Tonight’s guest bartender will be Chicago theater collective The Neo-Futurists.

Presented in collaboration with the exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, on view at the Smart Museum of Art through June 10, 2012.

Must be 21 or older.

+ Anatomy of Melancholy (Bryan Frye, 1960s/1999)
+ Troublemakers (Norman Fruchter & Robert Machover 1966)
+ Sean (Ralph Arlyck, 1970)

South Side Projections presents film screenings and panel discussions to foster conversation on social issues. It seeks to alleviate the lack of mainstream film viewing opportunities on the south side of Chicago by presenting films in alternative venues and to promote the film and video work of filmmakers and students who lack access to Chicago’s traditional art-house and film-school markets. South Side Projections was founded by Michael W. Phillips, Jr.

This program is part of The Tipping Point of Me and We, the latest call-and-response exhibition from the Contemporary Arts Council, which brings together seasoned and ascending artists and writers then asks them to speak to what they are seeing, living and experiencing in the tumultuous moments of the present human experience.

FEATURING
Artists || Michael Dinges, EJ Hill, Honey Pot Performance, Peter Kepha, Nicolas Lampert & Paul Kjelland, Kenrick Mcfarlane, Mark Moleski, Sarah Ross, South Side Projections, and Jabari Zuberi

Writers || Allison Glenn, Joseph D. Jordan, Patrick Lichty, Jennifer Patiño, and Rebecca Zorach

Curator || Tempestt Hazel

This exhibition is presented by the Contemporary Arts Council, an independent, non-affiliated organization dedicated to supporting emerging artists and curators, mainly from the Chicago area.

http://contemporaryartscouncil.org

Venue generously donated by Little Black Pearl Art and Design Center

For nearly a decade, Melissa Oresky has been making works based in abstraction and landscape. Best known for her paintings, Oresky’s collaged drawings represent a dynamic aspect of her practice, blurring commonly perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic spaces and forms, and generating unexpected combinations of colors and textures. Often working in linked sequences and extended series of drawings, Oresky’s work suggests movement of the body within landscape. This interest has led to her work in animation, where the layered structures of her paintings come to life, eliciting in the viewer the sensation of walking through a collage. Here, as in her other works, geometric eruptions of landscape punctuate and define the image, presenting a central tension between the boundaries of the natural and artificial worlds.

Oresky is a Chicago-based visual artist known for her painterly explorations of modern landscapes. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of their series 12 x12: New Artists, New Work; The Elmhurst Art Museum; the Riverside Art Center; Van Harrison Gallery, NY; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA. She is Associate Professor of Art at Illinois State University, and a visiting artist lecturer at several national institutions. Oresky holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Melissa Oresky: Trail will be on view from May 6 through August 19, 2012, at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60615; 773.324.5520 and www.hydeparkart.org. Exhibitions are always free and open to the public.

Afshar began her relationship with the Hyde Park Art Center as an art teacher in the school over 25 year ago. The Art Center first exhibited her work in 1987 as part of a three-person exhibition also organized by Richard Born who then described her tapestries as “simultaneously utilitarian objects and works of independent beauty intended both for use and appreciation at the same time.” This rich foundation is re-kindled and expanded in the upcoming exhibition. This monographic show will focus on stylistic consistencies and remarkable bead work in Afshar’s textile compositions from the 1990s to the present. Afshar will also debut a large wall relief installation made of found Turkish fabrics, tulle, beads, and wire that explore the disintegration of material over time, adding a temporal dimension to her work not present in her woven pieces.

Afshar’s multicultural upbringing inspires her beaded and woven contemporary artworks. Born in Istanbul, educated in Switzerland, and based in Chicago since 1975, Afshar draws on Eastern and Western traditions to craft her one-of-a-kind pieces. Afshar uses a range of color and diverse materials to create her artwork, which ranges from jewelry design to tapestries and installations. The artist became known for making one-of-a-kind wire jewelry in the 1990s, sold through her Lincoln Park boutique AniAfshar. Celebrated both in this country and abroad, Afshar’s textile and jewelry designs reflect artistic traditions from across the globe. In 2009 Afshar closed the boutique to devote her time to her contemporary artwork. She currently teaches Jewelry: Beads and Strings and Wires at the Hyde Park Art Center.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a color catalogue including an essay by Art Historian and critic, Dennis Adrian. The catalogue is made possible with the support of the Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation.

For nearly a decade, Melissa Oresky has been making works based in abstraction and landscape. Best known for her paintings, Oresky’s collaged drawings represent a dynamic aspect of her practice, blurring commonly perceived boundaries between natural and synthetic spaces and forms, and generating unexpected combinations of colors and textures. Often working in linked sequences and extended series of drawings, Oresky’s work suggests movement of the body within landscape. This interest has led to her work in animation, where the layered structures of her paintings come to life, eliciting in the viewer the sensation of walking through a collage. Here, as in her other works, geometric eruptions of landscape punctuate and define the image, presenting a central tension between the boundaries of the natural and artificial worlds.

Oresky is a Chicago-based visual artist known for her painterly explorations of modern landscapes. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of their series 12 x12: New Artists, New Work; The Elmhurst Art Museum; the Riverside Art Center; Van Harrison Gallery, NY; and ADA Gallery, Richmond, VA. She is Associate Professor of Art at Illinois State University, and a visiting artist lecturer at several national institutions. Oresky holds a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Work of…
Michael Dinges, EJ Hill, Honey Pot Performance, Peter Kepha, Nicolas Lampert & Paul Kjelland, Kenrick Mcfarlane, Mark Moleski, Sarah Ross, South Side Projections, and Jabari Zuberi

The Words of…
Allison Glenn, Joseph D. Jordan, Patrick Lichty, Jennifer Patiño, and Rebecca Zorach

FILM SCREENING || South Side Projections
June 6, 2012 | 7pm – 8:30pm
+ Anatomy of Melancholy (Bryan Frye, 1960s/1999)
+ Troublemakers (Norman Fruchter & Robert Machover, 1966)
+ Sean (Ralph Arlyck, 1970)

PERFORMANCE || The Price Point of Living
June 13, 2012 | 7pm – 8:30pm
+ Selections from a multi-arts Honey Pot Performance exploring notions of fairness and balance, or the lack thereof, in today’s economic landscape

Space generously donated to the Contemporary Arts Council by Little Black Pearl Art & Design Center

drkrm gallery, with the cooperation of the The Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection and The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, will create new silver-gelatin prints made from the original negatives. These 60 dramatic black and white limited-edition photographs, on display to the public for the first time in this traveling exhibition, will be offered for purchase with a portion of the proceeds benefiting the LAPL.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) created some of the most influential photographs ever made; he was one of the 20th century’s leading exponents of environmental values. It seems that every third family in America has an Adams’ poster on the wall, images that were difficult to make but easy to love. His images portray a romanticized and unspoiled Western American landscape, but Ansel Adams Los Angeles is a whole other body of work that is rarely discussed, let alone seen.

Image: Nova Paul, “Pink and White Terraces,” 2006, 16mm transferred to DVD, 8:00 min. (still).

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 20, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, May 21, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street, Chicago 60608

HOW THINGS STAND
Janine Biunno’s body of work exhibited in How Things Stand is visually informed by the continual gathering of images, both via photographing her daily commute across New York City and by simultaneously searching the internet for existing imagery of the same spaces. These reference images, equal parts original and digitally sourced, investigate the relationship between representation and interpretation in the built environment. As an artist Biunno is primarily interested in the often overlooked in-between spaces and physical boundaries of the structures that comprise cities. The work presented here is a distillation of the dense visual information of urban space. How Things Stand includes thirty Constructivist-inspired paper cutouts and an accompanying take-away zine of a selection of the reference materials, intended to provide context to the minimalist works.

JANINE BIUNNO is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work typically interprets the subjective view of the city dweller, addressing how the architecture and infrastructure found in the cities we inhabit function as signifiers for location, identity and economy. Janine earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University and BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She currently works for architect Steven Holl, as the Director of Publications.

More info about Janine Biunno can be found at www.janinebiunno.com

In this new body of work, Christy Matson activates rhythmic sequences that simultaneously reference an early modernist aesthetic and the preceding ethnographic patterns by which many twentieth-century painters and sculptors were influenced. The culmination of a process of translation from sketches in marker to full-scale weavings in cotton, linen, cashmere, and tencel, the fields of color within the woven patterns retain the marks of the artist’s hand as it telegraphs through the work of the shuttle. The reinsertion of the casualness of the sketches into the weavings highlights the importance of the idiosyncrasies in Matson’s process and use of color. The breaks or glitches in the self-inscribed systems destabilize the grid and underscore the tension between necessity and monotony in the structure of a plan.

The exhibition is organized around an intimately scaled series of framed weavings, four larger works on black, and a collaborative video project produced with Ken Fandell. Regulated, yet lively, the areas of pattern in the series float within a white, woven ground. Faint feathering around the edges suggests a continuation of the pattern below the picture plane, an effect that serves as a reminder of depth and invites interpretation through each work’s concurrent existence as both surface and object. Although they are constructed using a similar process, the larger works on black are stitched onto a Belgian linen ground on stretched canvas, a method of presentation that stresses the physicality of the works while initiating a conversation about materiality that trespasses over a more painterly history of abstraction. The video, a psychedelic collage of brightly colored segments from the drawings that inspired the weavings interspersed with footage of turtles filmed in El Salvador, speaks to faith in the relationship between persistence and intuition, exemplified by the work of the hand as it is bound up in the work of the loom.

Christy Matson (b. 1979, Seattle, WA), a Left-Coast transplant to the Midwest, is an artist and educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. She received her BFA in studio art from the University of Washington in 2001, and her MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts in 2005. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Knoxville Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; and the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design. In 2011, Matson was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, and in 2006, she was an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in New York.. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery and Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft.

TWO NIGHTS OF PERFORMANCES
Friday, May 18, 7-11pm
Saturday, May 19, 7-11pm

Thalia Hall
1215-1227 W 18th Street, Chicago 60608

Muses & Valkyries is the first solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Meg Leary. Trained as a classical opera singer, Leary is fluent in both the languages of music and visual arts, using one to inform the other. She uses a variety of mediums to explore ideas of sonic theory, the power of the human voice, and the construct of the “Diva.” Performance is at the center of Leary’s practice, engaging her interest in the body and the ephemeral nature of music. This work functions in conversation with her more formal object making practice, using materials such as cassette tape and vinyl records.

For the event at Thalia Hall, Leary is collaborating with the empty space at the historic opera theater, thinking about cultural memory and how music, art and performance can rejuvenate a space. Using a combination of performance, sculpture, music and dance, the show will be a two-night event followed by a gallery show of documentation and materials from the performance at Thalia Hall.

MEG LEARY is an independent artist and cultural producer who has worked with arts and cultural organizations in Chicago and New York for the last ten years. Her performance and video work has been shown at the Kendall Galleries at Kendall College of Art & Design, The Peanut Gallery, Links Hall, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, LaMama ETC, PAC/Edge Festival, Medicine Park Gallery and the Elegant Mr. Gallery. Additionally, she is a founding member of the Henbane Collective, an organization dedicated to collective exhibition opportunities, critiques and art blogging. She received an MA in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and an MA degree in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

More information about Meg Leary can be found at www.megleary.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 13, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, May 14, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street, Chicago 60608

CROSSING SPACE
Eunhyea Choi’s work is conducted within the frame of internal abstraction, perception of light and ephemeral visions, expressed through drawings, paintings, and installations involving light. This imaginative and emotional flow allows Choi to feel the consensual movement between space, time, and light to draw out vague outlines of unseen existences. Lights merge with one another, move, and dissolve within a fluid space. Through these various transformation stages, visual illusions expand their spheres and meanings by making connections with new spaces. Through these connections informed by the fragments of life, she is striving to create works that could be overlapped with endless imagination and numerous interpretations.

