Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 12, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday Feb 13, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 w 17th Street, Chicago 60608

BETA EYES
“Shit People Say” is a Youtube phenomenon, with millions of views around the world. It started with “Shit Girls Say,” in which a comedian compiled small clips of himself in drag performing stereotypes of women in various situations, portrayed as technophobic, needy, and self-absorbed. With the power of the internet, new versions of “Shit Girls Say” appeared with various cultural commentaries like: “Shit Black Girls Say,” “Shit White Girls say to Indian Girls,” and “Shit Straight Guys say to Lesbian Women.” Green considers whether these videos are a portal into a new era, where people can freely poke fun at our and others’ cultures, or merely a new conversation where disrespect is celebrated.

In an exploration of culture, race, and viral internet sharing, Green uses these videos as tutorials about different cultures. With the instant gratification of the internet, we are able to ingest one dimensional views of a group of people in three minutes. Imagine how someone who has never met a black male would feel after watching “Shit Black Guys Say” or other forms of viral entertainment? What happens to those people that do not fall into their typical cultural stereotypes that are so widely celebrated in mainstream popular culture? Beta Eyes explores that reality in a series of works featuring video, performance, and sculptural art pieces.

This collision of spectacles has it all:
* Attendees can challenge a pair of professional volleyball players
for the chance to WIN $100!
* Chicago’s best painters will display event-specific works on the
walls surrounding the court!
*!Muy Caliente! Imbibe exotic tropical beverages from the Cabana!
*!Muy Caliente! DJ set by wurkstep pioneers SICH MANG!
*!Muy Caliente! Sun Lamps, Palm Trees, Coastal Wildlife, Sun Block, and Sand!

The sandy lines dividing spectators, artists, and athletes will be smoothed over by all feet that make their way to this one night event at Antenna.

Painters include: Adam Farcus, Adam Grossi, Alberto Aguilar, Alex Bradley Cohen, Angeline Evans, Brian Wadford, Caroline Carlsmith, Cory Glick, Edra Soto, EC Brown, Irene Perez, Jeriah Hildwine, Jim Papadopoulos, Kevin Jennings, Nicole Northway, Pamela Fraser, Philip
von Zweck, Thad Kellstadt, Vincent Dermody

ALICE FELDT is an artist living in Chicago. She received a BFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago. She works in a variety of media (such as photography, video, animation, and poetry) and currently is exploring intimacy and sexuality through the combination of text and image.

More information about Alice Feldt can be found at alicefeldt.com.

With formal and ephemeral gestures of processing and repair, Rebecca Beachy’s sculpture recasts narratives of animal bodies as use objects: deer ground up by hand and returned to the site of collision as highway dust, repairing cracks in the asphalt; a muslin pillow accumulates the down from birds that collided with windows; the stain in a copy paper box is the evidence of having held an injured duck. The work, concerned with the damaged interstice between the wild and human structures, articulates physical engagement as an ethical gauge, positioning meaning as resting first in the material and the concrete. This sculptural presence is used to foreground questions regarding humans as animals, especially the question of the human relationship with gravity and mortality, and hopes to show the complexities in the interconnections between animals, people, and the ground on which both meet, collide, and dwell.

REBECCA BEACHY (b.1982) is a Chicago based artist, born and raised on a farm in Colorado, who works primarily in sculpture and installation. She is a recent recipient of both an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown in numerous locations including Edinbugh, Scotland, Dallas, Boulder and Chicago with recent and upcoming exhibitions at Gallery 400, SHOP (Southside Hub of Production), Roxaboxen and Eel Space in Chicago. She currently has an essay published in the latest edition of Puerto del Sol. Most recently, Beachy has been raising chickens and apprenticing as a taxidermist for the Chicago Academy of Scientists at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

More information about Rebecca Beachy can be found at www.rebeccabeachy.com

ANNA CAMPBELL received her M.F.A. in art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her B.A. in studio art from the College of Wooster. She lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan and teaches courses on sculpture, installation and curating at Grand Valley State University. Her research focuses on queered representations of heroic masculinity through video, sculpture, and installation art.

More information about Anna Campbell can be found at www.annacampbell.net

Alex Miller (b. 1987) originally from Alexandria, Virginia, is an artist living and working in Chicago. Alex came to Chicago as a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his BFA in 2010. Focusing on sculpture, specifically in cast metal arts and fiber arts, juxtaposes the academic and natural environments. Exhibitions in Chicago include works at Tom Robinson Gallery and the Sullivan Galleries.

Lorraine Barger (b. 1988) is from Greenville, Ohio. She is currently as student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and will be receiving her BFA in May. She works primarily in the fiber arts with a focus in weaving and natural dyeing. Her next up coming show will be her BFA show in March.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Jan 15, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Jan 16, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

OTHER FLOWERS is made up of a series of manipulated cross-stitch patterns on paper. The patterns were found in a town near to the site of the ACRE artist residency in rural Wisconsin and were hand-sewn with embroidery floss, which was dyed using a variety of plants from the property. Using these patterns as a starting point, the work magnifies the tension between abstraction and representation present in traditional needlework. By repeating and collaging pieces from the larger patterns into new forms, the past is obscured but always present in the work. The muted colors mimic a connection to place and history faded by time and memory.

COURTNEY WEBER (b. 1982) is a photographer, embroiderer, and occasional seamstress. She holds a BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Taught by her mother, the first thing she ever embroidered was a Christmas gift for her grandparents: a potholder with a snowman and a candy cane. She was raised in Missouri but now lives and works in Chicago with her husband and three cats.

