*NEW EXHIBITION*
“QUAD CORE”
Theodore Darst, Paul Hertz, Selena Jones and Sabina Ott

Opening reception Thursday, February 9th, 2012. 5 – 8pm
Exhibition continues through March 10th, 2012.
Gallery hours Weds – Saturday noon – 5pm

Our first exhibition at the new space will be “Quad Core” a group show featuring Theodore Darst, Paul Hertz, Selena Jones and Sabina Ott. It opens on Thursday February 9th and runs through March 10th, 2012. “Quad Core” exhibits four different artists whose core processes connect aesthetically and conceptually in interesting and surprising ways.

Theodore Darst’s art works are an attempt to fight nostalgia by giving it some notion of physicality. He uses video gaming platforms to make interactive environments that serve as snap shots to his formative years. These cyberspaces are a time machine to a lost mindset that he is trying to recover. Drawing from remembered experiences such as church, playing basketball, video games and robotripping Darst creates fictive spaces that are at once mysterious and engaging. By appropriating 3d models from the Internet as “ready-mades” he taps into a collective unconscious melding his memories with our own interpretations of what these virtual objects mean and refer to. Paul Hertz works in digital and traditional media, with particular interest in intermedia, algorithmic composition, and performance. For “Quad Core” Hertz will exhibit “Tree Jive” a series of thirteen digital images created by algorithms he has written and implemented. The resulting images are printed on Hahnemühle Rag Bright paper. For Hertz his process is part scientist creating an experiment – establishing parameters and letting it go; and part editor, sifting through the outcomes, and culling a body of work from the many permutations the algorithms create. For Selena Jones the process of construction is vital to the character of her creature-like forms and totems. Often choosing to create pieces with materials that physically challenge her both in terms of scale or method. Jones intentionally selects materials that are ubiquitous and readily available in order to create a feeling of familiarity with these strange forms. Sabina Ott challenges the viewer with objects that are at once all things and none. Her sculptures, paintings, mixed media works and video installations draw upon many reference points and perspectives. Are they plants or paintings? Landscapes or topographical surveys? Ott is a neo cubist – using the Internet to synthesize many different viewpoints and perspectives into a single cohesive body of work.

Theodore Darst graduated from the School of the Art Institute (BFA 2011). Recent projects and exhibitions include “gli.tc/h-Birmingham” @ vivid, birmingham-uk, “notes on a new nature” @ 319 scholes, brooklyn-ny, “byob chi 2″ @ byobworldwide + museum of contemporary art, chicago-il. Darst is the curatorial assistant for Two Hundred and Fifty Six Colors a 16mm film that traces the arc of increased complexity and pointed use of the animated gif organized and produced by Eric Fleischauer and Jason Lazarus.

Paul Hertz has exhibited his interactive installations, performances, and digital prints have been exhibited at many international media conferences and festivals. He currently teaches in the Department of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A master digital printmaker, Hertz has recently started his own print studio, Ignotus Editions. He currently resides in Chicago, his home for over 25 years.

Selena Jones is interested in the relationships humans can have with art objects, and how objects can provoke thoughts and new experiences. She incorporates animal forms to help evoke a sensation based on generalizations or mythologies associated with that form. Selena Jones graduated from the School of the Art Institute (MFA 2011) recent exhibitions includes MDW Fair (with What It Is), “Weddings/Proms/Corporate Events/Beauty Pageants/Bar Mitzvahs/Quinceaneras” at Zhou B Center, Chicago. She currently teaches at SAIC and Westwood College.

Sabina Ott deploys a fundamental strategy of jettisoning logic by messing with scale, perspective and hierarchies of knowledge. She creates a fantastical landscape made from debased craft materials. The resulting pieces move between two, three and four dimensions, becoming plateaus and tables, cliffs and chairs, light, lamps and video projections. Exhibiting since 1985, Ott has participated in over 100 solo and group exhibitions. Her paintings and prints are in museum collections nation- wide while her installation work has been included in international exhibitions such as the first Auckland Triennial in Auckland New Zealand, the Australian Contemporary Arts Center in Melbourne, Australia as well as the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis, Missouri and the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Cleveland Ohio. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artists Grant and a Howard Foundation Grant from Brown University, Her work is in the collection of the Corcoran Museum of American Art, Washington DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; The Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri; the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, California, and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport, California among others. She is Professor of Art at Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, IL

According to critic Joanna Drucker, “The relationship between linguistic statement and physical object influences every encounter we have with our environment.” The exhibition Nomadic Texts addresses the adaptability of text across book, sculpture and site. Located within, on or as artworks in this exhibition, words, fragments and sentences seem placeless and mutable as they inhabit expanded fields. Floating or migrating, texts are tacitly connected to their surface or context, unbound by image or narrative: easily unhinged and on the make.

In some works, dynamic composition or experimental typeface captures the spirit of movement and in others, mixed signifiers and poetic gestures suggest unlimited readings and shifts in meaning. Finally, some works capture the nomadism of text in a global sense, as words on signage, garments and the body are ephemeral in time and space.
The exhibition is designed as a site-specific intervention across the domestic space of What It Is. Sculptures, books and installation will be placed throughout the front gallery, living room and dining room.