EUNHYEA CHOI is an artist based out of Seoul, Korea. She received her MFA in 2010 from Ewha Womans University. Since then has shown around the world including Blank Space in Chelsea, NY, Tohoku University of Art & Design, Yamagata, Japan, Seoul Museum of Art and an upcoming exhibition at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery in London, England.

More information about Eunhyea Choi can be found at www.choieunhyea.com

“It has something to do with being in Chicago, in this crazy industrial/post-industrial city, working away in our catacombs of a basement,” says Andrew Barco. Like the adjoining studio cells that link their diverse practices, The Bike Room – a semi-subterranean vault (vernacularly dubbed garden apartment) is an apt container for the interactions of these artists, whose unifying premise extends the project’s locality from the lakefront and neighborhood grocery to the Northern Rockies of Wyoming, via the Chicago cattle trade.

The show’s purview examines human negotiations of natural and manmade moorings, as well as the physical and emotional ramifications that territory enacts upon us. The external is manifest in the works of Kostoff, Peters and Barco, whose working materials are sand, shoreline and air, respectively. Lee, Suiter and Yoon draw our focus inward to inhabitable (and uninhabitable) spaces – to the mundane objects that, nonetheless, define us – to domestic detritus, both comfort and threat – and to rituals we create to attract and repulse confinement.

Andrew Barco, Christina Kostoff, Hyojin Lee, Phil Peters, Antoinette Suiter and Jiyoung Yoon advised with SAIC adjunct professor Jin Soo Kim for the creation of this project. They come from North Carolina, New York, Ohio, Canada and Korea.

‘In Circles’ – New work by:

Surabhi Ghosh

and

Karolina Gnatowski

Both of these artists produce works that can be referred to as art objects in the classic sense of the term. They are objects that are at home in the purity of a gallery space; ‘sculptures’, ‘paintings’ and ‘drawings’. They are objects where there is ample evidence of the hand of the artist, built up with repetitive mark-making or cumulative woven patterns.
However, they both also make use of the decorative and they both riff off of the domestic. The resulting objects seem to exist somewhere between a domestic space and the white cube. We can not really be sure where to place them in the world and it is this ambiguous place in which the power of these objects lies.

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 12, 6-10PM
Open Hours: by appointment

Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space
1254 N Noble St

1:1
Olivia Valentine creates relationships between textile and architectural structures. Often working in site-specific installation using methods such as photography, drawing and textile construction, her work addresses the threshold spaces in both buildings and textiles. Recently these have taken the form of 1:1 scale lace windows.

This exhibition will feature a new site specific installation, 1254 N Noble (Constructed Orthographic Drawing in Blue), as well as a series of recent small scale works entitled Field Edgings, that emerged from a series of photographs taken at the ACRE Residency in 2011.

OLIVIA VALENTINE is a Chicago based artist. Her architectural scale textile installations have been shown both nationally and internationally. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She will be travelling to Turkey this fall as a Fulbright Fellow.

More information about Olivia Valentine can be found at www.oliviavalentine.net

David Leggett will exhibit new paintings focused on afro futurism and afro pop. Leggett’s work references cultural and personal relationships and attempts to tackle the many contradictions involved in the human experience. Leggett syas, “The artwork I make is about the experience of being present in the world. I want us all to be more aware of one another and the lives that we lead.” David Leggett received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and his BFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2003.

Kristina Paabus will exhibit a site-specific installation incorporating new drawings and sculptures. Paabus’ creates process oriented work through developed systems which investigate the fact, fiction, and the murky in between. Paabus states, “My hybrid spatial conversations elaborate on constructions that allow us to interact with, and gain control over, our surroundings.” Kristina Paabus received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

_________________________________________

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.

Lion VS Gorilla (LVG), a curatorial collaboration that uses experiential art to build community, is partnering with Version12 to create the First Annual Bridgeport Day, on May 12, 2012! Bridgeport Day is a celebration of the diverse communities that make up the neighborhood, and will be a fun, relaxed day where neighbors can meet, talk, mingle, and celebrate the community.
Join us for the Bridgeport Day Community Parade, as it winds down Morgan Street from the Zhou B Arts Center (35th St.) to Benton House (31st St.), from 2:00 to 3:00. At 3:00, the Bridgeport Day Block Party begins, at Benton House. There will be everything from a kimchee deathmatch battle (aka kimchee cook-off) to 12 pop-up operas with artisanal ice cream pairings to Bridgeport history storytelling to musical performances to a poop or paint exhibit to a three-legged race, because running is better when someone else is tied to your leg. There will even be a petting zoo!

Bridgeport Day is about YOU. We look forward to seeing you there!

p.s.
check out the facebook invite and feel free to share: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=566844178#!/events/273473529410521/

Bradley will be exhibiting works on canvas, paper, and piano. He sees these works as characters within a personal mythology, created from his experiences and memories. These works speak of his continuing interest in the area between figuration and abstraction, and the area between his music making and art-making practices. Collaboration can be a magical variable of making, and for this reason he is excited for his work to be in conversation with the work of Zoe Nelson.

The Homoccult Show :An Exhibition featuring Artworks of :

Christos Andres
Elijah Burgher
Maj Furani
Erika Keck
George Keller
Armando Lozano
Daniel McKernan
Sofia Moreno
ColectivoMultipolar
Erik Peterson

Featurning Homoccult & Other Esoterotica Volume 1+2. Curated by Daniel McKernan.

Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny
Todd Verow
Roberto Ratti
Terence Koh
Peter Christopherson/The Threshold Houseboys Choir
Daniel McKernan & Richie Rennt
Massimo & Pierce
Morrison Edley/ Edward O’Dowd
Micki Pellerano
Ron Athey
Breyer P-Orridge
Luigi & Luca
Lukas Beyeler
Dominic Johnson
Murphy Maxwell
BruceLaBruce & Gio Black Peter
Jody Jock
Lee Adams
Skye Thorstenson

“A collection of artists & filmmakers who have an affiliation to the Generation Hex era, a blend of old school and new school. Each individual has his/her own unique interpretation of the theme of the occult and esoteric. Jason Louv, in his introduction to Generation Hex (2006), states that the book is a snapshot of those ‘who are not only delving into this art of magick and science of the future, but who are coming to magical consciousness at a time when it has never been easier to find and link up with people of like minds and experience.’ This is a video survey of such people. As Scott Treleaven, in the final issue of This is the Salivation Army (1999), said: ‘We are the new circus. And we are the envy of the fucking World.’”

“Involuntary. Loss(y). Privacy” is a timely compilation of works that looks at the Internet’s evolving impact on our daily lives and the ways in which we are unintentionally identified/identifiable by data that is collected, captured and stored. Recent events in the national news media about racial profiling remind us of just how powerful a single fleeting image or profile can be in determining whether one is labeled menace or martyr. Stephen Flemister and Julian Williams are deeply invested in using portrait painting as a vehicle for exploring this duality.

The exhibition’s title centers on American society’s increasing willingness to give up the right to control personal information via the Internet and social media. In information technology, lossy compression is a term that refers to a data encoding procedure that minimizes the amount of data that is needed to make an image file legible. Each time a file is compressed, data is discarded and resolution is lost. For this exhibition however, lossy has taken on many different meanings for Flemister and Williams: Loss of self; a loss of innocence; the reduction of a person down to a vague likeness; an identity that is unrecognizable, minimized, and mistaken. Both artists start with digital imagery of unknown Black subjects as their source material but arrive at very different conceptual places.

Image:
Arabella, 2012, collage, mixed media on paper, 2 elements, 39.06” x 27.44” each

-featuring a reading by André Schürmann

-DJ: Jordan Walters

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -
((Sounds and shapes.))

The presented work illustrates Helmut Heiss’ current experiments with sounds and shapes.

Since his arrival, Heiss’ approach to the buzzing and sounding city of Chicago was rather a hearing than a seeing one (being the prototype perception in a widely-recognised city of architecture). He chose random sounds (mostly noises) on the grounds of their pictoral properties and made recordings of the various places and machinery:
There are sound samples of transport and the streets, stations, the casino, elevators, ventilations, the home, architecture itself.
Mostly these are representations of late industrialisation as well as contemporary high-end technologies. They are mainly artificial sounds, created by machines, to be ‘translated’ by another ‘machine’.

The next step was this machine-medium or transformer that could create pictures from the sound material or produce information by translation (into a language we don’t quite understand).
Transformation is a leitmotiv in Heiss’ art production. It’s about the search for alternative ways of creating pictures and the provocation of the senses. In this case, the aural stimulation becomes visual and evokes a synesthetic sensation.

The technical equipment for visualising the sounds: MP3-player, amplifier, vibrating speaker membrane, loudspeaker, mirror, micro-tripod, laser pointer, photo paper. The sound is projected onto the paper in a darkroom setting. The exposure time is two seconds.*

It’s interesting that the reproduced sounds resemble photos, drawings or writing but not pictures. In Heiss’ eyes they are a mix between landscape photo, self-portrait, recording in a language/sound way. It can be seen as a translation or transcription, information is being conveyed.

With the production of a wide set of sounds ‘translated’ into visuals, the result could indeed become a sort of an alphabet. The abstract resonance could serve as information carrier. This wasn’t the artist’s main intention. His principal focus lay on conducting the experiment and the trial series.
This unique experiment will be edited in 10 ‘pictures’.

*German physicist Chladni (1756–1827) experimented with the vibration of sonorous glass and metal bodies over which he sprinkled sand (in 1785). Chladni himself was inspired by Lichtenberg’s shapes and sound-trials.

Text: André Schürmann

a multimedia group exhibition featuring:

Devin Mawdsley

Anders Johnson

Rachael Lombardy

Kristin Abhalter

Jun-Jun Sta. Ana

Steve Armstrong

Corinne Halbert

Jonah Ortiz

Matthew Schlagbaum

Edra Soto

May 6 – May 29, 2012

Opening reception: Sunday May 6, 5 – 9pm

Positive Reinforcement is a collection of artwork describing and exploring several different local artists’ personal “happy places”. The exhibition is an opportunity for us to inhabit the fantasies of others and compare the similarities and differences between them. What they have in common is that none of them are literal visions of utopia. In fact, very few of the works are superficially pleasant, and many are aggressively ecstatic, even a bit violent. Motifs within this exhibition span across the board from nostalgia to sex and death, to more abstract, visceral interactions with shapes and materials. Mediums employed are equally diverse – from kinetic sculpture to pen and ink drawings. Peanut Gallery’s trademark sense of irreverent play is present more than ever in this exhibition, and we invite you to visit anytime and let Positive Reinforcement be your happy place for the month of May.

KADABRA VOL II
Sunday, May 6, 1-5pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

ACRE’s COOKBOOK SHUFFLE will be an afternoon of treats and libations featuring performances and happenings to celebrate the release of Kadabra Vol II. Donate $5 to feast on a buffet prepared by the ACRE kitchen witches or just feast your eyes on our new collection of recipes and artwork out of the ACRE kitchen. Performances include an experimental operatic violin and voice conversation between Meg Leary and Allison Trumbo, the synchronized dances and theatrical anger of Forced into Femininity, and a quiet set from the always dramatic electro-dance group Xina Xurner.