More information about Courtney Weber can be found at www.courtneylynnweber.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, Jan 8, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Jan 9, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

ACCUMULATIONS highlights the work of three artists intricately involved in the ACRE residency kitchen with disparate practices connected by a tendency toward collecting, obsession and re-assemblage. Melissa Damasauskas’ Fireplace Fetish is a hearth constructed of soft quilted bricks forming the “log cabin” pattern, a traditional quilt pattern centered around a red “hearth” and representing the log cabin “home.” The fireplace and the quilt are both symbols of warmth and home and have both become generally obsolete, rendered nostalgic remnants of a simpler past and reduced to elements of interior design and decoration. A fetish figure is believed to house a particular spirit which is often “awakened” by pounding nails or sharp objects into it. Fireplace Fetish is intended to house the spirit of home and community, inviting patrons to poke pins into it’s pin-cushion-like structure with the intention of awakening and renewing healthy community. Ashley Hudson explores ideas of imagination, inspiration and humor, creating a collection of fantastic and silly places constructed through collage and sculptural forms. She sees this as an ongoing investigation of her subconscious and her interest in the discarded. Leonardo Kaplan presents the newest piece from the ongoing series, The Gravity of Images involving the production of floor to ceiling, photographic dot pattern murals in various materials. Koala Porno continues his investigation of image reproduction presence through the layering and reproduction of appropriated imagery.

MELISSA DAMASAUSKAS is a fiber/sculpture artist working between Chicago and Northern California. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. Her work investigates intersections between domestic objects and traditions with the esoteric and magical, often considering presence and absence, intentionality and belief systems. Her other projects include menu planning, program development and cooking for the ACRE Summer residency kitchen.

ASHLEY HUDSON lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2004. From 2008-2010, she attend College of the Redwoods in northern California, where she studied historic preservation. Her art practice often involves the obsessive compiling of found objects and images into structures and scenes. Some of her interests include strange and historic architecture, wood, foreclosures, the end of the world, national parks, the subconscious and food.

LEONARDO KAPLAN was born in Columbia and currently lives and works in Chicago. He is involved with various artist-run projects, including ACRE, The Hills Esthetic Center and New Capital Projects.

ZACHARIAS ABUBKER is a Chicago based artist, where he works as a freelance preparator and photographer. He attended Columbia College Chicago, attaining a BFA in Photography in 2009. He plans to return to Ethiopia early next year for an extended stay to develop ongoing projects.

More information about Zacharias Abubeker can be found at www.zachabubeker.com

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is a volunteer-run non-profit based in Chicago devoted to employing various systems of support for emerging artists and to creating a regenerating community of cultural producers. ACRE investigates and institutes models designed to help artists develop, present, and discuss their practices by providing forums for idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects. Each year, ACRE conducts a summer residency program in rural Steuben, Wisconsin, bringing together over 100 artists, musicians, and thinkers to make and discuss their work. Back in Chicago, ACRE provides opportunities for all of its residents to exhibit at either ACRE Projects, a storefront gallery in Pilsen, or one of over 10 partner spaces.

ACRE Projects is a new space in Pilsen presenting weekly art events every Sunday evening. Each of ACRE’s 70+ residents are given the keys to the space for one week to do with it what they will. Additional exhibitions will be hosted by a number of local galleries and alternative spaces.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Dec 4, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Dec 5, noon-4pm

A DEVICE FOR SEEING: is always a translation or augmentation. Most humans see life through their eyes; some feel it in their bones. Once I tried to do both, but I got confused, so now I alternate monthly. Lenses are a whole different story because they change how we see in such a subtle way. It’s easy to forget they are there.

When you have lost something, you hold it in your mind so tight, and will the registration of memory and past to align.

When she lost it, she held it in her mind so tight for so long. Finally, she compressed it into a pebble. Luckily, it was in the hope that there was more to come.

JOSHUA SAMPSON (b. 1984, Commerce TX) currently lives and works in Chicago IL. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has exhibited in Chicago (various), Texas (various), China (Xuzhou Museum of Art), Italy (Santa Chiara Study Center) and has work in the 2011 Illinois International Film Festival.

More information about Joshua Sampson can be found at www.joshuasampson.com

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

ACRE Projects is a new space in Pilsen presenting weekly art events every Sunday evening. Each of ACRE’s 70+ residents are given the keys to the space for one week to do with it what they will. Additional exhibitions will be hosted by a number of local galleries and alternative spaces.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org

Hello Yasi

I’m ███████, senior instructor from the International Graphoanalysis Society; I began studying GA in 1970. So many people do not understand that there is lots of misinformed graphology in the world. If they would study Graphoanalysis, developed by the American genius █████████████████████████████████████████, then they would be amazed at how accurate it really is. But if I pick up a book on some other graphology, I’m disgusted by the vagueness and varied interpretations given the strokes in their writing samples. A most frustrating thing to me is how many people who studied our course years ago insisted in bringing in other graphology, and polluting a really accurate, pure product.

Is the piece of writing you talk about is lengthy – and for some reason you’d like to get the analytical comments on audio? We can accurately identify 125 personality traits, and I can take over 20 hours on a full written analysis. If you’re interested in something recorded, it sounds like it would be just a personality sketch–something pretty short. Still, I can sum up the essential personality in not so many words because I’ve been working for Headquarters for decades.

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YASI GHANBARI (b. 1984) is an artist living and working in Chicago. She received a BA from Oberlin College in 2007 and an MFA in Film & Video in 2010 from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: Eleanor Roosevelt/horticulture, defense mechanisms, “installation”, masterworks, feminism, set design, bio pics, interpassivity, guilt, reference, “mark making”, and Sigmund Freud.

