Freeark GALLERY & sculpture garden exhibitions
Sculpture Garden | Sarah and Joseph Belknap: We are Beasts
Installation view of “We Are Beasts” by Sarah and Joseph Belknap
Exhibition curated by Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé
Opening reception is Sunday, October 14, 2018, 3-6pm
*Stay tuned for information on upcoming artists’ talks in conjunction with the shows
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery and Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce a new outdoor installation by Sarah and Joseph Belknap, titled We Are Beasts. The exhibition is organizaed by Claudine Isé, Director of the Riverside Art Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden.
With the Belknap’s We are Beasts, questions of what–and where–our humanity has brought turn outward, towards the Cosmos. The Chicago-based artists will install a new installation of wildly colorful, grand-scale “meteorites” in various arrested positions. Here, the Belknaps present viewers with a field of strikingly poetic objects that posit terrestrial bodies–in this case, our own human bodies and the trees, rocks and other foliage of the Sculpture Garden — in provocative relation to minor celestial bodies like meteorites, which we normally think of as impossibly far away in time and space.
–Claudine Isé, Director, Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
Image caption:
Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap, artists’ rendering of We Are Beasts for RAC Sculpture Garden.
Artists’ Bios
Sarah and Joseph Belknap
Sarah Belknap and Joseph Belknap are Chicago-based interdisciplinary artists and educators who received their MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working as a team since 2008, their art has been exhibited in artist-run exhibition spaces in Springfield, Brooklyn, Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City and St. Louis. In addition, they have presented performances at institutions throughout Chicago, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Links Hall, and the MCA. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Columbus Museum of Art, The Arts Club of Chicago, the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, Western Exhibitions, and solo shows at The Arts Club of Chicago and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.
Indira Freitas Johnson and Garland Martin Taylor | Gathering | September 7 - October 6, 2018
Indira Freitas Jhnnson | Lifetine Offer, 2007, Ceramic, rusty bedsprings, dimensions variable
Opening Reception Sunday, September 9, 2018, 3-6pm
Closing Reception and Artists’ Talk on Saturday, October 6, 2018 at 3pm, moderated by Lise McKean
Exhibition Catalogue available for purchase - click here
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery and Sculpture Garden is pleased to present Gathering, a two-person exhibition of sculpture and installations by Indira Freitas Johnson and Garland Martin Taylor, curated by Joanne Aono.
Both artists address societal issues through their mixed media sculptures and community involved projects. Gun violence, racism, immigration, and individual rights are among the topics conveyed in their assemblages, as they seek to heal and invoke dialogue. Influenced by her artist father, a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and her social activist mother, Johnson creates forms reflecting non-violence from found objects and castings. Taylor channels his research of Henry Jackson Lewis, the first African American political cartoonist, as he welds bronze and stainless steel pieces with found materials such as skateboard parts, kinky hair, wood, stone, and pheasant feathers into 3-dimensional statements.
Johnson’s sculptures of hands and feet convey a calm spirituality in our main gallery space along with an interactive grid prompting the viewer to consider how we label ourselves. She will have an installation in the Freeark Sculpture Garden, combining pieces from her Ten Thousand Ripples project with a site-specific new construction questioning our inability to live harmoniously. Taylor will be exhibiting his iconic Conversation Peace and a recent related sculpture in the main gallery. Our rear gallery room will consist of an array of Taylor’s newest sculptures in an immersive installation of art and other items from his Southside studio.
Garland Martin Taylor | Conversation Piece, 2015-2018, Welded stainless steel and acrylic, 67 x 48 x 80 inches
Artists’ Bios
Indira Freitas Johnson
Indira Freitas Johnson is a sculptor, cultural worker, peace activist and educator. She holds undergraduate degrees from the University of Mumbai and the Sir J.J. Institute of Applied Art with a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She founded Shanti Foundation for Peace, later merging with Changing Worlds, to teach art and nonviolence decision-making skills to Chicago area public school children. Johnson created one hundred emerging Buddha sculptures as part of the Ten Thousand Ripples, Public Art, Peace and Civic Engagement initiative. This citywide project is a collaboration with Changing Worlds, the lead arts organization, and over thirty-five Chicago area cultural, educational, and community organizations.
Johnson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; City of Evanston; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; Haeinsa Temple, South Korea; Chicago Transit Authority; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, Alabama; State of Illinois Building, Chicago; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the prestigious Illinois Governor’s Award for the Arts, Arts Midwest NEA, and Arts International Travelling Fellowship, and was named the 2013 Chicagoan of the Year. Artist’s website: www.indirajohnson.com
Indira Freitas Johnson. “Searching #2,” 2018. Chicken wire, vines, onion bags, wire. 40 x 18 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the artist.
Garland Martin Taylor
Garland Martin Taylor is a sculptor, researcher, lecturer, and educator with a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His scholarly studies of the first African American political cartoonist, Henry Jackson Lewis, have been honored with several grants and speaking engagements throughout the country. He has been awarded a Crystal Bridges Research Fellowship in the History of African American Art at Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas and a Mellon Collaborative Fellowship in Arts Practice & Scholarship at the Richard & Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago.
Taylor’s art has been exhibited throughout the country including Artemis Gallery, Northeast Harbor, Maine; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; and Manchester University, North Manchester, Indiana, while his Conversation Peace has traveled 5,000 miles with the artist across the United States. He has exhibited extensively in the Chicago area including the Southside Community Art Center, the Museum of Science and Industry, Hyde Park Art Center, Weinberg Newton Gallery, Ignition Project Space, and the African American Cultural Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Taylor’s sculpture can be found in numerous private and public collections. His art has been reviewed in The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Reader, The Charleston South Carolina Chronicle, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and on WBEZ and WGN radio stations. Artist’s website: www.garlandmartintaylor.com
Garland Martin Taylor.
