2000s Exhibitions
Previous University Gallery Exhibitions
2009
unFiction
Open January 13 through February 15, 2009
University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present unFiction from January 13 through February 15, 2009. unFiction features nine video artists and photographers whose works blur the defining aspects of fact and fiction.
Informed by modern media presences such as YouTube, whose submissions fuse varying degrees of documentation and artifice, the work in unFiction is at times indistinguishable from such products of popular culture. The included work comments on a culture which, through media, constructs reality and in turn creates abstraction through the inclusion of uncertain fact.
Among the works featured are Cameron Jamie’s signature work BB in which the spectacle of suburban backyard wrestling becomes the actual subject of the work. Zoe Crosher’s The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois positions seemingly endless photographs of a family friend remaking her into a faux-celebrity/heroine ingenue. Joe Sola’s performance-based Studio Visitdocuments actual studio critiques interrupted by the artist leaping through his studio window. Lena von Lapschina’s dual-projected assemblage of images taken from her bedroom window in Vienna is accompanied by hypnotic acid-jazz by Nuclear Los. Photographer Charlie White’s series entitled Everything is American consists of an array of tableaux remaking iconic moments of Americana.
Curated by Bill Conger
Xiaown Chen: Great Smoke
Open January 20 through February 15, 2009
Anna Schachte: Graveyards and Parking Lots
Open February 24 through March 29, 2009
Stephanie Brooks: Distance Intimacy
Open February 24 through April 5, 2009
Distance Intimacy focuses on artwork Brooks has created since 2002, supplemented by a selection of her earlier work for historical context. The title of the exhibition derives from a series of sonnets the artist composed using actual email sign-offs from personal correspondence.
As the exhibition title suggests, much of Brooks’ recent work occupies an interzone between distance and intimacy, personal and impersonal. Among the sources she transforms through formal reduction are love poetry, family photographs, cherished books, and other totems of ubiquitous sentimentality. While the scale and subject matter of her work are intimate, the artist subverts their welcome through abstraction, slyly distilling verses down to place-holding punctuation marks, or reducing books of love poems into blank wooden blocks which retain only their sources’ dimensions.
Stephanie Brooks lives and works in Chicago. Her work has been exhibited in Berlin, Chicago, Denmark, London, Los Angeles, New York, Vienna, and Phoenix. She teaches sculpture and writing classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. She received her M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and her B.F.A. from Ohio University.
Curated by Kendra Paitz
Resources
Eric Garcia
Open March 3 through March 13, 2009
Jutta Strohmaier
Open April 7 through May 9, 2009
Student Annual
Open April 14 through May 9, 2009
Harold Gregor: Radiant Plains
Open June 9 through September 13, 2009
For forty years, Harold Gregor's landscapes have captured, if not defined, the geometry and richness of the central Illinois countryside. Radiant Plains is a selection of paintings and watercolors from 2000-2009, revealing a bold, experimental shift in this renowned Midwestern artist's work.
Adam Farcus: My Universe and Yours
Open August 25 through September 13, 2009
University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present My Universe and Yours, an exhibition of recent work by Adam Farcus, from August 25 through September 13, 2009. Farcus is an alumnus of Illinois State University.
My Universe and Yours, which spans Galleries 2, 2.5, and 3, provides an overview of Farcus's varied thematic explorations. He transforms everyday materials with a sincere blend of wit and poetic longing, tapping into our collective (and often overlooked) sense of fantasy; excavating his own family history; and playfully intervening in our dominant consumer culture. A piece of cardboard—folded, pierced, and painted black—becomes one's personal section of the night sky when hung just below the ceiling lights and given a poetic title: The Sky I Was Born Under. A projected still image of the artist in a self-made wolf mask, entitled Farkas (Wolf), is the artist's attempt to understand his family heritage: Farkas, the original spelling of his surname, means "wolf" in Hungarian and references an ongoing family debate over its origins in Hungary or Poland. For his Walgreens Interventions Farcus inserts his own unsigned artworks into photo frames available for sale in Chicago-area Walgreens stores, subverting typical art market channels and democratically distributing his artwork.
Adam Farcus lives and works in Chicago. His work has been exhibited at the Hyde Park Arts Center, Chicago; Second Bedroom Project Space, Chicago; McLean County Arts Center, Bloomington, IL; and the Miami Bridge Art Fair, Miami. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, his B.F.A. from Illinois State University, and his A.A. from Joliet Junior College.
Curated by Kendra Paitz
Fantastic LA
Open September 22 through November 8, 2009
Featuring work by a selection of Los Angeles-based artists whose energized paintings reflect the cacophony and diffuse landscape of Los Angeles.
Works by Dan Bayles, Gavin Bunner, Brian Calvin, Dave Deany, Bart Exposito, Alexandra Grant, Dennis Hollingsworth, and Phil Wagner.
Stephen Lack: Autonation
Open September 22 through November 8, 2009
Stephen Lack gained prominence in the 1980s East Village scene for his representations of violent crime and suburban dystopia. This selection of paintings and sculpture from 1984-2009 centers on the pervasive image of the automobile in Lack's work, infusing optimistic 1960s styling with foreboding nuclear hues.
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Press
John Arndt: Gardening at Night
Open November 17 through December 13, 2009
John Arndt's recent Gardening at Night series offers subtle meditations on environmentally sustainable practices, from sculptures encasing compost to monochromatic paintings made from compost tea. The artist repurposes discarded materials into sculptures and paintings that question authentic versus synthetic nature. Arndt's work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Houston, and Rome. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and lives and works in Forest Park, IL. Gardening at Night will continue through December 13.