KADABRA VOL II pairs delectable recipes from the ACRE kitchen with artists’ renditions of those recipes in a set of 25 cards packaged in a limited edition screen-printed tea towel designed by Ciara Ruffino. Contributing artists include: Zacharias Abubeker, Caitlin Arnold, Matt Austin, Becca Brown, Emily Clayton, Caleb Cole, Ben Driggs, Emily Green, James Green, Maggie Haas, Ashley Hudson, Matthew Lane, Bryan Lear, David Moré, Kristina Paabus, Joseph Rynkiewicz, Erin Washington, and Nicholas Wylie. Plus some extra special entries from 2011 visiting artists Selena Abbott & Ariel Diamond, Jenny Kendler, Lora Lode, and Courtney Nulicek. Compiled and edited with love and care by ACRE chefs Melissa Damasauskas and Rachel Ettling.

In a conversation with the artist Mary Heilmann at the Art Institute’s Modern Wing a while back, she asked “Did you see Heaven?” in reference to her brushy green painting (titled Heaven) then on exhibit. I remember so well the way she mischievously smiled that question. With big eyes. It still makes me smile.

It is that knowing yet playful attitude that inspires Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA and WYSIWYG, two presentations of paintings at PEREGRINEPROGRAM. Mary Heilmann folds into her work the legacies of Albers and de Kooning, and the two shows of Did You See Heaven? are built from those ideas, taking as their starting points the potential of intimacy with color and gesture in abstract work.

Beyond their essential material, paintings are also conditions for self-awareness. Did You See Heaven? is less about an agreement of recognition than it is about our differences in the presence of these works. Implicit in the statement are two other questions. If heaven is that state of bliss and ecstasy, could we see, or find it in abstract paintings? More importantly, if one agrees that the heady and sublime is indeed within reach from these works, where will we locate it and how will we understand it? Yes, there might be a bit of hyperbole here, maybe, just a little bit, but let’s not forget Heilmann’s big eyes.

– EC

Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA

Just as our “heavens” differ, we will each find our own way of experiencing this display of work. Individuated by form and scale, color in these paintings punctuate and notate, become figures, become experience, echo and contrast each other. In addition, the range of approaches, materials and postures further complicate our perceptions and conceptions. Through a spectra of physical and affective textures these works call our attention to subtle, even unnoticed things, saturating both eyes and mind.

What arrests each of us and how we apprehend the single work and exhibition is unpredictable. We come to these paintings with unique inclinations, memories and cadences. One might draw moth-like to a bright thing, a dark thing, remember the time when, stop a minute for, think an irrational thought, or slow, to imagine the work being made. Abstract works are unending because they are so flexible and indeed, the nimbleness of these paintings invites ours as the forms push, and pull, and the colors wheel.

The artists: Levi Budd and Jack Holström Schneider live and work in Chicago, IL, where they are completing their degrees at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Michelle Grabner is a Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at SAIC. She co-directs the artist project space The Suburban in Oak Park, IL, and The Poor Farm, a non-profit art space and residency in Little Wolf, WI. Ethan Greenbaum lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He has forthcoming exhibitions at Thierry Goldberg Projects, NY, and the Aldrich Museum, CT. Sam Jaffe lives and works in Chicago, IL. She will open a show at Grand Bizzare Gallery this August. Larry Lee works and teaches at SAIC, and recently had a solo exhibition at Kirk’s Apartment last November. Li Trincere has shown throughout the US and Europe, and has received an NEA grant along with Pollock/ Krasner grants. Trincere recently had a solo exhibition with MINUS SPACE, in NYC. Don Voisine is a member of The National Academy of Art, and president of American Abstract Artists. His work is also exhibited widely throughout the US and Europe. Jon Waites was born in Santa Fe, NM, and now lives and works in Chicago, IL.

PEREGRINEPROGRAM presents Levi Budd, Michelle Grabner, Ethan Greenbaum, Sam Jaffe, Larry Lee, Jack Holström Schneider, Li Trincere, Don Voisine, and Jon Waites in Did You See Heaven: SPECTRA from May 6 – Jun 10, 2012.
An opening reception will be held Sunday, May 6, from 4-7 p.m.

Did You See Heaven: WYSIWYG

PEREGRINEPROGRAM will present McKeever Donovan, Susanne Doremus, Ron Ewert, Richard Galling, Antonia Gurkovska, Sofia Leiby, Josh Reames, Ezara Spangl, and Patricia Treib in Did You See Heaven: WYSIWYG this September.

more info to follow…

CLOSING RECEPTION May 5 from 2 – 5 pm
Exhibition Dates: March 3rd – May 5th, 2012

“Is It What?” is a group exhibition featuring sixteen artists who have worked with What It Is over this period of time. What It Is, is a project space and gallery based in Chicago, IL founded by artists Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes at their residence in Oak Park, IL. For two and a half years artists were invited to interact with their domestic space and encouraged to literally play with the fabric of the house. Resulting projects over this period of time include site-specific installations in the kitchen, bedrooms, living room, bathroom and backyard.

“Is It What?” includes the work of the following artists: Lise Haller Baggesen, Man Bartlett (Brooklyn), Bradley Bullock (Carterville), Jacob Crose, Theodore Darst, Jonathan Franklin, Troy Hagenbart (Brooklyn), Selena Jones, Sabina Ott, Rob Ray (Los Angeles), Andrew Rigsby, Sara Schnadt (Los Angeles), Stoic Swine (Seattle), Channel Two: Jessica Westbrook and Adam Trowbridge, Anthony R. Vizzari, Michelle Wasson.

What It Is has participated in Aqua Art Miami, MDW Fair (Chicago), Fountain Art Fair (NYC) and the Next Art Fair (Chicago).

Hingegallery.com

Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday (Wednesday/Thursday/Friday noon – 7, Sat/Sun noon – 6)

Hinge Gallery
1955 W. Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622

www.hingegallery.com
info@hingegallery.com
312-291-9313

— Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality

Using the Smart Museum’s exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art and Jacques Derrida’s text “Of Hospitality” as points of departure, this symposium combines presentation, discussion, artists’ projects, shared meals, and a keynote address by critic and theorist Jan Verwoert.

What does it / could it mean to practice “hospitality” within the realm of art and culture? How might cultural institutions enact hospitality as a creative, ethically grounded, meaningful activity—one that gets beyond the rote pragmatism of the paid greeter who asks “how can I help you” but really means “what can I sell you”? What’s at stake when cultural practitioners and/or institutions embrace hospitality as a theoretical framework or a day-to-day activity? What stands to be gained, and what might be lost?

Dig into these questions during a full day of discussion, presentations, performances, and meals including Radical Hospitality One Pot at A Time, a dinner reception created by Soup and Bread Chicago.

Participants include Martha Bayne, Zachary Cahill, Michael Christiano, Anais Daly, Erika Dudley, Charles Esche, Fallen Fruit, David Giordano, Hannah B. Higgins, Anthony Huberman, Matthew Jesse Jackson, Allison Knowles, Laura Letinsky, Ed Marszewski, Eric May, Amy M. Mooney, Ana Prvacki, Michael Rakowitz, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Satinsky, Stephanie Smith, Cassandra Troyan, and Jan Verwoert.

Presented by the Smart Museum of Art in collaboration with the University of Chicago’s Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.

Floods, seismic activity and all varieties of natural destruction have inspired awe in the human race for centuries. We respond to these uncontrollable forces with artwork, community and the hope to rebuild what was lost. Come see artwork that deals with natural disasters/ Acts of God.

Musical Acts:

Joe Sepka (7-7:30)
Maribel (8-8:45)
Volcano! (9-9:45)
Odd Obsession (10-10:45)

Visual Artists

Jenny Kendler
Sam Sieger
Jeriah Hildwine
Stephanie Burke
Theodore Darst
Robin Kang
Aaron Orsini
Adam Rux
Luke Bradley
Kent Bamberger

Curated by Jake Myers & The Octagon Gallery

643 W 31st Street (near Halsted & 31st)
May 5th, 7-11pm
Version Festival 12

The event is totally free and there will be food and drink tastings from local vendors as well as locally made products for sale! Please see below for more info about SMALL.

Small Manufacturing Alliance (SMALL)

SMALL is a new organization that promotes companies and individuals who make locally manufactured products.

The goal of the organization is to amplify awareness of products made in the Chicago Metropolitan area through events, promotions, media and trade shows.SMALL will emphasize that sustainable businesses are the key to our economic well being. The organization will assist these local manufacturers with legal aid, seminars, marketing services, incubation services and other resources to help grow their business endeavors.

SMALL will be launched this May during Version Festival. We will create a department store like space called the SMALL Showroom at the gallery Co-Prosperity Sphere located at 3219 S Morgan Street in Chicago that will be open for the entire month of May. Think of it as the People’s Macy’s. Products will be displayed in the showroom for one month. During promotional events at the SMALL Showroom the creators of these local products will be able to demonstrate or present them to the public.

SMALL is being incubated by Public Media Institute (PMI). PMI is a non-profit 501(c) 3, community based, arts & culture organization located in Chicago, Illinois. Our mission is to create and incubate innovative arts programming and cultural infrastructures to transform people – socially and intellectually – through the production of festivals, art spaces, events, exhibitions, community projects, artifacts and media. Public Media Institute is committed to the region’s cultural ecology and is evident through our series of programs, spaces and projects. http://www.publicmediainstitute.com/

KIRK FABER
ZIAD NAGY
COURTNEY MACKEDANZ
QING YANG
JAEUK SONG
HANGIL JANG
NO FUN

@ The Dog & Bone Space

Black Arts is a collection of work celebrating women artists as ushers of this fertile season and intuitive interpreters of their environment. Referencing Neo-pagan traditions, where women are beacons of spring renewal, this show offers a medley of stalwart individuals whose work is a reflection of their unique character and strives for authentic thinking. The objects and images in this show emulate the new spring soil through a monochromatic black palette and act as icons of these of these creators’ complex personal mythologies.

The archetypal witch figure—like the Italian Bufana, the Christmas witch, Roman Diana, goddess of moon and hunt, witches of Caribbean and Haitian cultures, and even many interpretations Christian Mary—anchor the female to nature, fertility, growth and rebirth. In these positive representations, witches possess qualities of a shaman allied with nature and generators of communal ideals through personal mysticism. Since the beginning of colonial America, “witch” has been a derisive term for the strong, solitary, and independent female. “Witches”, because they expressed themselves in ways alternative to the gender female identity of puritan Christianity, were prosecuted for making personal myths, culture, and ritual counter to normative society. The contemporary female artist’s function is parallel to the independent, curious, mystical witch. Artists’ magic is enabled through the generation of images and objects that recontextualize popular culture and diverge from mainstream seeing. Their ritualistic practice takes place in the studio and the gallery, conjuring symbolic language and object numinosity. The work in Black Arts offers the viewer meditations and intimations that may act as inspiration in the making of their own personal magic.

ARTISTS:
SARAH MOSK, CAROLINE CARLSMITH,
REBECCA BEACHY, LAUREN EDWARDS,
SOPHIA CARA FRYDMAN DIXON, EMILY GREEN, LAUREN BECK, ROBIN HUSTLE, ELLEN NIELSEN, MEG NOE, JENNY KENDLER, MELISSA DEMASAUKAS, ALEX CHITTY, MEGAN DIDDIE,CAROLINE PICARD.

curated by Liz McCarthy

A little bit about the work:
Rosean’s drawings are a visual and textual manifestation of strange encounters and stranger dreams, merging the grotesque with blunt blows to our sense of decency.

