Introducing
BARELY FAIR's
SPOTLIGHT
PROGRAM
BARELY FAIR is pleased to present the SPOTLIGHT program, an extension of our on-going mission to bring awareness to Artist Run Project Spaces, emerging galleries, and the artists they work with.
The SPOTLIGHT program highlights individual spaces and the artists they bring to BARELY FAIR. The program updates this page with new spaces and artists regularly between now and the fair's Vernissage on April 8th. Follow us on instagram to be notified of program updates.
BARELY FAIR is operated by Julius Caesar, an artist-run project space in Chicago. Established in 2008, the non-profit project space has an ever-evolving group of artists as co-directors. They are Josh Dihle, Tony Lewis, Roland Miller, and Kate Sierzputowski at present.
Founded in 2004 by John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, Corbett vs. Dempsey is an art gallery with an associated record label, book imprint, and historical archive, specializing in contemporary art, art in Chicago, and improvised and experimental music.
Diane Simpson
Diane Simpson, born 1935, is a Chicago-based artist who for the past forty years has created sculptures and preparatory drawings that evolve from a diverse range of sources, including clothing, utilitarian objects, and architecture. The structures of clothing forms has continuously informed her work, serving as a vehicle for exploring their visually formal qualities, while also revealing their connections to the design and architecture of various cultures and periods in history. Her wide selection of materials (wood, perforated metals, linoleum, fabrics) reflect her interest in the coexistence of the industrial/architectonic and domestic worlds. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad; most recently in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. In 2010, a thirty-year retrospective was held at the Chicago Cultural Center, and she has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2019 Simpson was one of the ten recipients of the "Anonymous Was a Woman" award. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL; Perez Museum, Miami, FL; and the Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco and Paris, FR. She received a BFA in 1971 and an MFA in 1978 from the Art Institute of Chicago. Simpson is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago; JTT, NY; and Herald St, London.
Brittany is an Art Space in Vallejo, CA and Riverside, IL.
Reniel Del Rosario
Reniel Del Rosario lives and works in Vallejo, CA
Emily Prince De La Cruz
Emily Prince De La Cruz lives and works in West Marin, CA
Jonathan Runcio
Jonathan Runcio lives and works in San Francisco, CA
Micah Wood lives and works in Los Angeles, CA
Micah Wood
Patel Brown highlights alternative perspectives and encourages experimentation alongside innovation in both its programming and operations. Identifying gaps in representation and opportunities guided by collaboration and community, the gallery’s program looks to traditions in culture and identity, and how they are increasingly challenged by the globalized world.
Michael Dumontier and Neil Faber
The works presented at Barely Fair are part of their Library series. The brightly colored hardboard with simple handwritten fonts form part of an ongoing series Dumontier and Faber started in 2009. Dumontier and Farber’s Library series offers surprising and astute observations, all in the duo’s characteristic deadpan style. The simplicity of the shapes and text evokes an immediate but lasting profundity, with each piece causing one to wonder about the thoughts that roam their consciousness, and the books that take up residence on their—and our—shelves.
Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber are founding members of The Royal Art Lodge, and have continued a collaborative practice since the collective disbanded in 2008. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. They were shortlisted for the Sobey Art Award in 2014. Dumontier and Farber’s work is included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery and Winnipeg Art Gallery as well as Takashi Murakami, Tokyo, Japan; La Maison Rouge, Paris, France; Centro De Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Spain.
Founded in Milan in 1987, MASSIMODECARLO played a fundamental role in introducing Italian artists to international audiences, as well as bringing the most interesting voices of the art world to the Italian scene, promoting the establishment of a vital dialogue between artists and national and international institutions. Over the years, the gallery’s artists have all gained international recognition and an outstanding place into important public and private collections. The gallery has now locations in Milan, London, Hong Kong, Paris, an office in Beijing, as well as a virtual online space named VSpace.
Rob Pruitt
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Pandas may be rare in the wild, but they are ubiquitous in popular culture. Pruitt was eight years old when two giants pandas were gifted to the United States, after Richard Nixon’s ice-breaking visit to China. Pruitt, fascinated with the animal, quickly included the Panda as one of the central subjects within his oeuvre. Pandas can be related to many topics that the artist deems important; his relationship with his father, environmentalism and the fragility of the planet and last but not least peace, so actual in this very moment.
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Since the early 1990s, Rob Pruitt’s risk-taking investigations into American popular culture have taken many forms. From his notorious Cocaine Buffet (1998) and glitter portraits of Pandas or the significant Suicide Paintings’ series, Pruitt’s works are a surreal and extravagant interpretation of the pop world, a kaleidoscopic look towards mass culture by exploring the multiples aspects and the paradoxes of our present time. Throughout his career Rob Pruitt has fine-tuned his ability to express nuanced ideas about culture and society through re-interpretation of common objects and materials, all filtered through a sense of humor and irony. With his Mask series the artist continues his pursuit of depicting the complexities of personality and emotions. The facial gestures indeed, are cut into the canvas with a razor - destructive and creative at the same time, these gestures are married to an accumulation of gradients, patterns, and prints to create a character. Rob Pruitt was born in Washington D.C. in 1964, and studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington D.C. and Parsons School of Design in New York. He lives and works in New York.
Prairie is an independent exhibition space for contemporary art in Chicago, IL. Working in the long-tradition of artist-run spaces in the city, Prairie was established in 2017 by artists Jack Schneider and Tim Mann with the aim of creating a venue for emerging art and a platform for critical discourse.
Peggy Chiang
I am interested in the way things are packaged. The sculptures seem familiar, but their attempts at disguise enter some errant orbit that is both strange and unassuming. What lingers in the periphery is brought into focus: the dishwasher’s labor, the restaurant placemat, the casual exoticism of cooking wine. The physical connections prompt the viewer to acclimate rather than interpret, to attempt what scholar Lauren Berlant has once described, in the world of object-relation, as “seeing dramas in their ordinariness...nudging it to a new place the way a border collie would.”
Peggy Chiang (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA) is a New Jersey-based artist who approaches representations of marginal histories through a lens of surrealism and object fetishism. She received her BFA in 2011 from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and is currently completing her MFA in Visual Arts at Rutgers University.
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Goldfinch is a commercial gallery that seeks to provide compelling physical, conceptual, and discursive frameworks for artists and contemporary visual practices. Our exhibitions include artists’ talks, informal salon discussions, and publications. Located in East Garfield Park, Goldfinch is surrounded by dozens of artists’ studios. In keeping with this context, we strive to bring an experimental, studio-like sense of curiosity and play to our exhibition program.