Curated by Kendra Paitz
Faculty Biennial
Open November 17, 2009 through January 31, 2010
A multiplicity of work by current studio, art education, and graphic design faculty in the School of Art. The Faculty Biennial features work by School of Art faculty working in painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass, drawing, photography, printmaking, video, graphic design, metals, and wood. The Studio Art, Graphic Design, and Art Education areas are represented. Among the artists exhibited are those who have shown their work nationally and internationally.
2008
Jim Lutes: Paintings & Drawings from 1995 - 2008
Open February 19 through April 14, 2008
University Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Jim Lutes, comprising works made between 1995 and 2008.
Lutes’ paintings since the mid-1990s intertwine representational elements and abstract markings: images of landscapes, interiors, and figures are overlaid with abstracted networks of painterly swirls or cartoonish blobs which at times all but obscure the painting underneath. Self-referential portraiture and media-derived imagery are subsumed into an intense, ongoing exploration of painterly technique amalgamating acrylics, egg tempera, oils and encaustic in various combinations. Critic David Pagel has described Lutes’ work paradoxically as the “netherworld between intention and accident, spontaneity and formula.”
Lutes is a Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was an Associate Professor in the School of Art at Illinois State University from 1995-1999. He has exhibited extensively in Chicago; New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Brussels, Belgium and Kassel, Germany. His work has been included in the Whitney Biennial, the Corcoran Biennial, and Documenta IX, as well as solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago. This exhibition is supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
A monograph with an essay by Terry Myers will accompany the exhibition
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Dzine
Open March 3 through April 13, 2008
Sarah Nesbit: New Work
Open April 15 through May 9, 2008
Zoe Crosher
Open September 16 through October 3, 2008
The Graphic Imperative
Open September 23 through October 31, 2008
Transfigurations
Open October 7 through October 31, 2008
Bay Area documentary photographer Jana Marcus is known for her compassionate and revealing images of underground subcultures. Her award-winning exhibition, Transfigurations, is a groundbreaking photographic series on the transgender community.
Public awareness of transgender issues has grown over the past decade. The increased visibility of transgender persons, however, has resulted in an increase in discrimination and violence. According to the Gender Education and Advocacy organization, “Transgendered people are the most stigmatized and misunderstood of the larger sexual minorities (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender)”. In spite of this, the transgender community is emerging into its own place in history.
Displayed beside texts from interviews with her subjects, these stark, large-format photographs capture the transformed faces and bodies of those whom Marcus describes as “Truly self-made men and women”.
*Blake’s portrait appears in the exhibition.
The Election Show
Open November 4 through November 11, 2008
The Election Show is one of many concurrent exhibitions being hosted by galleries and museums throughout the U.S., and providing artists with the opportunity to address the high-keyed opinions, ideologies, and debate surrounding the Presidential election on November 2nd, 2004. Throughout its history, art has been a leading vehicle for expressing political thought. Artists such as Delacroix, Goya, Daumier, Thomas Nast, and Sue Coe have consistently taken advantage of art’s unique ability to convey and sway political opinion. The Election Show is a non-juried exhibition—all entries will be displayed and all viewpoints are welcome. There is no effort on the part of the organizers to present a fair and balanced view of sentiments concerning the upcoming election.
Deborah Aschheim
Open November 4 through December 14, 2008
MFA Biennial
Open November 11 through December 14, 2008
University Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of the 2008 MFA Biennial. The MFA Biennial has been one of our most popular and well-attended exhibitions, featuring a wide range of media. Held once every two years, the MFA Biennial is an exhibition of artwork by all students currently pursuing a Master’s of Fine Art degree in the Art Department at Illinois State University. Artworks submitted and displayed reflect the changing concerns and trends of the art world at large. It also provides our community an excellent opportunity to evaluate and enjoy numerous artworks by students attending Illinois State. An opening reception will be held on November 11 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Artists
- Devyn Baron
- Emily Brooks
- Derek Clem
- Jennifer Crones
- Matthew Cummings
- Jennifer Hansen
- Casey Hochhalter
- Eleanor Jensen
- Timothy Kowalczyk
- Marie-Susanne Langille
- James May
- Akshatha Rangarajan
- Connie Richards
- Jeffrey Robinson
- Nicholas Satinover
- Trew Schiefer
- Christopher Tice
- Paul Trapp
- Britten Traughber
- Jared Wittenmyer
2007
Carrie Gundersdorft
Open January 18 through February 1, 2007
Johnston Foster: Seasons in the Abyss
Open January 18 through March 9, 2007
University Galleries is pleased to present Johnston Foster: Seasons in the Abyss. This exhibition consists of six large-scale sculptural installations, each of which is fabricated out of discarded materials such as Venetian blinds, Astroturf, bicycle and auto tires, tent poles, traffic cones, and foam. These materials are combined and fastened together in purposefully slapdash fashion, but the artist's playful approach belies a mordant take on unbridled consumerism, the insatiable quest for power, and other pitfalls of post-industrial excess.
In the titular sculpture Seasons in the Abyss—a colossal tree form covered with green carpet scraps—the crafting of specific "ornaments" is as slyly deceptive as the dark humor Foster's art engenders. From a distance a microscope, ashtray, or animal trap might be mistaken for an actual commercial product; a closer look reveals that every object is handcrafted by the artist. Model car tires stand-in for instrument knobs, the cigarette butts are hollow paper, even the trap blade is hand cut out of scrap iron.
