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

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

Letha Wilson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. In addition to her work having been exhibited nationally and internationally, Wilson has received a number of fellowships and awards, including a 2009 fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been mentioned in various publications, such as the New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, Artnet Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wilson recently completed an installation at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, on view through November 27th.

Dave Murray lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He earned his BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received a number of fellowships and awards, including the 2010 Hearst Foundation Visiting Artist Grant at the Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida. Murray’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, most recently as part of a group show in The Queens Museum of Art in Queens, New York.

Fruits of a connected and continuous collaborative consciousness, A rod stewart little richard prince charles manson family is the collaborative effort of six artists working in three different states, communicating ideas over the web through images and conversations. The culmination of this conversation is a physical diagramming of current events, physical incongruities, and a questioning of the present. Opportunities for thought, verbal pandemonium, favoring flavors, and competing hierarchies, are some, but not all, of the ingredients that have produced what has become the punctuation of a six-headed run-on sentence.

“I wish to believe that Bruce Nauman’s work is more about shitting in your pants than about mystical transcendence.” -Kathryn Hixson

This exhibition is dedicated to Kathryn Hixson who passed away in the Fall of 2010. Kathryn was one of the most distinguished art critics in Chicago, an amazing teacher, advisor and good friend. Kathryn was finishing a PhD dissertation at the University of Texas Austin on the role of humor in the work of Bruce Nauman and Richard Prince.

In the spirit of her spontaneity, criticality and wise-ass attitude, recent M.F.A graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago pay tribute to Kathryn and her influence on the latest generation of emerging artists. No Joke presents work that is both conceptual and playful, riding a pendulum that swings between raw irony and the sweet sublime. This exhibition embodies odd couplings through mediated experiences of nature and the body, reflections on perception and image, space and time, slapstick humor and poetic gesture.

One year ago, Kathryn wrote a curatorial statement for the artists in this exhibition when they last presented their work together for the show, Killing Time. The following is an excerpt from that text:

“…Banking on the cohesion of popular memory, some tenderly quote the past, resuscitating it. Identity and difference are presented as space, weight, and time, continually constructed and reconstructed. Each ventures to share with the viewer a direct, sensual and sensuous experience that is decidedly in the present. Through immersion into each crystalline moment of their constructed experiences, one can feel the immanence of the past within the contemporary, to perhaps enliven our perceptions, and our ambitions for art, in the future.”

All proceeds going to support arts education at Association House.

We can direct our fate, or at least we will continue to act like it. Roll the dice without blowing on them. Spill salt without concern. Create artwork dealing with creation, destruction, the infinite, the dread of ultimately resigning our fate. As LVL3 celebrates its one-year anniversary, it begins this new segment free of preconceived notions from what has come before. Free of superstitions. With an anniversary exhibition of works by Ben Driggs, Veronica Rafael and Hans Peter Sundquist, we view a demonstration of a fearless exploration deep within the mind, and way far out of it, with a few conceptual and abstract curiosities in between.

Old master painters who did not have Pantone to look towards for creative expression looked toward religion. Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci would incorporate turquoise and other hues of blue into their frescos and oil paintings because the colors represented religious symbolism. In modern days, abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman would calm the eye with his almost monochromatic canvases using different hues of blue one of them being turquoise.

From innovative art movements to religion, fashion and design you will see in almost every culture that the color turquoise has historical and contemporary relevance. Goodbye Turquoise celebrates the closing of Pantone’s color of the year and surveys the artistic exploration of this color by contemporary artists.

Work by Samantha Bittman, James Cooper, Racer Levan, Montgomery Perry Smith and Leslie Supnet.

In a traditional sense, the technique and material used to craft mugs still remains the same. With ceramics the form for making a vessel is one of the first techniques a student will learn in traditional studio practice. Far removed from what kitsch art signifies, the act of creating mugs in studio practice is very personal and time consuming. However, the tourism and souvenir industry relies heavily on the production of coffee mugs and with pop culture being the largest demand of object ephemera it puts traditional studio practice to shame.

Featuring Alysia Kaplan, Andrew Holmquist, Andrew Norman Wilson, Annie Bielski, Ben Russell, Brook Sinkinson Withrow, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Clara Kim, Clint Enns, Daniel Eatock, Daniel Shea, David Robert Elliott, David Sampson, Dominic Paul Moore, Easton Miller, EJ Hill, Jason Lazarus, Jason Pickleman, Jeremy Tinder, Jessica Bardsley, John Riepenhoff, Kate Ruggeri, Kate Steciw, Katie Kraft, Katy Keefe, Leslie Supnet, Liz Nielson, Lucy Chinen, Marco Kane Braunschweiler, Martine Syms, Mat Rappaport, McKeever Donovan, Megan Plunkett, Michael Sirianni, Mike Fleming, Nick Nold, Olivia Swider, Patrick Bobilin, Paul Kenneth, Rachel Niffenegger, Randy Sterling Hunter, Ryan Travis Christian, Samuel D York, Sangho Choi, Stephen Eichhorn and Todd Beyer.

Curated by Andrew Blackley, Stephanie Burke and Steve Ruiz.

Work by Duncan Andrews, Susan Giles, Anna Kunz, Oliver Laric and Nathaniel Robinson.

Co-Curated with Brook Sinkinson Withrow.

As a culture we routinely use video as a language, whether or not it is acknowledged. This dialect has evolved from customary communication and presentation, overdetermined by the conventions of television, advertising, and web-based imagery. These artists communicate through this language to address our mediated experiences and to articulate expressions of the everyday. The video works unpack and transform the contexts in which we communicate with others – from the simple act of typing on our keyboards, to saying “I love you,”- and make formats such as reality television and Youtube video mash-ups personal. These artists, by talking in video, simultaneously address and communicate with the language we are culturally accustomed to.

Connectivity from the “real thing” is removed or sometimes replaced in art just as relationships are fabricated from false presumptions. We create expectations for one another that eventually either satisfy, call for compromise or lead to disappointment and failure. Feeble Intimacy showcases three artists who touch on methods of interaction with the viewer and incorporate themes that focus on human connectivity with one another and the environment.

Artists include Roderick MacKenzie, Gunsho, Kyla Cech, Scott Alerio, Margeurite Keyes, Nemo Boko, Travis Millard, James Bruce King, J. Chris Johnson, Lisabeth Gutierrez, Peter Karpick, Goddess Irena and Orion Dommisse.

Available works by Blood is the New Black, Milano Chow, Ryan Travis Christian, Alika Cooper, Alex Da Corte, Joel Dean, Cali Dewitt, Austin Eddy, Bea Fremderman, Myranda Gilles, Michael Hunter , Elizabeth Jaeger, Robin Juan, Landon Metz, Rachel Niffenegger, Annie Purpura, Courtney Reagor, Daniel Shea, Brian Sorg, Mitchell Spider, Hannah Stouffer, Fraser Taylor, Porous Walker and Virgil Wong.

Work by Paul Kenneth, Easton Miller and Nozomi Rose.

Maybes are tentative propositions that suggest an overlap between participation and obligation. They are declarations of intent without a future. This lack of commitment reflects a commitment to openness and possibility.

The three artists in our debut show make work that similarly straddles a line of purposeful compromises, generally between the material and the illusory. By straddling the supposed divide between media, they exploit the potential rather than the determined.