Em Kettner
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My miniature figurative sculptures and glazed tile drawings present theatrical and sensual scenes of interdependence. I weave directly onto delicate porcelain structures with cotton and silk thread to create patterned costumes or coverings. The sculptures are often assembled from separate or broken ceramic limbs which are bound together by the woven components, while the tiles are embedded like precious relics into hardwood frames. Recurring motifs include the hybrid body and the bedridden body, wherein figures intertwine in gestures both erotic and assistive, knitted to each other and their furniture supports. These vignettes celebrate a support system that in my life has been both social (care providers, animals, family, friends, lovers) and designed (furniture, mobility aids, architectural features). The miniature scale is a nod to votive objects that were historically placed on altars by the devout as pleas for relief from pain, illness, or deformity; here, however, by referencing familiar moments of physical fragility and mutual support, I’m hoping to revise problematic stereotypes about the disability community—chiefly that we are pitiable, passive, or cursed—and illuminate instead what makes each of us desirable, funny, and powerful.
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Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) is an artist and writer based in Richmond, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include “Slow Poke” at François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), “Play the Fool” at Goldfinch (Chicago, IL), and “The Eternal Worm” at Harpy (Rutherford, NJ). Her second solo exhibition with François Ghebaly LA opens April 2nd and runs through May 7th.
Em’s work has been reviewed and published in ArtForum, Art in America, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), HyperAllergic, and Sixty Inches From Center. She has been the recipient of the Wynn Newhouse Award, the MIUSA Women’s Institute on Leadership and Disability, an SAIC Teaching Fellowship, and the 2019-2020 AAC Diversity + Leadership Fellowship. Em earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by Goldfinch in Chicago and François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles & New York.
Meghan Borah
Meghan Borah’s paintings evoke the faded surfaces of vintage fabrics and decorative textiles. Her expressionless, female-presenting figures occupy dreamlike scenarios that may not be tranquil as they first appear. Their faces appear aloof and almost impatient, suggesting the presence of some type of negotiation between the public, outward facade and private inner longings. In this way Borah’s paintings are an ongoing examination of how we see and present ourselves, and how we may sometimes ache to become something else.
Meghan Borah (b. 1990, Evanston, IL) lives and works in Chicago, IL. Borah is represented by Galleri Urbane (Dallas) and Goldfinch Gallery (Chicago) Her work has been featured in Patron Magazine, Chicago Magazine, Time Out Chicago, New American Paintings and ArtSlant. Borah earned her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and was a resident at The Vermont Studio Center in October 2018.
Extase started as an apartment gallery in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood of Chicago in 2018 and operated in that location for 3.5 years. The building has since sold, but Extase remains committed to working with and supporting predominantly local artists by exhibiting their art in varying formats. Extase is managed by Julia Birka-White, Director of Rhona Hoffman Gallery and graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Art History Masters program.
Danny Bredar
Bredar’s practice employs conceptual figuration, writing, ceramics, and collaboration to generate multiple counterpoints within his network of production. Trained as a representational oil painter, Bredar’s ever-expanding diversity of methods and approaches seeks to subvert his own center or centers of gravity, to displace hierarchic values with metonymic contingency, and to destabilize meaning itself. In each set of exhibited relations, an encrypted language implies a “minor literature” that fuses connectivity and detachment via productive contradiction. Bredar’s ongoing sequence of Delft Tiles embed contemporary content into a traditional ceramic format, conveying how his experimentation works within structures and habits of culture to reformat their interiors. Innovative doubt becomes key to forge resistance to the monopolization of behavior.
Danny Bredar was born in 1992 in Denver, Colorado and currently lives and works in Chicago. He received his MFA from SAIC in 2019, his BA from Harvard University in 2014, and he worked as a studio assistant for the artist Matt Saunders. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at The Arts Club of Chicago, Soccer Club Club, Extase, Sandbox Industries venture capital firm, and Taqueria Los Alamos. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, the Elmhurst Art Museum, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Armory Show 2020, Taos Center for the Visual Arts, Sullivan Galleries, and with the fictional gallery Currency in Münster and Zurich. Upcoming group exhibitions will take place at David Lewis Gallery (NYC) and Rhona Hoffman Gallery (Chicago). Bredar also collaborates with Leah Ke Yi Zheng, with whom he is a 2019-22 Fellow at the Arts Club of Chicago. Bredar and Zheng are invested in the collaborative concept Currency, a fictional gallery run by fictional director Wenzel Beckenbauer.
AMFM is an (art)ist organization for the people. We support and feature emerging and established artists through our website, which includes content with local artists and creatives from all over the globe, and through our curated events, exhibitions, partnerships, and activations. Through programming, AMFM combines the arts to cultivate community, diversity, inclusivity, intergenerational engagement and of course, good vibes with a purpose, mission, or cause.
Marcelo Eli
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My work seeks to recontextualize Pre-Colombian art by painting these images into mythologies, such as the structure of the universe, shamans, warriors, eternal youth, and death. These mythological legends lend themselves as source material to a plethora of ideas. Inspired by the awe of these cultures and feeling an ancestral connection with them rooted in my experience as a LatinX artist in Chicago. I work this imagery into new narratives, commingling expressionist energy with the detailedness of the Pre-Columbian visual language. Through researching, I tap into that time and bring it to the forefront of today by creating new histories.
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In 2008 Marcelo enrolled at the Academy of Art University’s Painting and Drawing BFA program in San Francisco, CA. After two years he discontinued this pursuit to explore an independent direction. After moving back to Chicago, in 2011 Marcelo has focused on exhibiting locally, and building a studio practice. In 2016 he furthered his education by participating in the Hyde Park’s Center Program and attending the Visual Art Certificate Program at the University of Chicago’s Graham School.
Andi Crist
Andi Crist was raised in Birmingham, Alabama and earned her BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. She is the founder of Autotelic, a nonprofit arts organization that served artists on the northwest side of Chicago by creating affordable, alternative workspaces and exhibitions from 2010 until 2017. Crist’s creative practice is primarily sculptural, complemented by a career as a gallery preparator and fabricator. Her work touches on subjects of appropriation, practicality, and the assessment of value, frequently commenting on the industry of exhibition-making and unseen labor.
Jory Drew
Jory Drew (He/They) is an artist, educator, and cultural organizer. Their work explores the social constructions of race, gender, and love and the effect these structures have on our lives. Using painting, sculpture, and photography Drew demarcates the formations, patterns, and systems that have caused them and others social, political, and economic insecurity. Over the last ten years in Chicago, IL, they have worked to shape spaces and communities that promote personal accountability, empathy, and radical intimacy for the purpose of Black liberation.
