Anthony Lewellen
Brian Steckel
Chris Silva
David Cuesta
& John Heenan

As well as the playful art explorations of…

Chad Kouri
Laura Berger
Luke Ramsey

“When we come together to play and be, we are truly ourselves. When we are truly ourselves it is wonderful and when we act collectively in that wonder we do transformative work for our community and our world.” – Brad Colby

Aaron Delehanty originally conceived of the Monster Movie Seminar with monster movie expert, Matt Fagan during a residency at Lill Street Art Center in 2008. The evening is a celebration of monster movies through performance, discussion, movie clips, and presentation.

The festivities will begin at 8 pm with brief performances by Stephanie Burke, Jeriah, and Aaron Delehanty. These performances will be followed by a Monster Movie Presentation. Audience participation in encouraged.

If arriving during the presentation, please walk in and take a seat. No need to be shy!

Currently on view at Hinge Gallery through February 25th:

Group exhibition of gallery artists – Corydon Cowansage, Aaron Delehanty, Brent Houston, Charles Mahaffee, MaryKate Maher, & Ryan Richey.
_________________________________________

Located in the Ukrainian Village, Hinge Gallery presents a future forward vision for the culture of Chicago’s creative community. Hinge Gallery is dedicated to the exploration of multimedia arts through experiential discovery. Supporting programming includes artist’s talks, performances, panel discussions, workshops, and receptions.

The mission of Hinge Gallery is to support emerging contemporary artists of the highest quality from Chicago as well as around the world. Hinge Gallery is a commercial exhibition space featuring painting, mixed media, prints, sound, video, sculpture, and installation.

Opening Reception:
Saturday, January 28, 2012
6:00pm – 10:00pm

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.

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

ROOTS & CULTURE The mission of Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center is to provide exhibition opportunities for leading-edge emerging artists and to develop the city of Chicago’s cultural community as a center for art production and a destination for artistic discourse. Through two person shows, curated group shows, lectures, community gatherings and time arts events, Roots & Culture aims to provide a platform for the inventive practices of young artists. This programming helps to develop a dynamic community for the arts in Chicago and dialogue with the international discourse of contemporary art. Roots & Culture is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Programming and general operating costs are partially funded by The Illinois Arts Council, a state agency and The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation.

More information about Roots & Culture can be found at www.rootsandculturecac.org

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.

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

Jake Myers lives, works, and teaches in Chicago. Myers was a co-founder of the Pentagon Gallery and currently runs the Octagon Gallery in Wicker Park. His strange constructions have been featured at the Co-Prosperity Sphere in Chicago, the Queer Cultural Center in San Francisco, the Current Gallery in Baltimore and many others.

Bring your game face because there will be a sculptural prize for the winner of Short Court!

A member of the original Hairy Who exhibition group, which showed at the Hyde Park Art Center (1966- 1968) and introduced the Chicago Imagist notion to the world, Green has been mining a shaft of potent images for the last 45 years. He brings together a puzzle master’s love of pattern, illusion, code and system, a Pop artist’s interest in vibrant commercial and vernacular source images, and a fastidious finish fetish. This new group of paintings, which represents Green’s first solo show in Chicago in many years, features several elaborately shaped canvases, including “Hang Time,” a giant dollar sign-shaped painting inspired by the global economic downturn, and various approaches to perspectival confusion. The brilliantly colored, dizzyingly detailed images take great concentration to parse, yielding layers of interlocking imagery, all composed with a wry sense of humor, rich in visual puns and subtle allusions. The exhibition is accompanied by a 28-page catalog featuring an interview with Green and reproductions of all the work, plus images of source material and sketches.

In the East Wing
SUSANNE DOREMUS
In the East Wing, C vs. D presents an exhibition of new work by Susanne Doremus. Doremus has been well- known since the late 1970s for her sensitive, expressive paintings and drawings, which often tease the border between abstraction and figuration. In this exhibition, she will present three exceptionally beautiful new drawings, with intricate, whipping line work and soft, wash-like areas of color.

Organized by Jake Myers

Live Performances by:
Roy Ivy
E. Aaron Ross
Go Figure (John Myers, Traci VanLaarhoven Myers, Toni VanLaarhoven, Josh Myers)
Bill Myers
Allison Trumbo
Lara Stall
Austin Smith & Curt Schreiber

Tent Installations By:
Happy Collaborationists (Meredith Weber, Anna Trier featuring Claire Ashley)
Pentagon Gallery (Michael Garcia)
The Milk Factory (Jeff Prokash featuring Morgan Sims)
The Second Bedroom (Chris Smith)
Sam Sieger, Olivia Strautmanis, Bill Connors, Woobie Bogus, Mac Akin, Mary Clemens
Katie Schuering & Jesse Lee

Come and eat some smores between 730pm-11pm

http://www.andrewek.com/

Dana Toft, a Chicago native, has been painting over 30 years. Specializing in traditional and contemporary oil painting, Mr. Toft holds a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA in english from Wabash College (Crawfordsville, Indiana). He maintained a studio at The Flat Iron Arts Building for 8 years (1998 – 2006) and is currently showing works throughout the city, most recently at Robert Morris College (downtown) and the Southshore Cultural Center. Mr. Toft’s paintings have been shown in galleries and museums throughout Chicago as well as many countries, including Switzerland, England and Thailand.

http://www.scottjacksonstudio.com/Dana_Toft_Home.html

THIS EXHIBITION IS TWO DAYS ONLY!
November 18-19

We hope you can make opening night! Many of these paintings have never been shown in public and may never be shown again!

