open hours = fridays + saturdays 1-5 pm; viewings may also be made by appointment.

Caponigro’s most recent body of work examines patterns and circumstances from film adaptations of classic literature. While the books are carefully chosen according to a multitude of ever changing criteria, the nature of literature guarantees that not just the artist, but a larger audience has the possibility of shared, albeit varied, experience.

Artist Bio:
Before receiving her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jessica Taylor Caponigro attended Bryn Mawr College where she earned her BA in the History of Art. She has taught classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Olive Harvey College and currently teaches at Harold Washington College. Caponigro also works as the review editor for Art in Print and is the Director of Andrew Rafacz Gallery. In addition to solo and group shows in Chicago, her work has been exhibited in Long Beach, Philadelphia, and Rome. Her work is in the permanent collections at California State Long Beach and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection. More of her work can be seen at www.jtaylorcaponigro.com.

The YTA consists of screening web-based video for a live and participating audience. Each YTA features 2 hosts that use YouTube to elaborate on a point of interest relevant to their artwork or creative practice. After the “talk” the assembly opens for dialog, giving audience members the opportunity to pull up videos in response or that are relevant to the topic. It’s halfway between an artist talk and film screening; yet goes beyond their conventions by channeling the social possibilities of the medium.

Meg Duguid was raised in Columbus, Ohio, and received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA in from Bard College. She has performed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, and 667 Shotwell in San Francsiso. Duguid has screened work at Synthetic Zero in New York, Spiderbug in Chicago, and at the Last Supper Festival in Brooklyn. Duguid lives and works in Chicago, IL where she runs Clutch Gallery, a 25 square-inch white cube located in the heart of her purse.

Catie Olson is multi-disciplinary artist born in Decatur, Illinois, the pleasant home of two chicken cars. She received her BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1995 in Agriculture, ventured to Chicago and received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute in 2000. Catie organizes SpiderBug, a mobile short film festival, along with her husband, EC Brown. The pair also run Floor Length and Tux, an apartment art space. Catie has an animation that will be shown in the International Pancake Film Festival in Boston upcoming in July. She has shown work in Chicago including Heaven, Swimming Pool, antena and minidutch galleries. http://www.catieolson.com/, http://www.floorlengthandtux.com/, http://www.spiderbug.org/

Presented by Homeroom

Lori Felker is a filmmaker, curator, festival programmer, cinematographer and teacher living in Chicago. Her films have screened in festivals and venues around the world, including the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Florida Experimental Film Festival, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

The Zummertapez screening series invites artists to create a video mixtape that combines excerpts of their own work with material that inspires or influences them. Launched by Alexander Stewart and Andy Roche in 2007, the goal is to produce a more sociable and engaging artist talk. The 2011 Zummertapez series will conclude with a mixtape from Lilli Carre on August 21.

The films use an aesthetic language of multiple-exposure, single-framing, time-lapse, and computational techniques to produce striking visual imagery created directly on 16mm. Drawing on ideas in the work of Chris Marker, Bruce Conner, and Bruce Nauman, Monteleone’s films are moody records of locations, actions and dreams. Underlying all of his film work is the sense that Monteleone belongs to a tradition of eclectic thinkers and inventors whose experimentation is a route to grappling with self and psyche. Monteleone’s films reveal him as a combination of abstract scientist, workshop-tinkerer, and thoughtful observer.

“In this project, I will be turning to the conventional art of portraiture to distinguish and make indistinguishable the image of two artists: my friend, Cori, and myself. Having met two and a half years ago when Cori became my intern for a semester, we have since become friends. This friendship simultaneously grows out of and reflects our nature and concerns as artists. While I remain a mentor in many ways to Cori, so too does she mirror my own desires and endeavors across our sixteen year age span. She reminds me of truths I forget sometimes.

“On Saturday, May 28, we will spend the day reflecting one another’s image by creating reciprocal busts of ourselves. The Happy Collaborationists’ Exhibition Space will be our studio for the day. While both of us are sculptors, neither of us has engaged in this specific process of direct portraiture in the plastic arts. At the close of the evening, the busts will be preserved.”

In the preface to Lives of the Artists, Calvin Tomkins writes,

“Formalist art critics used to say that the life of an artist was irrelevant to the understanding of his or her work… In my experience, the lives of the contemporary artists are so integral to what they make that the two cannot be considered in isolation. If the work is interesting, the life probably is too.”