Most recently, Jory Drew has exhibited locally at The Hyde Park Art Center, Goldfinch Gallery, Mana Contemporary, and Roots and Culture. As an educator, Drew is currently a co-lead artist for the Teen Creative Agency at the MCA Chicago. You may also recognize them as a member of 3rd-Language, the queer arts collective and publication, a co-founder of F4F, a domestic venue in Little Village (Chicago), and a co-organizer of Beauty Breaks, an intergenerational beauty and wellness workshop series for Black people along the spectrum of femininity. Drew, is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has participated in the Black Arts Consortium x Hyde Park Art Center Artist Residency (Chicago,IL), the Open Kitchen Residency (Milwaukee, WI), ACRE (Steuben, WI/Chicago), and Hot Box Residency (Austin, TX). He is a proud recipient of a 3Arts’ Make a Wave Grant (2021), a Chicago Artists Coalition SPARK Grant (2021), and a DCASE IAP Grant (2020). They are also a co-curator of An Epithet, a multimedia exhibition featuring artists who use playful strategies of resistance to create sacred monuments and excavate structures of domination, exhibited at Co-Prosperity (Chicago,IL) in 2021.
HG was founded in 2019 by Peter Anastos. It is an artist-run space based out of the old Drag City office and recording studio. HG prioritizes working with emerging artists and artists with ties to the midwest.
Chris Bradley
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I’m in pursuit of clarity as temporary resolve to a creative urge powered by curiosity, experimentation, and expression. This clarity exists only as a momentary flash, a high, which in turn perpetuates the chase. Over time, I’ve developed a sculptural language around representation, poetic use of ordinary subjects, trompe l’oeil techniques, and exhibition as site for the imagination. My studio is a creative laboratory equipped with select tools and materials with which I explore and expand this language. I aim to use this language to encourage my audience to suspend disbelief and reconsider their perceived clarity in this world.
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Chris Bradley, born 1982, is an artist based in Chicago. He has recently presented his work in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Shane Campbell Gallery, Roberto Paradise, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Raleigh, and has been included in group shows at The Renaissance Society, Atlanta Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the NRW-Forum, and the Elmhurst Art Museum. He received his MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. In 2017, he was the recipient of the Meier Achievement Award. In addition to his studio practice, he is an instructor of sculpture at both SAIC and the University of Chicago.
Good Weather is a contemporary art gallery from North Little Rock, Arkansas founded in 2011. The gallery formed through an innate familial approach and from a desire to seed contemporary art discourse in and to Arkansas. Following thirty-eight solo shows and a dozen offsite and hosted exhibitions, the gallery’s primary location transformed in December 2017 into a long-term and perpetually changing fresco by artist Mariel Capanna. Between 2018–2020, Good Weather undertook a singularly itinerant program: curating exhibitions that were hosted by colleagues and organized through various other invitations, collaborations, and self-initiated projects. Since 2016, Good Weather has participated in national and international art fairs and presented exhibitions and focused programming operating as a commercial gallery with locations in Chicago, Illinois and at various offsite locations in North Little Rock, Arkansas.
Dylan Spaysky
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Spaysky’s artworks possess a homespun temperament. Shaped by personal history, Spaysky attempts to reconcile off-the-shelf consumer product as talisman or personal artifact. He pulls material from thrift stores that trade in the excesses of comfortable suburban lifestyles, and as such, his work encourages a dual conversation about abandonment and endurance.
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Dylan Spaysky (b. 1981 Pontiac, Michigan) is an artist who often repurposes common materials and turns them into idiosyncratic and strangely familiar forms. In his newest series of work, Spaysky composes bone sculptures using sanitized fragments from livestock animals and accents these with color nail polish purchased from an estate sale. The artist earned his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2007, and currently live and works in Detroit. Spaysky has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Good Weather (North Little Rock), What Pipeline (Detroit), CUE Art Foundation (New York), Andrew Kreps (New York) (with Mary Ann Aitken), Clifton Benevento (New York), Popps Packing (Detroit), and Cleopatra’s (Brooklyn). He has participated in group exhibitions at Hannah Hoffman (Los Angeles), AWHRHWAR (Los Angeles), Center Galleries (Detroit), What Pipeline (Detroit), Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, NGBK (Berlin), Susanne Hilberry Gallery (Ferndale, Michigan), and with Good Weather at NADA Miami, among others. He has red hair. He was co-director of Cave (Detroit) from 2010 to 2016 and is owner/director at Spaysky Fine Art Gallery LLC (Detroit).
Flyweight is a 1:12 scale exhibition space run by Clare Torina and Jesse Cesario (Brooklyn, NY)
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Our goal was/is to make a space with one major restriction (scale) so that artists can be rid of so many other obstacles. Make it tiny — but perceive it big — without rent, without high transport/shipping/insurance costs, with mobility, while producing very little waste. It’s continued to surprise us that there’s not more discussion around how much trash (often toxic trash…) is produced in making and exhibiting, especially by art fairs. That’s a big thing, but primarily, flyweight exists to allow flexibility for artists to test ideas that would be risky to take on otherwise, and to be able to say yes to major space alterations.
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Rachel Grobstein
Rachel Grobstein creates miniature paintings and sculptures, employing a radical scale shift and handmade detail to invite close scrutiny of often-overlooked parts of daily life, exploring memory, routine, and identity. She is the recipient of awards and residencies including a Museum of Arts and Design Artist Studios residency, a Roswell Artist-in-Residence Fellowship, a Jentel Foundation fellowship, a Hammersley Foundation Grant, a Studios of Key West residency, and a Vermont Studio Center Full Fellowship and Residency supported by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Solo exhibitions include Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX 2020), Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago, IL 2018), Next to Nothing Gallery (New York, NY, 2018), and the Roswell Museum and Art Center (Roswell, NM, 2017). Grobstein received her MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and her BA in Philosophy and Visual Arts from Bowdoin College. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Spaysky Fine Art Gallery LLC is an artist-run space in Southwest Detroit with a temporary annex space in Chicago's Midland Warehouses. SFAGLLC has specialized in producing shows that highlight the works of emerging and underrepresented artist peers through several iterations and locations.
Sara Nishikawa
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So much of my sensibility has to do with specificity and living in the age of melon ballers.
I focus on objects that serve as representations of the utilitarian objects that are part of our everyday routine. Drawing inspiration from existing objects, I make alternative objects that hope to disrupt the comforts of the everyday. They are outlines of the proposed objects negating original function, redefining their design, and putting the focus on the form.
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Sara Nishikawa was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and currently lives and works in Detroit, MI. She has a BA magna cum laude in Psychology from Loyola Marymount University (Los Angeles, CA 2012), a MA in Visual Arts from CSUN (Northridge, CA 2015, and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Arts (Bloomfield Hills, MI 2017). She has exhibited work at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale (South Korea), Simone DeSousa Gallery (Detroit, MI), 1301 Broadway (Detroit, MI), Ann Arbor Art Center (Ann Arbor, MI), Paint Creek Center for the Arts (Rochester, MI) Tessellate Gallery (Pontiac, MI), Reyes Projects (Birmingham, MI), Trinosophes (Detroit, MI), Forum Gallery (Bloomfield Hills, MI), and Mana Contemporary (Chicago, IL) among others. In addition to her studio practice, she has also worked on various projects such as Bulk Space (Exhibition and Project Coordinator), Reyes|Finn (gallery administrator), Mostly Butter residency (director), and Tessellate Residency and Gallery (co-director).