There will be beer, wine, spirits and hors d’ouevres for your indulgence…

One of the great contemporary artists, Oehlen has been dubbed by Peter Schjeldahl “the most resourceful abstract painter alive.” He is known for his daringly adventurous, highly inventive, and sometimes wickedly funny paintings, which often feature elements of collage mixed with linear free painting, sometimes applied directly with his fingers. A master of semiotic prestidigitation, Oehlen’s work challenges notions of elegance and balance, meanwhile asking irreverent questions about the concept of beauty and the dura- bility of taste. Since turning to abstraction in the late 1980s, Oehlen has developed a highly personal body of work that connects with the grand tradition of abstract expressionism, dovetailing especially with Willem de Kooning, but adding a thoroughly contemporary sensibility and subversive sense of humor. In this exhibition, Oehlen will present a group of ten small drawing collages and two large paintings, all part of his “Conduction” series, which takes its name from the structured improvisations of musician and composer Lawrence “Butch” Morris. Utilizing a graphic black and white palette, the works in this show continue in the spirit of Oehlen’s earlier “computer paintings,” which used pixelated motifs derived from computer drawing tools. The dazzling linear paintings in the “Conduction” series replace those jagged computer lines with graphics borrowed from Oehlen’s small drawing collages, blown up to a larger scale and painted and drawn into with spray paint and charcoal.

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

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

The earliest of these is a spectacular tour-de-force, Joe’s Painting #4 (1963-64), which combines a thickly worked surface and an optical illusion that seems to put a light source in the interstices of the grid.  Some of the pieces in the exhibition are actually woven from strips of fabric, while others are painted to look that way; some have a special architecture built into the stretcher, so the front of the canvas slopes forward in the middle, like the wing of an airplane, while others are part of an elaborate 12-panel series that progressively zooms in on the center of the first piece. 

Zucker has said that his initial inspiration for these rarely seen works, which have not been exhibited since the 1960s, was the weave of Walgreens’ lawn furniture, but they also engage and challenge the modernist formal impulse, breaking down painting to its most basic component, the weave of the canvas, which is itself a weave.  In addition to seven of these original grid paintings, the exhibition will also include one of Zucker’s brand new gypsum works, and several drawings that the artist made at the time, hilariously documenting his own physical relationship with these large canvases.  This exhibition puts in context the early work of one of the great mavericks of American art, and at the same time it brings back home one of Chicago’s own.

The exhibition is accompanied by an extensive 84-page catalog, loaded with period photographs and ephemera and featuring an essay by art historian Terry R. Myers and a conversation between John Corbett and Joe Zucker.

Anthony Lewellen (http://alewellen.com/)
Beth Pearlman (http://www.artbeth.com/)
Chris Silva (http://chrissilva.com/)
Doug Fogelson (http://www.dougfogelson.com/)
Eric Mecum (http://www.ericmecum.com/)
Jourdon Gullett (http://jourdongullett.blogspot.com/)
Justus Roe (http://www.justusroe.com/)
Kim Frieders Tibbetts (http://kimfrieders.com/)
Lauren Feece (http://laurenfeece.com/)
Liza Berkoff (http://lizaberkoffphotography.com/)
Matthew Hoffman (http://www.heyitsmatthew.com/)
Renee Robbins (http://www.reneerobbins.com/)
Robert Stevenson (http://www.flickr.com/people/simpleheady/)
Ruben Aguirre (http://www.theshiftchange.com/)
Tom Torluemke (http://tomtorluemke.com/)

Work by Jake Myers.

Finch Beer Co. will provide frosty libations, DJ Kid Color will spin into the night.

Public Works 3 is the latest installment of the celebrated Chicago annual art series featuring graphic artists at the hinge of contemporary culture and fine art expression.

EVAN HECOX’s inked drawings capture urban dwellings and their dwellers from New York to Mexico with a snapshot style that’s at once hyper-real and romantic. His work has been featured across record covers and art galleries alike, from Chocolate Industries vinyl to white walls in Tokyo, London and Los Angeles.

ANDY JENKINS began his art career with buddy Spike Jonze. Tinkers by habit, the pair stormed the scene as editors, illustrators, writers and designers for Freesylin’, BMX Magazine, Warp, Raygun – the list goes on. Andy currently heads the art department at Girl Skateboards and holds the reins of the infamous Art Dump.

