Vanesa Zendejas diligently investigates form, materials and surfaces. She has constructed a formal language that pushes the boundaries of the two-dimensional in sculptural form while pursuing a pure appreciation of beauty.

The individual and their autonomy is as pressing a concern now as it has ever been. Reflection on experience, engagement with space, materials, and the nuance that formal abstraction can provide, casts a needed relief on the nature of the products that have come to fulfill the role of culture. The skill of Looking is necessary for any critical insight. What good are the objects of our age if implicit within their design is the dismantlement of our ability to engage. Perhaps beauty and formalism are exactly what this moment is calling for.
Noah Rorem is an Instructor at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Painting and Drawing department where he also received his BFA in 2000 and an MFA in 2004. He has exhibited at Alogon Gallery, Chicago; Julius Caesar, Chicago; Gallerie Art:Concept, Paris; Hudson Franklin, New York, and Shane Campbell Gallery, Oak Park, IL..

Vanesa Zendejas received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and is currently in the MFA program at Bard College. She has exhibited locally at Vega Estates, Old Gold, LVL3 and Roots and Culture.

Adds Donna is pleased to begin Season 2 with Wish You Were Here, an investigation aimed at determining how and when content begins and can potentially never end. Through a format of perpetual change, questions explored and navigated shall inherit the space in and out of the mind. The oscillation of content in relation to cultural climate, human condition, and other external forces can be expected to conciliate the terms of conception while experiencing life in the present. As a full season show encompassing the duration of three to four conventional shows, works will adapt, change, enter and exit all while creating voids through enriched examination embellished in anticipation. How can the promise of a void do more?

As the title for countless songs, albums, books, and films, Wish You Were Here becomes a developing web deciphering the nature of intrigue. For Wish You Were Here work will get a second chance. Viewers who attend throughout the season will be able to experience work as physically present simultaneously with work manifesting as the unknown, as disappearance, as memory or remainder. Participants in this growing exhibition will not only have the autonomy to exit at will, but also to exist in accord with the variables present as much as absent. Work will come, go, and sometimes initiate a rubric all it’s own, for this investigation of time and place has but one absolute, Post Card Rack and Studio Toy by Jo Hormuth and Nearly by Michael Milano. Both works will inhabit the course of the season. Considering time rendered spatially, our gallery “checklist” will exist as an additional site or map for disseminating content, as will the Adds Donna website.

How do we think about spending time? Three hours on the couch watching cartoons feels quite different from spending three hours driving. What beyond the expectations and outcomes of time well-spent or time wasted distinguish our reality? As endeavors, acts of instruction, or indirect subtle movements, metaphors and absence collect and re-imagine what makes works work through composing time for our own tendency to share an unfixed nature. What is anticipated and capable of overlap in WISHYOUWEREHERE campaigns not just to trumpet the new, but negotiates room to appreciate the old.

Dana Degiulio
Diego Leclery
Hans Peter Sundquist
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung

New Catalogue presents its visualization of the famed Golden Record created by Carl Sagan and dozens of collaborators. The Golden Record was released into space upon the Voyager spacecrafts 1 & 2 in 1977, to portray the diversity of life and culture on earth to an unknown and unknowable audience. In collaboration with composer Judd Greenstein, and designers Mary Voorhees Meehan and Neil Donnelly, the group will exhibit collaborative documents, recordings, objects, photographs and sounds. These are their initial findings collected during a week-long studio session in Chicago earlier this July for a project to be exhibited at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012.

Kandis Williams produces large-scale black and white collages that track a deeply personal on-going exploration of racial-nationalism, authority, eroticism, magic and violence. For her show as New Capital’s first artist in residence, Williams takes the recent Tanzanian folk conviction that the arms and legs of albinos can be used in magic potions, and weaves copies of a documentary photograph of a severed Tanzanian albino arm into intricate and hypnotic lattice structures.

Using collage as a deliberately hideous metaphor for violence, these repetitive and idiosyncratic nets, formed from specific incidents of sociological chaos, are set against monochromatic gradients, suggestive of deep space and the occurrence of these incidents over time, compounding the horror and fascination with both physical and ideological difference. Williams implicates both herself and the audience in the intoxication of commodity – fetishism, dramatizing the mind’s struggle for truth in moral judgment.