Ellison calls her performances rehearsals for ways of being. They are ‘stageless’, yet she ‘acts’ on common social protocols, bringing some of our most common assumptions and everyday actions into question.

Saul Aaron Appelbaum’s paintings arrive at textual and physical morphology through crisp artificial vectors, polychrome extension into air, falling mass, light gradients, parametric modeling, and procedural indeterminacies.

Artists include:

The Artists
Jasmine Al-Masri
RyKeyn Bailey
Linda Benjamin
Shayna Cott
Christina Doelling
Samantha Doyle
Nick Ernst
Nicole Fennell
Simon Floeter
Erol Scott Harris
Brent Hjertstedt
Dusty James
Adeline Kreis
Julia Mlakar
Kirsa Molina
Ian Morrison
Sean Murphy
Grace O’Brien
Emily Perkins
Katrina Petrauskas
Katie Quade
Caitlin Ryan
Matt Schieren
Chelsea Schneider
Kelly Schulz
Lizzy Szwaya
Natalie Walser

Artists include:

The Artists
Jasmine Al-Masri
RyKeyn Bailey
Linda Benjamin
Shayna Cott
Christina Doelling
Samantha Doyle
Nick Ernst
Nicole Fennell
Simon Floeter
Erol Scott Harris
Brent Hjertstedt
Dusty James
Adeline Kreis
Julia Mlakar
Kirsa Molina
Ian Morrison
Sean Murphy
Grace O’Brien
Emily Perkins
Katrina Petrauskas
Katie Quade
Caitlin Ryan
Matt Schieren
Chelsea Schneider
Kelly Schulz
Lizzy Szwaya
Natalie Walser

SMALL Showroom Opening Party • 5-10 pm
3219 S. Morgan Street • free
Our big project for 2012 is the Small Manufacturing Alliance (SMALL). This is a showroom that will display over one hundred vendors’ wares. Stop in for some tastings and samplings. Featuring Half Acre, Virtue Cider, Koval Distillery and Few Distillery with tastings by Urban Belly and Zaytune Great American Cheese Collection and other food vendors.

Dusty Groove Records Party • 7-9 pm
755 W 32nd Street • free
Chicago’s premier record store for all things groovy — making a pop-up weekend appearance in Bridgeport! They’re having a Preview Night on Friday, May 4th, from 7pm to 9pm — open to the public, and with refreshments and music too!

Enoch’s Donuts + Kevin Heisner’s Tool Party
755 W 32nd Street • free • 6-9pm
Enoch’s Donuts opens with Kevin Heisner’s Tool Works exhibition.

Paratext Bookstore
755 W 32nd Street • free • 6-9pm
The new bookstore is hosting a book sway from 6-9pm.

Bridgepop SpringPop • 6-9 pm
3143 S Morgan Street • free
BridgePop is a group of resident Bridgeport artists and entrepreneurs who have banded together in a collaborative Pop-up Shop on Morgan Street. Stop over.

Ray Emerick Studios Opening • 6-10 pm
3149 S. Morgan Street, #1 • free
Artist Ray Emerick is a veteran Morgan Street artist. He joins Version festival by reopening his studio to the public.

Research House for Asian Art • 6-9 pm
3217 S Morgan Street • free
The Research House for Asian Art (RHAA) is a non-for profit organization whose goal is to promote art that is becoming more global and to provide a platform for the ongoing cultural exchange between East and West, in particular with China.

Maria’s Community Bar • 3pm -2 am
960 W 31st Street • free
Join us for the big after party after the shops close down.

The show will open in conjunction with the SMALL Showroom, installation is visible in the South storefront vitrine of the co-Prosperity Sphere.

Opening Reception: Friday, May 4th, 7:00 – 10:00 PM
2nd Fridays: Friday, May 11th, 6:00 – 10:00 PM

Open during business hours: Friday, May 4th – Wednesday, May 30th

Jessica Hogberg:
My artwork focuses on the systems, variations, and interactions between marks. The work can be viewed as a visual documentation of marks and movement that inevitably creates a system. Ranging from earthy and gestural to sterile and mechanical, marks become forms that evoke an existence. They mimic events such as mutation, micro-systems, and reproduction. Systems and marks become the building blocks with which I disassemble, reconstruct, and reinvent structures.

Kristen Maniscalco:
Since humans have lived on this planet, they have been using and exploiting resources to the point of exhaustion, and without respect for other life. My work is a reaction to our exponential population increase, and communicates the importance of respectful forethought regarding our natural resources. Using clay, glaze, wax, and metal, I create sculptures that deal with environmental, health-related, and social concerns.

Grace Scott:
Observations of the deep forests and rolling hills of Northern Michigan I grew up in, combined with my creative right brain, have created a new myth I live and work by. This ‘myth’ is an ongoing and growing creation. It represents a spiritual connection with nature, and is influenced by folklore, native myths, religions,and science. By integrating the ‘myth’ into my work, I am able to juxtapose it with the harsh realities of the modern world. I see the damage inflicted on the environment and animals, and view them as martyrs. I intend to show viewers nature as I see it, and remind them of our beautiful world’s fragility.

Mark Yee:
My work explores the ideas of energy and rest; peace and strife; yin and yang co-existing and occurring simultaneously in natural phenomena. Depth, layering, and balance are explored while creating spatial tensions in landscape-related compositions. Large-scale abstract work concentrates on creating as well as capturing movement. Allusions to windswept night skies or where a rocky shore meets the ocean can be found in the work, yet it remains purely abstract. My work is about balance and having the viewer finding peace for themselves in the paintings.

First Non-Chicago Focused Show to be Exhibited in City Gallery,
“Exit Eden” Reflects on Earth’s Changing Environment Through Photography by Chicago Artist

CHICAGO (April 4, 2012) – A new exhibition, Exit Eden, at the City Gallery at the Historic Water Tower, 806 N. Michigan Avenue, casts light on the Earth’s shifting environments through photography by Chicago artist Doug Fogelson. Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, the exhibition opens Friday, May 4 with a free public reception from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Exit Eden will be on display through September 23, 2012. The City Gallery is open Mondays – Saturdays 10 a.m.-6:30 p.m. and Sundays 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is free.

Exit Eden by Doug Fogelson considers the transformative effect climate change is having on our natural environment through the abstraction of landscape photography. In removing layers of both imagery and color from his original transparency film, Fogelson creates a dialog between destructiveness and beauty that points to a consideration of humanity within the elements. Exit Eden is Fogelson’s way of coming to terms with conflicted views about an earthly paradise and the extinction or loss of precious resources.

A Chicago native, Doug Fogelson studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College College. His work is displayed in notable public and private collections and with esteemed galleries. Most of Fogelson’s work is represented via photographic means and materials, and the photographic process itself is integral to his conceptualizations. His work addresses the physical implications of materials and a questioning of human interactions within shifting boundaries and borders.

Since 1999 the City Gallery has presented solely Chicago-themed exhibits. Beginning with Exit Eden, the exhibition space expands its focus to highlight Chicago’s artists and photographers, showcasing the diversity of quality work and breadth of vision in the city’s creative community.

For more information about Exit Eden and City Gallery, visit www.ExploreChicago.org.

The exhibition continues May 4 – June 16, 2012. ZIA|Gallery, 548 Chestnut St., Winnetka, IL, 60093. The gallery is two short blocks from the Metra Train Station. Contact the gallery at 847-446-3970 and check out www.ZIAgallery.net.

Dock 6 is proud to present our 3rd show in the bi-annual Design and Art Series.

Dock 6 is a collective of independent designers, furniture-makers, and fabricators located in Chicago’s Hermosa neighborhood. New work will be on display from Dock 6 partners Carson Maddox Studios, Lagomorph Design, Navillus Woodworks, SAP Design, Thomeworks, zakrose and -ism furniture.

Guest curator Oscar Arriola has chosen a group of artists to show throughout the 30,000 square foot Dock 6 facility. The Design and Art Series puts furniture design and fine art side by side in the industrial setting of the Dock 6 shop, simultaneously highlighting the symbiotic relationship of the two mediums and embracing their intrinsic differences. Participating artists are: Chris Kerr, Jim Zimpel, Angel Harrold, Ghetto Po, Jourdon Gullett, Uriel Correa, Taylor Hokanson, Phoebe Fisher, Sabina Ott, James Jankowiak, Tom Torluemke, Jo Dery, Ryan Duggan, M. Tuteur, Jeff Forsythe, and Russ White.

Design and Art 3 will also feature food from E-Dogz Food Truck an Jo Snow.
Electronic musician Neil Jendon will do a live performance and DJ.

Opening Reception: Friday May 4, 2012 from 6pm-12.
Open through Saturday, May 5 from 11am-4pm
Dock 6 is located at 4200 W. Diversey, Chicago IL

For more information about this exhibition, please go to:

www.dock6collective.blogspot.com
www.dock6collective.com
www.facebook.com/pages/Dock-6-Collective/183953238304824
www.facebook.com/events/143382515789421/

Her work takes various forms as sculpture, public projects, writing, and interdisciplinary collaborations. She has shown, lectured, and published nationally and internationally since 1988, both independently and with the artist collaborative Haha, and has received generous foundation and institutional support, including from the Louis Tiffany Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the Richard M. Driehaus Foundation, the ArtCouncil (now Artadia) and the Radcliffe Institute. Around the year 2000, she began to focus her individual practice on local projects relating to land-use. The book 3 Acres on the Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project, published by WhiteWalls Press in 2004, documents a public art project and exhibition related to these concerns. In 2008, WhiteWalls published With Love from Haha documenting twenty years of Haha’s site-based work, and also marking the end of that long-term collaboration. For the last five years she has been researching and writing a book on industrial mineral extraction sites in the U.S. and the movements of substances between land and bodies (Eating the Earth), which is now on review at the University of Minnesota Press. She has returned to the studio to work on sculptural projects related to this ongoing research, and to other considerations of matter’s active nature and explorations of our collective capacities for change.

A. Laurie Palmer studied English literature and studio art at Williams College as an undergraduate, and completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988 in printmaking and sculpture. She has taught full time at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and at Carnegie Mellon University, and part-time at the University of Chicago, UIC, and Vermont College. For the last twelve years she has taught sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently Chair of the department. She also was an art writer for ten years.

Genre

sexperimental dance

Biography

Xina Xurner has performed at the ACRE, MDW fair, Hyde Park Art Center, The Mutiny, Chances Pride Party at Berlin, The Burlington, The Hideout, Bitchpork, Permanent Records, The Empty Bottle, and some house parties. Their debut album “DIE” was released in February 2012, and a corollary book is being published by Green Lantern Press, featuring writings, artwork, and pornography in partnership with several collaborators, to be released in Fall 2012.

Description

Lil elote, Marvin Astorga, and Michael Perkins join forces as XINA XURNER, to bring you noise diva drag dance-anthems that oozes sex, death, and decay. Xina Xurner will make you sweat.

Band Interests

death, rebirth.

Press Contact: fb page or xinaxurner@gmail.com

Time

thrashing begins @ 10:30

… IN ADDITION

The Next Art Show …

The lovely Annie Foley will be debuting her Collection of whimsical Vernal paintings .

The Event will began @ 9pm .

PLease come early , get situated, order some food, hosted bar from 9-10.

Extravagant Attire Encouraged

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Jehan Hezemy
&
INNJOY.

This group of artists’ work in collaboration with one another in reference to the grey/gray scale; notions of collection, repetition, layers, time and light come into play.