At the Happy Collaborationist Exhibition space we eat, live and sleep alongside the art we show. The living quarters of Happy C, where each member has resided at one point in time, provides little privacy from each other and is often co-opted for the purpose of gallery storage. Living in this space is a cross between a sleepover, a residency, a co-op and/or dorm room.

Through this hypothesis, we will carefully construct a biographical installation by moving our bedroom furniture and personal items into the gallery side of Happy C—including the possessions of our currently out of town member Hadley, who’s suit cases will reflect the impact of a long distance dedication to our on-going projects.

At the end of our opening all are invited to spend the night at the Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space. Our hope is that through the innocence of a sleepover reminiscent of childhood days our audience will giggle, eat popcorn, even collaborate on ideas with the artist community Happy C strives to create and foster.

Please bring a sleeping bag and pillow. In the morning there will be pancakes.

Frank Heath’s Fixed Window (Apparent Midnight) (2011) compiles a series of recorded telephone calls played alongside a minimal field of slate and glass. The audio shifts among numerous conversations between the artist and collaborator B.J. Wooley and calls surreptitiously placed to businesses and organizations. These exchanges constitute an illogical, almost absurd, form of investigation into an ostensibly fictional event, incorporating the fabrication of the physical structure of glass and slate into this fictive space, as well as a self-reflexive deliberation and strategizing on the conception of the work itself.

The screening includes the release of a double-sided zine with two interviews between Alexander Stewart and Andy Roche: “On Psychedelia,” a 2009 interview on psychedelic culture and politics, and “RIFFIN,” a 2011 discussion about Leftist Catholicism.

Come kick off our 5th Anniversary Year, we are doing it in style!

Bigger and better than ever this year we are featuring our famous snack attack, full bar, and Chi-town’s hottest DJs.

And of course live and silent auctions of R&C’s incredibly generous and amazingly talented friends and family, including Mike Andrews, Isak Applin, Ali Bailey, Carl Baratta, Timothy Bergstrom, Elijah Burgher, Zach Cahill, Paul Cowan, Scott Cowan, Dana DeGiulio, Rob Doran, Jeanne Dunning, Austin Eddy, Stephen Eichhorn, Ryan Fenchel, Andreas Fischer, Carson Fisk-Vittori, Howard Fonda, Gabrielle Garland, George Gittins, Jacob Goudreault, Michelle Grabner, Jonah Groeneboer, Carrie Gundersdorf, John Henderson, Shane Huffman, Michael Hunter, Jo Jackson, Matthew Paul Jinks, Chris Johanson, Katy Keefe, Jessica Labatte, Jason Lazarus, Jose Lerma, George Liebert, Caleb Lyons, CJ Matherne, Aspen Mays, Brian McNearney, Michael Milano, Easton Miller, Rachel Niffenegger, William J. O’Brien, Carmen Price, Scott Reeder, Tyson Reeder, Edra Soto, Kristen Vandeventer, Nate Wolf, Vanesa Zendejas, Erin Zona and Molly Zuckerman- Hartung.

The videos in this program are part of a Berlin/Chicago Exchange between Eric Fleischauer and the one-year art space MMX Open Art Venue in Berlin.

Work by Andrew de Freitas, Elizabeth Wurst, Eric Fleischauer, Jon Rafman, Zachary Fabri, Inez de Vega, Michelle Teran, Nicolas Provost, Jacob Tonski, Cari Freno, Hugh Walton, Ben Kinsley, Jesper Just and David Sherry.

A deep commitment to in-depth understanding of her subject marks Naomi Uman’s filmmaking. Her interest in working with her hands and learning from her subjects is manifest in both the things she chooses to document and the processes such as sewing, gardening, cooking and preserving, painting and embroidering that she engages in while making moving image works.

TEACH 4 AMERIKA: THE CONVERSATION asks local art students, creative thinkers, and arts professionals to consider these questions on the local level as the first step toward constructing a national imagination of the future of arts education.

About the project: In late March 2011, The Bruce High Quality Foundation will pile into a used limousine-cum-school bus and take off on a month-long, coast-to-coast investigation of what’s going on with contemporary art schools.