Past Times: Remembering, Remapping, Recovering
Open August 21 through September 16, 2007
In conjunction with the 150th anniversary of the founding of Illinois State University, Past Times explored previous uses of the Center For The Visual Arts' present site. Artists Amber Ginsburg and Katie Hargrave teamed up with the Illinois State University and the Bloomington-Normal community to create an exhibition that illuminates the historic connection between the development of the University IS (N) U and the towns.
Each weekday at noon University Galleries offered free 30-minute walking tours of the Center for the Visual Arts grounds led by a variety of guides including actors in period costumes, historians, and artists. Viewmaster® Viewers will be provided for all tour participants, featuring digitally altered photographs combining historic and contemporary scenes. In the exhibitions at University Galleries, the various histories of ISU were explored, such as the former trolley line, and archery, tennis, and football fields.
Marks from the Matrix
Open September 25 through October 28, 2007
Cariana Carianne
Open November 6 through December 1, 2007
Frank Pollard
Open November 6 through December 16, 2007
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2006
Michelle Grabner: The Suburban, Normal Division
Open January 24 through March 26, 2006
University Galleries is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Michelle Grabner—an artist, professor, art critic, and curator, who appropriates visual information from her environment and applies it to her personal and professional spheres.
Throughout the 1990s, Grabner's subtle and sensuous paintings re-articulated the initial intrinsic beauty of patterns found in household items such as blankets, placemats, weavings, grapefruit bags, and colanders. Domesticity was brought literally to the surface in these paintings: Grabner spray-painted through porous or perforated materials directly onto canvas, then systematically filled in each faint “stencil” mark by hand with enamel or flocking. To most eyes, the paintings were abstract, yet, paradoxically, their surfaces were realistic evidence of the household objects from which they were generated. Suffusing the practical with the formal, the playful with the useful, these paintings extended the Modernist trope of the pure grid into the realm of everyday life.
Over the years Grabner's work has evolved from the tangible to the philosophical, finding inspiration in concepts of “goodness” from Plato, Wittgenstein, and Dewey. The artist's Goodness Paintings (2001-2004) engage the immaterial world of rainbows, visible light, and thought. Radiating from each painting's center, a succession of undulating bands of pastel color relate to Dewey's concept of reflective thought as a “con-sequence of consecutive ordering in which each determines the next as its proper outcome, while each, in turn, leans back on its predecessors.”
In a similar vein, the ethereal rainbows in Grabner's wall “drawings” transform public art spaces by simulating an outdoor phenomenon strongly associated with optimism, fortune, and good luck. Consisting of colored flock spray-pumped onto a wall coated with spray adhesive, these textured works change over time as soft air currents from visitors cause bits of the flocking to drift to the floor. At University Galleries, Grabner will further extend the inherent time element by periodically installing, vacuuming off, and reinstalling flocked drawings on a single 20-foot wall in the gallery. The artist has also installed wall drawings in Los Angeles, London, Milwaukee, Chicago, and New York.
A second process-oriented installation will consist of interchangeable arrangements of Grabner's paper weavings—comprising Color-aid strips woven through a backing sheet of paper—on a large area of the gallery's floor.
In addition, a third installation—the most collaborative and complex in the exhibition—will be constructed and will change over time. In the center of University Galleries, a show within a show will be installed: a simulated, life-sized replica of The Suburban, an eight-by-eight-foot artist project space Grabner has maintained since 1998 in a former auto body shop a few steps from her house in Oak Park, Illinois. University Galleries' recontextualized version of The Suburban will accommodate a compressed exhibition schedule of bi-weekly one-person shows.
Additional bodies of work include: (1) the Black-Ground paintings: hypnotic spirals on black paper composed of tiny hand-painted dots in various shades of grey. (2) two series of photographs, the Garden Rainbows and the black-and-white Spiderwebs, which blend Grabner's ongoing interests in process, light, and the historical relationship between photography and drawing, (3) a selection of video collaborations with David Robbins and Brad Killam, including One Mother's Love (2003), a faux-instructional “say know to drugs” piece, and Holiday Lights (2002), a survey of suburban homeowners' aesthetics as seen in their installation of Christmas lights.
Although Grabner has had several one-person exhibitions in London, Melbourne, Los Angeles, New York, Boston and Chicago, her show at University Galleries will represent her first large-scale solo museum survey. There will be an artist's reception on Tuesday, January 24, 2006, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. Grabner will be giving an artist talk on Wednesday, January 25, 2006, at noon. Admission to the reception, artist talk, and exhibition are all free.
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but you gave me flowers
Open April 4 through May 7, 2006
Curated by Kendra Paitz
In the green
you will find the immense rose
of Always.
-Federico García Lorca
Flowers stand as a seminal token of romantic love: that corporeal, traditional gift given as a symbolic promise of the bitterly intangible: love, devotion and togetherness. Though emblematic of permanence of affection, they are ultimately disposable. They will sag, wilt, die, and be forgotten.
but you gave me flowers uses sentimental and nostalgic imagery to explore the nature of love and loss, the inundation of emotions and implications that can be produced by one simple gesture. From the excitement and hope of new love in Danielle Gustafson-Sundell’s everlasting gobstopper love (the 2 of us) to longing memory in the aftermath of loss evident in Benjamin Gardner’s only the plum blossoms know me, each work touches upon an oversimplified aspect of these feelings.