More information about Yasi Ghanbari can be found at www.yasighanbari.com

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibition) was founded in 2010 with the ambition to provide the arts community with an affordable, cooperative, and dialogue-oriented residency program. The residency itself takes place each summer in rural southwest Wisconsin and brings together artists from across disciplines and levels of experience to create a regenerative community of cultural producers. Over the course of the following year ACRE endeavors to further support its residents by providing venues for exhibitions, idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

ACRE Projects is a new space in Pilsen presenting weekly art events every Sunday evening. Each of ACRE’s 70+ residents are given the keys to the space for one week to do with it what they will. Additional exhibitions will be hosted by a number of local galleries and alternative spaces.

More information about ACRE can be found at www.acreresidency.org

I’m ██████, senior instructor from the International Graphoanalysis Society; I began studying GA in 1970. So many people do not understand that there is lots of misinformed graphology in the world. If they would study Graphoanalysis, developed by the American genius ██████████████████████████████████████████, then they would be amazed at how accurate it really is. But if I pick up a book on some other graphology, I’m disgusted by the vagueness and varied interpretations given the strokes in their writing samples. A most frustrating thing to me is how many people who studied our course years ago insisted in bringing in other graphology, and polluting a really accurate, pure product.

Is the piece of writing you talk about is lengthy – and for some reason you’d like to get the analytical comments on audio? We can accurately identify 125 personality traits, and I can take over 20 hours on a full written analysis. If you’re interested in something recorded, it sounds like it would be just a personality sketch–something pretty short. Still, I can sum up the essential personality in not so many words because I’ve been working for Headquarters for decades.

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YASI GHANBARI (b. 1984) is an artist living and working in Chicago. She received a BA from Oberlin College in 2007 and an MFA in Film & Video in 2010 from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the following: Eleanor Roosevelt/horticulture, defense mechanisms, “installation”, masterworks, feminism, set design, bio pics, interpassivity, guilt, reference, “mark making”, and Sigmund Freud.

More information about Yasi Ghanbari can be found at www.yasighanbari.com

This work began as a prescribed obsession. A few years ago, after advice from a doctor to “pay attention to the moon,” Liz McCarthy began researching, contemplating, watching, and documenting the reflecting orb that punctuates the Earth’s night sky. Mimicking thousands of years of human instinct to create moon mythology, McCarthy uses photography and drawing to document her own personal relationship to lunar magnetism. In our urban society, surrounded by buildings and pavement, culture is less attached to the natural forces that have so much effect on both our surroundings and physical bodies. McCarthy seeks to emphasize the act of looking up and acknowledging the moon and its constant changing phases.

SPECIAL PERFORMANCE BY MR. 666

LIZ MCCARTHY is an artist based out of the Pilsen neighborhood. She moved to Chicago two years ago from North Carolina to help found Roxaboxen Exhibitions gallery and studio co-operative. She balances her art practice with her role at Roxaboxen as co-director and curator. Most of her work is made through a process of combining photography with mixed media to document her perception of time and place and its relationship to identity.

More information about Liz McCarthy can be found at liz-mccarthy.com

Cosmic Workshop is a collaboration using indigenous symbols of the Americas. Centered around harmony, cycles of change and transference of energy, the artists aim to explore happiness through multiple modes of communication – visual art, music, conversations, and interaction. Finding a balance between work and play, the space is meant to be a public zone for exploring ideas, sounds and words that encourage open–ended explorations of how to transform reality through happiness.

Open Hours: Thur-Sun only 1:00pm-6:00pm

Performance by Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society: Nov. 4th at 7pm

We is inspired by recent events of liberation around the world and in return Todd Diederich has liberated his photography by grasping at the ethereal and whimsy while photographing in areas like Englewood, Lawndale, Humboldt and Garfield Parks. The image as a compass. No terrain was left untouched by Diederich’s camera as he runs the gauntlet of society. These images are Diederich’s manifesto on how a revolutionary life can be lived, and more importantly, how it may look.

TODD DIEDERICH (b.1982) is a photographer, mixed-media artist, and occupier of Chicago. He attended Columbia College Chicago from 2000-2003 and in 2003 won the Jack Jaffe Award for Documentary Photography. Feeling good, Diederich left Chicago for the South and embarked on a mission to become a photo anthropologist. His street level style captures the energy and vibrance of the people and neighborhoods of Chicago. Recently, A Propeller Fund grant has allowed Diederich to continue his adventures whether it be underground Ball Scenes, celebrations for hometown teams or local characters, Diederich’s keen eye reveals the electric activity hidden in the city.

More information about Todd Diederich can be found at www.beodddierich.com.

ARTISTS INCLUDE:

Cristina Gonzalez
Juan Angel Chavez
Steve Reber
Sarah Belknap + Joseph Belknap
Micheal Rea
Mark Holmes
Josue Pellot
Montgomery Kim
Hao Ni
Kazuki Guzman
Matthew ‘Sighn’ Hoffman
Dylan Jones
Holly Holmes

As Patrick approached artists, his grounding shifted, his rules were sidelined, softened, or fudged. In short, he cheated. Rather than soft pedal the soft-pedaling, it has became the point of the evening.

Each performer works like Patrick organizes. Chottip consults Miss Manners and really wants to remain courteous, to put you at ease and to show the proper form. Jais has set his sights on a humbler aim—he simply wishes to make it through the night without peeing the bed. Kirk harnesses the history of performance; trading danger and starvation for comfort and laziness. Savannah and Courtney are movers and shakers, but each works through her gestures in ways we forget that we are viewing something essentially structured as a dance. Hillary and Jaeuk set up simple objects and structures that elude the need to do anything we call performance.

In short the evening is about that very human tendency to get away with something, to cut a corner, and to celebrate it the right way, because damn it—we pull it off.

Talk at 8PM.