Enter through alley
Parking on streets- Fullerton or Western Avenue
+ Red line to Fullerton #74 bus west to Oakley
+ Blue line to Western. Western Avenue bus north to Fullerton

This exhibition and the associated events and publications are the culmination of the course of study leading to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree. Candidates engage in intensive research during their tenure in the Department of Art Theory and Practice as they develop their individual art-making practices in a climate of rigorous critical thinking. The MFA Thesis Exhibition is the place in which they turn their research, as manifest in the works of art they have made, over to the public.

This exhibition is co-organized by the Department of Art Theory and Practice and the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Support for the MFA Thesis Exhibition is provided by the Norton W. Walbridge Fund and the Myers Foundations.

Avignone came to his subject through his own voyage of discovery in college. He grew up south of Chicago in Peotone and Bourbonnais, Illinois, as the oldest adopted child in a multi-racial family. Two sisters and a brother, like himself, are Korean, his youngest brother is from India. He first found other Koreans who had been adopted by white, middle-class American parents, when he left his studies in mechanical engineering at Olivet-Nazarene University to pursue a degree in photography at Columbia College Chicago; he received his B.A. in 2011. What had been trying times in his adolescent and racial identity struggle helped him flourish as a photographer when he decided to investigate his own American story and family. Learning directly from veteran photographers at school and gaining an appreciation for the published work of the legends of fashion and celebrity photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, he applied his new skills by depicting the members of his family and their suburban environment. The subject developed his skills in portraiture and led him to recognize the natural order of evolving human interactions: “catching life in the act of living” is how the French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson—of decisive moment fame—once phrased it. Using these techniques with the addition of a few early scrapbook photographs and documents, Avignone shows us what his American family experience has been.

“For many, when hearing the word ‘family’ brings other words to mind: mom, dad, brothers, sisters, love, and birth. But what if you were flown into your mother and father’s arms not by a stork but by a Boeing 747. My siblings and I came from foster mothers and lonely orphanages to parents and a little home in Illinois, some of us healthy and some with life-inhibiting special needs. Once we might have all been strangers, but with time, love, and perseverance we are fortunate to call ourselves one family.”

Avignone’s hand-made artist’s book of his family photographs, An Unfinished Body (2011) was recently accessioned into the collections of two prestigious institutional collections: The International Center of Photography and The George Eastman House. His photographs have been included in group exhibitions in Chicago, Evanston, and Pingyao, China. He maintains an online photostream of his work on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fifth_house_slaughter/

Matthew Avignone: Stranger Than Family consists of 20 large-scale photographs taken between 2010 and the present that are accompanied by smaller snapshots as well as and personal documents. An opening reception for the artist will take place May 3rd, 2012 from 5:00p-8:30p at David Weinberg Photography and will be up through May 24th, 2012.

- David Travis

“David Travis was the chair of the department of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago for the past 36 years, starting out as an assistant curator of photography in the department of prints and drawings in 1972. He curated more than 150 photography exhibitions at the institute, and guest curated exhibitions at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other museums around the country. In 1987, the French government awarded him the Chevalier de l’Orde des Arts et des Lettres for his contributions to the advanced awareness of French culture, and Chicago magazine named him a Chicagoan of the Year in 2002. A collection of his lectures and essays, titled At the Edge of Light: Thoughts on Photographers and Photography, on Talent and Genius, was published in 2003.” – Artinfo.com

David Weinberg Photography
300 West Superior | Suite 203 | Chicago | IL | 60654
Monday – Friday, 10:00am – 5:00pm
www.d-weinebrg.com | 312-529-5090

Growing up gay is clearly different, in a lot of ways, from growing up straight. Sometimes, though, those differences aren’t always as clear. One notion is that queer kids put off their adolescences until later in life than their straight counterparts. While dated, this idea is still one that many identify with. However, it’s not always easy to understand the often surprising implications of this anomolous developmental calendar. Wylie and King, who both grew up gay, will exhibit new work that explores their experiences with postponed adolescence. The third of ACRE’s series of 2012 staff shows, Puer Aeternus promises to be a little juvenile and a little queer.

Todd’s new suite of 2D fiber work abstractly reflects stories of his first girlfriend’s tongue, the anxiety of surname transmission and other (mildly traumatic) character-defining moments in his early history. In a sense, he views these stories as a celebration; because without each tiny piece, the entire infrastructure would surely crumble.

Nick employs less subtle references in drawings, video and sculpture to the historical and fictional heroes of his adolescence, and whines about the dearth of their real-world counterparts. He worries about 15th century anticipations of enlightenment in Dürer’s Nuremberg, and the similarly paradigmatically tenuous 1st century Ephesus. He finds in comic books exclamations that echo his saudade for metanarative. All this to say: he is afraid to jettison the vestiges of Christian, Trotskyist and Mutant confederations of his teen years.

Todd King received his BFA from Miami University in 2008 with a double major in graphic design and printmaking. He currently works full-time as a designer for Leo Burnett, and as ACRE’s head designer. View his some of his work at toddallthetime.com

Nicholas Wylie received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2004 and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2010. He co-founded Harold Arts, a Chicago-based non-profit arts organization centered around a residency program in rural Ohio in 2006, and was its co-director until 2009. He co-founded ACRE in early 2010, and currently serves as one of its two directors. For a day job, he currently works as artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s studio manager.

For the past year, David Leggett has created an artwork a day for his blog project Coco River Fudge Street, named after a fictitious location invented by the artist “to sound funny, dirty, and tasty at the same time.” His drawing blog has features including By Request Tuesdays, where anyone can email him a suggestion topic for a work and Old School Fridays, which he features a drawing he is particularly embarrassed about from his undergraduate body of work. All of the other days are filled with enticing artwork in an authentic style he has been cultivating over the past several years. The works primarily on paper chronicle Leggett’s comically dark thoughts and musings on current events in pop culture, his personal relationships, and casual conversations he has overheard between strangers on the street, L train, or at parties and other locations.

Born in Massachusetts, David Leggett moved to Chicago in 2003 to study painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he received a MFA. He is the recipient of several awards for his artwork, including the Fellowship Award for Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the 3Arts Visual Artist Award. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NY), and Sound Alternative Space for Contemporary Art (TX), as well as around Chicago at Western Exhibitions and 65 Grand.

Natasha Egan, Curator, Director, Museum of Contemporary Photography
David Hartt, artist
Judy Hoffman, documentary filmmaker
Leslie Wilson, art historian

Location: The Renaissance Society
Admission: free

Contemporary Art and Documentary practices have become hopelessly, instructively, and productively intertwined over the past few decades. Based on the work of Barrada and a host of her contemporaries, we have moved on from earlier postmodernism debates about fact versus fiction to more nuanced considerations of the historical trajectory of documentary as photography became more prevalent within artistic practices after the 1960s. Using a host of examples, this panel will articulate a set of working questions for discussion and debate. This event will take place at Swift Hall Room 310.

“Our tools and modes have changed, but the rudimentary behavior appears to be the same. A child with a crayon and a child on computer may draw the same things. The oldest sculptures known are of nude women, as are some of the most contemporary. We may tell ourselves that the reasons we make things now are different, but can we say they are only different insofar as the mode of language use and the tools are different? Isn’t the hardware still the same?
Can’t it be said that art that does well at its job usually finds the more novel approaches to the art object and idea? This can work to the extent that the art object can even cease needing to physically exist. But doesn’t it still work with the same ideas and images, only with fancier tools and more contemporary language.
An alien species observing our history wouldn’t easily recognize what we call irony or critique. Wouldn’t they just see centuries of people making pictures of food, bodies, tools, landscapes, geometry, etc.? Is the language game we play just a way to excuse ourselves from knowing we are making the same things over and over, without this realization?
I love historical artifacts. I love souvenirs and keepsakes. I love factoids. I don’t love them because of themselves… just the fact that they betray something really human. I love them like I love chess pieces. They are tools we make to play a game and ultimately I love the game.”

Nicholas Cueva received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives and works in New York.

Autumn Space
www.autumnspace.com
1700 W Irving Park #207
Chicago, IL 60613
Hours: Saturdays 2-5pm and by appointment
autumnspacegallery@gmail.com
Directions

A group exhibition featuring artwork by Andrew J. Hannigan, Dawn Cardona, Edyta Stepien, John Herndon, Lauren Feece, Maria Gaspar, Max Kauffman, Revise, Sam Kirk, Shannon Kerrigan, Tyrue “Slang” Jones, & Victor Lopez.

Opening Reception Saturday, April 28, 6pm-10pm
Closing, Friday, May 26th 6pm-10pm
Additional viewings available by appointment.

Believe Inn
2043 N Winchester Ave
Chicago, IL. 60614
773.562.2270

OR,

GET HIGH ON THIS CANDOR.

“It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I was not very well acquainted with the town yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: ‘from me you want to learn the way?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘since I cannot find it myself.’ ‘Give it up, give it up,’ said he, and turned away with a great sweep, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.”
- F. Kafka

Sam Topol

Benjamin Chaffee

Andy Plank

Sean Kilpatrick

XINA XURNER

There is no way for me to play Switzerland in this one—this is me taking one for the team. This is illuminating the comings and goings in my bed. This is a power f**k. These gestures are direct and directed at me. This is the wrong people speaking out, having their say. This is singing like a canary at the top of your lungs. This is sidestepping the dirty laundry; this is just dirty. Laughing in your face. Going for blood. Putting your cards out on the table.

The works of Barbara DeGenevieve, Brent Garbowski, and Joe Mault challenge the rules; up end structures. But not every challenge is militant. You may change the way you think about that other person’s body, the things that come in or go out of your mouth, or your relationship to power. But you might just sit a while and laugh.

In this new body of work, Christy Matson activates rhythmic sequences that simultaneously reference an early modernist aesthetic and the preceding ethnographic patterns by which many twentieth-century painters and sculptors were influenced.

The culmination of a process of translation from sketches in marker to full-scale weavings in cotton, linen, cashmere, and tencel, the fields of color within the woven patterns retain the marks of the artist’s hand as it telegraphs through the work of the shuttle. The reinsertion of the casualness of the sketches into the weavings highlights the importance of the idiosyncrasies in Matson’s process and use of color. The breaks or glitches in the self-inscribed systems destabilize the grid and underscore the tension between necessity and monotony in the structure of a plan.

The Sun Doesn’t Show through the Mist until Noon is organized around an intimately scaled series of framed weavings, four larger works on a black, and a collaborative video project produced with Ken Fandell. Regulated, yet lively, the areas of pattern in the series float within a white, woven ground. Faint feathering around the edges suggests a continuation of the pattern below the picture plane, an effect that serves as a reminder of depth and invites interpretation through each work’s concurrent existence as both surface and object. Although they are constructed using a similar process, the larger works are stitched onto a Belgian linen ground on stretched canvas, a method of presentation that stresses the physicality of the works while initiating a conversation about materiality that trespasses over a more painterly history of abstraction. The video, a psychedelic collage of brightly colored segments from the drawings that inspired the weavings interspersed with footage of turtles filmed in El Salvador, speaks to faith in the relationship between persistence and intuition, exemplified by the work of the hand as it is bound up in the work of the loom.

A two-part publication will accompany the exhibition. The initial text will contain documentation of the body of work as a whole and act as a guide for navigating the works in the gallery. A later, more comprehensive volume will follow with exhibition-specific documentation and reflection from participants on the ideas and discourses that emerged over the course of the show.