The dual nature of the plaid and heart-patterned fabric in Karen Reimer’s Boundary Troubles 1 shows the merging and attachment of two and the complications that can result. Leslie Baum’s Skokie, Untitled, and Untitled (Green Flowers) serve as wistful yet generic reminders of time and place.
The heavy layering of paint and imagery in Benjamin Gardner’s i promised you a rose garden, produces a calmer, strikingly poetic play on the notion of reminiscence and melancholy. The pink-hued patchwork fabric and appliqué flowers of Danielle Gustafson-Sundell’s one perfect iron-on moment sum up the over-sentimentalized, over-romanticized view of love and loss evident in this exhibition.
Thomas Woodruff: Freak Parade
Open September 26 through November 5, 2006
Thomas Woodruff’s Freak Parade is an ambitious and dazzling parade of images that celebrates beauty in aberrance. The Parade’s hapless yet noble characters march gaily across a black expanse, each member on a different panel. The procession begins with Anatomy Boy, an elegant lad flayed from the shoulders down, and ends with Sweeper, a grim reaper dressed in a costume that might be described as “heavy metal Watteau,” bringing up the rear. In between are thirty other attractions of wild imagistic imagination. One meets a “Man of Lettuce;” a tattooed panther; Siamese wolves in sheep’s clothing; a giant troubadour insect; a multi-breasted baton twirler; a virginal, footless somnambulist; and an assortment of many other memorable characters. They are all rendered in loving detail and delicately embellished with tiny rhinestones.
Woodruff began this project in late 2000 as a reaction against the global standardization of culture. A master of hybridizing vocabularies from the past and present, Woodruff references sideshow banners, Pompeian wall frescoes, Baroque religious paintings, theatrical posters, and Victorian penmanship charts to create a new yet oddly familiar world. It’s as if Renaissance artist Archimboldo collaborated on a project with Hollywood costumer Adrian. References to “normal” parades (Mummer, Tournament of Roses, Mardi Gras, Macy’s) are all here but turned on their heads Each image has a caption, title, or poem included. Written by the artist, these texts add another level of meaning to the pictures. They are deliberately subdued and darkened, and subvert the viewer’s usual response—so conditioned through advertising—to image and text.
Born in 1957, Thomas Woodruff has had an unusual career. He has had over 20 one-person exhibitions, and his work has been seen in museum shows internationally. His major gallery works are created in series. In the past, these works have often been elegiac in nature and dealt with the AIDS epidemic. His shows have included the rocket ship series, “All Systems Go”(1999) and his group of 365 individual apple portraits, “Apple Canon” (1996). He has contributed award-winning illustrations to nearly every major periodical in America, and has created book jackets for novels by Anne Tyler, Robertson Davies, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and many others. Woodruff illustrated Jack Handy’s “Big Thick Novel” for the Emmy award-winning season of Saturday Night Live. He has also designed for the theatre, most recently the décor and costumes for “Salome” at the Hawaiian Opera Theatre (2000). Woodruff worked as a tattooist in the late 1980s, and he has a cult status in the alternate art scene. He is presently the chair of the Department of Illustration and Cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. A documentary on this project, “Thomas Woodruff’s FREAK PARADE,” was produced in 2004 for Gallery HDTV.
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2005
Siebren Versteeg
Open January 18 through February 27, 2005
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Sad Songs
Open March 8 through April 17, 2005
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Shadows | Images: Andy Warhol
Open August 23 through October 2, 2005
Warhol's Shadow prints, like their counterparts on canvas, represent a far less familiar aspect of the artist's work than the celebrated icons of Elvis, Marilyn, and Campbell's. Nevertheless, they are reminders of Warhol's canny sense of the duality of image and abstraction. The images were silkscreened from photographs of shadows, pointing to the ethereality of all subjects, whether celluloid heroes or skulls.
Sang-ah Choi: moremoremore
Open September 20 through November 6, 2005
Born in Korea, and working in New York and Portland, OR, Sang-ah Choi packs her work with a seductive blend of East and West, kitsch and classical, contemplative and commercial, plasmic and plastic. Choi uses glitter, holograms, paint, and Sumi ink to create swirling, intricate patterns of bubbles, Venuses with cartoon eyes, and Taoist nature symbols for immortality—all interwoven into candy-hued fantastic landscapes. Featuring paintings, drawings, large-scale pop-up paper sculptures, and pop-up books, the artist's first solo museum exhibition will include several works created specifically for the show.
Curated by Barry Blinderman, with illustrated catalogue.
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2004
Repulsion
Open January 27 through March 6, 2004
Repulsion, curated by New York artist Heidi Schlatter, is inspired by the unsettling claustrophobic atmosphere of Roman Polanski's 1965 film of the same name. The mutations of physical and mental space in the film--endless corridors, cracks in walls, mirrors, drains, rotting meat relate the lead character's descent into madness--provide a context for a grouping of artworks that explore complexities of experience balanced between what individuals feel and process "inside" and what happens in the "outside" realm of social norms, conventions and collective history. The exhibition, housed within a mazelike fabricated structure, features work by eleven artists whose work provokes entry into this mental landscape.
Chris Vorhees: Raw Power
Open February 10 through 16, 2004
Gallery 3
Chris Vorhees’ low-tech plywood and cardboard sculptures double as absurd albeit innovative studies in energy conservation and power generation. His installation of sculptures, drawings, and a video work unit playfully investigated our dependence on and fascination with technology.