Nick Kramer
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Lately, living in suburban Michigan and in the bubble of Covid, my work has turned domestic. The kitchen counter and a desk I set up to do paperwork are my most generative spots. I’ve been stacking egg shells after breakfast, collecting gum wrappers, finishing childhood notebooks, chopping up paper, that kind of stuff. Leftovers from other parts of life into which I insert intentionality and a little TLC. I go through phases influenced by the shape of my life and the things that end up around me. The parameters of what I do are pretty fluid. However, within those, found objects (or really the idea of found objects) is a constant. Over the years I’ve noticed that either intentionally or unintentionally I’ll build in a distancing or chance element into what I’m making that relinquishes a degree of control. It’s as if I’m fabricating a found object or discovering a new aspect of something I’ve had for a long time.
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Nick Kramer is an artist, curator and occasional writer living and working in the metro Detroit area. Born in New York City, he attended Bard College and received his MFA from USC's Roski School of Art. He has exhibited in venues such as M+B, Los Angeles; Anthony Greaney, Boston; CANADA, New York; Hillary Crisp, London; Laurel Gitlen, New York, The Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, LAXART and The Pit, Los Angeles. He founded AWHRHWAR, an artists' gallery formerly of Los Angeles, now where needed.
Murmurs is an art space located in DTLA focused on championing experimental and emerging art practices. Murmurs exists to challenge what is expected of an art gallery by providing a new model of a multifaceted platform for modalities of expression that have the power to transform reality.
Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya
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Nahuales are mythological beings, witches/shamans that use ancient Aztec abilities of therianthropy to convert to animals. They exist and live alongside me and my family's cosmology. They've settled and share the same plane of existence of living in a small migrant community that's adjacent to the Rio Grande River and to the Camino Real Landfill. Nahuales too share my awe for the desert but have also inhaled the lethal landfill fumes that caused the premature death of my sister inside my mother’s womb.
What if the insidious fumes of landfill waste were to distort the genetic composition of Nahuales? Their shapeshifting from human to animal becomes arrested, leaving them at a liminal in-between space of human and animal. Because of this aberration, a new transfiguration occurs, born of abject queer fecundity. One in which internal organs become visible and curdled, giving these monsters a hypersensitivity to better feel their environment. Horns become claws, or antennae, or split tongues to pick up subtle movements in the air. Eventually, a new type of alchemy is made, evolved and better equipped to deal with hazardous environments.
This curse also causes the Nahuales magical energy to gnarl in on itself, constricting its own body to the point of implosion. What saves and diverts its pressurized abilities is the convergence of reanimated desert refuse; like sunwashed circuit boards that gravitate and latch on to this mutation, a new fantastic becoming stabilized in its own body. Nahuales in turn are a premonition of what a divergent body will look like as our world becomes more and more toxic, a rasquache mythological construction grounded in its new identification and of this time.
They become beings of a future that is already here, but also creatures of a time when desert used to be ocean and our hands were not hands but a thick foot of a muscle leaving behind slime over an already ancient rock.
These creatures then become Chupacabras, monsters born from the collective fears of Latinx communities. A mythological genesis from toxicity, but also a result of assimilation and neo-liberal agendas that led to NAFTA; forced migration, land exploitation, poverty, and gendered violence. The Chupacabras wanders the cities along the border by following old turquoise trading routes replaced by the commerce of NAFTA. Living in the hills next to the house of my uncle Arturo by the outskirts of Juarez, Mexico. A creature with bad posture, dry skin, skinny legs, and gray teeth from drinking man-made lagoon water mixed with laundry detergent is welcomed here, because of its acquired taste for ICE agents.
These Nahualitic creatures appeared on the night my dad crossed the Mexico/U.S. border with my cousin (the one I don't even like) by using a borrowed passport. Standing by, waiting for our turn to talk to the immigration agent’s interrogation, I thought of what it would've been like to cross the border, not on land or water: but on my grandmother's broom, under a battalion of stars and the sweet smell of sacred datura. No documents or fear, just the breeze below our feet. Instead that night, crossing the bridge, we became Coyotes; of both myth and reality.
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Born 1989 in Parral, MX, Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya’s lil monsters are a fantastic becoming that center around anthologies and social issues concerning border culture, abjection, and mestizaje. Aided by magical realism, nahualismo, Sci-Fi, and the labor of his family, his work hybridizes and creates parallels between land, the human, and the animal as a way to investigate the process in which violence eradicates, erases, and erodes communities of color.
The Franklin is an artists-run project space that welcomes artists and curators to engage with the East Garfield Park and Humboldt Park communities through cultural events. The Franklin is located in the backyard of Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan’s home.
Hương Ngô
Hương Ngô is an interdisciplinary artist born in Hong Kong and currently based in Chicago where she is an assistant professor in Contemporary Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research-based practice engages histories of migration and indigeneity through material artifacts that reveal practices of resilience and resistance. Her work traces nuanced paths of struggle that appear in territories of language, the production of knowledge, and narratives of belonging. Both archeological and futuristic, her work operates in layers, continuously making and unmaking an unruly archive.
Ngô's archive-based practice began while a studio fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2012. She was recently awarded the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant in Vietnam (2016) to realize a project, begun at the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer in France, recently exhibited at DePaul Art Museum (2017), and continued through the Camargo Core Program (2018), that examines the colonial history of surveillance in Vietnam and the anti-colonial strategies of resistance vis-à-vis the activities of female organizers and liaisons. Her work, described as “deftly and defiantly decolonial” by New City and “what intersectional feminist art looks like” by the Chicago Tribune, has exhibited at the MoMA, MCA Chicago, Nhà Sàn Collective, The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, and Para Site, and supported by 3Arts, Chicago Artists Coalition, DCASE, and Sàn Art, among others. She has been included in the 2005 Prague Biennial and Prospect.5 Triennial in New Orleans.
Selva Aparicio
Selva Aparicio is an interdisciplinary artist exploring ideas of memory, intimacy, and the temporality of life through installations that celebrate the cyclicity of the natural world. Working with nature’s ephemera, including cicada wings, oyster shells, and human cadavers, her praxis is an extended death ritual which foregrounds a unique reverence for the discarded. Capturing the meanings imbued in these materials and the rituals informing their significance and sentimentality enables both the facilitation of environmental, social, and political activism through art and the creation of outlets for the public navigation of grief and mourning in a world so defined by loss.