Christy Matson (b. 1979, Seattle, WA), a Left-Coast transplant to the Midwest, is an artist and educator at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. She received her BFA in studio art from the University of Washington in 2001, and her MFA in textiles from California College of the Arts in 2005. Recent exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Knoxville Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, OR; and the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design. In 2011, Matson was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, and in 2006, she was an artist-in-residence at the Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in New York.. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s Renwick Gallery and Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft.

With works generously donated by:

Alberto Aguilar
Lauren Anderson
Bill Berger
Jeremy Bolen
Elijah Burgher
Lilli Carré
Ryan Travis Christian
Arend deGruyter-Helfer
Craig Doty
Ryan Fenchel
Carson Fisk-Vittori
Sayre Gomez
Andy Hall
Jacob Christopher Hammes
Michelle Harris
John Henley
Andrew Holmquist
Michael Hunter
Carol Jackson
Jo Jackson & Chris Johanson
Jessica Labatte
Raquel Ladensack
George Liebert
Caleb Lyons
CJ Matherne
Eric May
Brian McNearney
Brendan Meara
Chris Meerdo
Heather Mekkelson
Michael Milano
Jayson Musson
Erin Nelson
Paul Nelson
Rachel Niffenegger
Jamisen Ogg
Angel Otero
Kim Piotrowski
Carmen Price
Steve Reinke
Michael Rea
Tyson Reeder
Andy Roche
Lisa Rybovich-Cralle
Ben Seamons
Geoffrey Todd Smith
Edra Soto
Rob Stone
Tony Tasset
Siebren Versteeg
Oli Watt
Kaylee Rae Wyant
Vanesa Zendejas
See you there!!!

The current body of work is a series of 10 graphite on paper diptychs, mounted on panel, which pair an image of an extinct animal with an image of a member of the species which likely caused its extinction. The human subjects are all nude and using digital media to photograph themselves in their natural habitat, the domestic privacy of the home bathroom. Horsley here presents nature as an absolute value wherein all our behaviors, past and present, good and bad, are part of a single continuum of history and evolution, unchanged over time.

Middle class. Middle child. Middle management. We want to know, can the middle be exciting? Extraordinary? Fantastically inefficient? Our exhibition, THE MIDDLE, is an irreverent take on the two-person show: over the course of three weeks, one solo exhibition will move into another solo exhibition. Beginning with one artist, and ending with another, we are most interested in the dialogue that happens when the exhibition space gradually turns over from artist to artist.

A durational exhibition is a particularly engaging model for showing the work of Amanda Greive, a realist painter of allegorical still lives and interiors, and Erik Peterson, who creates situation-specific installations which often implicate the audience in unexpected ways. While each artist has different studio outcomes, both share an acute awareness of the ways in which the viewer forms knowledge through the perception of images and objects. In other words, mining the everyday, Greive and Peterson deliberately re-order the visual world, placing reality into new aesthetic dimensions.

As the exhibition shifts, viewers will have opportunities to consider a common subtext that each artist explores from seemingly opposite ends: food. Greive depicts food in a highly metaphorical and subjective manner by way of symbolic still life paintings. Peterson, on the other hand, explores the production and consumption of food within a site-specific framework that acknowledges the gallery’s location in the Fulton Market meatpacking district.

Image: John Baldessari, “Six Colorful Tales: From the Emotional Spectrum (Women),” 1977, video, 17:10 min (still). Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Wodiczko was born in Warsaw, Poland, and lives and works in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He currently heads the Interrogative Design Group, and is Director of the Center for Art, Culture, and Technology, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work has appeared in many international exhibitions, including the “Bienal de São Paulo” (1965, 1967, 1985); “Documenta” (1977, 1987); the “Venice Biennale” (1986, 2000); and the “Whitney Biennial” (2000). Wodiczko received the 1999 Hiroshima Art Prize for his contribution as an artist to world peace, and the 2004 College Art Association Award for Distinguished Body of Work.

Image: Krzysztof Wodiczko, “Goście / Guests,” 2009, video, 17:17 min. (installation view, “53rd Venice Biennale”).

Known for his modular multi-media installations, Orlow collects evidence from different times, locations and events. In “Aide-Mémoire,” he uses these salvaged materials to create a narrative that speaks of history and memory, and how both can haunt an individual. In his newly reconstructed pictorial landscapes, Orlow references such seemingly disparate sites as Biblical Mount Ararat, a Ghost Town in Northern Armenia on the site of an earthquake, and a Kurdish village in Turkey built out of the rubble of an ancient Armenian monastery.

Born in Taiwan in 1950, Tehching Hsieh began work on his iconic series of One Year Performances starting in the late 1970s. Using long durations, making art and life simultaneous, Hsieh spent one year locked in a cage, one year punching a time clock every hour, one year completely outdoors, and one year tied to another person. For his final performance piece, Thirteen Year Plan, Hsieh intentionally retreated from the art world between 1986–99, setting a tone of sustained invisibility. Since 2000, having been released from the restriction of not showing his work during the 13-year period, Hsieh has exhibited and lectured in North and South America, Asia, and Europe, including major exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 2010 Hsieh was included in the Liverpool Biennial in the United Kingdom and the Gwangju Biennial in South Korea.

Image credit: Tehching Hsieh, One Year Performance 1980-1981. Photograph by Michael Shen
© 1981 Tehching Hsieh
Courtesy the artist, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection, Detroit, and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

A highly seductive combination, and not just physically. Bringing out their partners’ most determined sides enables them to achieve together what they might not achieve alone. Trine to each other on the zodiac calendar suggests an easy and sensuous orientation. Relationships in this combination are oftentimes very tightly knit. In some ways, in fact, they are indissoluble, since their watery nature is already so fluid. Colleagues in this combination work side by side for years in relative harmony, with a steady output and little fuss.

Strengths: Responsible, fluid, goal-oriented
Weaknesses: Distractive, secretive, procrastinating

ANGELA JERARDI (Scorpio II) is an independent curator and artist currently based in Philadelphia. From 2008 to 2011 she held the position of director and co-collaborator of FLUXspace, a non-profit alternative art space and collective creative endeavor. Angela studied Cultural Anthropology and Art History at Earlham College. Prior to joining FLUXspace, she worked with arts organizations and institutions including the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Maryland Art Place, Baltimore, MD, and Transformer, Washington, DC. Recent projects with FLUXspace include Mia Feuer: Displacement (2009), No Soul for Sale at the X Initiative, NYC (2010), and at the TATE Modern, London, UK (2011), and Kat Culchur (2011). Angela will be attending the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam this Fall.

More information about Angela Jerardi can be found at www.thefluxspace.org

SAMANTHA REHARK (Pisces II) lives and works both on the road and in Ohio. Her current works explore subconscious obsession and its effect as a habitual mode of self-therapy. In addition to her role as a member of the keyboard kid-pop group THREESOME, Sam leads a series of informatively fun events for Emerging Artists Columbus through ROYGBIV Gallery, and is one half of the self-publishing team NO SKY Publications.

More information about Samantha Rehark can be found at samantharehark.com

The group exhibition presents new works by artists who play with conceptions of time through video, sculpture, drawing, installation, movement, sound, and several participatory events on view at the Hyde Park Art Center from April 22 until July 29, 2012. Participating artists – Becky Alprin, Nadav Assor, Deborah Boardman, Lauren Carter, Ashley Hunt in collaboration with Taisha Paggett, Sarah FitzSimons, Judith Leemann, Kirsten Leenaars, Faheem Majeed, and Emily Newman – experiment with ideas about time, addressing uses, interpretations and ownership of natural and built environments in the present and their implications for the future.

Discourse about time represents the phenomenon largely in spatial terms: linear, long, short, compressed, sequenced. The art works in Hairy Blob take the conversation a step further, interrogating the relationship between perceptions of time and how they are necessarily grounded in spatial interactions with others and the environment. Rather than relating to time in terms of memory or nostalgia, the works included in Hairy Blob challenge cultural and social assumptions about time. At their core, the pieces in Hairy Blob hold forth the central tenets that ideational structures of time permeate the human experience.

For example, the iconic art work in Hairy Blob is Lauren Carter’s Sunsets, a three-dimensional structure comprised of gilded encyclopedias. As culturally codified perceptions of the world in concrete form, encyclopedias point to temporal effects on those perceptions when the information they contain becomes outdated. The passage of time renders both the object – the encyclopedia – and the facts therein useless. This complicated relationship is writ large in Sunsets, whose reflective surface adds another layer of complexity by mirroring the viewer’s image and revealing changes in natural light.

Many of the artists participating in the exhibition will fabricate their work publicly at the Hyde Park Art Center. The constantly evolving exhibition will include the filming of a “soap opera” by Kirstin Leenars, a free concert performed by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM) in Majeed’s installation, and a live audio/visual performance with Nadav Assor collaborating with Israeli artist, Daniel Davidovsky.

Hairy Blob is curated by Adelheid Mers, an artist and faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Graduate student Leah Oren is the curatorial assistant for the exhibition. Tristan Sterk will contribute exhibition design, and Jessica Westbrook and Adam Trowbridge will design and coordinate the Asteroid Belt, an online catalogue available at www.hairyblob.net beginning April 15, 2012.

Research and administrative assistance for Hairy Blob has been provided by students in the graduate curatorial seminar at SAIC. Additionally, the students will coordinate a satellite exhibition for Hairy Blob at the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at SAIC.

For more information and the full schedule of events, please visit http://www.hydeparkart.org/exhibitions/hairy-blob.

ALAN + MICHAEL FLEMING are twin brothers who have been making art together over the past 7 years. They attended graduate school as a collaborative and each received an MFA in Studio from the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. Their work ranges from performance, to video, to sculpture. Their recent solo exhibition, GAME ON, at threewalls presented a poignant and humorous body of work that the artists made while living apart for a year. In 2012 they were selected for the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) Program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and as a result their work will be included in the 2013 Bronx Biennial. Currently, they are both based in Brooklyn.

More information about Alan + Michael Fleming can be found at: www.spatialinterventions.com

The T-Shirt Show features work from twenty different artists and designers, from the Chicago area and across the country. The idea of the show is to turn 22 into a hybrid clothing boutique and gallery environment for the duration of the show. The T-shirts will be displayed in a style similar to works of art, yet they will be available for sale at the discretion of the participating artists. Some shirts will be unique one-of-a-kind pieces, others will be available in multiples, and others will be somewhere in between. In this way, the exhibit attempts to look at the idea of the limited edition and the identity of the art object, as visitors to the gallery can potentially walk away with a relatively cheap work of art in the form of a wearable (or not wearable) T-shirt.

The show features T-shirts designed by Jeff Baxter, Rachel Borchers, Rob Borosak, Michael Burton, Jessica Calek, Sam Cikauskas, Trevor Edmonds, Beverly Fre$h, Aaron Jones, Nicole Killian, Erin McGuire, Laurie Montague, Megan Owdom-Weitz, Yemonja Smalls, Jen Smith, Dan Streeting, Wes Taylor, Mr. Walters, and Heather Young. The shirts will be displayed on a custom laser-cut hanging system designed by Jessica Calek.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 20, 2012, 5-7pm
Exhibit: April 20 – May 18, 2012

Center for Book & Paper Arts Gallery
2nd Fl., 1104 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago
Mon-Fri, 10am-6pm; Sat, 12pm-5pm

SPECIAL EVENTS
ART AS READING / READING AS ART
Thursday, April 26
Private Reception by Invitation, 5–6pm
Artist Talks, 6–8pm

PANEL: ART MAKING & COMMUNITY
Wednesday, May 2, 7–8:30pm
· Mindy Faber (Open Youth Networks)
· Nick Jaffe (Teaching Artist)
· P.E.R.R.O. (Pilsen Environmental Rights and
Reform Organization)
· Voice of the City (Community Arts Organization)

MANIFEST ARTWALK & ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
Friday, May 4, 4–7pm

DAILY GALLERY PERFORMANCES
Monday–Friday
Visit colum.edu/interarts for details

Artists: Temple Jantu-tu Cunningham, Jenny Garnett, Michelle Graves, Kaitlin Kostus, April H. Llewellyn, Daniel Lubniewski, C.J. Mace, Trisha Oralie Martin, Haley K. Nagy, Amy Rabas, Michael Chad St. John, and Don Widmer.