Danica Phelps: Selections from Integrating Sex into Everyday Life
Open April 6 through 18, 2004
Annie Herron and Barry Blinderman: 200 Drawings: Select from the Pierogi Flatfiles
Open August 17 through October 17, 2004
200 Drawings: Annie Herron and Barry Blinderman Select from the Pierogi Flatfiles features a scintillating array of work by 68 artists selected from the Pierogi flatfiles in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Pierogi 2000 is an artist-run gallery representing the work of over 900 artists. Utilizing a straightforward but innovative presentation method devised by director Joe Amrhein, dozens of metal flatfile cabinets are stacked throughout the gallery. This system facilitates access to thousands of lower-priced works by a large variety of artists in a small space
Curator Annie Herron, who founded Herron Test-Site—the first gallery in Williamsburg in 1991—made her selections from the Pierogi files, first presenting them salon-style on the walls of the Carlsbad Museum, New Mexico. Inspired by her choices, Blinderman, director of University Galleries, visited Pierogi and added 14 additional artists to Herron's already substantial list of 54.
The artists represented, many living in New York, range from virtually unknown to well-established, and include David Byrne, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman, James Siena, Nina Bovasso, and Chris Johanson.
Separate lectures were given by Annie Herron, Joe Amrhein, and Nina Bovasso
Phuong Nguyen
Open September 21 through 26, 2004
Nina Bovasso
Open September 27 through October 3, 2004
Patrick McDonnell: Everyday People
Open October 12 through 17, 2004
Scott Roberts: Maquette for a Black Hole
Open October 16 through November 14, 2004
Zachary Buchner
Open October 26 through November 14, 2004
MFA Biennial
Open October 26 through November 14, 2004
2003
Tony Tasset: Better Me
Open January 14 through February 23, 2003
Tony Tasset: Better Me features thirteen of this Chicago-based conceptual artist’s sculptural, photographic, and video projects completed over the past ten years. Throughout his 16-year career as an artist, Tasset has consistently posed fundamental questions concerning the artist's role in contemporary culture.
Tony Tasset became known in the late 1980s for precision-crafted objects. Shifting medium and style to accommodate particular ideas for artwork, the artist has increasingly turned his investigation inward; he uses his own image and other elements of his personal life—his wife, his son, his garden—"to explore conflicts of the ego and the difficulty in expressing certain sentiments in a postmodern environment where truth is relative, and in a culture of consumption where emotion is a commodity." (Tasset, 2001).
Co-curated by Barry Blinderman and Bill Conger, Tony Tasset will consist of five sculptures, three videos, and five photo works. This exhibition is in accordance with our mission to provide a diverse and critical survey of contemporary art in all media, focusing particularly on artists who have produced significant bodies of work that have neither been shown in a museum setting nor documented extensively in a publication. Along with colleagues Jeanne Dunning, Gaylen Gerber, Joe Scanlan, and Hirsch Perlman, Tasset represents Chicago's first generation of conceptual artists, departing radically from the practice of Chicago Imagists such as Ed Paschke and Roger Brown.
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Ready for War
Open February 18 through March 18, 2003
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Slab
Open March 4 through April 9, 2003
Referencing real and imagined environments, the artists in slab present both natural and human-altered topographies as if they were cadavers awaiting dissection. These artists deal uniquely with contemporary landscape, positioning detailed environmental slices on horizontal sculptural supports. Embracing diorama and hobby miniaturist techniques, their fetishistic obsession with materials like gooey resins, finely milled plywood, translucent plastics, and foam foliage humorously transforms natural vistas into stage-like environments that reconfigure the concept of the sublime landscape.
Curated by Bill Conger
Artists
- Bill Davenport
- Won Ju Lim
- Duncan MacKenzie
- Scott Richter
- Mindy Schwartz
- Yuken Teruya
Social Strategies
Open June 17 through October 19, 2003
Artists
- Edgar Arceneaux
- Richard Billingham
- Jeremy Blake
- Tracy Emin
- Tainer Ganahl
- Gilbert & George
- Nan Goldin
- Felix Gonzalez-Torres
- Jenny Holzer
- Mary Kelly
- Barbara Kruger
- Wolfgang Laib
- Ken Lum
- Julie Mehretu
- Glexis Novoa
- Paul Pfeiffer
- Jack Pierson
- Neo Rauch
- Thomas Ruff
- Paul Shambroom
- Kim Sooja
- Beat Streuli
- Sam Taylor-Wood
- Sue Williams.
Elise Ferguson: wall/floor
Open October 9 through 19, 2003
Elise Ferguson’s recent gouaches on vellum address the curious interplay between Modernist utopian concerns and basic consumer design. Her “tile” works are editioned fragments of a large-scale outdoor sculpture entitled Retaining Wall: Linoleum, shown at Socrates Sculpture Park in 2003.
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2002
Nubo Wave Map (Space) Bubble
Open January 15 through February 17, 2002
nubo wave map (space) bubble includes paintings by Scott Anderson, Adelheid Mers and Sang-ah Choi, kinetic sculpture by Jeff Carter, a video installation by Susan Giles, and a collaborative work by Carter and Giles.
The name of the show is an arrangement of single words drawn from titles of each artist's work; these sounds and letter-shapes evoke a shifting, curved, linguistically playful space that relates to certain formal and contextual elements apparent in the work.