Selva Aparicio (b. 1987) is a Catalan artist living and working in Chicago. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MFA in Sculpture from Yale. Her work has been shown internationally in solo and group exhibitions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Yale Center for British Art, Can Mario Museum, CRUSH Curatorial, Kyoto International Craft Center, Instituto Cervantes NY, and the Centre de Cultura Contemporanea de Barcelona. She has received several major awards including a JUNCTURE Fellowship in Art and International Human Rights (2016), the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize (2017), a MAKER Grant from the Chicago Artists Coalition (2020), and was named one of the 2020 breakout artists in Chicago by NewCity Art.
Selva Aparicio's Transformaciones, stick insect legs and poppy flower, 3.4 x 7.2 x 7.9 cm, 📷 Andres Sunyer, image courtesy the artist
Selenas Mountain is a contemporary art gallery in Ridgewood, NY. The program presents a diversity of voices and mediums, with a focus on thematic group exhibitions and original solo exhibitions by emerging contemporary artists. The gallery is an artist-run space co-founded by Chicago natives/The School of the Art Institute of Chicago alumni Olivia Swider and Michael Fleming.
Dabin Ahn
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I love working with references, I don’t go looking for random things, usually inspired by different exhibition spaces I present my work / installations tend to be site specific. I’m equally attracted to valuable things (Ex. Artifacts in museums, vintage Royal Copenhagen figurines) and things of less value (Industrial / construction materials) Both my sculptural work and two dimensional work share a very similar process in that they are presented under the idea of trompe l’oeil. I find myself removing my hand from my work but there are hints about the process and material everywhere. I love markings, markings on the underside of Royal Copenhagen figurines and markings on industrial materials. I look at working with resin and making a canvas painting the same way. I’m taking raw materials and through fabrication process I’m creating a new form / image that is oftentimes realistic therefore easy to recognize/ identify.
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Dabin Ahn creates site-specific installations and artworks that reference art history ranging from Royal Copenhagen antiques to Sol Lewitt to Art Deco Architecture. Utilizing molds and cast resin, Ahn explores tromp l'oeil surfaces while working with art handling materials and construction tools such as tape spools, power drills, and Pink Panther insulation foam as subject matter. Ahn’s work creates a visual dialogue between high brow and low brow and questions the value we place on objects.
Infusing his artwork with a conceptual rigor, Ahn explores the currency and meaning we ascribe to objects of cultural production. His trompe l’oeil sculptures and installations
play with perception by challenging conventions of illusion and materiality. The artist plays with deceptive facades which only reveal their true nature when looking at the list of materials used. In Ahn’s work the surface is usually a red herring which forces the viewer to look closer and to question their own perception. Upon further study the viewer is rewarded with playful and poignant revelations about each piece.
Dabin Ahn (b. 1988, Seoul, Korea) is a visual artist based in Chicago, IL. Ahn received his BFA and MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited in various national and international galleries and institutions. Recent solo exhibitions include Liminal Fictions, Selenas Mountain, Ridgewood, NY; Apocrypha, curated by Stephanie Cristello, Chicago Manual Style, Chicago IL; 2 + 3, Andrew Bae Gallery, Chicago, IL; Records of Light, Gallery Imazoo, Seoul, Korea; Me, Myself, and I, Topohaus, Seoul, Korea. Select group exhibitions include: Ground Floor Biennial, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL; The Green Gallery Works, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Long Hello, curated by Carter Foster and Evan Gruzis, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Four Flags, curated by Stephanie Cristello and Ruslana Lichtzier, Chicago Manual Style, Chicago IL; Appearances to The Contrary, Andrew Bae Gallery, Chicago IL; The 12th Korea International Art Fair, Seoul, Korea; Silence, I discover, is something you can hear, Gallery LVS, Seoul Korea; Asia Contemporary Art Show, Hong Kong. Select press includes: Chicago Magazine, Chicago Gallery News, Tique. Ahn currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Ben Foch
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First and foremost, I’m a painter. That is the space where my concerns as an artist originate. Surface. Ground. Color. Composition. Subject. Hand. Scale. Paintings are stupid. I’ve always loved that.
If I could curate my fantasy 2 person exhibition, it would be Giorgio Morandi and On Kawara. I love how they keep making the same painting over and over again.
I’ve been making paintings of Chester Cheetah, the brand mascot for Cheetos. I like him because he is a cartoon with no narrative. I originally came to him because he felt like a classic representation of the Bad Boy.
Did you know that market research showed that consumers liked the feeling of getting the orange Cheeto flavoring on their hands and sucking it off because it made them feel dirty/naughty? This experience has been intentionally amplified in the product.
Corporate branding is interesting to me. Did you know that UPS brown comes from Pullman Brown? Which was the color George Pullman designed to paint his Pullman Sleeper train cars because it was the color that needed to be washed the Least often?
Those sleeper cars are scary paintings. George Pullman created a ‘company town,’ called Pullman on the South Side of Chicago. It was the site of the infamous Pullman Strike of 1894, which was violently suppressed by the military leaving 30 strikers dead.
His train cars were also where Pullman Porter’s came from. He hired only Black men (former slaves), paid only in tips. They’d work 80+ hours a week. 100% exploitation, but also, the birth of a black middle class and the first all-black union in 1925. I made a UPS brown Bandana Painting.
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Ben Foch’s studio practice deconstructs branding and familiar pop cultural references from the artist’s childhood. Recognizable animated figures such as Miss Piggy, the Pink Panther, and Chester Cheetah become elevated to icon status in Foch’s paintings through the power of repetition. The artist’s use of Newport cigarette packs, bandanas, and the Oakland Raiders as content conceives a conversation of youthfulness, and how pop culture shapes personal experience.
Ben Foch (b. 1977) is an artist based in Chicago. His studio practice is rooted in a tradition of “painting/non-painting”, employing techniques that can be considered both pop and conceptual, tackling topics from institutional critique to race, class and gender identity politics. Recent solo exhibitions include “Haiku” at Selenas Mountain (Ridgewood, NY) and “Hood Ornament” at M. LeBlanc (Chicago). His work was included in the group exhibition “Tricky Passage” at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, curated by Ben Gill. He is currently working on his first NFT project, Cult of Cheetah (cultofcheetah.io), a randomly generated collection of 10,000 unique cheetahs, created from 140 possible traits. Pre-sale for Cult of Cheetah begins April 1, 2022. A launch party celebrating the public sale and Opensea reveal will be hosted at M. LeBlanc April 8, 2022 from 9pm - Midnight.
Blum & Poe was founded by Tim Blum and Jeff Poe in Santa Monica, CA in 1994 as a space to show local and international contemporary art in all media. Blum’s extensive experience in the Japanese art world combined with Poe’s keen knowledge of emerging artists in Los Angeles resulted in an international program of influential artists. The gallery now has locations in Los Angeles, New York, and Tokyo.
