The Visualist » O’Connor Art Gallery

Pushing Paper

karly — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:00:14 +0000

Work by Joan Hall, Susan Giles, Regan Golden, Kate McQuillen, James Trainor, Michael Velliquette and others.

Mark Booth: nothing to do with wizards

karly — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 21:00:07 +0000

Booth’s installation of text works in hand-cut vinyl and multi-media drawings obliquely explore the subjects of association, categorization, perception, death, and dreaming. The drawings combine abstract text and visual images. The spontaneously composed works feature improvisatory mark-making and writing that investigate the act of writing at the speed of drawing. Booth’s use of text, form and imagery explores the materiality, nuance and subjective nature of language. Odd sentence fragments (like gesture drawings) open up narrative spaces, privileging intuition and chance over highly calculated constructions.

Twos

karly — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 21:00:42 +0000

Featuring guest curators Dan Devening, Karsten Lund, Lynne Warren, Mary Jane Jacob, Barbara Weisen, Shannon Stratton and Michael Graham. Work by Paul La Mantia, Paula Henderson, Rebecca Morris, Marcel Breur, Laura Marney, Seamus McGuinness, Andreas Schoon, Thomas Roach, John Stezaker, Mary Lou Zelazny and others.

Twos renegotiates the traditional group show model. Seven curators each selected two works to be shown in proximity to each other. Each pair was chosen for a strong aesthetic or conceptual relationship. Taken as a whole, this exhibition of ‘twos’ is an experiment in the possibility for a collection of disparately selected.

Helen Maurene Cooper and Maria Gaspar

karly — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 21:00:47 +0000

This exhibition includes recent photography by Helen Maurene Cooper and installation‐based work by Maria Gaspar. Each artist takes a critical and self‐reflexive investigative approach, using urban cultural detritus as material to explore identity, gender and history. Cooper explores the many worlds of nail art in both Chicago and Philadelphia. Her photographs depict friends, colleagues and students wearing acrylic nails, while posing and performing a related identity in front of airbrushed backdrops.

Gaspar’s installations, on the other hand, are comprised of debris often associated with parades, festivals and celebrations that are essential to the lives of Latin American immigrants in the U.S. Her projects are informed by her own identity as a Latina artist and also by her work for the Public Art Group, creating projects in many of Chicago’s ethnically diverse neighborhoods. Often using the color brown, symbolic of mud, re‐birth and skin, Gaspar’s tactile sculptures burst with celebratory colors that, along with the brown layers, reflect the layered, emotional and temporal unfolding of events.