Carter continues his series Untitled Relationships—multi-part works of collaged mass-produced materials, drawings, spray paint, and glitter—inviting viewers to define their own relationships between casual and formal elements. He positions fetishized objects like fat shoelaces, track pants, or Timberlands as the new materials of postmodern pastiche. Referencing iconic moments in modernist art and design, Carter turns contemporary culture on itself, empowering these common materials to surpass their casual status. In his new densely layered paintings, Carter’s formal treatment of paint (pouring, peeling, sculpting, weaving, gluing, nailing, etc) pushes the physical limits of the “flat” medium. Though Carter’s abstracts are aesthetically formal his use of casual signifiers to make marks breaks with modernist theory by conflating the subjective and objective nature of materials.

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

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

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

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

Featuring new work by gallery artists Justin Cooper, Robert Davis/Michael Langlois, Jason Middlebrook, Karen Reimer, Joel Ross and Carrie Schneider.

The title equally refers to the formal and material nature of their new work itself. Within the work of Arocha – Schraenen, simile and facsimile are often content; the nature of an image and its similarity or distance from the perception of that image. In the works that play with layering and blurring the lines between what is, in reality, a solid surface and what is only a reflection –or the facsimile of a tangible material – Arocha – Schraenen join the dotted lines between Modernism’s approach to something nearing an abstracted form of representation and the age old mimetic thrust of art drawing upon observations of the world around us.

In As if this intersection between science and art’s mimetic drives is once again foregrounded. Each work is actually a moiré of one form or another, whether manifesting as a sculpture or photographic work. Most immediately associated with textiles, a moiré is also a scientific phenomenon: an interference created when two grids are superimposed at an angle or where their mesh sizes differ. The nature of the moiré phenomenon connects textile traditions with the photographic and reprographic process and naturally lies within Arocha – Schraenen’s explorations of how images are constructed. In this particular case, their interest examines how moirés manifest in static objects transmute into a perception of movement. Yet, the works also conversely evoke a sense of scientifically explained moirés that occur when an image-making device – for example a television camera- attempts to transmit an image of certain patterned static objects due to the sampling limitations of the medium itself. Just as an image may prove illusory, these works remind us more specifically that one way in which an image might prove to be different from its perception is in terms of movement. Exactly what is moving and what is still within each situation?

OnTheWall, a wall project series visible 24/7, will present work by Assume Vivid Astro Focus.