“Spint,” (detail), 2018. Spent 9mm bullet shell casings, vintage Victor Topper gum ball machine, old record LP’s, aluminum turntable platter, Gull Wing skateboard trucks, ceramic sealed bearings, 69mm Sector Nine wheels, Whisky barrel, oak and kitchen table legs in black and chrome. 53” x 21” x 21”.
Guest curator Bio:
Joanne Aono’s drawings, paintings, and installations have been exhibited at museums, galleries, art centers, and alternative spaces. Her art has been awarded and reviewed by numerous venues and publications. She serves on the Riverside Arts Center’s exhibition committee and runs the alternative art exhibition project, Cultivator, from her farm and studio in rural Illinois. Artist’s website: www.JoanneAono.com
Artist’s Talk Moderator Bio:
Lise McKean is a social anthropologist, writer,and editor. Her research and writing range from contemporary art to religion and politics in India to social justice. She’s a regular contributor to Bad at Sports and writes essays for exhibition catalogs. Her alma maters include University of Chicago, University of Hawai’i, and Sydney University, where she completed her Ph.D.
Sculpture Garden Installation: Mara Baker, A Mountain One Fence High—A Ribbon Two Yards Wide
Curated by RAC Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé
May 20 through mid-Summer 2018
Opening Reception Sunday, May 20, 3-6pm
Mara Baker, A Mountain One Fence High–A Ribbon Two Yards Wide, 2018. Found chain link fence, plastic fencing, flagging tape, found mesh produce sacks, rope, twine, aluminum wire and other studio debris.
The Riverside Art Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden will present a new, site-specific installation in our Sculpture Garden by Chicago-based artist Mara Baker, who says of her work: “The primary inspiration for my paintings, site-specific installations and animations comes from found materials and the recycled byproducts of my studio practice. I often work site-responsively in alternative raw spaces like repurposed factories and homes, treating the sites as an opportunity to engage with larger ecological issues of decay and life-cycles. My work also explores the interplay between the real and the representational, often using tactile materials that reference the language of formal painting.”
Mara Baker, A Mountain One Fence High–A Ribbon Two Yards Wide, 2018, (detail). Found chain link fence, plastic fencing, flagging tape, found mesh produce sacks, rope, twine, aluminum wire and other studio debris.
For RAC’s Sculpture Garden, Baker will create a new, site-specific piece titled A Mountain One Fence High— A Ribbon Two Yards Wide and inspired by the urban fences of Baker’s neighborhood in Avondale, which function in both geographic and psycho-geographic ways to divide, cage, catch, block and color-code the environment. Baker’s installation at RAC repurposes chain link fence found on Craigslist in nearby River Forest, deconstructing and then reconstructing the fence in ways that challenge our ideas and expectations of their role and purpose in our communities.
Mara Baker, A Mountain One Fence High–A Ribbon Two Yards Wide, 2018, (detail). Found chain link fence, plastic fencing, flagging tape, found mesh produce sacks, rope, twine, aluminum wire and other studio debris.
Mara Baker, A Mountain One Fence High–A Ribbon Two Yards Wide, 2018, (detail). Found chain link fence, plastic fencing, flagging tape, found mesh produce sacks, rope, twine, aluminum wire and other studio debris.
Women Painting Men
May 20 – June 23, 2018
Guest Curated by Gwendolyn Zabicki
Gallery Talk: Saturday June 9 at 2pm
Featuring paintings by Karen Azarnia, Mel Cook, Katie Hammond (Halton), Jessica Stanfill, Celeste Rapone, and Gwendolyn Zabicki.
Coverage in the Chicago Tribune: “Crushing the Patriarchy in One Look” by KT Hawbaker
Gwendolyn Zabicki, “Tree Trimmer,” 2015. Oil on canvas. 32 x 24 inches.
Katie Halton @beast4thee Missing you already Acrylic and fabric on canvas 48 x 48 IN 2018
Celeste Rapone, “Rider Husband,” Oil on Canvas, 42” x 48”.
Jessica Stanfill. “Gabrielle and the Swan,” 2015. Oil on canvas.
Mel Cook. “Fruit Punch II,” 2015. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 20 in.
Karen Azarnia. “Field,” 2018. Oil on canvas, 42 x 60 inches.
“Women Painting Men” is a group exhibition featuring the work of six female painters.
In this show, we see portrayals of men that run from sexual to sympathetic to sentimental. This exhibition asks viewers to consider: is the female gaze simply a reversal of the male gaze–that is to say, men rendered as sexual objects for the viewer’s pleasure; or is the female gaze best understood as a new generation of women learning to look at themselves and others in a new way?
Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in her 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In the essay, she states that the female gaze is women looking at themselves through the eyes of men. More than 40 years have passed since Mulvey wrote her still powerful essay. Do alternative modes of seeing and representation exist in the world, or are artists and viewers alike still trapped in a binary of active and passive?
AP ART 2018 – Riverside Brookfield High School Annual Exhibition
AP ART 2018 – OUR ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF ART BY RIVERSIDE-BROOKFIELD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS!
Exhibition on View April 21 – May 12, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday April 27th, 6-8pm
*Please note that although our opening receptions typically take place on Sunday afternoons, we will hold the reception for “AP Art 2018” on Friday, April 27th from 6-8pm to accommodate the schedules of students and families.
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden and Riverside Brookfield High School are excited to announce our 9th annual presentation of exceptional artworks made by students enrolled in RBHS’s AP Art class. This group exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs by students in their sophomore, junior and senior years.
Artwork by Ryan Kodama.