Co-Curated by Bea Fremderman and Nicholas O’Brien

A Small Forest explores delicate landscapes developed and appropriated by artist that have been found and manipulated within the space of the screen. The scale and focus of these environments varies between each maker, however the underlying self-reflexiveness of each participant is reflected in the tenderness of the spaces that they shape. Manning employs gifs to create delicate animation loops that reflect on a recent past, a distant landscape, and the resulting forgotten emotion that was once occupied but now remains abstract. The lush super-saturated moments found within Padgitt-Coles’ digital images linger in an ambient realm that only appears in discarded or neglected VHS b-roll footage from backyard nature documentaries. The abstract nostalgia of Manning and Padgitt-Coles is countered by the physical reconfiguration of Steciw’s rug which reminds us our physical presence in the space of the screen. Lastly, van der Zanden’s machinima employs a humorous approach to tackling the issue of land and its representation in digital frameworks. Together these artist’s create a suite of subtle works that slow the otherwise rapid navigation of the networked world, and give pause to allow for the sublime properties of land to take precedence when entering screen space.

Inasmuch as US is “we” and “we” is BEN RUSSELL, we will exit as we entered, 25 months prior: A Lazy Sunday Opening, With Grilled Meats and Un-Meats, Libations and Fireworks and Goodwill Aplenty. A week shy of Independence Day, we will send bottle rockets to the sky while interrogating the monumental semiotics of national identification (OKÓN); we will hold hands and dive into the virtual summertime sea, hunting electric crabs and manatee-smiles (TM SISTERS). We will consume live Ham Dances (POOPER & PIZZA DOG) and roast the last marshmallows and bask in the illuminating/illuminated minimalist monolith to the challenges of communication (HIDEOUS BEAST) as our psychic hearts and Six Degrees of Separation to Everyone Everywhere are mapped out in chalk dust and memory (CO-PROSPERITY SCHOOL). From Miami to Mexico City, Bridgeport to Pilsen, and Inner to Outer Space, BEN RUSSELL : US is the US in your USA, the WE in your WE THE PEOPLE, the NOSOTROS in your NOS(O)TR(O)ADAMUS. BEN RUSSELL : US is Goodbye to our Past and Hello to our bright uncertain Future.

Print sale featuring work by Alex Chitty, Ben Driggs, Scott Fortino, Jenny Kendler, Irena Knezevic, Kyla Rafert, Jennifer Ray, Daniel Shea, Anna Shteynshleyger, Victor Yanez-Lazcano and Scott Whipkey.

We are so intertwined with our iPhones and Androids it is as though we are becoming like them. This hardwiring of our hearts and minds will surely rob us of our humanity.

The body of work in The Observants explores the creation, or re-creation, of a past, lost, or future material practice involving a group of monochrome white objects, handmade upholstered furniture, and performers. The works are fictional artifacts—objects of ambiguous and ceremonial use. They are sacred objects that waver, uncertainly, between functionality and formalism. They are extremely precise objects of ambiguous use. The performers utilize these objects in a communal mourning ritual, finding strength in their collectively crafted space of refusal of the options their world presents to them. In the central section of the performance, they chant the word “No” (or “Know”) in repetition along with a recorded chorus of their voices, until becoming one hundred voices strong reiterating their refusal, mournful and celebratory.

Throughout her work Gordon employ strategies for transforming everyday objects through various modes of covering—painting, upholstering, coloring in, and mosaicing. She is intrigued by surfaces, both of objects and physical bodies, as rich sites for creative reinterpretation and redeployment. Gordon’s works both create and honor the real life production of secular materialist rituals as modes of personal and social transformation.

Happiness Machines—the NEW, flanking exhibition—features hundreds of cut-out collage drawings made with fugitive materials (construction paper, white-out, fluorescent pen, permanent pen etc). Awkward graphite outlines of celebrity referents like (among others) the Olsen twins, Orlan, Kurt Cobain, Angelina Joli, Damien Hirst, and Michael Jackson are juxtaposed with text gleaned from tabloid headlines, advertisements and, occasionally, philosophers. While various, each drawing is part of a single *fan-tsy* edition, hanging like comics in a drug store, sheathed in plastic sleeves. Drawings are available for $3 each.

Psycho Dream Factory—the NEW book—inspired both exhibit and delightful green experiment beverage! Happiness Machines. Each story appropriates celebrity figures like paper dolls and enacts new drama. Imagine Dr. Dre’s first experience coming on the Burning Man festival! Imagine MJ’s death was only a publicity stunt! What if Woody Allen found a protégé? These are just some of the scenarios you’ll entertain in this delightful volume. Introduction provided by Lily Robert-Foley, with delicious design created and covers printed by Sonnenzimmer, this full-color book was made in an edition of 100 and will be available for $20.

Prior to the exhibition, 25 copies of Psycho Dream Factory were placed, with bar codes, in supermarket checkout aisles in Chicago IL.

Trindlerschinquand is a Parisian based performance duo composed of Adrian Schindler and Romain Trinquand. Their partnership began in 2008, and they have continued to share their theatrics internationally. Their performances promote absurdity, intensity, materiality, and failure. They use their bodies as tools taken out of their usual context through raw and grotesque situations. Their performance in Chicago at Roxaboxen Exhibitions acts as a culmination of the pairs extended visit to the states.

The Tao Te Ching is notoriously difficult to translate because of the existence of multiple source texts and the supple, adaptable nature of Chinese characters. The original text was passed hand to hand and rewritten by numerous scribes. Errors and “corrections” were made, parts were brought in, and sections left out. Also, several English equivalents exist for each character and a verse can generate dozens of plausible translations. Translation in Chinese is Fan Yi (Romanized); Fan can mean turn and Yi means interpretation. One concept inherent in this combination of characters is the interpretive turn, showing a translation to be in an indirect relation to an original, turned any number of degrees away from the source. There is a great deal of poetic license in all the translations of the Tao Te Ching because there are so many linguistic variations that work and so many “original” texts from which to begin. Additionally, the Tao Te Ching is meant to be interpreted individually and for each reader to seek a unique understanding of the text. In these ways the whole of the Tao Te Ching, in its manifold forms, is translation without
original and unique to every interpreter.

