Flexspace
Verdant Visions: works by Yva Neal
Verdant Visions is a collection of works that explore our connection with nature and how it affects our psyche thru interaction. Each piece uses natural materials and invites the viewer to have a relationship by either misting the moss or stacking the rocks. In this digital world, we find ourselves “ungrounded”. The contact these pieces provide help trigger body memory of being out in nature.
Yva Neal (b.1973, England) recently moved to Riverside, IL. She attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her 20-year career in product design, visual retail design and landscape design realizes a dense and multi-disciplined skill set. She has had a studio at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago’s Bridgeport Neighborhood for the past ten years. Her work has been included in various group exhibitions nationally at Zhou B Art Center in Chicago, Art Basel: Miami, Telluride, CO, and on the Big Island of Hawaii.
Her current focus, creating awareness through interaction, stems from her forays into studying plant medicine, mycology and motherhood.
Central and Hollywood Schools presents: A Feast for the Eyes
Over 35 students involved in after school art club at both Central and Hollywood Schools have worked over the past months to create individual faux meals inspired by installation artwork and artists like Claus Oldenburg and contemporary Lucy Sparrow. Everything from placemats, serving ware, and of course, food, was prepared and made by the students using media that includes paper mache, clay, felt, and plaster.
25 Years of RAC School
Noah Loesberg, Illuminated Manuscript Page #1, wood and tinted polyurethane resin, 11.5″x16.5″x1.5″, 2016
RAC is pleased to announce this upcoming exhibition featuring work from instructors during the school’s 25 year history.
25 Years of RAC School
November 4th – 30th
Please join us for the opening reception Sunday, November 4 at 3pm-6pm
Music performed by the Acappella Fellas in the Sculpture Garden at 4pm.
Tara Zanzig: EGO
Tara Zanzig debuts a recent series of gritty analog quality works on canvas and paper whose style references the 1990s’ era of photocopied punk flyers and zines. Her pieces for this exhibition draw inspiration from psychological effects related to modern media’s presence and function. This work explores relevant topics including identity, perception, and value.
Tara Zanzig is a Chicago based, mixed media artist who work focuses on the process of hand created and pulled screen print. With a Pop influence and punk aesthetic, her work seeks meaning in a commercially driven society through the exploration of its icons & idols. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute.
Tara currently lives in Chicago. When she is not working in her studio she teaches screen printing at Spudnik Press. Her work has appeared in the Rockford Art Museum, The Newberry Library in Chicago, The Wabash Arts Corridor Project and is in numerous private collections
Amy Babinec: Golden Rule
Abandoned, Golden Rule Mine, Lenzburg, Illinois, watercolor, colored pencil, and charcoal on paper, 11 1/4 x 15 inches, 2017
Amy Babinec debuts a recent series of Intimately-scaled drawings which address the power of objects to contain memory and history. Using archaeology as a tool to uncover discarded fragments of domestic lives, she creates a dialogue between real and imagined family history.
We are delighted to announce that Amy will be teaching two workshops:
Saturday, June 16th, with an artist talk to follow with Amy in the FlexSpace at 1pm.
Introduction to Object-Based Archaeological Drawing
Sunday June 10th
Amy Babinec is an artist and educator whose projects focus on lost memory, trauma, and archaeology. An upbringing in the coal country of Illinois has informed her recent practice of documenting abandoned mines. She received her MFA from the University of Chicago, her MA in art history and archaeology from the University of Maryland, and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute.
She currently teaches painting and drawing at colleges in the Chicago area and is a teaching artist at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her work has appeared in exhibitions nationwide.
RAC FlexResidency + Exhibition – Tom Burtonwood: In Two Places @ Once
RAC is very pleased to announce the RAC FlexResidency, a month-long residency that invites Chicago area artists to use the RAC’s FlexSpace as a studio for new ideas, and followed by an exhibition of the new work made. For it’s inaugural year, Tom Burtonwood will be occupying the FlexSpace for the month of March with new work to be shown in April titled, In Two Places @ Once. See what he’s up to day to day by following the link http://tomburtonwood.com/rac/
Tom Burtonwood (b. United Kingdom) is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator. He/they are engaged in research probing thresholds between the virtual and the real, between images and objects. Recent projects are motivated by an investigation of surface, texture and representation through sculpture, installation and time based media.
Recent venues presenting Burtonwood’s work include CICA Museum Gyeonggi-do, Korea, DEMO Project, Springfield, IL; Terrain Biennial 2017, Oak Park, IL; Cedarhurst Center for the Arts, Mount Vernon, IL; The Elmhurst Art Museum Biennial, Elmhurst, IL; The Samuel Dorsky Museum, SUNY, New Platz; Flux Factory, NY, NY; The Compound Gallery, Oakland, CA; Northeastern Illinois University Gallery, Chicago, IL; The University of Illinois Springfield, Springfield, IL; Bruce High Quality Foundation University, NY, NY; Firecat Projects, Chicago, IL; Wright State University, Dayton, OH; Purdue University Gallery, West Lafayette, IN; The Printing Museum, Houston, TX; Terrain Biennial, Oak Park, IL; Fuseworks, Brooklyn, NY; Front Room Gallery Brooklyn, NY; New Capital, Chicago, IL; The Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Shemer Art Center, Phoenix, AZ and Printed Matter, NY, NY.