Once again, the “AP Art” exhibition will occupy both the Freeark Gallery AND our FlexSpace next door! The exhibition of approximately 50 artworks is on view for three weeks, from April 21st through May 12th. Come share the creativity of our community’s young artists by joining us for a celebratory reception on the evening of Friday April 27th from 6-8pm! Light snacks and refreshments will be served. Thank you to our sponsors Paisans Pizza for providing food for the reception!
Artwork by Audrey Hicks.
Artwork by Brianna Diaz.
Artwork by Michaela Espisito.
Artwork by Will Gerena.
Artwork by Xjavier Olvera.
*****
A big thank you to our reception sponsors Paisans Pizza (http://www.paisanspizza.com/brookfield/) for providing food for the opening reception event!
This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
708-442-6400
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesdays – Saturdays 1-5pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter.com
or contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Ise: cise[at]riversideartscenter.com.
The Riverside Arts Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
This program is funded in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from Riverside Township.
STRIKE/SLIP: John Grod, Stacy Isenbarger, Harold Jeffries and Jennifer Mannebach
March 11 – April 14, 2018
Guest curated by Jennifer Mannebach
Guest curator walkthrough and artist’s talk with Jennifer Mannebach and John Grod takes place Saturday, April 14, 2-3pm
Guest Curator’s Statement:
STRIKE/SLIP brings together the work of John Grod, Stacy Isenbarger, Harold Jeffries and Jennifer Mannebach–artists who share a deep interest in borders and boundaries. What is the condition of existing at a border or threshold? Whether it’s a geographical area or a philosophical point of view, to inhabit a headspace while simultaneously empathizing with someone else, one or the other must be slightly blurred. ‘Around,’ ‘Between,’ ‘Within,’ ‘Delineate’ and ‘Across’ are words that, as Stacy Isenbarger once said, “draw us to an edge, but more importantly our need to define it in reflection to our place in confronting it. We shift.”
The tectonic implications of STRIKE/SLIP, a type of fault line where the ground shifts horizontally in an earthquake, are especially resonant in this context. I’ve asked three other artists who have these proclivities to join me in this exhibit. Working with Harold Jeffries is particularly freighted with these concerns. Although I have worked with him professionally at Little City Center for the Arts as a facilitator for his singular work, he is also a friend and collaborator. While the content of his work is already rich with polarities and borderlines (heaven/earth, real/imagined), there is also the circumstance of Jeffries’ everyday interactions with people. Jeffries’ spoken communication is often discursive and fragmented, and I believe this kind of collaboration could only happen authentically within the context of longstanding friendship and trust. Jeffries’ empathy and generosity of spirit are asserted through his deep concern about the housing needs of all people, on earth and elsewhere. His drawings, or “blueprints for heaven,” are designs for something yet to be built; they are mutable and in the moment, but reflect a concrete intention.
The relationship between John Grod, Jeffries and me as we collaborate contains thresholds that are vacillating, only becoming more legible through a longer arc of time. Grod has a persistent and tenacious pursuit of expanding creative possibilities through video; more than just a facilitator, he is able to harness his own formidable creative and technical skills to collaborate in a way that gives others a voice but also reflects his own distinct sensibilities. His choice of labor intensive processes reveal his empathy and dogged pursuit of these ideals. Stacy Isenbarger’s work invites closer inspection while never allowing for a comfortable place to settle. Superannuated upholstery and padded surfaces imply domesticity and comfort, but also insinuate questionable issues of decorum or even subterfuge. New and old structures and notions of inside/out dichotomies are underscored by the absurdity of a velvet covered rock or stick. Thoughts turn to mutations, a transmutation of nature and culture as well as private/public implications. It is not so much about marking the contours, but rather, exploring possibilities in that liminal space. –Jennifer Mannebach
Artists’ Statements:
Jennifer Mannebach, artist, guest curator:
I’ve always been interested in remnants, mistakes, awkward encounters. In past work,
I’ve explored the shifting ground of casual moments between people. My most recent
body of work explores the boundaries and architecture around, between and within
people. Inspired by city maps, honeybee navigation charts and human genome maps,
my references also extend into tracking methods of larger group identities, conflating the
boundaries of the body with geographic boundaries, underscoring the inauthenticity of
maps that can never tell a complete story and the reduction of an individual to a genetic
map. A housing map of Chicago was the catalyst for Vouchers, which also references
illuminated manuscripts, a grand contrast to the important stories swept under the rug in
anonymous representations of people’s lives. In recent work, my use of paper
emphasizes these tectonic shifts in the transition between areas that are cut and
sanded, placed comfortably, and sections that are applied more in the tradition of
marquetry, revealing a seam rather than overlap.
Stacy Isenbarger:
Detached from expected presentations, my work is empowered by cultural associations
to materials, language, and iconography. Poetic intersections at play create dialectical,
contextual space for viewers to experience. As viewers perceive their place in relation to
these suggested boundaries and directives, they can reflect on their own ability to
navigate the complexities of our restrictive environments. This outside dynamic
highlights the shortcomings of labeling and dividing lines of cultural, spiritual, and
political judgment. Through this philosophically charged space, viewers are asked to
challenge their assumptions of their environment and the restrictive barriers they build
for themselves.
Harold Jeffries:
Harold’s empathy and generosity of spirit are asserted through his deep concern about
the housing needs of all people, on earth and in heaven. Harold’s drawings or
“blueprints for heaven” are designs for something yet to be built, yet paradoxically they
are mutable and in the moment. They seem constantly renewable, the desire to create
an ideal fixed home a guiding principal, perhaps to remedy the transiency of his abusive
and unstable childhood. Though physically manifested in singular drawings, these plans
are a lifelong project with no beginning, middle or end.