MICHAEL CINA is an abstract painter known globally for originating YouWorkForThem, a graphic design boutique, and its sister company, WeWorkForThem, an award-winning design studio. Some of his freshest, darkest creations adorn the covers of Ghostly International releases, where his position as art director has created a signature Ghostly style reminiscent of the glory days of Factory Records.

Since the late 90’s CHRIS STRONG has taken the same austere eye with which he photographs solemn, quiet landscapes to music and fashion icons in and around Chicago – Wilco, Joan of Arc, Kid Sister, Metric, Califone and Billy Corgan are just a handful of the artists adorning his record covers and magazine spreads.

Evan Hecox

http://evanhecox.com/

Andy Jenkins

http://www.bendpress.com/

Michael Cina

http://michaelcinaassociates.com/

Chris Strong

http://www.chrisstrong.com/

Finch Beer Co.

http://www.finchbeer.com/

DJ Kid Color

http://www.soundslikecolor.com/

Public Works

http://www.thispublicworks.com/

Letha Wilson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College in New York City. In addition to her work having been exhibited nationally and internationally, Wilson has received a number of fellowships and awards, including a 2009 fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been mentioned in various publications, such as the New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, Artnet Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Wilson recently completed an installation at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, on view through November 27th.

Dave Murray lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He earned his BFA from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has received a number of fellowships and awards, including the 2010 Hearst Foundation Visiting Artist Grant at the Alexander W. Dreyfoos School of the Arts in West Palm Beach, Florida. Murray’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, most recently as part of a group show in The Queens Museum of Art in Queens, New York.

Artists/ Contributors Include:

Jesse Avina
Michael Garcia
Ryan Dunn
Jim Zimpel
Stephanie Burke
Jeriah Hildewine
David Ayling
Mary Ayling
Jake Myers
John Myers
Jeremiah Myers
Lara Stall
Joe Sepka
Bo Totten
Christa Donner
Ben F Carney

New paintings and sculptures by Max Reinhardt.

With live performance.

According to philosopher Glenn Albrecht, ‘solastalgia’ is “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place [...] one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

In her practice, Kendler explores how human activity has changed our beloved landscapes. She reinvents the idea of ‘the Naturalist,’ who historically scouted and cataloged a vastly different natural world of pristine vistas, unfathomable fecundity, and deep mystery. Though mystery and beauty remain writ large in our contemporary natural world, solastalgia creeps in at the borders, affecting us even when we are unsure what is at work.

Solastalgia’s central work is a cyclorama depicting an arctic ecosystem out of balance. The 15 ft ring of translucent film is suspended in the middle of the room; its detailed sequential drawings referencing an emakimono scroll. Other works include pennants with lacy cut-outs of extinct animals, tiny hand-sculpted figures holding miniature versions of these pennants, and a pyramid of sea urchins, conceived as a monument to ocean acidification.

These paintings on translucent film, delicate drawings and miniature sculptural terrariums—employ the language of myth & magic, and use fragility, ornamentation and intricacy to echo the subtle and mysterious relationships of the natural world.

With Solastalgia, Kendler presents her intimate drawings and sculptures as a counterpoint to the view of nature as something to be possessed. She suggests instead, that it is we who are possessed by nature.

Work by Ron Ewert, Chris Fischer, Mike Kloss, Bryan Lear, Brett Naucke and Triangle Incorporated.

Carter continues his series Untitled Relationships—multi-part works of collaged mass-produced materials, drawings, spray paint, and glitter—inviting viewers to define their own relationships between casual and formal elements. He positions fetishized objects like fat shoelaces, track pants, or Timberlands as the new materials of postmodern pastiche. Referencing iconic moments in modernist art and design, Carter turns contemporary culture on itself, empowering these common materials to surpass their casual status. In his new densely layered paintings, Carter’s formal treatment of paint (pouring, peeling, sculpting, weaving, gluing, nailing, etc) pushes the physical limits of the “flat” medium. Though Carter’s abstracts are aesthetically formal his use of casual signifiers to make marks breaks with modernist theory by conflating the subjective and objective nature of materials.

Presenting a breadth of work in photography, video, and new media, the artist’s disparate practices are brought together under a shared sense of ambivalence about leaving the detached cloister produced by an art education. The floor lasts for four years only; intangible though the feeling is, the upset caused by being forced out into the world with only a shirt on one’s back, a degree on file, and a repository of contacts in one’s phone is a sentiment known by all students. What remains to be seen is whether or not everyone concerned will succeed, and how, further, they define success.

Participating artists include Thomson Dryjanski, Brandy Fisher, Emerson Granillo, David M. Hall, Misato Inaba, Absis Minas, Jen Smoose, Jaroslaw Studencki, Kristen Lee Stokes, Eileen Mueller, Casey McGonagle and Hyounsang Yoo.

Guest curated by Max Reinhardt.

