anchor Graphics, that will have a working relief printing press that visitors will use to print postcards designed by local artists; and a Community Loom, three floor-to-ceiling looms, designed and built by artist Alexis Ortiz. Visitors will be able to learn a simple Guatemalan weaving technique and contribute to a large-scale woven map of Chicago.

Talk at 8PM.

Sponsored by The Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts and the Art|Science Initiative at University of Chicago.

Nazy’s ensemble of paintings/sculptural objects clue the audience into her obsessive doubt between having an idea or no idea. The work is a theatrical stage for a play of nothing.

Join us as Theaster discusses the energy he has put into new works over the last two years. He will talk about the relationship between his art practice, myth making and urban stewardship and how slippery these relationships are.

Space is limited. Please RSVP online. This event is free and open to the public.

Ditto, or the same as what has been said consists of images searched from the labyrinthine archives of the Internet, in a hauntological rearrangement of sorts. It features works by some key 20th century avant-garde artists, such as Vladimir Tatlin, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Francis Picabia, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Smithson, Man Ray amongst many others. These canonical art works are then paired with their non-art counterparts from the far-flung global south in an ethical proximity, to invoke a mode of relating, one in which difference is neither reified nor erased but negotiated.

Blending making, an activist mode, and mediation, Dorit Cypis (MFA, California Institute for the Arts, and Masters of Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University) has focused “on the physical and somatic body as the site for negotiating interiority and the social world.”

Since the 1980s Cypis has employed strategies of photography, performance, installation, social sculpture to explore relationships between personal and social identity, questioning subjectivity in relation to corporeal, social, political and psychological spaces.

It is as an artist that Cypis approaches a conflict resolution practice. Her 25+ year career in the arts, exploring the social, physical and psychological aspects of who we are, how we represent ourselves, and how we relate to others, brings a breadth of knowledge, experience, and subtle tools of perception to mediation.

Curated and introduced by Artemis Willis, Ph.D candidate, Department of Cinema & Media Studies.

Shteynshleyger’s (Russian-American, born Moscow 1977, lives Chicago) photographs—portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, and interiors—display a historic sensitivity that is at once personal and political. Arts patron Waldburg-Wolfegg is on the Advisory Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the International Committee of the Renaissance Society, where Shteynshleyger had solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Shteynshleyger will be previewing some of her new work in progress.

Fain (American, born London 1980, lives Chicago), who is best known for his controversial public-performances and parades, recently taught the course The Parade Float as Guerrilla Art in Northwestern’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. Straton, the founder and Executive Director of local non-profit Threewalls, is intimately familiar with Chesterhill, OH, the location of Fain’s most recent parade and the subject of his current project. Together they will discuss this project along with new contexts for art making and exhibiting.

Gunn’s (American, born 1980, lives Chicago) paintings, sculptures and installations investigate the power and perception of pattern and light as well as the roles of spatial and cultural context to the assignment of meaning in contemporary art. Michelle Grabner, who is an artist, curator, writer and the founder of The Suburban in Oak Park, taught Gunn at the School of the Art Institute, where she is Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department and where Gunn received his MFA in 2007. After the conversation, follow us to Shane Campbell Gallery, for the opening of Grabner’s solo exhibition Like a rare morel.

Patterson (Jamaican, born Kingston Jamaica 1981, lives Lexington, KY) will have a dynamic mixed-media installation that investigates Jamaican dance hall culture in the gallery’s window facing Division Street. Mosaka included Patterson in his 2007 exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where he was formerly Associate Curator of Exhibitions. Recently, Mosaka has become the Contemporary Art Curator at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois. Patterson’s installation Gully Godz in Conversation-Conversations Revised I, II and III will continue through March 26 as our 4th on the wall project.

Labatte is a recent graduate from the MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her formal explorations of everyday objects and materials focus on color and shape while emphasizing a collage aesthetic grounded in both the illusionistic tendencies of photography and the still life tradition. By manipulating the picture plane on her large format camera and emphasizing a deceptively flattened space, Labatte asks us to consider the photographic space and its relation to both the picture frame and the two-dimensionality of the paper support.

Artists included in the silent auction: Paul Chan, William Cordova, Jamal Cyrus, Torkwase Dyson, Kianga Ford, Kira Lynn Harris, Lauren Kelly, Rodney MacMillian, Adia Millet, Pamela Phatsumo, Robert Pruitt, Carrie Schneider and Ishmael Randall Weeks.

Carrie Schneider will introduce Cauleen Smith, who will speak about and screen clips from the in-process project.

RSVP required.

Chan is a Chicago based artist with-in the words of Chan-a Bay Area heart. His rigorous paintings, works-on-paper and durational performances record the minutia of daily life, while combining historical and fictitious narratives to reflect on such themes as spirituality and environmental sustainability. Chan develops his work through a highly personal, meditative practice that involves making daily Sumi ink drawings that give “value and meaning to everyday life through painting.”

Kerry James Marshall is one of the most important artists working today, known for formally stunning large-scale paintings, drawings, sculptures and other objects that take up the visual representation of race and, specifically, African-American identity and history, as their subjects.

His wife and collaborator Emilia Kabakov and University of Chicago art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson join him in this talk to reflect on past projects and their place within contemporary art. A Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish origin, Ilya Kabakov was born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He left the Soviet Union in 1987 and two years later began collaborating with Emilia. The two now live and work in Long Island.