“The idea of art education needs to be taken back from the self-fulfilling professional art education industrial complex,” the Foundation argues, “and put in terms—economic, social, and practical – for artists on the ground.” Teach 4 Amerika is a rallying effort to begin this conversation on a national scale and to encourage a new generation of students, artists, and educators to imagine what is possible for art education in America.

This event has limited attendance, RSVP required. Contact abigail@three-walls.org to reserve a space.

Work by Jeff Badger (Portland, ME), Carl Baratta (Chicago), Amanda Curreri (San Francisco), Joanne Lefrak (Santa Fe), Kathy Leisen (Detroit) and Dan Schank (Philadelphia).

Looking to the objects that surround us, the work of Vanesa Zendejas deals with the reconstructed modernism we live with and that which is present in our common knowledge of art history. Sculptures and works on paper resonate between classical abstract forms and familiar furniture, arrangements and textures. The work also looks to the more obscure American geometric abstractionists and their direct influences, always keeping in mind our modernist lineage and how that effects us.

This seemed like a reasonable metaphor for a strain of video art concerned with direct recording of action and performance, with emphasis on personal expression, structural innovation, peculiar point of view and humor. The 16 short works in this program present a multitude of approaches to performance and direction in video. Experimental DIY methods prevail over conventional notions of story, quality or technique. The camera provides audience access to the thing that has happened, however shaky, small or strange; often with complex and affecting results.

Featuring Andrew Fansler, Derek Fansler, Ken Fandell, Eric Fleischauer, Gabriel Fowler, Charles Irvin, Emily Jones, Mike Lopez, Daniel Paz, David Servoss, Kwabena Slaughter, Clay Smith, Alexander Stewart, Kirsten Stoltmann, Selina Trepp and Erik Wenzel.

Suitable Video is the curatorial platform of Scott Wolniak, organizing video programs for screenings, gallery exhibitions and limited-edition DVDs.

Work by Mara Baker.

We will be screening both of these films on one loop in the second floor window of 1369 W. Chicago Avenue from 8pm—Midnight the following dates: February 19, February 26, March 12, March 19, March 26, April 2, April 9, April 16 and April 23.

Instruments of Resurrection explores how artists breathe new life into historical figures, personal stories, moments in time, or forgotten scientific methodologies. These resurrections dredge up rich histories and set into swirling motion narratives that were previously settled into a comfortable story. By bringing back to life something that was forgotten, hidden away, or misrepresented, these artists are giving their subjects the opportunity to retell and recast their narratives in the present tense.

Work by Dani Leventhal, Michael Gitlin, GUMMI international, Rosa Barba, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jem Cohen and Jessie Mott/Steve Reinke.

Enshrining the storied tales of bats a-flame, balls made of liquid water, and fielders flying just faster than the zingers of one loud-speaking announcer, the SWWMYOSBL Hall of Fame recounts and pays tribute to the heroes of the South Western Wisconsin Make Your Own Soft Ball League. Though in existence only one season, within which only one game, the championship, was played between the only two teams in the league, the SWWMYOSBL remains a steadfast symbol of all that is great in this country: John Cougar Mellencamp, Chevy trucks, and artists playing sports. (Or is it players making art?) We have here whatever peaks your interest, be it a bat fashioned from a cow’s legbone or a ball hewn of sawdust stuffed dustmasks, for within these walls the derring-do of champions bubbles up, it truly is a Hall of Legends.

Work by Erik Peterson.

At the intersection of the mathematical sciences and religious study was the theory of Sacred Geometry. This idea of relating sacred meaning through precise mathematical proportions relating to mystic design and prescribed to art, music, and architecture. The idea traces back to Plato who stated that “God geometrizes continually”. The Golden Ratio is a number often encountered when taking the ratios of distances in simple geometric figures. This number has fascinated many of the great thinkers throughout history from Pythagoras to da Vinci and its proportions were employed to design some of the greatest architecture from the Parthenon to Le Courbusier. This irrational number recurs often in nature, which has lent to this recurring preoccupation with its metaphysical significance.

The five artists in A Certain Ratio employ abstraction to investigate these classic philosophical inquiries. A reduction of form to symbolic or allegorical mathematical composition imparts their work with a depth of mystical pursuit. This is a dialectical approach to the position stated above by Mr. Stella and the dominate role of abstraction since Minimalism of a strict, materialistic formalism, emptied out of signs.