1.THE RACE — Emphasizing the personal computer as the frame for production and consumption, 30 animated GIFS will play simultaneously by a diverse yet local slew of artists, designers, curators, writers, art historians, and cat fanciers, as they all race their animated GIF to personal computer battery death via an ad hoc computer lab.

2.TWEEN SCREEN — Projecting the animated GIF to a monumental scale via the 15’ TWEEN SCREEN; the wee GIF file will reach new lofty proportions that are incapable of experiencing at home in your mom’s basement.

TWEEN is a one night event and all GIFS and documentation, as well as a text by Steven Pate, will have an eternal afterlife where you can revel in its planned obsolescence at tweenchicago.tumblr.com. TWEEN is a project in collaboration between artist Christopher Smith and Octagon Gallery.

Participants include Aaron Orsini, Adam Farcus, Adam Grossi, Alberto Aguilar, Alicja Zelazko, Angeline Evans, Arielle Bielak, Adam Trowbridge, Ben Russell, Big Bad Ron, Brandon Alvendia, Brian Wadford, Burak Birinci, Chris Hammes, E. Aaron Ross, Eric Fleischauer, Emily Keuhn, Hooliganship, Isak Berbic, Jake Myers, Jerimiah Chiu, Jesse Avina, Jon Satrom, Kevin Jennings, Kevin Robinson, Kirsten Leenaars, Kyle Fletcher, Laura Boban, Lara Stall, Mark Sansone, Michelle Harris, Michael Radziewicz, Miguel Cortez, PaperRad, Philip Parcellano, Philip von Zweck, Rob Ray, Silas Reeves, Steven Pate, Tim Pigot, Tom Burtonwood, Theo Darst and many more!

Fruits of a connected and continuous collaborative consciousness, A rod stewart little richard prince charles manson family is the collaborative effort of six artists working in three different states, communicating ideas over the web through images and conversations. The culmination of this conversation is a physical diagramming of current events, physical incongruities, and a questioning of the present. Opportunities for thought, verbal pandemonium, favoring flavors, and competing hierarchies, are some, but not all, of the ingredients that have produced what has become the punctuation of a six-headed run-on sentence.

On the evening of April 15th we will introduce three photographers, Adam Jason Cohen, Roy Gardiner, and David Rasool Robinson. Each with specific styles developed during their career, these photographers have yearned for an exhibition to display their passion.

Since discontinuing the pursuit of his BFA, Adam Cohen has extensively travelled the United States in search of examining the contemporary landscape of leisure and recreation. He has moved from the New York metropolitan area to Boston, and back again, and has finally settled in Chicago this fall. He has plans to see this body of work through until he feels it is completed and ready to be published as a monograph.

Roy Gardiner has perfected a style all his own within concert photography highlighting his chameleon vision as both musical admirer and performer. As a photographer and documentarian, this Chicago native captures and transmutes images as an interpretation of his reality. Trained on his father’s Minolta X-7a, this self-taught artist, began shooting as a favor to his crew. Networking and communicating with an assortment of promoters afforded him the opportunity to remain behind the lens. Specializing in music and concert photography was a natural evolution as he honed his craft recording the community of artists and musicians during the height of the independent hip-hop era of the mid to late 2000’s.

David Rasool Robinson is a self-taught photographer based in Chicago. Seeking to understand the motivations behind people’s behavior he originally was a psychology student at The University of Illinois at Chicago. Around this time David began using photography as a means to further explore his curiosity in regards to human behavior. Having ended his studies at UIC, David briefly transferred to Columbia College but ultimately found that real world trial and error would be the best way for him to hone his craft and find his voice. David’s work primarily focuses on candid portraiture; he seeks to honestly capture his subject while still respecting their personal space and private moments.

Saint Alfred is an independent apparel brand that was introduced in 2005 as a boutique on Milwaukee Avenue. Now one of the top brands in its industry, Saint Alfred intends to retain global awareness while pushing the creativity in the Chicagoland area.

In order to feel the passage of time we reach out with the unsure hands of a sleepwalker, grasping for the familiar, to validate what we think we know. The featured artists engage in a dialogue that continually reevaluates the hierarchy between the beginning, middle, and end of an experience, process, or work. PRELAPSE examines the relationship in the human mind of what is seen, when it is seen, to what is known, and how.

Curated by Easton Miller.

“I wish to believe that Bruce Nauman’s work is more about shitting in your pants than about mystical transcendence.” -Kathryn Hixson

This exhibition is dedicated to Kathryn Hixson who passed away in the Fall of 2010. Kathryn was one of the most distinguished art critics in Chicago, an amazing teacher, advisor and good friend. Kathryn was finishing a PhD dissertation at the University of Texas Austin on the role of humor in the work of Bruce Nauman and Richard Prince.

In the spirit of her spontaneity, criticality and wise-ass attitude, recent M.F.A graduates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago pay tribute to Kathryn and her influence on the latest generation of emerging artists. No Joke presents work that is both conceptual and playful, riding a pendulum that swings between raw irony and the sweet sublime. This exhibition embodies odd couplings through mediated experiences of nature and the body, reflections on perception and image, space and time, slapstick humor and poetic gesture.