BEAST, described in numerous circles as a “three-piece percussive drone/noise force, complete with two drummers and skull-based strobe-electronics” is comprised of three 6’ 2”+ artist/ musicians Thad Kellstadt, Tim Nickodemus and Ben Russell. BEAST has performed most recently at the MDW Art Fir, Chicago, and at Form Fit. Members’ projects have been viewed at La Casa Encendida (Madrid), the Rotterdam Int’l Film Festival (Netherlands), the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago). Epileptic eyes! Heart attack ears! BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST BEAST

Both Destineez Child and BEAST appropriate familiar and distinct nomenclatures. In so doing, they speak a language that is both coherent yet disguised. The shift of frame creates a new syntax that becomes the core of creative production. Recall the child hood game that degrades an original phrase through repeated whispers, until it’s source is lost. A similar gestalt is apparent in each of these performances. As the new phrase emerges, though imprecise, it now retains its functionality. Here, this temporal and spatial shift in cultural grammar becomes the locus of the creative pursuit.

Works by Matias Faldbakken, Sophie Calle, Joe Smith, Andy Kaufman and Benjamin Bellas.

In the off space, we’re offering a selection of recent works on paper by Leslie Baum, Todd Chilton, Peter Fagundo and Cary Smith. Leslie Baum’s paper works include the use of watercolor, gouache and collage. Todd Chilton is showing new gouache paintings on paper that reflect his ever-evolving interest in abstraction and pattern. These new pieces were generated from the same source material as the paintings but come to a state of resolution with a nice sense of informality and humor. Peter Fagundo, whose work with found material is always rigorous, is offering a set of three sculptures from cardboard, wood and paint. We’re very happy to include new colored pencil drawings by East Coast artist Cary Smith. This group of drawings compliments his Splat show presented earlier this year at Feature, Inc. in New York.

Through an examination of building surfaces and their hierarchies of ornamentation and relief, Max Warsh collages images peculiarly reminiscent of amateur photography, the flâneur, and cubist perspectives into skins patterned by cultural and architectural detritus. Eschewing the flatness and opacity of images and walls, the photographs contained within these works buckle and exfoliate from weak substrates and porous surfaces. They resurface the building within which they hang, activating a narrative of looking through, rather than looking at.

Each artist disrupts and distorts the language of their medium for content latent but often difficult to extract. The role of perception is employed as a strategy to re-pattern collective cognition and establish different common denominators for experiences that escape the initial reading of the source material.

The exhibition features new paintings and collaborative works that engage the historical trope of nude figure painting.

Marc Arcuri, (ironically labeled ‘undefineable’) is self-defined as a drifter, gambling addict and sock fetishist. He will perform two sets of his poetic slop-art remedial comedy.

Esme Rodriguez, drag queen and trans/intersex cultural theorist will perform a drag show on the loading dock and amidst Ben Gill’s Brancussi-esque sculpture garden.

The video installation Stone Painting by Amsterdam based Estonian artist Katja Novitskova, merges caves at Lascaux with virtual reality.

At 10 pm, the evening will conclude with a screening of Paris is Burning the documentary chronicling ball culture in 1980’s New York.

Curated by Susanne Doremus.

Wade Guyton produces “monochromes” from simple image files that are printed on canvas with a ink-jet printer. The technology is deliberately stressed by commanding the computer to print a relatively small file over a large canvas area and by pulling at the material as it feeds through the printer, forcing breaks and stutters in the scan lines. Gaps and errors disrupt smooth function—the printer skips and drops the images as one would scratch a record on a turntable. In his work, Guyton understands how those digital files, clearly derived from “weak” sources, can be relocated through aggressively directed material and process.

The imagery in Cheryl Donegan’s paintings comes directly from millions of Jpegs posted daily on the internet. The flotsam and jetsam on eBay and Craigslist, uploaded catalog inventory, and all the blog pages that no one has time to look at. The frantic pace of clicking from screen to screen inspires compositions in her paintings that overlap, obscure, hint and distract. Her sense of space, building off the fracturing of Cubism, follows the logic of junkspace: the endlessly additive, thin, permanently unrealized space of cities littered with cranes, Grand Opening banners and abandoned storefronts.