Work by Elijah Burgher, Ryan Fenchel, Jonah Groeneboer, Shane Huffman and Erin Zona.

New paintings and sculptures by CJ Matherne examine an infatuation with space, as it pertains to a cultural scene as well as simple observable elements such as light, mass, and volume. In his work, concerns with the grotesque, un-hip, and awkward imbue an anxiety that already exists in the subject, adding a dark humor and his own brand of cartoonish awkwardness.

In Existence Value, a gesture precedes all considerations and assumptions, rendering immediate perception obtuse. These objects, losing all subjectivity; question their own role (real or imaginary) and the artist’s desire to create and be present in the work.

Work by Scott Cowan and Paul Cowan.

Work by Jodie Mack, Theodore Darst, Nick Briz, Alexander Stewart, Clint Ens, Nick Salvatore, Johnny Rogers, Jon Satrom, James Connolly, Ben Pearson, Jimmy Joe Roche, Karl Klomp, JB Mabe and LJ Frezza.

Performances by James Connolly & Eric Pellegrino, Tamas Kemenczy & Mark Beasley, Jeronimo Barbosa, Andrew Bucksbarg, Ben Baker-Smith & Evan Kühl, StAllio!

Actually, everybody is a dragon, but current conditions discourage and disallow us to express those sinuous traits.

Like a multi-headed hydra, Hey, We’re All Beginners Here! is an exhibition with numerous voices to illuminate our historical moment and paths into the future. It’s a series of social events and collection of images. Cultural workers and artists from different fields are contributing to this cloud of images. Among those contributing are Robin Hustle, Sarah Kavage, Pennie Brinson, Salem Collo-Julin, Sarah Ross, Red76, Sarah Smizz, Courtney Moran and Park McArthur. The exhibition includes drawings, an open stage and pulpit, a book making work shop, good food, video, wheat grass and a bike ride to Shaumberg.

During her exhibition at Happy Collaborationists, Shirley will present a body of work from her ongoing mission to jump over Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Through her training and obsessive preparations, culminating in a performance of death defying feats, Shirley asks the question, “Is it possible to jump the art shark?” and if so “Where do you go from there?”

The artists in this exhibition represent the range of relationships that artists have to Ox-Bow, from faculty members, to staff, to resident artists, to fellowship recipients and students. The majority of the artists included in the exhibition represent the contemporary generation, while two artists, George Liebert and Betsy Rupprecht provide a link to the past—both in their deep personal histories at Ox-Bow and in that they are each highly regarded instructors that have had an enduring influence on the younger generation. Both these artists share in a tradition of narrativised landscape painting, whether employing mythic or personal storytelling through the allegory of the experience of nature. This concern is evident in painted works by Shara Hughes, Carmen Price, Andrew Winship and Nate Wolf. Works by Hughes and Wolf use idiosyncratic styles in which the application of the paint itself ducks and jumps in frenzied reverie synched to the characters and objects that populate their images. Price cherrypicks characters and symbols from daily experience and strings them together in playfully cryptic thought streams. Winship caricaturizes and anthropomorphizes natural phenomena in his painting for the exhibition. Last Lagoon, by Melanie Schiff carries this concern of landscape narrative into photography. Phenomenological approaches to nature are present in a photograph by Aspen Mays in which the light of a firefly is literally captured in the camera’s lens and Jonah Groeneboer‘s installation work bends and reflects light through a geometric network of line. A preoccupation with craft and material experimentation follow through Groeneboer’s work into fiber work by Mike Andrews and installation work by Anna Mayer, which recast everyday materials and craft into works of intuitive and ritualized consideration.

Also on view in Roots & Culture’s kitchen space is a show, Who Cooks for You? arranged by the six cooks of Ox-Bow. Part group exhibition and part museological display, the cooks, who are all artists as well, will conjure the spirit of the Ox-Bow kitchen. The kitchen at R & C itself is designed around an old stove from Ox-Bow that was salvaged during the renovations in 2006. With Erin Chapla, Tom Harrington, Mikey Henderberg, Eric May, Carmen Price and Becky Wehmer.

Images and objects provided by Slim Limb, weelittleladdy and Beelzebubba.

Also featuring a new installation by Kate Ruggeri in the project window.