One year ago, Kathryn wrote a curatorial statement for the artists in this exhibition when they last presented their work together for the show, Killing Time. The following is an excerpt from that text:

“…Banking on the cohesion of popular memory, some tenderly quote the past, resuscitating it. Identity and difference are presented as space, weight, and time, continually constructed and reconstructed. Each ventures to share with the viewer a direct, sensual and sensuous experience that is decidedly in the present. Through immersion into each crystalline moment of their constructed experiences, one can feel the immanence of the past within the contemporary, to perhaps enliven our perceptions, and our ambitions for art, in the future.”

All proceeds going to support arts education at Association House.

As a part of his solo exhibition at Johalla Projects, he will be releasing an edition of newsprints and a monograph of new work. Also, his first contribution to HomeSchool, a traveling institution for experimental pedagogy, will be held in the space at 4pm on Saturday, March 5th.

We can direct our fate, or at least we will continue to act like it. Roll the dice without blowing on them. Spill salt without concern. Create artwork dealing with creation, destruction, the infinite, the dread of ultimately resigning our fate. As LVL3 celebrates its one-year anniversary, it begins this new segment free of preconceived notions from what has come before. Free of superstitions. With an anniversary exhibition of works by Ben Driggs, Veronica Rafael and Hans Peter Sundquist, we view a demonstration of a fearless exploration deep within the mind, and way far out of it, with a few conceptual and abstract curiosities in between.

Shteynshleyger’s (Russian-American, born Moscow 1977, lives Chicago) photographs—portraits, still-lifes, landscapes, and interiors—display a historic sensitivity that is at once personal and political. Arts patron Waldburg-Wolfegg is on the Advisory Committee of the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the International Committee of the Renaissance Society, where Shteynshleyger had solo exhibitions in 2004 and 2007 respectively. Shteynshleyger will be previewing some of her new work in progress.

Fain (American, born London 1980, lives Chicago), who is best known for his controversial public-performances and parades, recently taught the course The Parade Float as Guerrilla Art in Northwestern’s Department of Art Theory and Practice. Straton, the founder and Executive Director of local non-profit Threewalls, is intimately familiar with Chesterhill, OH, the location of Fain’s most recent parade and the subject of his current project. Together they will discuss this project along with new contexts for art making and exhibiting.

Gunn’s (American, born 1980, lives Chicago) paintings, sculptures and installations investigate the power and perception of pattern and light as well as the roles of spatial and cultural context to the assignment of meaning in contemporary art. Michelle Grabner, who is an artist, curator, writer and the founder of The Suburban in Oak Park, taught Gunn at the School of the Art Institute, where she is Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department and where Gunn received his MFA in 2007. After the conversation, follow us to Shane Campbell Gallery, for the opening of Grabner’s solo exhibition Like a rare morel.

Performance by Sean Fader.

Patterson (Jamaican, born Kingston Jamaica 1981, lives Lexington, KY) will have a dynamic mixed-media installation that investigates Jamaican dance hall culture in the gallery’s window facing Division Street. Mosaka included Patterson in his 2007 exhibition Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art where he was formerly Associate Curator of Exhibitions. Recently, Mosaka has become the Contemporary Art Curator at the Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois. Patterson’s installation Gully Godz in Conversation-Conversations Revised I, II and III will continue through March 26 as our 4th on the wall project.

Art work for sale and auction by Brandon Alvendia, Caitlin Arnold, Matthew Austin, Mara Baker, Tom Burtonwood, Ben Driggs, Aron Gent, Adam Grossi, Elisa Harkins, Katy Keefe, Jason Lazarus, Matthew Nichols, Betsy Odom, Aay Preston-Myint, Daniel Shea, Montgomery Perry Smith, Greg Stimac, Jessica Taylor, Krista Wortendyke and many more…

Old master painters who did not have Pantone to look towards for creative expression looked toward religion. Botticelli and Leonardo Da Vinci would incorporate turquoise and other hues of blue into their frescos and oil paintings because the colors represented religious symbolism. In modern days, abstract expressionist painter Barnett Newman would calm the eye with his almost monochromatic canvases using different hues of blue one of them being turquoise.

From innovative art movements to religion, fashion and design you will see in almost every culture that the color turquoise has historical and contemporary relevance. Goodbye Turquoise celebrates the closing of Pantone’s color of the year and surveys the artistic exploration of this color by contemporary artists.

Work by Samantha Bittman, James Cooper, Racer Levan, Montgomery Perry Smith and Leslie Supnet.

Featuring new work by gallery artists Justin Cooper, Robert Davis/Michael Langlois, Jason Middlebrook, Karen Reimer, Joel Ross and Carrie Schneider.