Scott Anderson's intricately composed and vividly colored canvases, titled in Esperanto (a failed universal language), consist of congealed microcosmic realities reflecting suburban dystopia. Mimicking both corporate presentation charts and diagrams on theories of knowledge, Adelheid Mers' banner-sized digital paintings are arch taxonomies based on her readings from Dewey to McLuhan. Jeff Carter's kinetic sculptures track movement and interval in nature—from the ephemeral lighting patterns of fireflies to the slower, cyclical motion of bamboo rustling in the wind. With a high-gloss finish resembling ceramic tile, Sang-ah Choi's paintings ricochet between ancient art and animé, art and decoration, while addressing the curious relationship between Eastern and Western standards of beauty. By stripping away descriptive content, Susan Giles' videos Um, (space), and Vagueness call our attention to the facial expressions, breathing patterns, mouth shapes, and non-verbal utterances that shape meaning in everyday speech.
Curated by Barry Blinderman
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Night Vision
Open February 26 through April 3, 2002
Night Vision takes its title from the high-tech optical apparatus used in nocturnal military operations, whose greenish glow has become increasingly familiar since CNN's televised transmission of the Persian Gulf War one decade ago. The strategic advantage afforded by technologies that can penetrate the night provides the central metaphor for this exhibition. “Metaphors infiltrate real living,” states the accompanying catalogue text by Tim Griffin; likewise, the works in Night Vision may shed some light on the murky implications surrounding this theme.
Walter Benjamin wrote that “the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” In Night Vision, the symbolic lens refers to actual technologies co-opted by the artists experimentally, as well as to documentary sources or subjects used for reflection and analysis.
Night Vision showcases work by artists and art collaboratives based in New York and in Brooklyn. Employing a variety of media, from painting, to video projection, to sound, these artists are deeply influenced by ongoing developments in technology: the science of optics in the service of both military and social objectives, and networks as extensions of intelligence and creativity, or as portals for infiltration, surveillance and infection.
—Joy Garnett
Curated by Joy Garnett
Artists
- Jordan Crandall
- Christoph Draeger
- Joy Garnett
- Adam Hurwitz
- Bill Jones & Ben Neill
- John Klima
- Joseph Nechvatal
- Jonathan Podwil
- Radical Software Group
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Harold Boyd: Bodies of Work
Open June 15 through September 15, 2002
Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1938, Harold Boyd's career as an artist and university professor spans over 30 years. From the late 1960s onward, Boyd's influence as a professor of painting and drawing can be seen in the work of his many students—including Nicolas Africano, Wonsook Kim, Tony Wong, and Diego Cortez. He retired as a full professor at Illinois State University in June 2000.
A master of line and psychological nuance, Boyd’s figures are engaged in dialogue, dance, and acts of physical endurance—all poignant yet comic commentaries on the human condition. Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, William Carlos Williams, Gandhi, and other cultural heroes populate Boyd's fluid landscape. Since the mid-80s his work has consistently featured non-idealized aging male figures. Biographically or autobiographically inspired (his father, himself, Adlai Stevenson), yet fictional in result, these figures “all share an awakening clumsiness, as if surprised by gravity, as if remembering a weightless childhood, the childhood of a soap-bubble. But in the gallery, this all changes. There is closure everywhere, and with it grace and a surprisingly idea sort of beauty.” (Tim Porges, Harold Boyd, Old Body: Beginner's Mind, 1999)
Consisting of over 40 large and small-scale works on paper, prints, paintings, cut-metal sculpture and cast works from the 1970s to the present, our exhibition offered a comprehensive view of Boyd's oeuvre.
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Melanie Manchot: love is a stranger
Open September 24 through November 3, 2002
Melanie Manchot’s artwork challenges socially and culturally constructed ideas about beauty, aging, sexuality, and fantasy. This exhibition includes photography and video from three major bodies of work: Liminal Portraits —nude portraits of the artist’s mother set within dramatic landscapes and domestic spaces; The L.A. Pictures —a photo-and-text series of kissing couples which explores notions of intimacy and personal space; and Gestures of Demarcation —self-portraits of Manchot in which figures, often turned away from the camera, pull and tug at the artist’s skin. Organized by Stuart Horodner, Curator at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, this traveling exhibition is the first survey of the artist’s work to appear in the United States, and is accompanied by a monograph published by Prestel.
2001
White Light
Open January 9 through February 11, 2001
WHITE LIGHT is the third in a trilogy of exhibitions—including post-hypnotic (1999-2001) and The UFO Show (2000-2001)—focusing on visual manifestations of altered states of consciousness.
Whether we are talking about sun and moon worship, the New Testament’s “light of the world,” Eastern religions’ radiances and auras, or the light bulb that pops up above the heads of cartoon characters, light is the oldest and most pervasive visual correlate for attainment and inspiration. In a parallel technological quest, we have over the millennia channeled our awe of celestial and natural phenomena into the creation of light-based technologies and representational devices: from the cultivation of fire to the invention of photography, electric lighting, and cinema, to the more recent cathode ray tube and liquid crystal display.
All visual art is, of course, dependent upon the phenomenology of light—the work in this exhibition, however, calls particular attention to radiance itself as image. In contrast to much of the atmospheric light art made by precursors such as Robert Irwin, Dan Flavin, and James Turrell, the work of the artists presented here is more transgressive and jarring in terms of viewer perception. We are reminded that along with the ecstatic or meditative qualities associated with light, we also have the invasive, disturbing aspects—blinding searchlights, the interrogator’s lamp, the paparazzi’s flash.