In Tom Meacham’s work, the Untitled paintings and the Fuzagi paintings both announce a state of uncertainty: a title, and a legitimate identity. This negative approach, this self-erasure, is nonetheless broadcast in the strongest way possible: the garish colors of the grid painting, indeterminately selected by feeding randomly generated numbers into a computer program, are a return to zero, semiotics, an imposter, and simultaneously an argument for the spectacle in painting. And in spite of its surrealist legacy, the painting that announces THIS IS NOT A FUGAZI T-SHIRT cancels out not only its identity as a painting, but also ideas of economy and authorship.

Each of these artists share the idea of “weakness.” Erasure, lack of closure and misuse puts them firmly within the realm of what Boris Groys terms the “ultra-modern”—a fast moving society with little time to resolve or complete images, only to keep clicking; discarding one project for the next; oscillating between the poles of outlandish luxury and debased realism. They displace the weak image within the technology of the digital and announce the latest move in a paradox between so much and too little.

In Ryan Fenchel‘s recent work, metonymy drives the discourse. Objects, images and ideas link up with one another to move meaning outside and beyond any literal association that might limit the reading. Quoting Steve Reinke in a statement about Ryan Fenchel’s work, he says “things don’t stand in for other things, abstract concepts are not allegorized as concrete things or characters. Instead, there are potentially endless chains of associations, things are substituted for other things more or less like them. Things rub against one another, are arranged—sometimes in regulated geometric patterns, sometimes like stars in a constellation—and there is always something contingent in these arrangements: components could be switched or substituted without the autonomy of the Fenchel world being compromised.” Like the other artists in Kabinett 6, the accumulation and relocation of cultural material is the primary objective in these humble but mysterious works.

This exhibition of new work includes previously displayed works. More than a nod to personal history, their inclusion compounds the underlying structures of narrative.

The race against ideology is a paradigm of Ben Gill’s artistic production. Surface and pliability of narrative structure are a conscious target, rather than an a priori habitus. The works resist categorization. The paintings are sculptures. The sculptures are paintings. His photo-based works are not photography. They could be identified as fiction novels, not because they are scans of fiction novel covers.

For Melissa Pokorny, found objects constitute the starting point for elaborate constructions that address gender, the public and private self, the nature/culture divide, and most recently, the connections between “things” as potent containers capable of active agency and the deeply haunted sense of place that clings to landscape and personal possessions. The unremarkable histories of everyday objects become activated and heightened as they move into new situations and re-position within a larger tableau. The compulsion to collect and the status of marginal objects and things is a focus in these works. The rarified and the quotidian work together to create momentary and speculative connections. Reveries. Fragmentary narratives emerge on the nature of loss and desire and the power of magical thinking. The stuff comes from estate sales; the photographs were taken at the Funk Prairie Home and Gem & Mineral Museum in Shirley, Illinois. This collection, amassed over a lifetime by hybrid seed baron LaFayette Funk, claims to be the largest privately held collection of rocks and natural ephemera in the United States. It is a “kabinett” for Kabinett 5.

Within his most recent projects, the Chicago artist Andreas Fischer has been producing works that come about through fragmentary impulses. Utilizing small material statements occurring within individual paintings, among paintings in series, and in relation to images in the world, he’s been working toward revealing raw information rather than refined and resolute declarations. By intentionally constructing the uncertainty of an unresolved outcome, he guides the viewer away from questions of how ideas must fit together to arrive at a clear destination, and instead reveals experience through process. He’s interested in the possibilities for these fragments to swirl around each other, sometimes mixing, but never obligated to interrelate. Fischer’s paintings hang on the shell of representation. He uses the language of traditional painting subjects as markers for unburdened meaning and as the armature upon which to hang his loose network of gestures. Ultimately, for the viewer, it’s the deliberate instability of the painting structure that creates a satisfying tension between clarity and hesitation.