John Grod:
Formerly the Little City Center for the Arts Media Arts Manager, John received a degree in fine arts from The University of Illinois at Chicago and went on to work at The Center for New Television; a non-profit media arts center for ten years. There he conducted workshops in video production and post-production as well as being the on-line editor for “The 90’s”, a nationally syndicated PBS magazine style show that won numerous awards. He has served as a freelance independent video consultant, editor and production assistant for numerous award-winning productions. He maintains a strong commitment to educate and counteract mainstream media’s marginalization of those on society’s fringes. Grod has won over 30 awards for media programs produced at Little City. In 2013 he directed Share My Kingdom, which premiered at the Gene Siskel Film Center and has been featured in various film festivals since then.
Andrew Falkowski: Flat Earth
January 28 – March 3, 2018
Reception: Sunday, January 28, 3 ‐ 6pm
Artist’s Talk: Andrew Falkowski with Terry R. Myers, Saturday February 24th at 3pm
Curated by Anne Harris
Andrew Falkowski, “Read Between the Lines,” 2017, Acrylic, Modeling Paste, 34” x 23”
Click Link to download a PDF of the exhibition essay by Anne Harris: Andrew Falkowski Two Paintings and Fake Tape Essay
The RAC is pleased to present Andrew Falkowski’s solo exhibition Flat Earth.
Andrew Falkowski’s newest text paintings riff off pop-culture sources culled from junk mail, commercial packaging, magazines, art history and punk songs. In reproduction, this work reads as smart and wry — a sleek visual stylization of audio aggression. A sustained look at the actual paintings reveals a layered conversation. Meaning is found through the intersection of paint, image and language, combined with playfully loving swats at painted illusion.
This ranges from trompe l’oeil to replication. For example, duct tape: Falkowski seems to use it, but it’s really acrylic paint. He’s cast this from a mold and then applied it to the surface of his painting. The illusion is so convincing that we see none – the cast tape looks just like duct tape. Once we understand the wit behind the process, the experience of the painting flips. The look of jury-rigging becomes painstaking craft. First impressions dissolve into contradictions. Fiction is fact; fact is fiction. In the end, we have work that extends the inherent irony in painting: that surface meaning differs from deeper meaning.
Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms. – Roy Lichtenstein
–Anne Harris
About the Artist
Andrew Falkowski is a Chicago-based painter. His work has been exhibited at venues ranging from Rosamund Felsen Gallery (Los Angeles), to Mixed Greens Gallery (NYC), to Chicago galleries such as Andrew Rafacz, Kavi Gupta and Julius Caesar, as well as The Suburban (both Oak Park and Milwaukee). Falkowski’s work has been discussed and reviewed in such publications as Time Out, Chicago Art Magazine, and Artforum.com. His art criticism and essays have appeared in publications such as New Art Examiner, Cakewalk Magazine and Shifter Magazine. He is now currently a contributing writer to Chicago Artist Writers and New City Art Online. Falkowski is Assistant Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as Core Faculty in SAIC’s Low Residency MFA program.
RAC Spotlight | Natalie Jacobson – Seeing Things: the difference between you and me
Guest Curated by Mark Booth
OPENING RECEPTION: Sunday, December 10, 3-6PM
Exhibition Dates: December 10, 2017 – January 13, 2018
Natalie Jacobson, Untitled, 2016, acrylic and spray paint on burlap and stretcher, 10″ x 8″.
Natalie Jacobson’s work explores the states between inside and outside by focusing on the ‘thingness’ of a painting. While hinting at pictorial space, she looks for ways to erode the hierarchy of supports, surface, and picture plane by using all components to create an image.
Untitled, 2017. Spray paint and ink on burlap and stretcher, 18″x16″.
Untitled, 2016. Spray paint on burlap and stretcher, 10″x 8″.
Untitled, 2016. Spray paint and thread on scrim and stretcher, 10″ x 12″.
RAC Spotlight exhibitions are annual solo shows highlighting the work of artists in the RAC Community. Natalie Jacobson is RAC’s Arts Programming Manager and heads up our FlexSpace program. She has exhibited her work in group shows at the Hyde Park Art Center; the Rockford Art Museum; The Guest Room, Chicago; and Dogmatic Gallery, Chicago, among other venues. “Seeing Things: the difference between you and me” is her first solo exhibition.
Guest Curator Bio: Mark Booth is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, writer and musician. He is an assistant professor in the Writing and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited his work widely both nationally and internationally. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions at Devening Projects + Editions (2017); Sector 2337 (2016) and Adds Donna (2011) in Chicago.
Aimée Beaubien | Twist Affix | October 29 - December 2, 2017
October 29 – December 2, 2017
Curated by Claudine Isé, RAC Freeark Gallery Director
Artist’s Talk: Saturday, November 11, 3pm
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 29, 3-6pm
Installation view of “Twist Affix,” 2017, at RAC’s Freeark Gallery.
The Riverside Art Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Aimée Beaubien.
“Leaning, shooting, bedded, staked, staying. Drooping, reclining, pitched, and placed. Sloping, jutting, braced. Holding, heaped. Planted and spread. My recent collage-based installations map networks of meaning and association between the garden, the ephemeral, and the photographic. Qualities of the garden run parallel to the nature of photography: they are spaces defined by interactions of the scientific, the accidental, and the temporal.
In my garden installations, cut forms interweave, encircle, and hang; trail in ribbon-like shreds; and become wild ornamental outgrowths. Hothouse grow lights create plays of intensely colored light and shadow; an oscillating household fan may keep these enmeshed forms actively swaying with life.
Installation view of “Twist Affix,” 2017, in rear gallery.
My collage practice is driven by the translational space between image and material, and by generative and cumulative strategies of making. I embrace the documentary capacity of the camera, recording what I encounter. My images become printed photographs, then sculptural forms. Cutting and reassembling, I draw with scissors.