WHITE LIGHT includes photography, painting, video, sculpture, and site-specific installations incorporating emanations, traces, or reflections of white light. Artwork represented: a two-monitor DVD installation entitled Night Space by Richard Bloes (NY), exquisitely nuanced blue-and-white paintings resembling electronic screens by Christian Garnett (Brooklyn), a large-scale photorealistic painting of lightning by renowned 80s conceptual artist Jack Goldstein (Los Angeles), visually riveting photograms consisting of golden bursts of light and radiating concentric halos by Adam Fuss (NY), a viewer-activated 100-bulb wall installation entitled Double Flag by Gregory Green (Brooklyn), a pulsating black and white video entitled Feedback by Ray Rapp (NY), a Venetian blind-like grid of motor-driven prisms by Mark Genrich (Normal), an audio CD that when plugged into a TV set creates oscilloscopic dances of lines accompanied by electronic tones by Carsten Nicolai, a.k.a noto (Berlin), a wall-hanging wax disk by Maya Lin (NY), who designed the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C., a luminous oil painting by Judy Ledgerwood (Chicago), entitled Freddy (after Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue"), two paintings by Susie Rosmarin (Brooklyn) which produce some of the most eye-boggling afterimages and spatial effects in contemporary painting, and Kathleen McCarthy's (Chicago) etherial eight-columned installation consisting of virtually nothing but fishing line. WHITE LIGHT is curated by Barry Blinderman, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated brochure documenting the exhibition.
Resources
- Exhibition Brochure (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
- Exhibition Brochure (Herron Gallery)
Press
pixerina WITCHERINA
Open Feburary 20 through April 1, 2001
Pixerina Witcherina consists of works by women who address transformative forces, mythic location, and fairy-tale influence. Taking its title from an imaginary language that Virginia Woolf created to converse secretly with her niece, the work in Pixerina Witcherina transforms the representational assumptions of the narrative into whimsically abstracted visual yarns that thrive on a sense of storytelling. Ironically, the work of these women embraces the power of myth while deconstructing it, building feminine divinity for the contemporary age.
Curated by Bill Conger
Artists
- Karen Arm
- Meghan Boody
- Bonnie Collura
- Margaret Curtis
- Amy Cutler
- Katharina Fritsch
- Margi Geerlinks
- Hillary Harkness
- Claudia Hart
- Julie Heffernan
- Julia Latane
- Tracey Moffatt
- Maria Porges
- Amy Sillman
- Elena Sisto
Resources
Issues of Identity in Recent American Art
Open June 12 through September 9, 2001
Issues of Identity in Recent Contemporary American Art is an exhibition which presents work by nine contemporary artists residing in the United States addressing issues of culture, race, gender, and national and personal identity. Often employing strategies of humor, cynicism, and anger, the art in this exhibition represents a broad range of media and involves the viewer in such sensitive topics as oppression of women, cultural clichés, and revisionist history. A traveling exhibition which we hosted for the summer of 2001, Issues of Identity is curated by Dan Mills, Director of the Gibson Gallery at SUNY, Potsdam.
Some words on the artists: Enrique Chagoya intermixes the cultures of US and Mexico, old and new religions, and art and popular culture in his paintings and prints. The late Tseng Kwong Chi made photographic self-portraits in which he presented himself as cultural “other” in a Mao Suit, making expeditions to Western tourist attractions. Bursting with drama, humor, and cultural clichés, Robert Colescott’s paintings grapple with racism, sexism, and historical perspective, often through re-interpretation of earlier works of art. Brad Kahlhamer paints narratives that explore his Native American heritage and history as a child adopted into a European-American family. Michael Oatman's installations investigate the transformation of identity during processing for incarceration, or “classification” under the guise of faux sciences such as eugenics. Adrian Piper creates installations, performances, drawings, and videos that expand our attitudes about race, xenophobia, gender, and forms of oppression against women. Cindy Sherman employs photography to challenge the images and myths of popular culture and mass media. Combining elements drawn from the traditional Japanese woodblock print, ukiyo-e, and American Pop Art, Masami Teraoka addresses issues concerning East/West culture clashes, contrasts of modern and archaic culture, and crass consumerism. Carrie Mae Weems utilizes photography and text in a strategic attempt to transform the representation of African-Americans.
New Angeles
Open October 1 through November 10, 1991
A one-time art-school laboratory for born and bred Californians, Los Angeles is becoming a destination for many young artists who might have at one time located to New York City. Interesting variations of West coast art continue to develop L.A.'s Venice, Chinatown, and Echo Park areas where burgeoning alternative and artist-run galleries are nourishing communities of artists who have located there. New Angeles presents 22 artists beginning their careers in L.A, including Dwayne Moser's photographs of movie stars' lackluster mailboxes, Charles Irvin's disturbingly humorous video of a baby playing with a phony severed head, Mary Weatherford's dusky, melancholic landscapes replete with California light and seashell accoutrements, and Robert Gunderman's kitschy but endearing Sculpey and colored pencil bird figurines.
Curated by Bill Conger
Artists
- Brian Barasch
- Todd Brainard
- Samara Caughey
- Tessa Chasteen
- Robert Gunderman
- Dave Deany
- Jacques de Beaufort
- Mari Eastman
- Michelle Fierro
- Katie Grinnan
- Micol Hebron
- Evan Holloway
- Charles Irvin
- Rob Keller
- Robbie Kinberg
- Daniel Mendel-Black
- Maude Mink
- Dwayne Moser
- Joseph Park
- Dana Schutz
- Pam Strugar
- Phil Wagner
- Mary Weatherford.
2000
BOTANICA: Contemporary Art and the World of Plants
Open January 18 through February 20, 2000
Curated by Peter Spooner, The Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota - Duluth, BOTANICA presents the current work of fifty artists, who consistently utilize forms, concepts, and systems from nature, and in particular, the plant world. These artists, who possess both national and international exhibition reputations, use botany as a point of departure, a primary subject, as an art material, and as a means of discussing relationships with nature and the environment, in a world of technology and industry.