For an unmurmuring turn, Tim Louis Graham presents an altered image of the cover of his copy of the Tao Te Ching, his translation of folding screens, and a colored ground. Through this flexible and yielding exhibition, Graham attempts to take us on divergent paths interconnecting issues of origin and translation, mobility and deployment, and openness regarding interpretation.

“My work explores a hazy territory between reality and fantasy, skepticism and faith. It is, in essence, about spiritual confusion, and the necessary suspension of disbelief that I feel I need to comprehend and navigate of the world. It plays with the human ability to get caught in a narrative and the beauty and purity of a naive vision that has yet to be questioned.”

“In order to greater understand this territory, my research has branched out in several directions. I’ve looked deeper into my own folklore, the fantastical stories and superstitions passed down through the tightly knit matriarchy of my mother’s family. My most current research is into spiritual pseudoscience, including Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone theory, Plastic Shamanism, or the inauthentic New Age appropriation of Native American and other rituals, and my own spiritual background, which includes practices of Judaism, Quakerism, Tibetan Buddhism, and other more occult and mystical interests encouraged by my family and studied academically through the lens of ethnography. I have been experimenting with different forms of divination as tools for personal insight, eking out gems of genuine enlightenment from illusion and abstraction. I am trying to create works that hover emotionally between a sincere desire to trust in their power and a rational view of their actual effectiveness.”

Mark Beasley & Isabella Ng, presenting, I told you we could hear the ocean, a digital performance collaboration exploring the mediation of distance through screenspace and networked video streams.

Benjamin Chaffee, presenting, Trying to square the circle, as near a halo appears to be.

And collaborative ensemble, Noah Furman, Millie Kapp, Hilary Kennedy, Annie Maurer, and Matthew Shalzi, presenting The palm poises as a plant and slips into the evening of the day:

We made a dance to become the cause of our effects. The performance is a collage of dream reenactment, an unwritten Shakespearean tragedy, and world cup-inspired celebration. Your presence will multiply and expand our effects. It is this arrival that we have been continuing towards without knowing where you are or what you look like.

BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is art-word and art-puzzle made manifest! From Lewis Carroll to Egyptian hieroglyphs to the British game of Concentration to your older brother’s collection of Lone Star Beer bottle caps, BEN RUSSELL : REBUS is yet another move forward in wo/man’s eternal quest to arrive at symbolic meaning through pictogrammatic signification! With the ever-clarifying but perpetually complicating metaphoric powers of art at our ready, we call upon you to venture in/out of that great unknown we call Meaning with naught but a Wi-Fi trail marker as guidepost for your deeply personal inner quest (Zak Arctander). Your path, as it were, will be bound by strange lines and drops of blood (Jim Trainor), it will lead you to a painted cave wall of glyphs and symbols (Carmen Price) and an outcropping of transformative image-combinations (Sarah Mosk), at which point your world will rotate entirely. That thrum of voice and hum of light will settle upon your head, echoing out from smaller-cave to skull and back, an HD image-sound cipher (Ika Knezevic) cracked by your own delicate puzzle of eyes and ears.

So good it must be SICKBIRD, so affecting it’s like a punch IRIGHTI, this is proof positive that art and BEN RUSSELL : REBUS are PPOD – come on down and see for yourself!

Accumulofetishix™: Manages anxiety associated with advertising immersion and hyperbolic growth. Images and merchandise form an adhesive bond upon contact with computer paint tools, subcultural icons, high school yearbooks to corporate logos.

Bodacept™: Heals the hard to define space between the self and the other in physical space and psychological experience. Site-specific installations and projections interact with architecture and large jacquard weavings to invade and control the human body in both unusual and everyday experiences.

Placebex™: The Placebo category recontextualizes everyday interactions with ambient noise and decoration through interactive pieces using sound, gravel, pottery, and macaroni and cheese.

Participating artists include Sara Clugage, Christine Elliot, T. Brandon Evans, Meredith Kooi, Lauren A. Ross, L.C. Parker, Jeremy Shedd and Dustin Yager.

Oh, rust-surfaced sphere, with your receding polar ice caps and optical illusion canals! If not for your half-mass, your eccentric orbit, and your global dust storms, we would call you sister or cousin; but it was your fiery red-lit temperament and your thin atmosphere that led the Romans to name you after their God of War, and we at SPACE PROGRAM shall do the same. We shall land our newest craft upon the peak of your Olympus Mons, and from that vantage point (highest in the solar system) we shall survey the entire galaxy stretched out before us. Unlike the 2/3rds of failed Mars voyages that left before us, we shall traverse your Valles Marineris with the understanding that the power of Mars as the power of War is a power best used to secure the peace. Our childhood wargames (Geissler/Sann), our damaged soldiers (Single Spark Film Collective), our flicker destruction (Sharits), our media paralysis (Smith), and our transcendent explosions (Conner) are herewith submitted as evidence. With a question on our lips we shall raise our flag upon your soil, its single dollar/Euro sign fluttering in the solar wind: Oh, Mars—if it costs $309,000 per kilogram to land upon your basalt surface, what (pray tell) is the average cost of peace?

This session is based on the use of abstraction in language, and how the desire to enunciate, or to speak through desire, works in hypnotic ways. Come be mesmerized and disoriented and enthralled by the following performers/readers: Ken Baumann, Brett Gallagher, Devin King, Carrie Lorig and Bailey Romaine.

Famous people have the tell-all because we know there is a truth they conveniently left hiding. We don’t trust that we have the real deal until there is something unexpected, uncanny. But how much space is there for demanding something novel inside the story of things we already know? How do we recognize revelation? After all, the truth of some things isn’t there unless it is gilt and florid because that’s how we found it. Stark is edited as much as pretty things are decorated. And the truth doesn’t just float above the world, separated from situation and nuance.