Featured artists in the program include Jon Cates, Warren Cockerham, Nick Edelberg, Lori Felker, Jason Halprin, Emily Kuehn, Kent Lambert, Jodie Mack, Jesse McClean, Nicholas O’Brien, Jon Satrom, Kate Raney, Michael Robinson and Jerzy Rose.

CHANNELING is an entryway into the spirit realm and the queer body politic: a program of experimental moving image work that calls up the ghosts of the past and the specters of the future. The intent of the program is to re-imagine film and video as occult technologies that allow us to connect with the bodies, experiences, and emotions that are often invisible– ghostly, even–in everyday life.

Videos by Vanessa Renwick, Elliot Montague, Shana Moulton, Michael Robinson, EMR (Math Bass & Dylan Mira), Aay Preston-Myint, Jillian Pena and John Di Stefano. Presented by Threat Level.

Work by Jesse McLean, Sterling Ruby, Dani Levanthal, Jim Finn, Pat Steir, Susan Youssef, Wynne Greenwood & K8 Hardy and Nicholas Provost.

The premise of this exhibit is to address painting as an increasingly abstract notion, and to consider its inherent sculptural and object based possibilities. The way has been clearly cut to broach the topic of “subject as object” with respect to painting, to lure out the infinite possibilities paint and its associated materials has when piled up, cut and woven, collaged, wrapped around a form, chewed up and licked onto whatever, etc, etc. Clearly there is nothing new about apparently non-traditional uses of paint, but what every new generation must face is how to ask these materials, new and old, to perform in an intelligent and prescient fashion, that may bow to the rectilinear plane or demand a new format entirely. Werner Herzog offers that raw creativity may come from a fever, perhaps a scorching moment of insightful apoplexy or a sustained burn state of dreaming from which the uncanny emerges.

The YouTube Assembly is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of viral video in a live event. The event consists of screening web-based video for a live, participating audience. Like karaoke or a traditional performance open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, in this case, by sharing their favorite Youtube clips. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members will be encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity

Each screening will feature a pair of hosts from different artistic backgrounds that will share their YouTube video picks and help facilitate the evening’s open mic portion.

Participating artists are Ninna Berger, Caitlin Denny, John Henderson, Parker Ito, Zachary Kaplan, Anne Guro Larsmon, Matt Momchilov, Justin Olerud, Job Piston, Melissa Sachs, Bailey Salisbury and Justin Swinburne.

In this tradition Industry of the Ordinary invite you and your loved ones to their 2009 Xmas Knees Up.

Traditional British food, drink, music, dancing. games and visuals will be served, and the first one hundred guests will receive a commemorative drinking vessel to use and cherish.

Throughout history, the face has been an enduring, ambivalent subject manipulated by artists to explore a range of human emotion. Often a formal affair required for the preservation of a family memory, portraiture has long been swapped out for it’s modern equivalent- the photo. Since the invention of photography, portraits have become a new beast altogether- sometimes barely reminiscent of the human form in varying states of play, despair, or terror. These five artists take the definition of ‘portrait’ and run with it in completely different directions. Ben Fain uses high definition video to define his girlfriend’s extraordinary father (Dr. Russell Schneider, a forensic odontologist) enacting a theatrical autopsy/taste-test on an injured rival player lying on a parade float during the Warren Township High School homecoming parade, (an event held in Gurnee, IL, on Saturday, October 4th, 2009). Alice Tippit employs analytical lines in her colorful compositions to suggest the interpretation of a human form, and Andrew Holmquist paints whimsical figures using fluid brushstrokes with a refined palette.

New sculptures and paintings by Edra Soto explore how different forms represent ideas of Heaven and Hell. Speculations of what awaits us after passing, rebirth, transformation, world peace, communions, hope, love, and ideas of mental and spiritual darkness are all referenced through a lens of a Roman Catholic upbringing.

Scott Wolniak is an interdisciplinary visual artist working in drawing, sculpture, video and installation. Investigating visual systems and patterns in our immediate environment, Wolniak derives subject matter from reflections on his daily life in relation to optics, metaphysics, comedy and craft.

We have options, an infinite amount of them, which we must see as wide-open variables to use or deny. Every decision made is made with intention. It isn’t about being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but rather the sequence of events and how they add up.