A seminal issues amongst these artists and the purpose for this show is to test instinct with respect to the nature of pure creativity as a genuine investment in “the real,” or conversely a misguided venture into a spurious hyper-reality; implosive simulation in the maelstrom of contemporary culture.

Work by Jacob Goudreault, Easton Miller, Matt Nichols, Max Reinhardt and Simon Slater.

Featuring work by Adam Wright, Alex Gvojic, Brian Harlow, Brad Reardon, Chris Lindig, Chris “Turbo” Goff, Harlan Thompson, Josh Kurpius, Joe Suta, Jeff Wright, Ken Nagahara, Max Schaaf, Mitch Cotie, Slippery Pete, Tim O’Keefe and Tim Remis.

Curated by Andrew Blackley, Stephanie Burke and Steve Ruiz.

Work by Duncan Andrews, Susan Giles, Anna Kunz, Oliver Laric and Nathaniel Robinson.

Work by Bridey Bowen, Alex Chitty, David D’Andrea, Rob Doran, Ryan Duggan, Ron Ewert, Heather Gabel, Horsebites, Myles Smutney Hyde, Damara Kaminecki, Jenny Kendler, Joey Knuckles, Rick Leech, Monique Ligons, Alexis Mackenzie, Kyle James Morrison, Steak Mtn, Rachel Peacock, Bird Reynolds, Christy Roads, J.L. Schnabel and David Snedden.

Curated by Heather Gabel, Myles Smutney Hyde and Anna Cerniglia.

Co-Curated with Brook Sinkinson Withrow.

As a culture we routinely use video as a language, whether or not it is acknowledged. This dialect has evolved from customary communication and presentation, overdetermined by the conventions of television, advertising, and web-based imagery. These artists communicate through this language to address our mediated experiences and to articulate expressions of the everyday. The video works unpack and transform the contexts in which we communicate with others – from the simple act of typing on our keyboards, to saying “I love you,”- and make formats such as reality television and Youtube video mash-ups personal. These artists, by talking in video, simultaneously address and communicate with the language we are culturally accustomed to.

The title equally refers to the formal and material nature of their new work itself. Within the work of Arocha – Schraenen, simile and facsimile are often content; the nature of an image and its similarity or distance from the perception of that image. In the works that play with layering and blurring the lines between what is, in reality, a solid surface and what is only a reflection –or the facsimile of a tangible material – Arocha – Schraenen join the dotted lines between Modernism’s approach to something nearing an abstracted form of representation and the age old mimetic thrust of art drawing upon observations of the world around us.

In As if this intersection between science and art’s mimetic drives is once again foregrounded. Each work is actually a moiré of one form or another, whether manifesting as a sculpture or photographic work. Most immediately associated with textiles, a moiré is also a scientific phenomenon: an interference created when two grids are superimposed at an angle or where their mesh sizes differ. The nature of the moiré phenomenon connects textile traditions with the photographic and reprographic process and naturally lies within Arocha – Schraenen’s explorations of how images are constructed. In this particular case, their interest examines how moirés manifest in static objects transmute into a perception of movement. Yet, the works also conversely evoke a sense of scientifically explained moirés that occur when an image-making device – for example a television camera- attempts to transmit an image of certain patterned static objects due to the sampling limitations of the medium itself. Just as an image may prove illusory, these works remind us more specifically that one way in which an image might prove to be different from its perception is in terms of movement. Exactly what is moving and what is still within each situation?

Connectivity from the “real thing” is removed or sometimes replaced in art just as relationships are fabricated from false presumptions. We create expectations for one another that eventually either satisfy, call for compromise or lead to disappointment and failure. Feeble Intimacy showcases three artists who touch on methods of interaction with the viewer and incorporate themes that focus on human connectivity with one another and the environment.

As we enter into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the influence of Christianity has diminished and, as a whole, Westerners have become more accepting of alternative spiritual customs. The availability of information and the freedom of expression permitted in our society have allowed us access to a myriad of faiths; in turn, our lack of restrictions has led to blend together and formulate new convictions. Similarly, the rate in which we receive and process information, particularly via advanced technology, has effected how we view god and religion. WHO’S YR SHAMAN? is a group exhibition featuring artists who take inspiration from unorthodox belief systems. Their production is a continuation in the history of mystical practice in art and, like their predecessors, they are responding to the climate of their contemporary world. The common thread which binds these seven individuals is their deep admiration and engagement in magic. It is a vital part of each of their creative processes and, as a result, transfers a numinous power into their final conceptions.

Work by Elijah Burgher, Sara Fagala, Terence Hannum, Chad Harrison, Ivan Lozano, Adam Ludwig and Rebecca Walz.

Raffle and auction items include paintings, photographs, drawings, and sculpture by local Chicago artists and ACRE’s 2010 residents. Entrance is $10, which includes 3 raffle tickets and a door gift. Additional tickets can be purchased for $4, or you can get 7 tickets for $20. The silent auction closes and raffle winners are announced at 10:30pm. Funds raised go toward ACRE’s inaugural summer residency.

