Opening Reception: Friday Jan 13th, 6-9pm
Open Hours: Thursday Jan 12th 4-7pm, Saturday Jan 14th 12-6pm

Roots & Culture
1034 N Milwaukee, Chicago 60622

SOFT GROUND
Emily Clayton’s recent work began as a series informed by sunsets, occult photography and stage curtains. Charged with spacial impossibilities, each are asking the viewer for the same thing, to willfully suspend disbelief. Distilling from this a sense of illusion and visual deception, the works are reduced to an atmospheric gradient of color. The series examines the two dimensional plane of an artificial horizon in relation to the stage and studio photography. They are backdrops, scenery, simulated landscapes all void of subject or performer. Situated within the historical tenet of process driven practices the work aims to exhibit a calculated control of material and form.

Eileen Mueller’s work focuses on the material history of the photographic image and its role in confounding unwritten or inaccessible histories. Her latest work links her own practice within communal educational spaces and the historic progeny of the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College. While making a pilgrimage to Black Mountain, Mueller sought out the vistas wherein the landscape served as an emulsion, fixing the ghosts of American Modernism. Through embedding her own images into an anomic archive that also contains material mined from historic materials she poeticizes existing histories to build a mythology of the artist.

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EMILY CLAYTON is a Nashville based artist who works primarily in sculpture, installation and painting. After receiving her BFA from University of Tennessee in 2004 she spent several years in Chicago helping to organize exhibitions and events with the Co-Prosperity Sphere, Version Festival and Mule Magazine. Her work has been shown in Chicago, New York and Nashville.

More information about Emily Clayton can be found at www.emilyclayton.com

EILEEN MUELLER has studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she recently received her BFA. She is the recipient of the Fred Endsley Memorial Fellowship and the World Less Travelled Grant as well as a finalist for the Gelman Travel Fellowship. Eileen recently showed in Ceaseless Blooms in Jobless Colors at Johalla Projects and is scheduled to show at the Kohler Museum this coming fall. Eileen is the co-founder of GURL DON’T BE DUMB, a curatorial project that is currently based out of Chicago.

More information about Eileen Mueller can by found at www.eileenmueller.com

The ornate yet crudely made paper sculptures that comprise Lisa Rybovich Crallé’s new series, “In Play” function as a mock-museum encompassing pseudo-classical “statues” resting on pastel colored poster-board pedestals. The resulting environment is reminiscent of an amateur stage-set for a play that takes place at a demented simulacrum of a museum. This makeshift museum is littered with simplified papier maché tools of museological upkeep (broom, extension cord, cleaning supplies, etc.), creating a bizarre atmosphere of heightened artifice.

Jacob C Hammes is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Chicago. Hammes has exhibited and performed throughout the US and internationally, most recently at the Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts in Auckland, NZ. Hammes’ work and various projects have been reviewed in publications such as Art Papers, Proximity Magazine, and the Leonardo Music journal. This is his first exhibition at Roots & Culture. www.stopgostop.com/jacobchammes/projects.html

Lisa Rybovich Crallé lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and received her MFA from the University of California, Davis. Her work has been exhibited in the US and abroad, including exhibitions at The Lab (San Francisco, CA), Proof Gallery (Boston, MA), Royal Nonesuch (Oakland, CA), G126 (Galway, IRE), as well as this year’s Bay Area Currents exhibition (Oakland, CA). Lisa is currently an Artist in Residence at the People’s Gallery (San Francisco, CA) and she is the 2011 recipient of the Robert Arneson Award. This exhibition is Rybovich Crallé’s second at Roots & Culture. www.lisarcralle.com

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.