Artists include Joseph Grigely, Mark Holmes, Alex Valentine, Karen Reimer, Jason Pickleman, Stephanie Brooks, Steven Miglio, Robert Ransick, Rachel Foster and Rebecca Foster.

(Quote from “Language in the Landscape” p. 90, in Figuring the Word)

Image “S-Train” by Steven Miglio

Healy has documented the prototyping stages and production of M.16.2 on his blog. Watch as the zoetrope takes shape over the next five days.

Not lamenting the past, but rather acknowledging the fact that life it takes twists and turns and with another twist of faith, another turn along the way, we could have ended up in another bed, with another boy or another girl or with nobody at all. We could have moved to the countryside and raised a dozen kids or we could have taken the time to learn to play the electric guitar or ten finger typing…

We would love to invite you to participate in the show, by exchanging a Valentine with us, in the form of a favorite song lyric, dedicated to your own X. We do not need to know the story, nor the names of the people involved, as long as the lyric means something to you that’s good enough for us.

Work by Lise Haller Baggesen.

Grokhovsky’s practice is a hybrid of diverse disciplines and mediums, the themes of which stem from my experience of life in the East and West, under different political regimes. The Soviet and Post-Soviet mentality, dislocation, longing and embodied memories of “home” intertwine into pressed layers, forming an emotionally charged platform.

Her project for What It Is, Double Exposure: (House Portrait Number 1.), is a site-specific installation, consisting entirely of photographic images of the interior and exterior of a House and its’ inhabitants, situated inside the House itself. The double layered dynamics of a lived-in environment of a house-gallery are investigated and played with, via the medium of photography. Revealing histories and daily mechanics, treasures, traces and mysteries of artistic life inside the art itself.

The collaboration of Mara Baker and Rafael E. Vera grew out of a shared love for formal language, the process of drawing and their mutual backgrounds in site-specific installation.

Over the past year they have collaborated on a series of drawings entitled Trading Paper. The drawings explore basic ideas of structure and how it can morph, deconstruct, or be recreated. The drawing work was based in a slow exchange of ideas; which one artist started and the other finished. Both artist’s made a conscious effort to treat each other’s drawings as a site from which to mine formal clues and create a visual conversation.

In Rise over Run their individual practices combine to create a site-specific installation. The work takes inspiration from the slope and imperfections (created by age and use) of the front porch at What It Is. Utilizing common porch construction materials, pulleys and basic drafting tools, the work is a reflection and a response to the effect of time, weight and gravity.

The series girls embodies a two and half year endeavor to represent girls and young women, focusing on how they identify with their own femininity and relate to others. The portraits depict girls of many ages, and though unintentional, their expressions and body language tend to show a certain resemblance to one another. These similarities help inform the viewer that experiencing maturity and being comfortable with your own femininity isn’t specific to a certain age and is an important part of a woman’s growth.

Formally, Sara makes performance and installations that use task, found objects, interactivity, projection, and movement derived from common gestures. Her work creates environments that shift the audience regularly from spectator to participant as the performer constantly moves between pedestrian and more stylized or evocative activity and the viewer negotiates spacial immersion in the work.

Works often take shape as installations and live activities that translate data visualizations of large quantities of socially-resonant information into material, gestural and poetic form.

Since November 2009, site-specific versions of Network have been created in Chicago for an unused store front downtown and a gallery space at Hyde Park Art Center. For What It Is, a version of Network will be created to inhabit the entire house that is the project space and artists’ live-work space and extend out into the garden.

Visualizing the idea that we simultaneously live in a real and virtual world, and that the virtual is infinitely expansive, Network uses large quantities of electric yellow twine (tied in patterns based on both social network structures and Internet network infrastructure) to suggest a virtual network landscape cutting through an otherwise ordinary space.

Artists/curators/residents Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes will also live with the work in their home for a month, negotiating their routines around it. A series of photographs will document their activity for the project catalog.

In Joe Grimm’s installation work he uses modified 16mm projectors, sans film and domestic standing fans to play with light, space, time, what one perceives and what actually exists. In two featured site-specific installations, Erica Moore, activates the preexisting architectural details using reflective materials. By using non-traditional hanging and installation methods, Moore plays with what happens when the viewer has to physically move their body to look at an artwork. Both artists play with physical presence, perspective, consciousness, and the relation we have to our surroundings.

Seek permission to work. Acquire the necessary permits. Establish a remit. Documents to regulate creation. Permission To Work is an exhibition designed to challenge and interrupt pre-determined ideas about what defines living space and how art works can negotiate the everyday domestic experience.

For the artist the everyday is to dream and often to dream is to work. So the concept of live/work/display space is a fluid one without clear boundaries, limits or territory. Where does living space start and work place stop? Where does studio end and exhibition space begin?

Permission To Work brings together seven artists and invites them to create an exhibition in the style of Schwitters Merzbau or a Kunsthalle. This exhibition presents a variety of positions/outcomes/projects juxtaposing performance pieces, site specific installations and interventions to create a gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. By seeking “permission to work” we have granted artistic license to play with the fabric of our home and produce art that re-contextualizes the living area as exhibition space.