Caroline Allison tells us stories we think we already know, and gleefully squares us off with uncanny discoveries. Danica Favorito tells us such small fragments that we only have responses left to hold on to, and then she taunts us for trusting our emotions. Jeffrey Grauel also toys with not telling us anything. Unless, that is, we believe him. If we do there are lifetimes at stake. Each artist has edited to the point that cold and hard rings consistently true. Each artist dances with lushness and layer, texture, unexpected beauty, scars, lingering leftovers, and suspension of disbelief. At the end of it, though, we are left holding our own bag. What remains inside that we are so willing to carry?

Lovers Rock! This party is for you and you and you and, as such, Alex Hubbard is there to welcome you at the door of your new Cinepolis. You’ll find Michael Robinson just inside, asking Venus the self-same question All Through the Night: “What is beauty?” Chick Strand’s Elasticity and Laida Lertxundi’s My Tears Are Dry shout answers from the living room with meditations on longing, euphoria and ecstasy. Later on, Lertxundi escapes outside for some fresh air, wanders into the volcanic horizon and stakes claim to a desert outpost in Footnotes to the House of Love—after all, there’s no rainfall on Venus. Back inside, we share a Puce Moment or two with Kenneth Anger—all glitter and glamour and greyhound, an early indicator of just how British club-and-rave this party is going to get (courtesy of Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore). The music rises, you dance and dance and get caught up in that Crystal Lite high of Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines 8 until finally the dense carbon dioxide atmosphere makes your head throb and you run into a corner to empty yourself out entirely. Through bleary-eyes you think to yourself, “The surface of Venus sort of looks like Hell” and as you vomit brightness underneath so many toxic clouds, you realize that this planet really is a metaphor for love as well.

Sophia Dixon presents new works on paper. In these drawings, Dixon was thinking about objects in transformation, and dark passages between different realities. This led her to imagery that moves between organic surface and deep space. Marks meander, lazily insisting on the integrity of the flat surface that they trace. In excess, they reach a pitch of anxiety, protesting too adamantly. Dixon grapples with how much effort humans put into constructing the pattern and texture of our everyday lives, ignoring the fragility of the world we create. An event outside of our control rips a hole in the cloth, and we fall right through. Wormholes appear in everyday life, leading straight to the uncanny. But it may be the details from our ruptured cloth, the embroidery, that we use to pull ourselves through the trapdoor, into new spaces.

The event is a fundraiser for Open Books.

Much of Malella’s recent work deals primarily with a collision of three elements: nature, human activity, and time. For him, “time” is the key factor in the relationship between humans and nature as one seemingly dominates the other in procession, only again to be succeeded, thus exposing how indistinct they are from each other. Human activity subverts nature and nature consequently emerges from its displaced form, both contributing a permanent mark of their singular progression over time.

“And, with the power of words came approval, with approval came acceptance, and with acceptance came excitement, happiness, and relief as well as added incompetence.”

Recipes for Mold and Sun is a patchwork documentary of the Driftless Area of rural southwestern Wisconsin. Sparked by the artists’ exploration of an abandoned homestead during their stay at the ACRE residency program in nearby Steuben, the project expanded to include microfilm and archival research, interviews, and plenty of aimless wandering. Taking the form of an installation at Roxaboxen Exhibitions, Recipes for Mold and Sun includes plaster castings, large format screen prints, a video projection, various salvaged objects, and a wall collage.

Laura Davis is playing domestic, but the comforts of home have turned on themselves. Embellishment generates tension and devastates traditional notions of appropriate beauty. Intension rules the day: there is no way to ignore the savvy design structure that supports her domestic agenda.

Jason Dunda intends his devastations too. Each dilapidated structure desperately slammed together is carefully, almost lovingly, rendered. What is it about the Law? Stockholm syndrome, atonement, or is he on the other side of the justice equations?

One begins to worry about neighboring either artist. Are these telltale signs of psychopathic violence? Both push hierarchy into unknown terrain. Each in her own way pushes us to encounter some pretty uncomfortable assumptions. We are left bewildered or bemused or maybe to act out ourselves.

The show includes examples of fake pre-Columbian clay figures by Ms. Schroeder, bewitching new photos of Mr. Katter’s and a portion of Mr. Jones’ precarious recent sculpture and painting. The egocentric sentiment expressed by many pieces in the show—“Nobody to have any fun with”—is the profundity of an adolescent, who (mis)construes the deeply felt as the heavily significant.

Participating Artists include Daniel G. Baird, Mark Beasley, Jon Cates, Chris Collins, Theodore Darst, Louis Doulas, Arend deGruyter-Helfer, Lauren Elder, Daniel Everett, Eric Fleischauer, Bea Fremderman, Joe Grimm, Nate Hitchcock, André and Evan Lenox, Patrick Lichty, Rachael Milton + Ramsey Alderson, Judd Morrisey, Micah Schippa, Sarah Weis, Andrew Norman Wilson, Samuel D York and many more!

Tony Balko and Olivia Ciummo have been working together on films for a decade, recently they have both collaborated with Majeure the alter ego of A.E. Paterra, drummer for seminal sci-fi prog explorers Zombi. Majeure has composed synthed out tracks to accompany the visuals of these two filmmakers and they plan to continue to collaborate again in the future.

Bruah is drawn to esoteric tourist destinations with unique histories, especially during the quiet off-season. She is interested in the human need for escapism paired with the continuing wish to connect amidst solitude and physical separation. She started photographing the Dells region in 2008. Inspired by H. H. Bennett, the first photographer to heavily document the Dells, she explores the new and man-made parts of this destination that was once only known for it’s unique sandstone formations. Echoing Bennett’s interest in promoting the region through mass-produced imagery, the images on the walls are also shown as part of a postcard installation. While mimicking how a tourist spot depicts itself to the world, Bruah hopes to raise questions of promotion and interpretation.