Merge Visible is the second installation of a continuing project that began in November of 2011 in New York with the exhibition Flatten Image. Each group show features a similar but rotating roster of artists whose individual practice may address questions of physical perception through sculpture and installation, redefining objects via photography or inventing new scenarios through the use of contemporary digital media. These works investigate the translation from object to image and vice versa; an incomplete list of the increasingly strange nature of representation.

“Fielding’s body of work titled Facades hints at a metaphor for a key concept in all of his work ̶ a throwing down of the gauntlet, the notion that the very act of seeing is thrown into question. In these works the outsides of things are replete with content and reference to a world, both inside and out, of places and feelings. Though perhaps better known for his portraiture, these photographs’ extraordinary formal beauty belies their transference of character into place. Fielding has traveled the world and managed to transcend merely capturing the exotic by a sense of assurance that has him finding his perfect moment, not merely in a formal confluence of light and shade and composition, but by what speaks to him, regardless of the inherent beauty, history, function or psychology of the place in question. These qualities may indeed be imbued in the photograph, but what most engages us is their ambiguity and his aesthetic of looking that overrides the specificity of place. In a sense they thus become what some have posited of all art, a self-portrait. So it can be Rome or Mérida or Aswan ̶ it matters more that we are drawn into his acute sense of looking at the world with fresh eyes. The challenge is made: what is it we are viewing?—and, most importantly, what do we see?

Sykes’ most powerful works create a dialectic tension between chaos and order, abstraction and representation, and at times between temporal immediacy and fading memories. Drawings whose intense sense of motion hints at a bodily presence become a kind of Sufi dance of energy. Ambiguous figure/ground relationships often push gestural abstraction towards representation and imagery, which is sometimes bolstered by collaged real world artifacts. Memory and the associational poetry of image are never far behind in these abstractions. Occasionally the artist utilizes symbolic archetypes as focused imagery that hints at spiritual content, whether it is a graceful dance of opposites, a mask-like persona, or blob-like forms that seem like psychic entities. At times Sykes will transform background details or marginalia of her previous work into the starring attraction of a newer work. In addition, her layering of meaning and memory, as well as her varied approach to balancing illusion making with the flat “is-ness” of mark-making and gestural painting all keep the viewer involved with the very process of looking.

ADAM BLUMBERG (b. 1978, lives Philadelphia) – Raised amongst the horseradish fields and abandoned coal mines of a rural St. Louis suburb, Adam Blumberg is an avid baseball fan and enjoys collecting smashed pennies. He earned an MFA from ICP-Bard in 2007 and a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. From 2004 to 2005, Adam participated in the Research Program at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kitakyushu, Japan. His work has been exhibited in England, Germany and Japan in addition to the United States, including recent exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Philadelphia, PA and Unit B Gallery, San Antonio, TX. He is currently curating an upcoming exhibition at Storage Gallery, Philadelphia for the summer 2012.

“limes and bricks suck pink you tasteless hunk

or just

limes and brick suck pink
or
tasteless hunk”

Ashley’s work over the past ten years has evolved out of an examination of domestic objects of comfort and play. This impetus has led me to explore forms that include: my home, pillows, mattresses, bodies, airbags, and playful bouncy castles as symbols of comfort, protection (over-protection) and playful energy. My recent work has used silhouette shapes from architectural fragments of my home as a starting point from which an inflatable form is stitched. These architectural fragments once inflated become figurative: a reference to the people who dwell inside them and the thing that makes a house a home.

The expression “Objet Petit A” is a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Lacan referring to the idea of an “unattainable object of desire.” Meaning literally “object little-A” the label is summed up in Lacan’s statement: “I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you.” The piñata-smashing spectacle is intended to highlight the tension between the art object as a value-invested commodity, and the art object as a mediator of meaningful public discourse. Art can be both, of course, but by leveraging the piñata as a form intended to be engaged in a particularly violent manner, the show forces the question of whether regarding the physical art object as commodity limits one’s ability to perceive deeper content within a work of art.

In what could be the most destructive art exhibition in the history of Chicago, all of the artwork in the show will be obliterated by the show’s closing. Whatever various and sundry contents should spill forth from the piñata sculptures will immediately be considered public property.

This show is companion to the original “Objet Petit A,” which took place in September of 2009 at Spoke (and the alley adjoining the 119 N. Peoria building) in the West Loop, and is curated by Dayton Castleman and Matthew Dupont.

Paul Erschen is an artist and musician who lives and works in Chicago. Erschen’s recent studio practice involves sculpture, printmaking, mold-making/casting, and archiving. Recent exhibitions include: “West Plaza” at Document Gallery, “Group Hug” at Co-Proseperity Sphere, and “Recipes for Mold And Sun”, a collaboration with Rachel Ettling, at Roxaboxen.

Tacita Dean and Mark Wallinger
April 14 – May 12, 2012

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).

The fifth exhibition in this series will feature video, mixed media and works on paper by Tacita Dean and Mark Wallinger. Using found drawings and photographs, Tacita Dean examines beauty found in the everyday. Culling source material from a flea market in Berlin, Dean discovered a collection of drawings by Martin Stekker. Further research identified the artist as little known contemporary of Robert Walser (both born in 1878), inciting further inspiration for eleven works titled Berlin and the Artist (2012). Mark Wallinger pairs nine works on paper with a new video piece that responds to Walser’s predilection for walking and writing. With Shadow Walker (2011), Wallinger records himself wandering along Shaftesbury Avenue in London. The three-minute, looped video captures the sound of a busy street and Wallinger’s shadow cast on the ground. This exercise allows the artist to experience the city in the tradition of Baudelaire’s flaneur and absorb the freedom of anonymity expressed by Walser in his prose. The Color of Snow (2012) is a series of nine works on paper reflecting on Walser’s highly stylized mode of writing with The Microscripts. Wallinger notes: “Each has the urgency of a coded message smuggled out of captivity on found scraps of paper. To start with a blank sheet of paper would be anathema, out of the question, a dizzying prospect. Better to greet the page as the first snow ready for the carefree and the careless to leave their mark.”

Together with the Goethe-Institut Chicago, the Donald Young Gallery hosted a symposium on Robert Walser on February 26, 2012 with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Consulate Chicago. The gallery will publish a book with contributions from the participating artists and the exhibition is in collaboration with Christine Burgin, New York, The Robert Walser Centre, Bern and Konrad Aeschbacher, Erlach. If you would like more information please contact Emily Letourneau or Robyn Farrell at 312-322-3600 or at gallery@donaldyoung.com.

Curatorial statement by Donald Young:

A number of years ago, I enjoyed reading a selection of short stories by Robert Walser, with a forward by Susan Sontag and a postscript by the translator Christopher Middleton, and from there I went on to read his novels: The Assistant (1908), Jakob Von Gunten (1909), and The Tanners (1907). He is a modernist but at the same time unlike any other modernist. He can be self-effacing, indignant, curious, happy, but always about the most modest people, things, or occurrences. Walking was important to him and The Walk (1917) is one of his best-known short stories. During his lifetime he crisscrossed Switzerland on long, solitary hikes and he died on Christmas Day walking in the snow. The finest writing on Robert Walser and his work is by another walker/writer W.G. Sebald who described him as: “A clairvoyant of the small.” And started his essay for The Tanners as follows: “The trace Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to almost have been effaced altogether…he was only connected with the world in the most fleeting of ways. Nowhere was he able to settle, never did he acquire the least thing by way of possessions. Even the paper he used for writing was secondhand. And just as throughout his life he was almost entirely devoid of material possessions so too was he remote from other people.” Of his writing Sebald wrote that Walser, “almost always wrote the same thing and yet never repeated himself.” And that his, “prose has the tendency to dissolve upon reading so that only a few hours later one can barely remember the ephemeral figures, events, and things of which he spoke.” Walter Benjamin went, as far as to say that, “the point of every one of his sentences is to make us forget the last one.” Sebald also wrote: “If Walser had any literary relative or predecessor, then it is Gogol. Both of them gradually lost the ability to keep their eye on the center of the plot, losing themselves instead in the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of their vision, and about whose previous and future fate we never learn even the slightest thing.”

I was fascinated by the microscripts, which I first saw in an extraordinary exhibition in 2008 in Berlin entitled “Notation. Kalkul und Form in den Kunsten”. Then Christine Burgin worked on the book Microscripts with its translations by Susan Bernofsky and was interested in creating an exhibition in New York with the help of the Walser Center in Bern. We decided to collaborate on showing the microscripts together with first editions of his publications, many of which were illustrated by his brother, as well as photographs. I became more and more interested in the connection between his writings and certain contemporary artists and out of this has come a series of exhibitions: “In the Spirit of Walser”. This is a purely subjective choice and avoids any attempt at an inclusive exhibition or homage to the writer. Hundreds of artists have made work in homage to Walser–many of a highly personal and sometimes romantic and sentimental nature. This is not an area that interests me personally and I am confident that the artists who have agreed to work on this project will produce work that is as original as its inspiration. With this in mind I have asked each artist to write a text that will be published with the documentation of the exhibition.

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean attended the Falmouth School of Art in England, the Supreme School of Fine Art in Athens, and the Slad School of Fine Art in London. Dean was awarded the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy in 2004 and the Hugo Boss Prize at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2006. She participated in the Venice Biennale in 2003, receiving the Sixth Benesse Prize at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005; she was nominated for the Turner prize in 1998. Her work has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including: The New Museum, New York, Tate Modern, London, MUMOK, Vienna, Australia Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Dia Beacon, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York. Tacita Dean lives and works in Berlin.

Mark Wallinger

Mark Wallinger graduated from Goldsmith’s College in London in 1985 and received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Central England in 2003. In 2000 a retrospective of his work, Credo, was exhibited at Tate Liverpool and he represented Great Britain at the Venice Bienniale in 2001. Wallinger was awarded the Turner Prize in 2007 and most recently, the Ebbsfleet Landmark Project Commission and My City commission in Canakkale, Turkey. His work has exhibited internationally at museums and institutions including: Tate Britain, London, Museum De Pont, Tilburg, Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Kustnernes Hus, Oslo and The Whitechapel Gallery, London. Mark Wallinger lives and works in London.

FLAT 12 will feature new work from Cole Pierce, Angela Lopez, and Stephen Nyktas, alongside resident FLAT artists Catie Olson and EC Brown.

COLE PIERCE will create a floor of enamel-encoated floppy disks.

Cole Pierce is a Chicago-based artist who makes paintings, video installations, and audio multiples. He received an MFA in Art Theory & Practice from Northwestern University, his recent exhibition at Hinge Gallery was favorably reviewed in Modern Painters magazine, and currently has work in Born Digital at CAM Raleigh.

http://colepierce.com/

ANGELA LOPEZ will present a stop-animation video alongside watercolor/collages depicting the fluid relationships between humans and other species.