Coppice/Pik features a live performance by Chicago-based duet Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer) and a video screening by Israeli artist Maya Pik.

Coppice will be performing Vinculum (Coincidence), a procedural composition that unfolds from intersections between two accordions, fixed media, spatial/temporal intervals, and audience flow.

Echoes is a video by Maya Pik, recently screened at Synesthesia Nights Festival, in Jerusalem.

Britta Bogers’ work in Kabinett 4 is a small fraction of an expansive practice that includes large-scale paper works and paintings. By limiting the focus here to a specific group selected from hundreds,we glimpse into the practice of an artist who is continually making decisions that move form, line and composition forward. These drawings, made with acrylic and pigment colors on primed paper, are defined by a distinct set of chromatic decisions. The result is immediate and direct; well past a sketch but never taken to over-definition. The structural forms come from memories of concrete things; but those memories are blurred and fused with other influences, leaving the images feeling familiar but still elusive. Britta Bogers’ drawings are made with a light touch, but securely anchored by the masterful use and understanding of her visual language.

For more than 10 years, Mark Holmes has been making sculpture from common materials that riff on functional construction. The work never stays there though. With subtle pronouncements revealed through the joinery and other key elements of the facture, Holmes makes poetic and nuanced declarations about form, space and light. The sculpture can be languid or highly dynamic, but it always shifts as you move from one point to another. His past productions of floor and wall objects referenced vaguely functional objects, but here, things are slippery. These objects feel domestic in scale but his use of color creates a tricky deflection that leads the allusion to functionality astray. In linen, wood and pigment, his recent standing sculptures are clearly figurative but feel more like sentries than moving bodies. Surfaces striated with horizontal seams keep us aware of the floor and hold them firmly in place. But in the end, their emphatic color and a weird sense of direction keep these characters active.

Jered Sprecher’s studio practice explores the “handwriting” of humankind. He collects the markings of cultural communication and filters and processes these notations into complex visual constructions. Laden with a dense vocabulary culled from endless sources derived from his immediate surroundings, Sprecher’s paintings, drawings and installations reflect on how we process information and make sense of “noise” in our environment. Kabinett 4 includes a group of new paintings and a Project Table with source material from all three artists in the exhibition.

On December 4th we will be hosting a silent auction and raffle, in addition to a Christmas gathering, with hopes of raising funds for improvements to the gallery. Artists include Caitlin Arnold, Jessica Taylor Caponigro, Scott Cowan, Edmar, Ron Ewert, Frank Van Duerm, Eric Fleischauer, Aron Gent, Emily Green, Drew Griffith, Michael Hunter, Leo Kaplan, Katy Keefe, Nicole Kita, Michael Kloss, Chad Kouri, Jason Lazarus, Joseph Mohan, Dustin Ruegger, Greg Stimac, Ben Speckmann and Nicholas Wylie. The Hornswaggler Arts bar will be slinging handcrafted cocktails, live Christmas music on guitars and saxophones, carolers and magicians will populate the crowd. Please join us and continue your support and to celebrate our first successful year!

Also, Maria Jönsson’s sculpture Releasefest remains on view in the upstairs gallery, and Greg Stimac’s video will be displayed in a new context.

For Kabinett 3, Dana DeGiulio is using the gallery as a expanded drawing field. Her installation is both a stage set for the entire exhibition and a composition-in-the-round. Using found and manufactured material, she choreographs her moves to pace and direct the way we negotiate the space. While passing through, we see weird stuff moving up and off wall; often rudely interrupting the sanctity of the white space and the other works in the exhibition. This is pure expression slowed down by an awareness that the components have been carefully cast in her studio, brought to the gallery as raw material and then composed on site. The acrylic paint peels stretch and hang between corners of the room; strings connect objects; plastic lays over and nearby other works. There are also paintings in the exhibition, but they’re presented not as discreet objects but as components annexed for the greater good. As her practice reveals, the work for Kabinett 3 shows a desire to make gesture variable, portable, isolated, something other than raw expression. In her hands, the mark is an aftereffect, a consequence of matter and interference.

