Maurice Merleau-Ponty states in The Phenomenology of Perception that “If reflection is to justify itself as reflection, that is to say, as progress towards the truth, it must not merely put one view of the world in place of another, it must show us how the naive view of the world is included in and transcended by the sophisticated one.” The exhibition will look at art-making methods involved with skepticism not for its own sake, but as a crucial step in forming a social dialectic.

Abelow’s work is a disciplined exploration into the life, meaning and symbols of a painter. His paintings exercise autobiography, color, rigid geometric abstraction, text and expressive figuration. The figurative works are self-portraits that mock a perverse persona of himself as a painter.

Baratta’s paintings are highly colorful and highly referential. He appropriates Alchemy prints, glam rock costumes, Kung-Fu movies, and Moghul miniature painting among a wide range of other sources to establish a broken narrative—one in which the only conclusion is that something is wrong.

Reames’ work deals with the back-and-forth between image and object. His paintings are often sculptural and his sculptures typically employ two-dimensional images. The work is a demonstration of a disbelief in absolutes and a strong belief in nuance and the grey area.

Each exhibit will be installed on the hour by preparators/artists Aza Quinn-Brauner and Daniel Baird. They may paint, spackle, hang, build pedestals, assemble sculptures, install monitors, and do typical gallery tasks throughout the duration of the art work’s rotation.

The public performance exposes the behind-the-scenes gallery installation and prep work. The on-lookers experience timely intervals of action allowing singular artists in a group show to be viewed more intimately and critically. Additionally, because of the truncated exhibition times, some guests may come and go with the intention of seeing a specific artist’s work (just as one would come to see a band play their set within a night’s line-up) conveniently featuring more obvious social sub-groups within the art viewing and art making public.

By calling to attention some important yet less apparent parts of the gallery experience, the viewer can focus on these moments.

Anthony Elms curates the work of artists Danielle Gustafson-Sundell, Shane Huffman, Erin Leland, Matthew Metzger, Sonny Venice and Philip von Zweck.

Katherine Pill curates the work of artists Madeleine Bailey, Samantha Bittman and Matt Nichols.

Philip von Zweck curates sub-curators Christina Cosio, Stevie Greco and David Roman.

Christina Cosio curates the work of artist Erik Peterson.

Stevie Greco curates the work of artists Jason Bryant, Todd Mattei and Caroline Picard.

David Roman curates the collaborative work of artists Matt Irie and Dominick Talvacchio.

In honor of Swimming Pool Project Space’s two year anniversary, the gallery’s outdoor space will be the location of Pool Party, an anniversary celebration. Featuring art, fun and games selected by the directors of Swimming Pool Project Space and Twelve Galleries Project as well as the live entertainment of Academy Records and friends.

Emerging from the basement, filled with must and the filthiest of black molds, come drawings on wrought papers that haven’t seen daylight. The drawings are representations of Roman Grey’s location in a seemingly un-locatable place. They have an “almost” logic. Psychological space resonates.

Within a void where entities exist, creatures are displayed with the mapping of teeth and eyes. Constellations and charts form order and chaos. A world of omens is revealed through archaeological iconographical glyphs. The determination to escape is vital.

Thirty sought after high school students from magnet art programs around the country were invited to submit their work for this juried exhibition. Eleven were chosen to exhibit work in the gallery.

Alongside the exhibition, a biographical video compilation of these thirty young artists will be distributed during the opening and projected on the screen out back.

Work by Nicholas Alguire, Luke Carlson, Sky Cubacub, Jackie Furtado, Walter Latimer, Christine Porco, Christina Quinlan, Julian Stropes, Mitchell Thar, Harrison Tyler and Azura Wannman.

The loom uses the gallery’s walls to turn a room into a simple machine. It spans the width and breadth of the space, and therefore there is no place to enter without becoming part of the planar field of yarn and donated materials.

Throughout the duration of the show, Swimming Pool Project Space holds an open invitation for anyone to bring his/her own materials and learn to weave. This loom is a very simple incarnation of what can be a very complex craft, and anyone can be taught how to weave on the Room-A-Loom in a matter of minutes.

Swimming Pool Project Space has created one rule outside of Julia’s initial plan, and it is made with respect to Chicago’s history of attention to formal craft. The materials you bring to weave at the Swimming Pool Project Space must be blue, any shade of blue… This is to reflect the floor of the Swimming Pool.

Chiara drives around with immense, hand-built cameras, the largest mounted on a flat-bed trailer, to create unique Cibachrome prints that are veiled in ethereal color or heavy darkness. McFarland melds digital collage with unconventional uses of black-and-white Polaroid film to create powerfully condensed visions of ominous mountain valleys and isolated forces of nature. In the end, the two artists’ mysterious or mirage-like landscapes have less to do with particular places than the ways we experience the world outside — whether physically, in memories, or through the many images we come across on a daily basis.

Chiara and McFarland’s works reflect both a feeling of natural wonder and a sensitivity to the increasingly mediated aspects of our lives today. Neither artist could create these particular images using standard photographic methods and equipment so they painstakingly devised their own. Yet if their practices intersect in some respects, they diverge in many others, not least of all in their formal choices. The differences, however, bring into relief the artists’ alternate approaches to subjects such as presence and absence, human relationships with the natural environment, and the photograph’s existence as both an image and object.

For the ongoing series Land’s End, John Chiara exposes sheets of photographic paper inside his colossal, hand-made cameras without using a negative. He visualizes the composition intuitively, but makes on-the-fly interventions with his hands during the exposure. The fogging, disruptions, and color effects that stem from his process distance the final image from the view on location, while underlining the print’s material qualities and the artist’s involvement. At the same time, Chiara’s vantage point is limited by where he can drive and park — sometimes pavement fills the foreground of the image — binding up his photographs with the city’s infrastructure, the paths laid out in this environment. In Chiara’s view, his works are as much dynamic records of a photographic event as they are atmospheric translations of his surroundings.

In Pictures of the Earth, Sean McFarland depicts natural phenomena and places that he himself couldn’t have witnessed, physically or geographically. Working from a substantial pool of photographs (some his own, others from published sources), McFarland digitally pieces together these pared-down, archetypal images from disparate parts. He then reshoots them as small black-and-white Polaroids, toiling with the imprecise medium at length to achieve the desired look and feeling. If photography is supposedly a matter of being in the right place at the right time, McFarland echoes how our minds form mental images, or even false memories, of things we’ve only seen in pictures. Yet, as pocket-sized Polaroids, the works offer a certain reassurance that they were taken on site and off-the-cuff, developing in that familiar way as soon as the camera spit them out.

The public performance exposes the behind-the-scenes gallery installation and prep work. The on-lookers will experience timely intervals of action allowing singular artists in a group show to be viewed more intimately and critically. Additionally, because of the truncated exhibition times, some guests may come and go with the intention of seeing a specific artist’s work (just as one would come to see a band play their set within a night’s line up) conveniently featuring more obvious social sub-groups within the art viewing and art making public.

By calling to attention some important yet less apparent parts of the gallery experience, the viewer can focus on these moments.