Photographic paper is my sculptural material. Through it, I explore physical and perceptual relationships. Within the visual and temporal entanglements of my installations, perception slips between recognition and abstraction: from a sky, a topography, or a textile, into fields of color and pattern and back again.
Detail of “Twist Affix,” 2017.
Immaculately tended or grown wild; in public space or as private refuge, gardens are collections. They are the products of migration, accumulation, curation, and caprice. Culled from the orderliness of scientific taxonomies, we assemble our gardens for aesthetic pleasures, and for contact with wildness.
Our hours spent in leisure or in the attentive labor of cultivation are hours spent contemplating temporal bodies. In the botanical, we watch biological time, reproduction, death, and renewal. In the fragile and heavy shapes of blooms, we find the erotic. Heat, moisture, light, earthy fragrance, soft din of ambient sound: a bouquet of the sensory.
Detail of “Twist Affix,” 2017.
In the store of family pictures I have inherited, it is evident that my great-grandmother photographed her garden throughout the seasons and her lifetime. Now I photograph in my tiny backyard garden, in my mother’s amazing garden in Florida, and in the botanical gardens near each of our homes. In these spaces, varied life cycles move at different speeds: interdependent systems bloom, grow, intertwine, and die. Gardens portray time.
My studio is on the first floor of my home, and the garden is out back. Wild, fast growing vines creep about the garage, slink through the yard and climb all around our house. I have noticed my domestic environment influences my work in unexpected ways. Last summer I began pulling out thickly entwining morning glories, plucking the heart shaped leaves and rolling them up into large tumbleweeds. In my studio, the hanging dried and drying plants mingle with huge tangles of cut and woven photographic pieces that dangle down from the ceiling.
I often allow everyday objects from my domestic space to become integrated into the structure of my sculptures and installations. Surrounded by suspended, propped, and perched objects, I consider perceptions of weight: the weight of things, the weight of images, the weight of representations, and the emotional ties interlaced throughout.
I am captivated by many different types of collections, from the significant objects curated and presented by museums to idiosyncratic displays in homes. My photographs are often made in institutional exhibits of art and artifacts, in quirky home museums, in urban plant conservatories, and in my domestic space. As I work in the studio, I jot down fragmentary impressions of what I am making. Titles evolve from these sketches, encouraged by William S. Burroughs cut-up techniques. My titles are collages in text. These transformations – cutting up visual material, making associations, writing, then cutting and fashioning new written forms – mirrors the iterative, recombinatory process of my site-conscious installations.” — Aimée Beaubien
RAC Sculpture Garden: Laura Miracle and Mark Parslow: Bouquet Garni and a Sandwich
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery and Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce our newest installation for the Sculpture Garden, on view through mid-September 2017.
In this collaboration, Mark Parslow and Laura Miracle explore the potential of reclaimed building materials for creating public spaces for exploration and contemplation. Named for its combination of herbs and edible plantings, ‘Bouquet Garni and a Sandwich’ is an invitation to reflect on the role of the senses in experiencing both time and place.
The materials used in ‘Bouquet Garni and a Sandwich’ have humble beginnings: a demolished home in Evanston; a torn-down bowling alley. These materials show their history through their patina: nail holes, layers of adhesive and wax, the stamp of the lumberyard.
The raised beds in ‘Bouquet Garni and a Sandwich’, with their various plantings of edibles and herbs, are meant to be an ongoing source of cuttings for Art Center visitors, adding taste to the senses that are engaged in this work. The plantings also serve as a screen that will guide views both in and out of the space, highlighting the potential of the bench to be both a place for restful seeing and an object of playful looking.
Portage: Duncan Robert Anderson, George Blaha, and Dan Gamble
September 10 – October 21, 2017
Opening Reception Sunday September 10, 3-6pm
Panel Discussion with the Artists Held on Saturday, September 30th at 3pm, moderated by Troy Klyber
Exhibition Curated by Troy Klyber
Dan Gamble, Cascade, 2011/2016. Oil on canvas, 72″ x 64″.
Portage is the act of carrying from one navigable passage to another, or a route through which this activity occurs. As human beings we navigate our own individual streams. But we are also social beings, compelled to reach out, to find and connect with fellow travelers. Some make creative works to serve as signposts and markers, or maps, of their journey. Carrying these creations, they occasionally leave their streams to converge and compare notes, to share what they have learned along the way.
Three artists–Duncan Robert Anderson, George Blaha, and Dan Gamble–have made a portage, so to speak, to Riverside, which itself occupies an area near the historical Chicago Portage. They come from parallel streams, bearing work rendered from disparate media and materials — sculpture, digital images, painting, and drawing. Yet there is a natural affinity and kinship in their works, arising from shared interests in history, cosmology, mythology, physics, science fiction, and philosophy. It is through their individual searches for meaning, and their works, that the artists seek to connect with fellow travelers and cultivate a sense of wonder in the world, marking points along their exploration of this and other realms, real and imagined.
Duncan Robert Anderson, “valentine sevier in supplication to Nwt,” 2017. Gouache and colored pencil, 30″ x 26″.
George Blaha, “LM”, 2014, inkjet print mounted on dibond.
2017 RAC Members Exhibition (Freeark Gallery) + Kids Show (FlexSpace)
Exhibition Dates: July 1st – August 5, 2017
Artists’ Receptions are Saturday, July 15, 3-6pm
Our annual Members Exhibition and RAC Kids Show is a time to celebrate the creativity of the RAC community and our artist-members! We look forward to this exhibition every year, because it foregrounds the paintings, drawings, sculptures and photographs of our talented supporters.