Angela Lopez studied painting at the Kansas City art institute. Her paintings use the exploration of alternating power struggles between humans and nature as a way to express gloomy ominous and desperate emotions. Her artwork has been featured in exhibitions at H&R Block ArtSpace, The Dolphin Gallery, in Kansas City MO, as well as Buenos Aires Argentina at Proyecto’ ace Studios and the Beasley gallery in Arizona. She premiered her first solo show, “On the Upside,” at the Urban Culture Project Space in 2009. In 2010 she curated her second exhibition “Community+Loneliness” at the Paragraph Gallery with Urban Culture Project in Kansas City Mo.  Angela lives and works in her hometown of Chicago.

http://lopezangela.com/home.html

STEPHEN NYKTAS will create an installation consisting of found radios from different eras.

Steve Nyktas (MFA, Northwestern University, 2007) is a Chicago-based artist whose work is preoccupied by opportunities to better understand the normal world by seeing places that were never meant to be seen and to look at things as they are not meant to be; to observe a version of the everyday which exists just beneath consciousness. His work has been exhibited at Dorsky Gallery (New York, NY), Gallery Four (Baltimore, MD), Rowland Contemporary Gallery (Chicago, IL), The 22nd International Festival Sarajevo (Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina), and he is a member of the Danny Think Tank artist collective.

http://stephennyktas.com/

CATIE OLSON will present a hand-cranked automaton of a Band-Aid punching a pillow.

Catie Olson is an artist and filmmaker who organizes the Spiderbug short-film series (http://www.spiderbug.org). She is ½ of Floor Length and Tux.

http://catieolson.com

EC BROWN will present paintings of wooden capsules containing imaginary film stills with choice male actors of the 60s-70′s as terse mallard-carvers.

EC Brown is a painter and exhibition organizer who co-directed the COMA exhibition space from 2006-2008 (http://www.occidentalmuseum.org), and organizes the ASCII exhibition series (http://www.archeospiritist.com). He is ½ of Floor Length and Tux.

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.

Raised in Nsukka, Nigeria, Okore’s largely abstract works are inspired by textures, colors and landscapes of her milieu. Finding reusable value in discarded materials, Okore enriches her work with layers of meaning through familiar processes. Both in her home country Nigeria and United States, she relies on the use of flotsam or discarded objects, which are transformed into intricate sculpture and installations through repetitive and labor-intensive techniques. Most of Okore’s works explore detailed surfaces and organic formations.

Nnenna Okore is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at North Park University, Chicago. Her works have been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries in Chicago, New York City, London, Paris, Cancun, Sao Paulo and Copenhagen. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award; and has also been recognized by the Chicago Tribune, BBC and New York Times, among dozens of media outlets, for her exceptional use of materials, textures and colors in her works.

Nina Barnett’s practice addresses transition, distance, and exploration, both horizontal and vertical. Her current investigations concern aspects of holes, tunnelling (mining), and depth through drawing, video, and sculpture. Barnett hails from Johannesburg, South Africa, where she received a BA at the University of Witwatersrand.

Chaz Evans is an artist, media art historian, and the artistic director of Parker, a performance collective based in Chicago. His work investigates the points at which software and performance intersect, using methods that apply historical forms of critique to emerging disciplines of media and technology. He has exhibited at such venues as Eastern Expansion Gallery, Chicago; Chopin Theatre, Chicago; the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and the Evanston Art Center. Evans received a BA from North Park University in Theatre and Performance and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Kasia Houlihan works in a variety of media in an effort to get at the experience of relating. With photography, drawing, video, performance, audio, sculpture, she chips away at such concepts as closeness and distance, thresholds, and control. She has exhibited at venues such as Comfort Station, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; and the de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, Miami. Houlihan received a BA from the University of Chicago.

Mark Kent originally hails from Ireland and has been leading a nomadic existence around Europe for the last 10 years, creating films resulting from his experiences. Kent has exhibited work at Buro Leeuwarden, the Netherlands; SKAM e.V, Hamburg; Galerie Conrads, Düsseldorf; and Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam.

Brendan Meara is a media artist whose work addresses themes of identity, moral value, greed, freedom, obsession, existence, reason, faith, suicide, and humor. His work has been exhibited at the University of the Americas, Puebla, Mexico; Review Studios, Kansas City; Roots and Culture, Chicago; and Alderman Exhibitions, Chicago. Meara will have a forthcoming ‘Artist Edition 10″ LP’ on Positive Beat Recordings, Chicago. He received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004.

Brantley draws influence from an array of pop culture icons, comic book heroes, Japanese anime and the bold aesthetics of street art pioneers Jean Michel Basquiat, Kaws and Keith Haring. Brantley’s recent focus is to share energetic narratives—moments of reality from his life and the lives of his peers, mixed with fantastical fiction—to create a fragmented environments of make believe. Spray paint is often at the forefront of these mixed-media illustrations, working in part to de-contextualize the levity of cartoon imagery, and bring a critical edge into the white cube.

Recognized nationally for public works and solo shows in Chicago, Hebru Brantley has exhibited in Atlanta, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles and New York, and was most recently featured in the Fountain and PooL fairs in March 2012. Two of Brantley’s paintings will be featured at the Swedish Embassy in Stockholm through 2013. Brantley earned a B.A. in Film from Clark Atlanta University, and has a background in design and media illustration. He current lives and works in Chicago.

Opening reception: 13 April 2012, 7–10pm
Closing reception: 27 April 2012, 7–10pm
Gallery hours: M–W, 10am–4pm, and by appointment

“I can do that.” –Everyone, ever.

Ahhh, the four most frequently uttered words in the art world. Commonly the cause of much frustration and eye-rolling among artists, art historians, and art lovers, this [occasionally hubristic, occasionally accurate] assertion is usually countered with the retort, “But you didn’t do it.” Oftentimes, it is the concept behind a work of art that lends that work significance and meaning. Other times, some art really does suck.

What if we give you, o’ self-appointed art critic, the opportunity to play an active role in creating the kind of work that you so vocally long to see?

I CAN DO THAT is independent curator Jenny Lam’s highly anticipated follow-up to last fall’s acclaimed Exquisite Corpse show. At the exhibition, in front of each piece will be the art supplies the show’s artists used to create their respective works. With these supplies:

- Exhibition visitors will be invited to “improve” some of the artwork as they see fit, directly applying medium to the work itself. This could mean anything from dotting one small corrective brushstroke to smearing paint all over and slashing the canvas. (Self-expression, fuck yeah!) Each subsequent visitor is encouraged to make further changes. Consequently, the exhibition will constantly be in flux. There will be photo and video documentation of this continuous evolution.

- In front of other artwork will be blank canvases—or whatever foundation the artist used—for visitors to replicate the pieces.

Most gallery and museum shows tell you not to touch the artwork. In I CAN DO THAT, you can touch it, change it, destroy it, perfect it. This is your show.

Participating artists hail from across the country and around the world. They include Alyssa Trainor, Angela Hearld, Avisheh Mohsenin, Brandon Kirkman, Brooks Golden, Caitlin Bergh, Carisa Mitchell, Chris Barrett, Chris Busse, Clarisse Perrette, David del Bosque, Dead Squirrel, DRIP-EX, Dubi Kaufmann, Emmanuel L White Eagle, Fernanda Quaglia, Gabor E. Nagy, Gabriel Garcia-Fraire, Glendalys Medina, Gracie Cannell, Imaginathan, Janet Mamon, Jared Haberman, Jimmy Wilnewic, Kathleen Enright, Kev Anderson, Kyra Termini, Lee Eun Young, Left Handed Wave, Marty Burns, Mister Vibe, Nancy Bechtol, Nikolas Burkhart, Noel DeGaetano, Pancho Panoptes, Patricia Biesen, Peggy Shearn, Peter Dzubay, Predrag Djordjevic, Rachel Dennis, Robin Jiro Margerin, Scot West, Sioban Lombardi, Sona Mirzaei, Zachary Trebellas, and you.

I CAN DO THAT is located at:

Variable Space
1564 N. Damen Ave., 3rd floor, at Milwaukee Ave. in the heart of Wicker Park
Chicago, IL 60622

Admission is free.

For updates, previews, peeks behind the scenes, press coverage, and more, visit http://artistsonthelam.blogspot.com/.

For the show’s Facebook event page, visit https://www.facebook.com/events/176211252481192/.

Middle class. Middle child. Middle management. We want to know, can the middle be exciting? Extraordinary? Fantastically inefficient? Our exhibition, THE MIDDLE, is an irreverent take on the two-person show: over the course of three weeks, one solo exhibition will move into another solo exhibition. Beginning with one artist, and ending with another, we are most interested in the dialogue that happens when the exhibition space gradually turns over from artist to artist.

A durational exhibition is a particularly engaging model for showing the work of Amanda Greive, a realist painter of allegorical still lives and interiors, and Erik Peterson, who creates situation-specific installations which often implicate the audience in unexpected ways. While each artist has different studio outcomes, both share an acute awareness of the ways in which the viewer forms knowledge through the perception of images and objects. In other words, mining the everyday, Greive and Peterson deliberately re-order the visual world, placing reality into new aesthetic dimensions.

As the exhibition shifts, viewers will have opportunities to consider a common subtext that each artist explores from seemingly opposite ends: food. Greive depicts food in a highly metaphorical and subjective manner by way of symbolic still life paintings. Peterson, on the other hand, explores the production and consumption of food within a site-specific framework that acknowledges the gallery’s location in the Fulton Market meatpacking district.

Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap have been working collaboratively for the past four years. Their work has been shown in Chicago at Zolla Lieberman, Sullivan Galleries, The Chicago Cultural Center, MDW Fair and the Ryerson Woods in Deerfield. As well as RAID Projects in Los Angeles, Los Caminos in St. Louis and Flux Space and Nexus Gallery in Philadelphia. Sarah and Joseph will be visiting artists in collaboration with The Happy Collaborationists this summer at ACRE. In May, they have a solo show at the Comfort Station in Logan Square curated by Michael Green. Currently Sarah and Joseph teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and are 2011-2012 BOLT Residents at Chicago Artists’ Coalition.

Consisting of a massive installation with a series of accompanying prints, this exhibition is a departure from Defibrillator’s usual performance programming.

Gallery hours will be 14 april to 21 april from 3-8pm.

An opening reception catered by Guerilla Smiles will include a musical performance by Marvin Ausby.

“Identity is recognition. Recognition is capital or the affirmed version of self properly represented through accepted symbolic forms. These forms have been established for you. You utilize the already constructed past and manipulate it according to the laws of originality in order to establish some potential new form that might outlast you. You are an artist.”

On my show, yellow hair on an orange
Head protrudes a tongue onto that
One in the hole

On the other head.
Her hot pink slab really feels for
The other pad.

Eyes painted like a doe’s— caught
In the headlights: The car’s
A hell bent

Babe magnet. These guys go,
God will come at the end (of the blow.)
They swear, sounding like a boom

On the head and ears of a bounding
Doe (she goes in the wood.)
The hunk

Takes the gang
From the bang. With it come knobs,
Frequencies of radio unlimited, human.

WIWWIW is an acronym that does not specify what is desired; an unanswerable cry. The new sculptural works by Hendrickson are inspired by the small bodies found in manga porn, factory farms, and child beauty pageants.

Jacqueline Hendrickson received her MFA from the University of Chicago where she is currently a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Visual Arts. Her studio, a refurbished centenarian barn, is located in Wisconsin.