Dave Muller
Dave Muller creates paintings and installations that are rooted in his deep fascination with music, how it infiltrates and shapes our identities, and the communal dialogue it generates across cultures. Muller appropriates album art in a painterly style that is both whimsical and factual. The paintings are autobiographical and expressive; adoring as well as historically referential. He is careful to include details such as hype stickers, anachronistic price tags, and extinct record shop labels, always attending to age, use, wear, and tear. These paintings tell idiosyncratic stories of politics, subculture, and atmosphere that have morphed through eras and cultures.
Muller (b. 1964, San Francisco, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. His work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MI; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA. His work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.
Tony Lewis
In an ever-expanding engagement with drawing, Tony Lewis harnesses the medium of graphite powder to confront such social and political topics as race, power, communication, and labor. The material provides a literal and conceptual foundation for the artist's work, as it is stretched, smudged, rubbed, spliced, and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. Graphite powder is an inherently unruly medium, a substance that threatens to wander. Lewis nurtures this dispersal, allowing for the powder to build into a ubiquitous state that settles upon and indiscriminately marks paper surfaces; the graphite-slick studio floor becomes a "tool the same way a pencil is a tool."
Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in Chicago. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions including Anthology 2014–2016, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2018); Plunder, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA (2017); Alms, Comity and Plunder, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy (2016); and nomenclature movement free pressure power weight, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2015). Lewis participated in the 2014 iteration of the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY and was the recipient of the 2017–2018 Ruth Ann and Nathan Perlmutter Artist-in-Residence Award at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA.
Left Field is located in Los Osos, a small town on the central coast of California, which is halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco just off highway 1. The gallery presents exhibitions with the primary goal of bringing to our region, contemporary art not otherwise seen here.
Ben Sanders
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Like a fetish object or tarot card, the charmed poppies hint at a concealed magic. Opium is born of the poppy tear, the sap secreted from within the plant’s seed pod. Pleasure achieved and pain abated from the same elixir. The allure of fantastic escape or drip of salvation both cut only by the emblematic Sans Serif TOYOTA, like the rear view of pickup truck receding into the desert night at the end of a public service announcement — it’s all drugs, kids. Crystalized in swathes of protuberances and pollen, Sanders’s starry eyed organisms host the arcana of another trade, linking Middle America to another far off place. This too, in a puff of smoke.
-Matthew Lax on Sanders's "Poppies" Exhibition
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For Sanders, practices of gardening and cocktail-making hold as much value as a process-rich, finely rendered painting. Complementing his studio work is an enthusiastic, open-ended list of activities, materials and processes, inspired by the domestic and the designed. Whether facilitating highly curated social experiences involving food and beverages, or working with members of diverse, non-art communities, Sanders welcomes the influence of the everyday as a path towards meaning.
Ben Sanders (b. 1989, Arcadia, CA) is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally, as well as commissioned by clients, big and small, throughout the world, including Nike, Dropbox, Louis Vuitton, SSENSE, and The New York Times. Most recently, Sanders’ work has been exhibited at Ochi Projects and Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Asya Geisberg in New York, NY; Left Field in San Luis Obispo, CA; Carl and Sloan in Portland, OR; and LVL3 in Chicago, IL.
Based in Cleveland, SPACES is the resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment. We commission artists from around the world—at all stages of their careers—to make new work that is responsive to timely issues. We use these projects as points of departure to create educational initiatives that help develop a more informed citizenry. Regionally, we distribute grants to artists in Cuyahoga county to support new and urgent works of art.
Bailey Scieszka
Commemorative Beanie Babies often followed major events of the 1990s and early 2000s. These relics of Millennial childhoods were vessels for social traumas and, coupled with nostalgic fervor, they appreciated great monetary value as a result. The Princess Bear, released in 1997, commemorated Princess Diana, whose tragic death fueled media speculation and elaborate conspiracies. The frenzy for the Princess Bear continues to this day, as fascination surrounding the Royals and Diana's relationship to them is further explored through new films and television series.
Three major conspiracy theories are commemorated for Barely Fair through bespoke “Teanie Beanie” (TM) sculptures: The Stanley Kubrick Bear, commemorating NASA's faked moon landing; The Bloody Jackie Kennedy Bear, commemorating the government plot to assassinate JFK; and the Ken Kesey Psychedelic Bear, commemorating the CIA’s Project MKUltra.
These sculptures are a lens through which we can understand commemoration of historically significant events and the conspiracies that envelop them. These theories shape many American beliefs in questionable ways; from why the Civil War was fought to more recent QAnon theories anchored in antisemitic conspiracies that trace back to the 14th century. Scieszka's work will explore how we commemorate history through popular culture, play, and collectibles.
Bailey Scieszka lives and works in Detroit. She holds a BFA from the Cooper Union in New York City. She has recently shown with Atlanta Contemporary (Atlanta), MOCAD (Detroit), Stems (Brussels), Larrie (New York), Maria Bernheim (Zürich), AALA (Los Angeles), and What Pipeline (Detroit). Her puppet dramas have been performed at Paris Internationale and NADA New York. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, Forbes, The New York Times, Mousse, Cura, Cultured, and The Los Angeles Times, What Pipeline recently published More Heart Than Brains: The Collected Plays of Bailey Scieszka. Much of Scieszka’s work emerges from the mind of her alter-ego Old Put, a demonic-shape-shifting-clown whose works across performance, video, painting, and drawing are layered with popular reference.
Based in Los Angeles, Serious Topics is the brainchild of artist couple Kristin Calabrese and Joshua Aster that hosts wildly experimental, collaborative projects that are conceptually messy and attempt to embody the spirit of art.
Salomón Huerta
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When I was 6 years old, I carried a gun for the first time. Before crossing the border from Tijuana to San Diego, my dad would strap his .38-Special revolver inside my pants to avoid inspection. He loved his gun. It protected him and his family. Once we moved to East Los Angeles' notorious Ramona Gardens housing project -- one of the most violent neighborhoods in the country at the time -- my father carried his gun 24/7. Who needs the cops, he would say? In the evenings, he would place his loaded .38 on the nightstand, where I would place his daily food and drinks. For me, this series of paintings represents more than portraits. They symbolize a simple way of life in the midst of a violent, hyper-reality.
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Previously known for his paintings of standing or sitting figures with their backs to the viewers, this body of work signals a departure for Huerta. This series moves beyond serial depictions of a single subject, and look to Huerta’s environment and relationships for inspiration. The paintings remain representational and, primarily, portraiture. They continue Huerta’s process of distilling classical elements for overlaying modern social and cultural content for scrutiny. His process and paint handling, color pallet and intimate investigations link together the distinct bodies of work in a delicate balance of the familiar and new, provoking viewers to look with inwards.