Artists
- Dan Addington
- Curtis Bartone
- Ross Bleckner
- Todd Blockley
- Gloria DeFilipps Brush
- Helen Chadwick
- Mel Chin
- Ann Connor
- Gregory Crewdson
- Tom Czarnopys
- Peter Edlund
- Leslie Fry
- Lynn Geesaman
- Henrick Hakansson
- Alice Hargrave
- Joseph Haske
- Howard Hersh
- Steven Heyman
- Jean Humke
- Sue Johnson
- Terri Jones
- Roberto Juarez
- Diane Katsiaficas
- Jackie Kazarian
- Mary Jean Kenton
- Barbara Kreft
- Ann Klefstad/Jeff Kalstrom
- Samm Kunce
- Robert Kushner
- Eve Andree Laramee
- David Lefkowitz
- Jacquelyn McBain
- Barbara McCarren
- Carolyn Ottmers
- Michael Paha
- John Pakosta
- Dan Peterman
- Ted Rettig
- Holly Rittenhouse
- Jim Rittiman
- Alexis Rockman
- Bill Schuck
- Rosalyn Schwartz
- Stan Shetka
- Vincent Shine
- Kiki Smith
- Alan Sonfist
- Michelle Stuart
- Agneta Svensk
- Philip Taaffe
- Erika Wanenmacher
- Darren Waterston
- Meg Webster
- Francis Yeatts Whitehead
- Terry Winters
- David Wojnarowicz
- Andrew Young
- Keith Yurdana
Resources
The UFO Show
Open February 29 through April 2, 2000
Appearances of blinking ellipsoids, whirling orbs, and hovering illuminations have been reported throughout history, especially since the onset of atomic warfare and subsequent testing. Whether based in empirical reality, paranoiac projection, false memory, or an innate desire to realize an archetype of wholeness, UFOs have captivated the popular and artistic imagination. The term UFO-first used by the military to define any unidentified object in the sky has been widely adopted by post-1950s society as a synonym for the image of the flying saucer popularized by science fiction books and movies. Paradoxically, the mystery of the "unidentified" in the term is automatically equated with the identification of an extraterrestrial Other, while the "flying object" is as swiftly likened to the very terrestrial image of a saucer-shaped thing. The blurred distinction between the "unidentified" and the identified Other it represents-whether real or imagined-has provided fertile territory for artists fascinated by a sublime form shuttling between the atavistic and media-generated chambers of the collective unconscious. Creating two- and three-dimensional work relating directly or symbolically to discs, saucers and other phenomena associated with UFOs, the artists in this exhibition variously confront a historically ingrained and commercially-reinforced locus of millennial obsession.
Curated by Barry Blinderman and Bill Conger.
Artists
- George Blaha
- John Brill
- Andrew Detskas
- Sharon Engelstein
- Joy Garnett
- Keith Haring
- Lance Horenbein
- Claire Jervert
- Christopher Johnson
- Jeremy Kidd
- Paul Laffoley
- Moriko Mori
- Panamarenko
- Cynthia Roberts
- Kenny Scharf
- Ionel Talpazan
- Oliver Wasow
- Ken Weaver
- Amy Wilson
Resources
2000 Clowns
Open June 10 through September 10, 2000
Born of the earliest forms of theater, the image of the clown inhabits some of the most intimate areas of human psychology. Appearing most commonly as a symbol of folly, frivolity, and comic relief, lurking beneath this type of representation are sad clowns longing for acceptance, mischievous clowns instigating mayhem, and malicious clowns that insult and provoke to the point of retaliation. The most insidious clowns are those that prey on the subconscious in the form of childhood nightmares. Clowns are an adult invention—adults in makeup playing out desires extending beyond expected social paradigms—mirroring our maturation and enabling us to come to terms with the realities of our world.
2000 Clowns is an exhibition of sixteen artists who have used this popular and compelling character in their work, identifying the clown not only as the fool, but also as a surrogate for the human individual—alone and imperfect.
Curated by Bill Conger and Timothy Porges.
Artists
- Donald Baechler
- Mike Cockrill
- Michael Ray Charles
- Elizabeth Ernst
- Jonathan Hammer
- George Horner
- Catherine Howe
- David McGee
- Mark Newgarden
- Michael Lindell
- Bruce Nauman
- Martina Shenal
- John Spear
- Linda Voychehovski
- Ken Weaver
- Thomas Woodruff
Resources
Walking
Open September 19 through October 29, 2000
Walking focuses on several contemporary artists who make work about walking and by walking. Walking in cities may be understood primarily in sociopolitical terms (tourism, commuting, surveillance, and the Situationist dérive), while in the rural context, the focus shifts to explorations of leisure, pilgrimage, and nature. Several of the artists use walking as a drawing technique, by attaching pencils, solvents, and video cameras to their bodies during the act. Informed by the rich traditions of romantic art and literature, and scientific or cultural studies of human movement, these artists take a most familiar activity and use it to generate complex works about place, presence, and human agency.
Curated by Stuart Horodner
Artists
- Francis Alys
- Eleanor Antin
- Janine Antoni & Paul Ramirez Jonas
- Hamish Fulton
- Sharon Harper
- Jin Lee
- Tom Marioni
- Matthew McCaslin
- Curtis Mitchell
- Francois Morelli
- Rudolf Stingel
- Nancy Spero