Featuring work by over 30 artists including Caitlin Arnold, Alex Chitty, Ben Driggs, Paul Ershen, Scott Fortino, Rebecca Gordon, Elisa Harkins, Kelly Kaczynski, Irena Knezevic, Young Joon Kwak, Jason Lazarus, Aliza Morell, Heidi Norton, Jennifer Ray, Matt Siber, Montgomery Perry Smith, Greg Stimac, Brian Ulrich and more.

In a Plain Brown Wrapper is an exhibition of work that would not be shown in many other venues. It is the end of the first decade of the 21st century and yet the discomfort of the majority of people in regard to naked bodies or talk about sex still fuels the debate about what is appropriate for public display, and whether it is pornographic, or worse, obscene.

Public offense and keeping the children safe from images that might “damage them” are the reasons invoked most often when art with sexual content is brought into question. This show opens for discussion the fact that pornography has become the filter through which imagery of the sexual/sexualized body is understood, analyzed, controlled by law, and condemned even by a population that regularly indulges in its fantasies.

The artists in this exhibition are aware of pornography’s grip on America’s cultural consciousness but are not interested in commenting on hypocrisy. Instead they make work that is related to porn and its numerous tropes, and in doing so, make defiant statements about sex, sexuality, gender, power and the role of fantasy in all our lives.

Featuring work by Steven Frost, Elisa Garza, Elise Goldstein, Emerson Granillo, Jesse Hites, Jacob King, Ivan Lozano, Joelle McTigue, Karina Natis, Clare O’Sadnick, Edward Rossa, Joshua Sampson, Talaya Schmid, Kristen Stokes, Jaroslaw Studencki, Bu Tu, Wayama Woo and Meredith Zielke.

Featuring work by Caitlin Arnold, Aron Gent, Maureen Peabody, Daniel Shea and Greg Stimac.

Work by Elise Blue, Ben Russell, Rakele Tombini and Chiara Tommasi.

Artists include Roderick MacKenzie, Gunsho, Kyla Cech, Scott Alerio, Margeurite Keyes, Nemo Boko, Travis Millard, James Bruce King, J. Chris Johnson, Lisabeth Gutierrez, Peter Karpick, Goddess Irena and Orion Dommisse.

Available works by Blood is the New Black, Milano Chow, Ryan Travis Christian, Alika Cooper, Alex Da Corte, Joel Dean, Cali Dewitt, Austin Eddy, Bea Fremderman, Myranda Gilles, Michael Hunter , Elizabeth Jaeger, Robin Juan, Landon Metz, Rachel Niffenegger, Annie Purpura, Courtney Reagor, Daniel Shea, Brian Sorg, Mitchell Spider, Hannah Stouffer, Fraser Taylor, Porous Walker and Virgil Wong.

Work by Paul Kenneth, Easton Miller and Nozomi Rose.

Work by Marissa Benedict, Christopher Bradley, Scott Carter, Lauren Carter, Younghwan Choi, Colleen Coleman, Allison Fall, Elise Goldstein, Katya Grokhovsky, Samantha Hill, Holly Holmes, Scott Jarrett, Selena Jones, Maya Mackrandilal, Lisa Nonken, Luis Palacios, Ben Stagl, Stephanie Victa and Andrew Norm Wilson.

Maybes are tentative propositions that suggest an overlap between participation and obligation. They are declarations of intent without a future. This lack of commitment reflects a commitment to openness and possibility.

The three artists in our debut show make work that similarly straddles a line of purposeful compromises, generally between the material and the illusory. By straddling the supposed divide between media, they exploit the potential rather than the determined.

Hahn and Zwingl’s work focuses on a sculptural practice that investigates concepts of space and object related strategies. Three of the artists—Marcel Hiller, Roland Kollnitz and Verena Dengler—will join Hahn and Zwingl in Chicago to collaborate on individual site-specific sculptural works that respond to the adapted retail space on Milwaukee Avenue.

Work by Markus Hahn, Anna Zwingl, Marcel Hiller, Roland Kollnitz, Verena Dengler, Klaus Gölz, Karin Hatwagner, Ulrike Johannsen, Björn Kämmerer, Daniela Löbbert, Marcin Kowalik, Philipp Leissing, Ralo Mayer, Nadine Arbeiter, Christoph Meier, Nina Frgic, André Normann, Noële Ody, Markus Kircher, Nadja Athanassowa, Ines Spenthof, Lisa Truttmann, Robert Grafschafter, Simon Reitstätter, Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair, Sebastian Walther, Heidrun Kocher-Kocher and Hannah Swoboda.