Selected installation views from 2017 Annual Member’s Exhibition:
Camille Silverman, “Memory of the Mountain,” 2017
Ruth Freeark, “Wood Moire”
Foreground: Shawn Vincent, Untitled earthenware sculpture; background: Beverly Rivera, “Abstract #3”
Holly Holmes, “Sky Circus,” 2017
Tom Burtonwood, “Thresholds,” 2017
Nancy Hejna, “Nostalgia”
Anna Kunz | Physical Sunshine | May 21 - June 24, 2017
May 21 – June 24, 2017
Reception: Sunday, May 21, 3 ‐ 6pm
Curated by Anne Harris
Anna Kunz, detail of work in progress: Physical Sunshine, latex
and acrylic on fabric, daylight, 5’3” x 4’ x 2’, 2017.
Download a PDF of the exhibition essay written by Anne Harris by clicking here: Anna Kunz–essay
The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Anna Kunz’s solo exhibition Physical Sunshine.
Anna Kunz’s paintings are flowing plains of fabric that transform rooms. She steeps porous open-grained cloth in paints or dyes, and also paints through fabric against the wall — allowing pigment to penetrate and mark the surface beneath. The paint on the wall becomes a piece but so does the material itself, which is then hung loose so that daylight passes through it. And the light itself is also a piece. That light is saturated with color, which leaks through space and splays across the floors and walls.
This interaction between material, pigment, light and air — the physical three-dimensional experience of translucency — is the body of Kunz’s work. We are the heart. The work comes alive as we move through it. These lushly seductive color-spaces only exist as art when they contain us. The meaning lies in the experience. As the work transforms from attractive to mesmerizing, we’re lured into hypnosis, a full body engagement, like music and dance.
Kunz’s work descends from non-figurative painters of the sublime such as Turner and Rothko, and also from color field painting, particularly Helen Frankenthaler. Today it sits between the juicy geometry of Mary Heilmann and Robert Irwin’s ethereal scrim pieces. Its 3-dimensionality has been woven around experimental dance, and she has worked collaboratively with choreographers and dancers, most notably the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in both New York and Chicago. Although her installations are body-less, they are completed by us — our moving physical selves.
All is a procession,
The universe is a procession with measured and perfect motion
Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric
–Anne Harris
In the artist’s studio: a model of the RAC Freeark Gallery, as plans for the installation unfold.
About the Artist
Anna Kunz lives in Oak Park, IL, and teaches at Columbia College Chicago. She received her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991, her MFA at Northwestern University in 2000, and attended the prestigious Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2009. Kunz has exhibited her paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures and installations at such venues as White BOX, NYC, Art Expo Projects Chicago, and the Smart Museum at University of Chicago. Her work can be found in such public collections as the Prudential Building in Chicago, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and St. Salvador’s College in Scotland. Honors and awards include residencies from the Edward Albee Foundation and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, as well as nominations for grants such as 3Arts, the Artadia Fund and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. In addition to her own work she has curated exhibitions such as the HATCH GALLERY PROJECTS for the Chicago Artists Coalition, and NATURE, Unframed, at the Morton Arboretum, Lisle, IL. She is currently Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid (TSA) in Chicago, part of a national artist-driven coalition of alternative galleries. More information on the artist can be found on her website.
Currently, Kunz’s solo exhibition Heroes for Ghosts is on view through June 17 at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, TX. She also will be having a solo show in 2018 at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, curated by Alison Peters Quinn. She is represented by McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL, and Galleri Urbane Dallas/Marfa.
Anne Kunz, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, 2010
Anna Kunz: Heart of Glass, latex on fabric, C2C project space, San Francisco, CA, 2017
This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
708-442-6400
Gallery Hours: Tue-Sat, 1-5pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter.com
or contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé at cise[at]riversideartscenter.com.
Like us at: www.facebook.com/RACFreearkGallery
Not a RAC member yet? Become a member today and support the creative vision of RAC! Memberships are available online.
The Riverside Arts Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
This program is funded in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from Riverside Township.
AP ART 2017 – Riverside Brookfield High School Annual Exhibition
‘AP ART 2017’ – OUR ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF ART BY RIVERSIDE-BROOKFIELD HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS!
Exhibition on View April 22 – May 13, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday April 28th, 6-8pm
*Please note that although our opening receptions typically take place on Sundays, we will hold the reception for “AP Art 2017” on Friday, April 28th from 6-8pm to accommodate the schedules of students and families
“White,” by Stephanie Molina-Bajana
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden and Riverside Brookfield High School are excited to announce our 8th annual presentation of exceptional artworks made by students enrolled in RBHS’s AP Art class. This group exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs by students in their sophomore, junior and senior years.
“Dirt Track,” by Bailey Schejbal
“Glovebox,” by Adam Nie
This year, the “AP Art” exhibition has expanded to include over 45 artworks and will occupy both the Freeark Gallery AND our FlexSpace next door! The exhibition is on view for three weeks, from April 22nd through May 13th. Come share the creativity of our community’s young artists by joining us for a celebratory reception on the evening of Friday April 28th from 6-8pm! Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
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This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
708-442-6400
GALLERY HOURS: Tuesdays – Saturdays 1-5pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter.com
or contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Ise: cise[at]riversideartscenter.com.
The Riverside Arts Center is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
This program is funded in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from Riverside Township.
Brent Fogt and Stacia Yeapanis: Resist the Urge to Press Forward
March 5 – April 15, 2017
Opening Reception: Sunday, March 5, 3 – 6pm
Closing Reception, Artist’s Talk and Sculpture Garden Installation Unveiling: Saturday, April 15, 3-6pm
“As the ordinary directness of line in town-streets, with its resultant regularity of plan, would suggest eagerness to press forward, without looking to the right hand or the left, we should recommend the general adoption in the design of your roads, of gracefully curved lines, generous spaces, and the absence of sharp corners, the idea being to suggest and imply leisure, contemplativeness and happy tranquility.”
–Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, Preliminary Report on a Proposed Design for Riverside, Illinois
Stacia Yeapanis. “Sit Down in the Tangles,” 2017. Detail of site-responsive installation. Cardboard and plastic.
Brent Fogt, “Half Trunk,” 2016. Jute, cotton yarn, paint, tree branch, trunk. 36 in x 60 in x 40 in.
The precise balance of Brent Fogt’s assemblage sculptures and the repeated tangles and scribbles in Stacia Yeapanis’ floor-based installation echo the ideas foregrounded in Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmstead’s curvilinear landscape design for Riverside, Illinois—a design that invites locals and visitors alike to slow down and contemplate their surroundings. Fogt creates objects that interact precariously with the wall and ceiling, while Yeapanis explores groundedness by arranging tangled thickets of material that blanket the floor. For both artists, making art is a way to escape the clock and pursue an alternate system of time, where discrete, repeated actions in the present take precedence over the looming expanse of the future. Each uses discarded, undervalued materials and meditative processes to encourage viewers to become more aware of their bodies and of the present moment. Rather than pressing forward, they ask us to be still for a while and attend to what’s right in front of us.
Yeapanis’ materially dense installations self-consciously echo the anxiety of “constant doing” that defines contemporary life, while simultaneously offering us an antidote to this pervasive busyness. They are improvised arrangements of thousands of distinct parts—byproducts of non-goal-oriented, repetitive gestures—that will be reconfigured in future installations. For this exhibition, Yeapanis has reduced her material choices and palette to colors found in three, regularly discarded types of material: tan-colored cardboard boxes and shipping tubes, multi-colored plastic dog waste bags, and the ivory tones of raw hand-spun wool. Her work’s ephemerality is pivotal to its content, which speaks to the presence of impermanence in everyday life and the possibility of responding to it with a sense of wonder and play rather than unease.
Fogt’s research and artwork focus on how small, discrete actions—additions, subtractions, divisions—accumulate over time. He creates slender, off-kilter sculptures by assembling fallen tree branches, discarded furniture, worn-out clothing, and other cast-off materials he has rescued from the streets and dumpsters of his Chicago neighborhood. Fogt sutures the branches and prefabricated furniture by screwing, wrapping, or crocheting them together with cotton yarn or jute. The resulting sculptures may hang from ceilings, lean against walls, or rest precariously on floors. By placing humble, weathered materials into predefined architectural spaces, his artwork points to daily activities like standing, sitting and walking that require us to physically balance ourselves and our surroundings.
Alongside sculpture and installation, both Fogt and Yeapanis will present two-dimensional works. Fogt’s collaged images from a 1960 Sears catalog hover in fields of empty space, the pieces appearing to float on the page, while the swirling cacophony of Yeapanis’s colorful ink drawings echo the unpredictably organic forms of her 3-dimensional installations. The artists will also collaborate on an installation for the outdoor sculpture garden, which combines materials Fogt collects while taking long walks along Riverside’s winding streets and parks with “tangles” cut by Yeapanis from packing boxes collected from her neighbor’s recycling bins.
About the Artists:
The son of a Lutheran pastor and a psychotherapist, Brent Fogt was born in Ohio and raised in Texas. Fogt’s sculpture, collage and drawings have been featured in solo exhibitions at Austin College, Emory University, Indiana University and the Lawndale Art Center, and in publications such as New American Paintings, Art in America and hyperallergic.com. He has completed artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, I-Park Foundation and Yaddo. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan and a Master of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. Fogt lives and works in Chicago.
Stacia Yeapanis is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer, and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received her MFA in 2006. Yeapanis conducts weekly interviews with artists for the OtherPeoplesPixels blog. She was a 2011-2012 Artist-in-Residence and a 2012-2013 Mentor-in-Residence at Chicago Artists’ Coalition’s BOLT Residency. Her site-responsive installations have been featured in solo exhibitions at Siena Heights University, Heaven Gallery and Lillstreet Art Center and in two-person shows at Dominican University and Design Cloud. In August 2017, Yeapanis will have a solo exhibition of her work titled Sacred Secular at Indianapolis Arts Center.
*****
This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
708-442-6400
www.riversideartscenter.com
PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW WINTER GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, & Saturday 1 – 5pm, Friday 1-4pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
All of our exhibitions are free and open to the public.
For additional information and high-res press images contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Ise at cise[at]riversideartscenter.com.
A Certain Slant of Light
January 15 – February 25, 2017
Opening Reception: Sunday, January 15, 3 – 6pm
Guest Curated by Bill Conger and Shona Macdonald
“There’s a certain slant of light On winter afternoons,
That oppresses like the weight Of cathedral tunes”
– Emily Dickinson
The work of this group of artists hopes to encapsulate the lyricism, fragility, and foreboding inherent in Dickinson’s poem. Memory too, captured in Dickinson’s vivid imagery, is present in much of this work: particularly the way memories unearth and dislodge, becoming different with age. Also, stillness and boredom where the imagination runs free, on days such as dreary, rain-soaked Sunday afternoons, as evoked in Dickinson’s poem.
The poem’s undercurrent of affliction illuminates something within the narrator herself. A supernatural heft within the four slight passages swells as the arbitrary and enigmatic slant of light transforms into a malevolent force of nature. The artists represented here amplify common visages and familiar objects while expounding on the implications. These artists similarly excavate content from the slightest stimuli either pictorially or through gesture. Their works yield psychically charged moments, which reference Dickinson’s unequalled ability to exact underlying drama from arrested observation. — Shona Macdonald, Guest Curator
Artists in the Exhibition: Bill Conger, Natalie Jacobson, Shona Macdonald, Melissa Randall, Dawn Roe, Pete Schulte, Buzz Spector, and Dustin Young.