Rather than the strict correlation of image and text, the intention of the collages in Frontispiece is different. Rather than focusing on the loaded image-symbols, those privileged nodes of interpretation, they play with the forms that frame and suggest this referentiality.These cues to the civic still linger, as we are constantly asked to engage with our political images, without being troubled with what they might mean. These text-less frontispieces then imply new ideas and social visions; they are images looking for authors.

Grant Ray continues his experiment-based practice of documenting photographically the pseudo scientific investigations into unexpected forms of communication from unexpected places. For this latest set of photographs, Ray returns to the wooded rural areas of North America to get closer to an unblemished natural landscape in humorous exploration to locate marks, traces, or signs that could be construed as natures attempt at communication.

From long hikes in the woods to discover naturally forming patterns of flora and faunas that reflect/mimic the night sky in the form of constellations. To late night psychotherapy sessions with a flashlight, paper, and coal dust producing plant shadowgrams that are then read as Rorschach test. Or the uncanny patterns of marks from tacks and staples from flyer’s, ads, job postings on information boards located in the sleepy Wisconsin towns of Steuben, Boscobel, Ferryville and Soldiers Grove. As whimsical and humorous as the photographs are, they stand to poetically reflect nature as a site of human projection of our desires, ambitions and destruction. A testament to the environment and the often complicated and politicized issues that effect it.

India ink drawings of old growth forests and highway traffic accidents populate Rose’s current project. Working from an ever-growing archive of photographic source material Rose creates densely patterned landscape drawings and acrylic paintings on plexi-glass. These works engage a labor-intensive process to translate vacation snap-shots and news media photos into intricately detailed patterns, digital abstractions and stylized silhouettes.

All works were created between August 2010 and February 2011.

Work by Jennifer Ray.

Her work is primarily in sculpture and installation, informed by a practice of academic research and writing that cross over to studio practice. A core narrative engages several disciplines within the Social Sciences, for example the function of language and translation, as well as creativity in relation to issues of criminality, inequality and labor.

After all, art is BLESSing (which, coincidentally, is also the term for a group of unicorns)—art is brightness, art is hope, art is buoyancy of spirit in the Newest Year. In the year of our (land)lord 2011, we’ve assembled an array of minor altars upon which to worship and be worshiped—we’ve erected a selfless monument by which to orient ourselves in the darkness, a beacon of positive communication (Dayton Castleman) with which we can broadcast our message to the world. BEN RUSSELL : BLESS is self-realization through rigor and ritual, it is a document of time-in-space, re-spaced (Derek Chan); it is sage incense and Cherokee flatbread and self-taught customs derived from a disappearing culture (Sandy Kay Allen); it is an inquiry into Painting and Form and the very real possibilities of a center that has expanded outward from itself (Judy Ledgerwood). Last but certainly not least, BEN RUSSELL : BLESS is a video-shout-in-triplicate, a protest against social and spiritual conservatism, a conversation that we simply cannot allow to become familiar (David Wojnarowicz).

We are BLESS, we are future, we are now—take our hands and join us, let the light of Art shine upon us all.

Many immigrant families come to the United States to pursue the American Dream of owning their own business and creating a successful family life. Many times, however, the burden of maintaining success in the family business gets passed from the parents to their children. Even though Hyeon’ s parents were a teacher and an engineer in Korea, when they came to the US they found themselves unable to pursue these careers and opted for started a number of small businesses, finally settling on a family-run dry-cleaning store. The washing, drying, pressing, and delivering of clothes involves a variety of materials and labor patterns that Hyeon has constantly been exposed to throughout her life in America.

In Hyeon’s art practice, much like her parents business, she engages in her own repetitive process with similar intensity towards the transformation and treatment of objects and materials. This process gives her time to reflect on the issues being brought out in the work, and also exposes her to the meditative state of its production. This dual focus on material and process is a way for her to embed something intangible, like the energy of labor or personal memory, into an art object.

Ransom’s artwork began through the observation of these often strained relationships and came to fruition through the proposition of potential remedies to our constant struggle with co-evolution. She introduces these remedies in the form of interactive sculpture, possible prosthetics, wearable recording devices and digital manipulations. Ransom’s artwork invites technology, real and imagined, to heighten our awareness of the existence and perspectives of the world from other species point of view. It questions and investigates the constant personification and attribution of human characteristics, lifestyles, and views on animals, insects, and ultimately nature. Though Ransom finds the development of evolving technology to be alluring, many of her pieces comment on our dulled awareness of environmental concerns that our techno-advancements can trigger. Ransom’s work continues to progress into a serious commitment to investigating interspecies relationships and environmental concerns. Ultimately she hopes to always invite the viewer to question how technology can concurrently invent, destroy, enshroud and expose itself within our shared environment.

The works in Eating Without a Face grew out of Kwak’s experience working in the kitchen at Acre Residency and learning about composting this past summer. Compost, a dinner table, and kitchen scraps are featured materials in these new works. Themes of decay, regeneration and the desperate search for the possibilities contained within a dying self impelled the creation of these works.

These themes recur in Death Rites, featuring performances by a variety of artists working in different disciplines, curated by Kwak. The ceremony draws from various ritual practices including Kwak’s experience growing up in a Korean-American Christian church, but the participating artists produce a multiplicity of pathways, connections and possibilities for transformation that destabilize common expectations of the church-going experience.