Johalla Projects and their curators aspire to offer you thought-provoking exhibitions and provide support for emerging and mid-career artists. Because of the economic state of affairs, we decided to try something different. We have organized our first Art Auction Fundraiser. Proceeds from the auction will go towards improving our exhibition space and continuing to support artists in Chicago. This is an event fit for the collector on a budget. Whether you are a seasoned art investor fixing your eyes on a steal or a budding enthusiast looking for that first piece of art to kick start your collection, our auction has something for everyone. Over 50 artists have donated original work. Participating artists are Nathan Baker, Bridgette Buckley, Elijah Burgher, Philip Dembinski, Anni Holm, Aron Gent, Jon Gitelson, Chad Kouri, Daniel Shea, Montgomery Perry Smith, Myles Smutney-Hyde, and many, many others.

OnTheWall, a wall project series visible 24/7, will present work by Assume Vivid Astro Focus.

Work by In b Flat, Kristin Freeman, Shane Lavalette, Jason Polan, The Free Listening Project and Daniel Shea. Curated by Joseph Rynkiewicz.

The snow globe has seen its popularity remain in our contemporary consciousness due to its ability to delight us with dream-like visuals that tap into our memories. Like the Romantics who invented this agreeable souvenir, we too desire a window into the quixotic and the surreal. Featuring sculpture, photography, and film, Snow Globe is a transformation of our gallery space into exactly what it sounds like – a white, wintry realm. Videos by Sonia Levy and Momoko Seto mediate on foreign ice worlds, while an installation by Johalla Projects in collaboration with Chad Haldeman, Justus Roe, and Phil Schuster set to an audio track by Nick Spiese offers another interpretation on the frigid and frozen landscape. Photographers Aron Gent and Steven Karl Metzer use their cameras to capture the season in a manner that recalls a particular time and place; the traces of winters’ past recognized within their images harkens back to the very device that has inspired our exhibition. Snow Globe offers a new way to experience this kitschy and nostalgic item; Johalla Projects invites you to consider our reflections on the snow globe and place yourself within a winter terrain fashioned by a diverse group of multi-media artists.

Work by Lauren Elder.

Work by Jesse Avina, Melissa Damasauskas, Matt Shaw, Alise Spinella, Julia Stotz, Peter Takamori and Casey Ann Wasniewski.

Installations by Chris Bradley, Ryan Dunn, Joseph Grimm, Dorian McKaie and Kim Walker. Performances by Joey Carr, Benjamin Chaffee, Bethany Childs and Rebecca Simmons, Ryan Dunn, Joseph Grimm, Joseph Kramer, Monica Panzarino, Aaron David Ross and Michael Vallera.

TRY experiments use food as the liturgical basis for exploring the nexus of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspects of human experience. By providing meals designed to engage various facets of eating such as etiquette, nutrition, and collective ecstasy, Carnal Torpor seeks to provide an embodied experience of ‘culture’ as ‘nature’ and vice versa.

Opening performances with David Daniel & Mike Vallera and Henry James Glover & Frank Van Duerm.

Dan GrahamVanDamme. Laurence OscarMeyerWeiner. Frank StellaEllaOla. Piero Maserati. Pet Peeves Klein. John Cageless. Clement SmokeGreenberg. Off Kawara. Yoko NoNo. Raygun Johnson.

Double Dutch serves as a simultaneous descriptor and refutation for the newest collection of work by Liam Crockard, Ben Schumacher and Hugh Scott-Douglas. Created specifically for Scott Projects, Double Dutch implies both the form of play as with three players and a jump rope, and the expression of dismay conveyed by the popular idiom. Observing the work under this guise, a number of crucial questions begin to arise surrounding the framing, materiality and distribution of the present-day readymade and its extensions. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher all work from mass produced objects with few reservations for wholesale appropriation or subversion. This implicates everyone: reflecting the unscrupulous tendency amongst younger generations to draw from any and all sources, Double Dutch suggests linkages that may extend beyond their component parts.

Liam Crockard’s collage work often employs disorienting silhouettes and landscapes, which defy seamlessness and favor form over coherent narrative readings, though an alternating sense of displacement and scrutiny arises in the work’s installation as well as questions surrounding the formalities of exhibition and the materiality of rough studio practice . One might consider a continuation of these dichotomies between formal and gestural practice embodied in Hugh Scott-Douglas’ painting and collage. Can a critique and and empty gesture co-exist? How does one negotiate a product for negation? Scott-Douglas engages and abuses the reified gestures of subversive art practice, equally longing for the return of their auratic power and wishing them dead. Ben Schumacher’s work takes up the possibility of a legitimate embrace of the once disruptive Readymade in the information age. Physical presence and participation are taken up in their most immediate form – the online RSVP – and translated into emblematic, permanent objects. Questions of skill and labour remain crucial in Schumacher’s work, but are strong components of both Crockard and Scott-Douglas’ approaches as well. Ultimately what sits at the core of Double Dutch are a series of these dichotomies – deskilling and the readymade, subversion and the hollow gesture and studio and exhibition practices amongst others – which come to reflect something of the climate for art making today. Crockard, Scott-Douglas and Schumacher are not being prescriptive with their work about the way things are. Instead, they prefer to ask questions, make comparisons, and settle somewhere between jump rope and an idiom.