Salomón Huerta (Tijuana, Mexico, 1965) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, and exhibitions at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC, and a solo exhibition of his paintings at Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX. Huerta's paintings are in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, among others. Salomón's upcoming show at Harper's NY opens in July.
Kysa graduated with honors from the Glasgow School of Art in Glasgow, Scotland. She has exhibited at, among other venues, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Tang Museum, The DeCordova Museum, Dublin Contemporary, The Nicolaysen Museum, The Katonah Museum of Art, The Hudson River Museum, The 2nd Biennial of the Canary Islands, The National Academy of Science, Nancy Littlejohn Fine Art, Morgan Lehman Gallery, Von Lintel Gallery, and Halsey McKay. Her work has been written about extensively including in Art Forum, The New York Times, Interview Magazine, and The San Francisco Chronicle. Her work is included in many public collections including MIT, Google, Microsoft, The Progressive Collection, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse. She is a NYFA fellow (2003) and Pollock Krasner Grant recipient (2010)
Kysa Johnson
Kysa Johnson’s drawings, paintings and installations explore patterns in nature that exist at the extremes of scale. Using the shapes of subatomic decay patterns, maps of the universe or the molecular structure of pollutants or of diseases and cures – in short, microscopic or macroscopic “landscapes” – it depicts a physical reality that is invisible to the naked eye. Often these micro patterns are built up to form compositions that relate to them conceptually.
Recent series have used particle decay patterns as a visual alphabet to explore the life and death of stars (The Long Goodbye), the origins and cultural valence of gold (As Above, So Below), and the creation of the hydrocarbon in nebula (CRUDE). All using the microscopic, telescopic, and historic to illuminate our present. Whereas series like The Long Goodbye use these marks of dissolution and transformation to mine those processes at the cosmic scale, Ghosts In Common uses imagery firmly planted on earth from two time periods interchangeably to explore echos of shared human experience across the ages. This work focuses on the small similar things that we see every day to meditate on connections through time and history.
A series within the series uses imagery from her backyard herb garden and drawings and paintings of domestic gardens from the 14th century. Even through grown centuries apart, all are filled with similar plants - wild roses, mint, rosemary, and thyme among others. These are the same herbs and flowers that plague doctors would stuff in their beak-like masks, or people would carry in kerchiefs to hold in front of their noses before venturing out into the streets during their plague.
BOZOMAG is an art gallery situated in the Poolhouse of a residence in Los Angeles.
Raymie Iadevaia
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Like a cat brushing its head on people and places, I paint to get closer to the textures of the world. My paintings are chromatic mixtures of domestic spaces and imagined landscapes: house cats, coffee cups, flowers and plants, looking out windows, meandering hiking trails, staircases, strange architectures, woodland creatures, and distant cities. I start the day through a diaristic drawing practice, sometimes to anticipate a painting, other times when the painting has already begun. The accumulation of pen and ink cross-hatching is used to solidify form, build density, and indent the page with a rattled field of traveled directions.
As a translation from the drawn meditations, I layer oil paint from thin to thick passages, scrambling the surface with a multiplicity of marks and brushstrokes. Sometimes using a single brush for the entire painting. The arm forms the initial gesture, activating and toning the surface with color, a vague mood, and sense of motion. Then, the paintings are made from the wrist and fingers: frenetic, nervous, anxious, jerking, jittery movements to expel and move the energy from my body to the surface. I want to keep the eye moving inside the paintings forever. Becoming endlessly surprised, seeing something new with each passing glance. Wouldn't it be amazing if a painting can nourish like food, photosynthesizing the design of pigments on a surface, keeping one alive just through the act of looking? Like a painting great cauldron, swirling continuously, stewing and steeping flavors, transforming ingredients, extracting more and more intensity from the coalescing bowl of substances: the mass pot paint.
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Raymie Iadevaia (b. 1984, Newport Beach, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received a BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts and an MFA from Art Center College of Design. His work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Switzerland, Berlin, and Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include, The Intangible Forest at Halsey McKay in East Hampton, NY & group exhibitions include, Celestial Opera, Human Cathedrals curated by Lauren Wolchik at Paradice Palace, NY and Mirror Eye curated by Kate Mothes and Jes Cannon at Ortega y Gasset, NY.
4th Ward Project Space (4WPS) is an artist-run exhibition space based in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. 4WPS honors the artistic direction of individual artists and seeks to cultivate an audience audience. 4WPS operates without regard to commercial interests.
4WPS is directed by: Mika Horibuchi (co-founder), James Kao (co-founder), SaraNoa Mark, and Valentina Zamfirescu (co-founder)
Kay Hofmann
Kay Hofmann’s fluidly anthropomorphic sculptures, carved out of marble, alabaster, wood, and granite, capture figures in various states of movement. Each work is hand-carved, without the assistance of modern power tools. Throughout her oeuvre, Hofmann renders figures surrounded by or encompassed in ropes, draped fabric, vines, and marine vegetation. The compositional incorporation of raw untouched stone places Hofmann’s figures in states of mediation or deliverance, one that oscillates between figuration and abstraction.
Though she does not consider the work to be self-portraiture, it is autobiographical. Hofmann sees herself in every piece of stone, stating that in the process of making “I begin to think of myself as her.” As one traces the development and continued focus of her practice, the recuring motifs begin to reveal a manifestation of physical and emotional liberation.
Kay Hofmann (born 1932, Green Bay, WI) works and lives in Rockford, IL. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1955 and studied at Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris (1955-56). Hofmann has mounted numerous one-person exhibitions in her sixty-year career including Rahr-West Museum, Manitowoc, WI; Gilman Galleries, Chicago, IL; Peter Miller Gallery, Chicago, IL; and Mindscape Gallery, Chicago, IL. Her work is found in collections across the country including Michael Jordan Collection, Borg-Warner Collection, and Henry Marcus Collection.
Michiko Itatani
"For me, to be an artist each day is an intellectual choice and a carefully chosen commitment. There is no intoxication."
Starry Night Encounter
一期一会 “ichi-go ichi-e”
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“Starry Night Encounter” is my personal translation of the Japanese term “ichi-go ichi-e”. It is an idea found in Zen Buddhism and in the concept of the transitory nature of things. The term is particularly adopted in the Japanese tea ceremony: a 7’x7’ space, a guest, a simple serving of a cup of tea.
One should delight in each encounter as if it were a “once-in-a-lifetime” occurrence. Treat every meeting as if it is the first and the last because it may not come again, or the same meeting repeats infinite times.
In my recent work, I am going back to this very basic feeling in a personal way. Using a fictional and symbolic space, I condense experienced and imagined multi-layered encountering events. I appreciate every encounter with a person, a creature, a tree, a flower, a rock, a room, a book, a song, a painting or a life.