As a highly skilled potter, the Danish artist Marie Torbensdatter Hermann brings a nuanced touch to the small cups and pots that often come off the wheel in her studio. These lovingly crafted manifestations express a desire to make sensual the prosaic utensil and take it beyond usefulness to a point of pensive reflection. Memory is clearly at work in her process. The pieces are steeped in personal history and attempt to capture certain feelings that come from the knowledge of familiar things. That delicacy has recently given over to a newer, more assertive approach to object building that relies less on the wheel-thrown vessel but moves toward the roughness of hand built sculptures. These recent pieces often feel landscape-based and suggest forms cast from nature rather than from the hand. She is also placing these new works in relation to contradictory elements that distort scale and begin to feel like small collections of eccentric discoveries.

Arnold’s artistic practice of meeting and spending time with each girl allows for an intimate atmosphere for these portraits. A common thread of confidence in the girl’s statures and trust in the artist to allow these expressions to unfold, results from the time spent between artist and subject. Although unintentional, body language and expressions repeat through this series remarking on Arnold’s thesis that a girl’s maturity is a defining and lasting shift. With a host of girls ranging in ages, the viewer can see the beginning, awkward development and confident acceptance of their burgeoning womanhood.

Artists participating include past exhibitors, invited artists/musicians, and organizers of The Hills including; Caitlin Arnold, Michael Boles, Jessica Taylor Caponigro, Olivia Ciummo, Sarica Douglas, Deep Earth, Ron Ewert, Michael Hunter, Leo Kaplan, Katy Keefe, Nicole Kita, Michael Kloss, Ben Marcus, Joseph Mohan, Sara Mosk, DJ Rad Pitt, Dustin Ruegger, Margaret Taylor, Frank Van Duerm, Kate Walsh and Lauren Walsh.

Caponigro is particularly concerned with the failure of domestic materials and their ability to maintain beauty after mass production, compromised material, and displacement from their luxurious origins. The materials are manufactured with the intention of deceiving the viewer into believing that the simulations are equivalent to the articles they reference. She tactfully chooses domestic patterns as a means of reaching her viewers through material familiarity. Caponigro’s intention is to create work in which proscribed relationships of the seemingly recognizable are called into question along cultural, domestic and personal expectations.

Continuing their reflection and analysis of modernity in art, Paul Cowan and Matt Stolle question, analyze, confirm and modify tropes and conventional tactics of the art object and artistic practice. Through their explicit references to the history of painting and modernism, the works here exemplify understanding while analyzing the rhetorical nature of art. Through experience we understand how to experience, possibly gaining an ability to control experience, and potentially losing a variable of perspectives on the experience.

In Causality Without Cause, Cowan and Stolle reconsider the general relations of cause and effect, realizing their roles to be more subjective in the cognitive experience. Through an attempted singularity and isolation of ‘effect’, they search for the origin or ‘cause’ of the work. Within this reassociation, the result is a kind of reversed order; effect and cause. The work certainly celebrates its aesthetic successes (potential effects), threatening acute perception to a point of obtuse and alternate thought. Through this we are left with an analysis of cognition in general.

In the Off Space, Thomas Roach presents Wheatstone Stereoscope. Made with graphite, carbon, magazine pages and silkscreen, these frank constructions treat a mélange of mass-media images as text and present a disambiguated and conversely idiosyncratic Modern language. Roach avoids composition by presenting his pictures in the middle of larger standardized supports, a strategy that makes his works appear similar—as simple commodities. The title of the exhibition, Wheatstone Stereoscope, refers to an early optical device designed by Charles Wheatstone and to Roach’s project overall: the reproduction of mass-media images in parts, presentations of which tease at significance and coerce viewers into acknowledging their part in creating meaning.

…Sorry I Didn’t Have Time to Google You features work by David Jourdan, Lisa Holzer, Kitty Kraus, Chiara Minchio and Stefan Schuster.