www.tomburtonwood.com
Liz McCarthy: The Pen
“The Pen” uses clay and carpet to create a site for material play. The rug in this installation acts as a synthetic ground and compositional confinement for the sculptural clay pieces. The carpet is an artifact of a Midwestern suburban home, where the carpet exists as a material for making the space comfortable, safe, and clean to protect the body, but is also produced from man made materials derived from petroleum, synthetic material designed to repel naturally occurring materials. The clay, pulled from the earth’s crust, acts in resistance to the surface, by marking and embedding itself into the synthetic fibers, producing a filthy site of production.
The clay objects that emerge in “The Pen” are collaborative experiments in form, celebrating the act of mess making and material play. For this particular installation, students and community members are invited to participate in “clay play”, shaping the materials with suggested gestures and forms from the artist that reference ceramic hand-building traditions. After the initial “Clay Play” building of forms, the material, comprised of wet, dry, and fired clay, shift and change on the site as the clay dries and crumbles.
Liz McCarthy works across disciplines to explore themes around the materiality of human bodies, and their complicated physical and psychological relationship to a material world. Through research and studio intervention, she explores how different materials develop meaning through use and origin, and how physical performance can be used as an agent to re-inscribe meaning. Liz McCarthy received her MFA from the UIC studio art program. Her work has been included various group and solo exhibitions internationally at venues such as ACRE Projects, Heaven Gallery, Roots and Culture, Mana Contemporary, Gallery 400, ExGirlfriend Gallery, and Threewalls. She has visited as a resident artist at Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE, High Concept Laboratories, Ox-bow and Banff Centre. In October of 2017 she will be hosting a “Whistle Hangout” performance at the MCA (more info here: https://mcachicago.org/Calendar/2017/10/MCA-Hearts-Chicago/Liz-Mc-Carthy-Whistle-Hang-Out)
Project made possible by Ceramic Supply Chicago
RAC FlexSpace: Paula Henderson
With her recent series Groundwork, Henderson returns to her ongoing interest in abstraction within a post-modern framework. In contrast to the self-contained formalism of modernism, she focuses on prosaic, schematic patterns of formal appeal that operate simultaneously as social signifiers.
In the Groundwork paintings, Henderson utilizes the distinct patterning from the soles of shoes to think about the very particularity and variety of design that goes into the literal marking (and marketing) of our movement on the ground. In her artist’s statement about this body of work, Henderson notes:
“I record these patterns as I find them, oftentimes a chaotic mix of partial prints and in other sites ordered, discernable designs. This manufactured residue that marks us routinely across space in time, though on the one hand quite ordinary, fascinates me as vestigial configurations of our collective history.
Additionally, I am focused on how these tread patterns act as social signifiers. They are variously studied in forensic science to identify/profile a wearer as suspect. They often serve as distinguishing social and cultural markers by the preponderance of brand patterns marking style trends/ movement in particular neighborhoods in Chicago where I live and work. This brand(ing) of place follows our movement and conditionally holds our histories in sand, rain, snow, concrete, and mud. I am interested in how these surface iconographies- prosaic, routine, overlooked- act as hieroglyphic narratives of our collectivity and markers, as well, of our spatial disparities.
Not insignificantly they resonate with the flow of human activity as witnessed in social migrations/diasporas.
And finally, the range/progression of the Groundwork series from decipherable, ordered, schematic designs to layered ‘remixes’ of partials dispersed within shadows, puts me in mind of human planning- initiated in the abstract by a few with a discrete objective- that once deployed sets in motion unforeseen outcomes for the many.”
RAC Kids Show in FlexSpace!
Our annual Members Exhibition and RAC Kids Show will take place July 1-August 5, 2017. We invited all current RAC members and students to submit artwork for display. The RAC community looks forward to this exhibition every year, because it celebrates and showcases the creations of our talented supporters and students. Come check it out!
Annual Members Show in the Freeark Gallery + Rac Kids Show in FlexSpace
Exhibitions run July 1st – August 5, 2017
Artists’ Reception: Saturday, July 15, 3-6pm
Laura Husar Garcia: Wishes
The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present a premier solo exhibition of photographs by Laura Husar Garcia in our FlexSpace Gallery.
Artist Statement:
“Several years ago, I collected hundreds of smooth, flat stones for my mother when she became a widow. I placed them in a simple box for her to keep. Whenever we felt the need, we walked down the hill and made wishes in the pond below the family cabin. The box of wishes burned in a massive house fire, yet the stones remained. This gave me a continued sense of hope, enabling me to make new wishes from what once was, while rebuilding our home. With each toss of a stone, the universal symbol of the circle came forth in a consistent response with expanding ripples, a reminder of the eternal and infinite. My favorite time is dusk, when water reflects the day’s end with a deep blue. Entitled Wishes, this work stems from a blend of melancholy and yearning, focusing on the past, present and future. For me, the blue that quietly develops at dusk is soothing, contemplative, and spiritual. The physical expression of tossing stones in the water is an act of mediation with the seen and unseen.” ~Laura Husar Garcia, May 2017
Laura Husar Garcia has documented the intimacies of the human spirit and the beauty of nature for more than 25 years. Her photography has been exhibited widely, including Fotofever at the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, France, The Polish Museum of America in Chicago, Photo Indepenent in Los Angeles, California, The Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago, Tilt Gallery in Scottsdale, Arizona, Galeria el Zocalo in Santa Fe, New Mexico and LightBox Photographic Gallery in Astoria, Oregon, among others.