In my youth, I wanted to pursue writing fiction. I still strongly believe in fiction's ability to express the deepest truths. In these compositions, libraries, museums, public spaces and performance halls are intermingled with images of the cosmos. It’s my fiction writing: incomplete, fragmented and under inquiry.
Through this working process, I am trying to come to terms with the complex reality of the 21st Century. And my vision stays pathetically optimistic.
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Michiko Itatani is a Chicago-based artist who was born in Osaka, Japan. After she received her BFA (1974) and MFA (1976) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returned to her alma mater in 1979 to teach in the Painting and Drawing department. Itatani has received the Illinois Arts Council Artist’s Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Her work is collected in many museums, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Olympic Museum, Switzerland; Villa Haiss Museum, Germany; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Canada; Museu D’art Contemporani (MACBA), Spain; Hyogo Prefecture Art Museum, Japan; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South Korea.
Ми - художня галерея, розташована всередині колишнього приватного бару, заснованого колишнім польським футболістом і тренером Олімпійських ігор, що розташована в районі автосалонів, які в основному вживані в місті Чикаго, який гноиться всередині прихованого, але дуже реального " це те, що ви робите», ставлення, яке набагато кращим прикладом є його місто-побратим Київ!
Mari Eastman
Mari Eastman (b.1970, San Francisco, CA) holds an MFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She has been in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Berkeley Museum of Art (Berkeley, CA), Barbara Gladstone Gallery (New York), and Maureen Paley (London) and had solo shows at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (Los Angeles), Cherry and Martin Gallery (Los Angeles), Sprüth and Magers Projekte (Munich), among others. Recent solo shows include Bombon Projects in Barcelona, Spain, and Grifter in New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and Artforum.com and featured in Contemporary Art Daily. Eastman lives and works in Chicago and is on the faculty of the Painting and Drawing Department at School of The Art Institute, Chicago.
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I am half Japanese, and I grew up in Asia (Singapore, then Japan) surrounded by ceramics, carpets, carved furniture, and animals from Bali. My mom is a huge enthusiast of decorative arts and would take us to all sorts of places so that she could buy woven textiles and other artifacts … I remember when I was six or seven and sat at the dinner table across from a hanging indigo blue Chinese carpet depicting a deer under a tree with a crane flying above. Actually they still have it. It's amazing. I guess that's where the decorative elements stem from.
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Dominique Knowles
Knowles’ work invites through the archetypal & moves beyond as an incredibly specific expression of interspecies companionship. At once a seemingly private language, its monumental character reveals that the work is generated from primordial knowledge. They garner strength from the formless, fluid movement of unbounded rhythm.
His poetics are epic in scale, with an intimate cadence that ebbs & flows in sub-realities. There’s a symbiosis of confessional narrative & emotional lyric, acting as a soft ground for a central figure of luminously erotic queer desire.
Romantic longing nourishes an empathic absorption into a space pulsating with aliveness. The aesthetics consistent resonance of humane & animal grief is redemptive. Through alchemy, there’s hope for rebirth as its ochre atmosphere breathes prenatal warmth & a givenness for meditations on ancient sentience.
This open & untethered vision of inter-being is more than a pollyannish dream of a beautiful ecology. The stakes of this cosmology are deep within solemn contemplation of what is nature, how does one maintain another’s quality of life & what capacity of being death doula allows for a way to die with dignity & grace.
Dominique Knowles (b. 1996 in The Bahamas) lives and works in Chicago and Paris. Knowles received both his MFA in Painting as a New Artist Society Award scholar in 2020 as well as his BFA in 2017 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Chapter NY (New York, NY), White Columns (New York, NY), Misako and Rosen (Tokyo, JP), KINDL (Berlin, Germany), Institut Findlandais (Helsinki, FIndland), Andrew Kreps Gallery (New York, NY), Vdrome (Milan, IT), Galerie Layr (Vienna, Austria), Sperling (Munich, Germany), Four Flags at Chicago Manuel Style (Chicago, IL), Soccer Club Club (Chicago, IL), The Green Gallery East (Milwaukee, WI), The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (Nassau, Bahamas), Popop Studios (Nassau, Bahamas), The Bahamas International Film Festival (Nassau, Bahamas), The Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Medulla Gallery (Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago), 14°N 61°W (Martinique), Halle 14 (Leipzig, Germany), Elmhurst Art Museum (Elmhurst, Illinois), The Packing Plant (Nashville, TN) and Julius Caesar (Chicago, IL). Knowles has participated in a residency at The Suburban (Milwaukee, WI). Knowles is featured in publications such as Artforum, Frieze Magazine, Spike Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Süddeutsche Zeitung, FAZ, Garage Magazine, Contempoaray Art Daily, Art Viewer, Bad at Sports, Arc Magazine, Arts of the Working Class, Parnass, Kuba Paris, Blank Canvas, Das Kunstmagazin, The Seen Journal and The Poor Farm Press.
For Barely Fair 2022, ODD ARK LA will present a solo project by Los Angeles based artist Dan Levenson who has produced a miniature version of his "SKZ Kindergarten”, a preschool attached to the imaginary State Art Academy, Zürich (SKZ). In this school, children learn the same basic formalist principles taught to the adult art students. The maquette version of the preschool includes scale models of the SKZ's flat-pack Kindergarten Easels, Mannequins, Painting Aprons, and wall hangings, all of which reinforce the lesson being taught.
Dan Levenson
Dan Levenson is a Los Angeles-based visual artist working in installation, performance, video, painting, and sculpture. His work addresses issues of subjectivity, education, creativity and freedom and takes the form of artifacts rescued from the ruins of an imaginary art school: the State Art Academy, Zurich (its initials in Swiss-German are SKZ). As a painter, he follows the strict formalist pedagogy of his imaginary school, geometrically dividing metrically sized canvases to create abstract compositions. He expands on the story through performance, installation and video. Levenson has taught performative drawing lessons at the Hammer Museum, American Jewish University, USC’s Roski School of Art, and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute in Berlin, Germany.
His recent work concerns the Kindergarten attached to the imaginary art school. “SKZ Children’s Painting Workshop” is an experiment in collaboration with children, presented as installations and performances. The workshop draws inspiration from Friedrich Fröbel’s original 1837 concept of the Kindergarten: a garden that promotes natural learning and creative growth. Children are invited into an installation environment with sculptural painting easels, hand-painted painting smocks, and brightly colored banners where they paint on large abstract coloring-book pages. Their interactions with the printed composition invite reflection on creativity and freedom.
Dan Levenson has exhibited at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Vielmetter Los Angeles; Honor Fraser, Los Angeles; Praz-Delavallade, Paris and Los Angeles; de boer gallery, Los Angeles; PARTICIPANT INC, NYC; LAXART, Los Angeles; White Columns, NYC; and Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA. He is the recipient of a Pollock/Krasner grant and Yaddo and MacDowell Fellowships, among other awards.