To create Skies in Between, Renate Wolff started by identifying the individual characteristics and architectural components of the space. The walls, the floor, the door, the single vertical post, the ceiling joists and all the complicated lighting elements influenced the schematic of this complex series of conduits that link the painting to its support. Color also brings into question aspects of the room through contrast and assertive graphic clarity. How one experiences Skies in Between brings to mind the criteria through which one traditionally understands and views painting. Form, composition and emphasis are important elements of the overall structure here, but the work breaks the constraints of the rectangle to become a field layered with planes that are both actual and perceived.

Works on paper by Berlin artists Christian Bilger, Michael Bause, Ruprecht Dreher, Frank Eltner, Dirk Lebahn, Seraphina Lenz, Christiane Schlosser, Renate Wolff and Julia Ziegler in the off space.

The first part of the exhibition, titled Scenes from Kill ‘Em All: Since the Dawn of Thrash Metal, documents the aftermath and influence of Thrash Metal icons Metallica on Mohan’s generation. Born in 1981, Mohan is particularly interested in his generation’s creative production and consumption; he uses Metallica as a point of examination, or a common denominator, for the viewer to approach his works and reflect on these ideas. The 1980‘s generation was the first to adopt MP3’s and filesharing, and Metallica was the first famous band to stand in tone deaf opposition to that while they boasted an “opposition” to mainstream music culture. Despite these set-backs, everyone has some early experience and impression of Metallica that Mohan smartly portrays. The photographs are used as a means to transport the viewer back to their nostalgia towards the creative period of the 1980’s, the evolution of that creative exchange through the 1990’s, and the current state of affairs in 2010.

The second part of Mohan’s exhibition, I Own These Works You Assholes, is concerned with ownership rights, authorship, and derivative creation. Driven by frustration stemming from a professional assignment, Mohan had a first-hand experience with the loss of creative control. In this body of work, based on losing ownership to his photographs, Mohan comments on the legal basis of authorship. A direct result of the evolution of creative originality in our time, this exhibit stands as a stunning example to what Mohan explores in Scenes from Kill ‘Em All: Since the Dawn of Thrash Metal. Where Mohan’s mentality stems from his initial love towards the seductive, reactionary power of Thrash Metal, and as he saw his icons oppose the free, revolutionary exchange of their ideas in the 1990’s, it is of no surprise to find his photographs stolen from him in 2010.

For this exhibition, Scott Cowan and Katy Keefe’s compatibility is on display. The show, made up of paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and wall-installations, was created as a team. The importance of this work ethic beholds the conclusion that because of this closeness, the artists were able to create the work in a collaborative fashion that taught and guided their artistic process.

Erik Neff in the Off Space.

Julius Cæsar will present work by Michelle Grabner, Thomas Lawson, Carrie Moyer and Scott Reeder.

Heiner Blumenthal in the offspace. Recent evocative black and white photographs and non-objective ink drawings—each informing the other—in the first devening projects + editions exhibition for this Cologne-based artist.

Home Wreckage includes work by John Arndt, Claire Ashley, Alexander Braun, The Franks, Patrick Gavin, Marie Hermann, Roxane Hopper, Peter Power, Anders Ruhwald, Wolfgang Schlegel, Roman Signer and Franz West.

Redden at d p + e will be accompanied by a 48 page catalog featuring work from the exhibition and essays by Horst Bredekamp, Manon Bursian and Marc Ries.

Time Trauma Drama and Rhyme is a group show organized by Jason Pickleman that presents visual and literal meditations on the nature and human experience of Time. As a rumination on our relationship to temporal experience, the exhibition brings together artists working in a variety of mediums, along with a group of objects that express time in a very explicit way. Can we really grasp the nature of 30,000 years ago? What about one million or four billion years ago? What about the spaces between the second hands on the clock; those small gaps that masquerade as PAUSE? This show considers these questions through the works of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Jin Lee, Jared Madere, Casey Ann Wasniewski, Chris Altschuler, and the focus of the exhibition, five geological samples on loan from University of Colorado, Boulder geologist Stephen Mojzsis. Featured on raised pedestals in the center of the gallery, the rocks present examples of mind-bending proportion: the oldest rock in the solar system-a piece of “space rock” (4.567 billion years old), microdiamonds extracted from a meteorite whose date pre-dates the sun, and a sample of the world’s oldest micro-fossil.