Laura is co-winner of a 1st place Community Grant from the Illinois Humanities Council and a 2015 Photolucida Critical Mass top 200 finalist. Her photographs have been published in several books, including “America At Home: A Close-up Look at How We Live”, which is one of the largest collaborative photographic projects in publishing history. Her work has also been published in The New York Times, National Geographic Magazine, Newsweek, Slate Magazine, and several other publications and books. Laura has been a photo editor for various workshops including The Chicago Photography Center and a portfolio reviewer at Columbia College in Chicago. She was a photographer in Santa Fe, NM, for more than ten years, where her foundation as an artist took root, before moving to Chicago where she became a photo editor at The Chicago Tribune. Currently Laura is the co-founder and Creative Director of Three Story Media and she lives in Riverside, IL.
Her work will be exhibited in Platform Gallery’s “Staged”, a group show in Evantston, IL in conjunction with Evanston Made on June 3rd.
More of her work can be seen at www.husargarcia.com
Kevin Blake: What The Cool Pigeon Knows
Kevin Blake. “Raving Through A Suite Of Smokeless Husbands,” 2016. Oil on Paper, 26″ x 26.”
Read an interview with Kevin Blake on the Other People’s Pixels Blog here.
All the novelty of history coalesces in the present moment–as a distillation of that which preceded it. This pastiche, or visual cuing of past narratives, has arrived on a platform unrecognizable to the history it propagates. In “What The Cool Pigeon Knows,” artist Kevin Blake presents a traditionally beheld painting vernacular as a means of synthesizing this collage with the use of recycled imagery from the collective past. The characters in these paintings are developed from the hard-working, strong, but nevertheless remote-controlled heroes of the post-World War II fringes and subsequently, post-war American idealism, which continues to infiltrate the cumulative psychology. These works look to film noir, pulp fiction, and the birth of advertising as a platform for projecting the viewer into a dialogue about time, and the affect of language on the human operating system from a generational vantage point.
In a world in which the wheel of events rolls on so rapidly, in which contradictory information slides by our eyes on effervescent screens, and in which constitutions and dynasties are dissolved in mere moments–the individual has become the sole proprietor and patron of belief. “What The Cool Pigeon Knows” highlights this responsibility–the everyday task of asking oneself why you believe what you believe, and applying those conclusions to the world you see in front of you.
About the artist
Kevin Blake lives in Chicago. He received his MFA in 2014 at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, his MA in Art Eduction in 2011 and BFA in 2004 at SAIC, Chicago. He has exhibited his work in Chicago the last few years and is a contributing writer at Bad at Sports and New City.
RAC Flex: Keep Your Eye on This Space!
Artist’s Talk and Drawing Robot Demonstration during “Good Machines” exhibition
RAC Kids’ Show, 2016
Charley Krebs cartoons exhibition “Black and White and Blues All Over”
RAC Painting Class
RAC’s FlexSpace is a multi-use space that mirrors RAC’s mission to promote artists and educate the public about art. It is used for exhibitions, performances, readings, classes, public events, outreach initiatives, and more! We think of it as a space of possibility and a place for thinking outside the box when it comes to the arts and art education. So keep your eye on this space and if you haven’t already signed up to receive RAC updates, click here to be added to our mailing list!
Upcoming in FlexSpace 2017:
Exhibition by Kevin Blake, March 5-April 15
Exhibition by Laura Husar Garcia, May 21 – June 24
Annual RAC Kids’ Show, July 2- August 5
Exhibition by Paula Henderson, September 10 – October 21
“GOOD MACHINES” FAMILY DAY SATURDAY JANUARY 7, 2-4PM
COME PLAY AT OUR FAMILY DAY WORKSHOP
When: Saturday, Jan 7, 2-4pm in the RAC Flex Space and Freeark Gallery
You and your toys can make drawings together!
Have any wind-up toys at your house that you want to bring in? Want to make your own machine? Bring any and all with you to the RAC this Saturday for our Family Day Workshop: we’ll supply brushes, tape, paint and LARGE pieces of paper, and snacks, lots of tasty snacks and hot cider!
RAC Kids Art Show
June 26-July 23, 2016
Reception: Sunday, June 26, 3-6pm
The RAC Kids Art Show is one of our favorite events of the year! Kids enrolled at RAC art camp, current students under the age of 18, and budding young artists with family memberships are all given the chance to exhibit their artworks in the RAC’s beautiful new Flex Space. The show runs through Saturday, July 23 and is open Tu-Sat, 1-5pm. Check in with the Attendant at the Freeark Gallery next door to gain access to the exhibition.