The more reduced something is and the more minimal its expression, then the more malleable it is to having meanings applied. It is a challenge to attempt to communicate in a realm where a rhetoric language has precedent over all others. Our perception is keen and desires to become more acute in that manner. In logic this is good, but in alternative scenarios additional variables occur.

At what point can something like faith be accomplished? It is never knowing, but only trusting, and letting the self become something -constantly. What is often meant when people use the word ‘faith’ is faith in the adulterated sense – something one needs ‘in order to renounce everything’. When in reality, faith itself presupposes that one has renounced everything.

In Existence Value a gesture precedes all considerations and assumptions, rendering immediate perception obtuse. We consider these objects objects, losing all subjectivity; questioning the role of the object (real or imaginary) and the artist’s desire to create and be present in the work.

The YouTube Assembly is an attempt to capture the phenomenon of viral video in a live event. The event consists of screening web-based video for a live, participating audience. Like karaoke or a traditional performance open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, in this case, by sharing their favorite Youtube clips. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members will be encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity

Each screening will feature a pair of hosts from different artistic backgrounds that will share their YouTube video picks and help facilitate the evening’s open mic portion.

This is our first curated series and explores notions of fraternity through pairings of artists selected based on their strong collaborative bond noted throughout their work and real life relationships. The series will focus primarily on performance and installation work, mediums which the Happy Collaborationist are happy* to continue prominently promoting a stage and venue for in the contemporary art scene of Chicago.

Two young men forcing another to eat a goldfish, or restraining a fat friend and pouring milk all over him, these are simple dramas that initially defined Doty’s work. The images of drunken boys that have been “chiefed” draw from the same vein; their unconscious shit-faced faces vandalized with absurdly homophobic messages like “I Heart Cock” and “Nothing But Dude” make a travesty of young masculinity. Of course, Doty wouldn’t let himself escape his approach. In one of his better known works, drunk coming down a wooden backyard staircase, Doty himself has slipped and fallen forward, smashing his 40 oz. and his face in the process. Where moments earlier he may have been holding court, we now stop to look at what a failure he has become, a reflexivity that acknowledges that no one escapes the fatalism of our world.

Made both magic and terrible, Doty’s new photographs of women push for a greater discomfort. The tactics of humor have dissolved; the optimism of comedy is squelched. The grimace and sadistic chuckle that was present is absent, the aesthetic is now far more cynical. Caught between rough historical references to Balthus or Fragonard and the amateur soft-porn advertising that we commonly associated with brands like American Apparel, it would be easy to say these images are harsh parodies of the common sexism we find in mass media and art history, but that’s simply not true. Locating this banal critique is a futile task, and rather than make a work so easily legible, Doty opts for something less explicable. The subjects, the women presented are without any power, without any right, without any value, so much so that they are better referred to as objects. Flattening the drama, each photo is isolated, its subject made prone and made tragic. Vacillating between subtlety of “Untitled 19” and severity of “Untitled 24”, the images make not attempt to either assert or subvert any gaze, having either would comprise the work’s objectivity. Instead, “Untitled 24” stands glancing sideways towards the lens. Her hands clasped around her growing belly, her cast silhouette on the wall underscores that she is just like anything else in the picture, a clown, a kitsch object sitting through the tedium and slowness of life.

While the exhibition’s smart-assed and antagonistic title might suggest otherwise, the images themselves defy being determined by gender. Each is aesthetic, prior to being political, and they demand this initial interpretation. What would otherwise be recognized as a subject is shown as an object. With each image pointing out that no one escapes life seeing them as an object, claims of discrimination are deadened. Being distinguished as an object rejects affiliation with any group, it is sexless, race-less, and hopeless in its dearth of humanity. Works like “Untitled 22” and “ Untitled 25” are epitomic of that. In the first, a woman wearing only a thong lies on the ground, the right leg slightly lifted, she’s positioned facing away from us so that we know her only by form of her thighs and the black fabric that hides her crotch. While Doty’s technical aptitude is ever present, the set looks slapdash, a painter roller still wet leans against the wall, and a plant gives the illusion of an ambiance. This is not portraiture, these are not models, any thematic pretenses for the purpose of dignity are unneeded when we address the subject whose fate is to be an object. Instead of the socially constructed victim, the marginalized or mistreated subject, what is presented is the subject so tragic it has no subjectivity to assert, determined to exist depersonalized, determined to be the waste they must become.