I. Selection of the title was bold and shocking.

II. The structure is set out in the backside.

III. A return to pagan classicism is rejected.

IV. Realism and symbolism is accreted.

V. Postmodernists are among its admirers.

VI. A dramatic object starring characters and inanimate object.

VII. Molly recreates the world.

Work by Michelle Grabner.

Copse is a three-movement composition for performed multi-channel sound installation, based on the atomization and dispersal of instrumental aspects. The products/by-products of the instrumentation are separated and shuffled spatially and temporally, in an effort to present the parts-to-the-whole relationships as fluid and continuous.

Coppice (Noé Cuéllar & Joseph Kramer) is a Chicago-based duet of bellows and electronics. Formed 2009, they have produced original compositions for stage, fixed media, and performed installation settings, with a focus on adhering textural attenuation, processed gradation, the contours of instrumentation, and their multiple aspect highlights.

Their variable instrumentation departs from bellow and reed instruments (accordion, pump organ, shruti box, harmonica), custom electronics (reproduction, transmission, spatialization, interference and gentle feedback), and multi-channel systems adapted in ways responsive to location, audience flow, and aural perspectives.

New works by Chelsea Culp.

Walking at Night is a body of recent paintings that use landscapes in and around Chicago’s Ukrainian Village to address the theme of searching in everyday life. Initially the paintings read as familiar scenes from a walk alone after dark. However, with longer viewing, the environments become unsettling. The vertical format and scale of the paintings reference the viewer’s physical presence. Pathways lead to passages, to shadows, or off the page entirely. Color drives a tension between familiarity and mystery. The mood is unclear, both inviting and suspenseful. The more you enter the image the more you wonder, what am I doing here?

This almost-always recession-cusp-of-the-everyday is apparently unrelenting, and most of can’t afford Japanese Robonurses to carry our stricken selves from bed to bed to bed. It’s in times like this that the soothing, comforting, and occasionally lactating powers of art can be called upon to heal us – BEN RUSSELL : NURSES stands as proof that artists are the new clinicians, that apartment spaces are their temporary free clinics…

And so: when you find yourself multiplied and contorted and devouring your own flesh (Christa Donner), let us dress your wounds. When you have been beaten upon and pounded into like the skins of so many heavy metal drum heads (Andy Positive and His Dissonant Riders), let us put a salve upon your bruises. BEN RUSSELL : NURSES is art for the body – let us be your healthcare professional!

Like the memory-image of battlefield matrons conjured up through the smell of fresh oil paint (Peter Hoffman) or a jellyfish-shaped monument to bodily fluids (Ben Fain) or the hand of God descending upon your weary frame while a Madonna song echoes through those dark nights (Jacob Ciocci), BEN RUSSELL : NURSES is art for the soul – make an appointment now and avail yourself of our metaphoric health care setting!

Most folks know that toffee is simply caramelized sugar, maybe a little butter thrown in to help the browning. My grandmother made a candy she called lassie jack. Same ingredients, same process. Just pushed the process a little further until the candy is the color of black coffee. I think there was a little molasses in the mix too. Draws out that hit of bitter that keeps you coming back. It isn’t just sweet.

Clayton Merrell’s paintings are built on contradictory messages. Vantage points are all mixed up and occupy conflicting and impossible layers. His view is sweetness and harmony. Harmony that boggles because it should be a mess. The obvious conflicts work like that bitter note in my grandmother’s candy.

Jason Jozwiak embraces the moment of encounter, like all good post-minimalists. His objects may not always remain discrete. He paints outside of the canvas lines. His materials are not color and picture plane, despite direct reference to traditional painting presentation. The work may keep moving, and sometimes he “paints” with failures from the kitchen. At the end of the encounter, you’re left a little unsure that you saw art at all.

We learn that minimalism rests on the phenomenological encounter with a form. Folks speak of that moment, the ah ha. Once that lesson in synthesized into our vocabulary, all of art becomes the moment of encounter. There is only a viewer looking at art. The funny thing is, both of these painters work so that the moment is drawn out, or happens under the radar. Something shifts, something about viewing changes, but I’ll be damned if I can point out just where and when the shifts happen.

In the artists’ words: The works in this show seek to map out the possibilities for flat representations of identity to claim mortality as their own process. Vying for melancholia and merriment, Simulacra rebel their own paradigms of mediocrity. Loaded objects dress in the drag of self-reflexive subjects. But the question remains: can a symbol, in time, make the arduous journey back to the privileged realm of the organic?

Precious stones, gems, and jewels are coveted because they are beautiful, rare, and ultimately quite useless. Scarcity is key to degree to which they are valued. To extract even the tiniest drop of these precious materials, the earth has to be worked hard before it gives up its treasures. Motherlodes are the stuff of legend.

Rob Bondgren’s recent paintings and collages erupt from such covetousness. He transposes the desire attached to the beautiful and the rare to the men, and parts of men, that feature in his imagery. They become jewels themselves, and Bondgren’s often faceless objects of desire revel in their useless beauty even as these images urge us to see how dehumanizing such objectification can be. In turn, this association reveals the pearl drops, the bangles, the chokers, and the diamond studs, as well, to be corporeal, sexual, and pliant. Men and gems slide into each other in these works, all tied together in the discoball rays and kaleidoscope colors that flood the images. He seems to have used every hue, over-adorning his paintings with color after color. As with gems and jewels, too much can still be never enough. Bondgren has embraced this excess at heart of his imagery, covering his paintings with veils and rivulets of lurid colors that interpenetrate the images. This, too, he learned from diamonds, which shimmer because of the way they grip and bend light, holding it in. Bondgren’s deft use of watercolor and spray paint and his love of translucency found in them a perfect visual analogue. Jewels and gems are the starting point for Bondgren’s headlong displays of longing and lust, and he pushes through this imagery to arrive at works that seem, in part, to aspire to Walter Pater’s call to “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame.”