Installation view
Bill Conger, “Chrysalism and Coastal Beaching,” 2016. Found brass, 7 x 108 inches.
Natalie Jacobson. “Self Reproducing Triangle.” 2014. Acrylic on canvas. 14″ x 16″.
Buzz Spector, “Ghostwriters #1,” 2016 . Collaged dust jacket elements 12-1/4 x 12-1/4 inches, framed
Buzz Spector, “Ghostwriters #2, 2016. Collaged dust jacket elements 12-1/4 x 12-1/4 inches, framed
Installation view
Pete Shulte, “French Film Blurred pt. 6,” 2015. Graphite, pigment on paper, 8 X 8 inches.
Dustin Young, “Fragment II,” 2013. Ink on paper. 20 x 24 inches.
Installation view
Dawn Roe. “No One Was With Her When She Died (Glitter and Tape),” 2013. 24 in (h) x 63 in (w), Pigment Print.
Installation view
Shona Macdonald. “Ghost #4,” 2016. Silverpoint on paper. 22 x 30 inches.
Installation view
Melissa Randall, Untitled (Jentel Series), 2013. Ink on paper, 5.5 x 7.5 inches.
Good Machines
December 4, 2016 – January 7, 2017
Reception: Sunday, December 4, 3 – 6pm
Curated by Natalie Jacobson
How can we use technology to better connect to others and create new experiences for ourselves? This group exhibition explores this question through works that exploit machine and technology and use interactivity as a form of performance, while looking at the role that potentiality and destruction play within those experiences. Artists whose work often uses technology as a medium are invited to create machines that will generate a gesture, a kind of “drawing” in the form of a mark, sound, light, object, or movement. Due to direct or indirect public interaction with the machines, and within the confines of the gallery space, these drawings will change over time, and possibly be destroyed in the process. Come join in!
“Good Machines” draws inspiration from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization started in the 1960s by Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer that brought artists, engineers, and cutting-edge technology together with the goal of reshaping human relationships to machines, information, and community. Artists who worked with E.A.T. include Fujiko Nakaya, Andy Warhol, John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Forrest Myers, Öyvind Fahlström, Lucinda Childs, Alex Hay, Frank Stella, Michel Auder, John Chamberlan, Nancy Graves, Ralph Hocking, Joan Jonas, Les Levine, Michael Netter, Brigid Polk, Larry Rivers, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra, Tony Shafrazi, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier and many, many others. Their goals were generous in that they wanted to reach people traditionally outside of the art world, as well as take art outside of the gallery context and insert it into the everyday in ways that opened up new conversations.
Niki Passath performance at Longli Media Arts Festival, China, October 2016. Photo credit: Franz Shuber.
For more information on E.A.T. and its history, see: Experiments in Art and Technology: A Brief History of Experiments and Projects, by Woody Vasulka.
Artists in the exhibition are Taylor Hokanson in collaboration with J. Stephen Lee, Richard Holland, Eric Lunde, Niki Passath, Jesse Seay, and Philip von Zweck. The exhibition runs from December 4, 2016 – January 7, 2017.
About the artists:
Taylor Hokanson is an artist, educator and open source hardware advocate. His practice revolves around the creative opportunities formed by online communities and computer-aided fabrication tools. This research informs carefully engineered objects that question the myth of singular authorship, our expectations of post-digital functionality, and the absurdity of human-human and human-computer interaction. Hokanson’s work has been shown in Austria, Canada, Estonia, India, Italy and throughout the United States. In keeping with the nature of his research, online venues form an equally important distribution medium. See the following websites for more information: taylorhokanson.com; diylilcnc.org; github.com/TaylorHokanson; lynda.com/search?q=taylor+hokanson.
Richard Holland is a 2003 JD/MA/MFA graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He had his first gallery show while still in high school, in 1989, and never really came to his senses. Along with Duncan MacKenzie, he founded the art blog and podcast Bad at Sports in 2005. He received grants from the Illinois Arts Council in 2004 and 2009. He has lectured and led numerous panel discussions on art, business and legal issues faced by artists, and comics at a varied string of venues including apexart, threewalls, the National Museum Publishing Seminar, the Art Institute of Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and College Art Association. He has been a visiting artist at Bradley University, Washington State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his spare time he is an attorney in private practice, a realtor, and father to two future ninjas.
J. Stephen Lee is a graphic designer and educator currently located in Portland, Oregon. He has experience in art direction, motion graphics, and UI/UX. He received an AB in Studio Art/Psychology at Dartmouth College and an MFA in Graphic Design/Integrated Media at CalArts.
Eric Lunde is not an artist that specializes in any one talent, media, or genre. My work has ranged from performance and performance art, experimental audio to 2D drawing and wall sculpture/installation. I have numerous audio releases in various formats released through audio concerns here in the US and throughout the world.
Niki Passath studied Violoncello and Architecture in Graz, Austria and made his diploma in Media Art and Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria.The longterm involvement with classical music instruments lead to his interest in automatons, machines and robots. On the one hand he develops robots which draw their experiences as traces on different surfaces, on the other hand he is using the 3D-printing technology to transfer digital content back from the virtual to the reality. Passath lives and works in Vienna.
Jesse Seay is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Audio Arts & Acoustics at Columbia College Chicago. She holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her sound-producing kinetic sculpture has shown at the Hyde Park Art Center, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, the Chicago Children’s Museum, and is on permanent display at the University of Chicago. Find her online at www.jesseseay.com.
Philip von Zweck‘s conceptually driven works ranges from radio broadcasts and participatory public projects to solely authored paintings. He was a founding member of the radio art collective Blind Spot (2005-2008) and producer of the weekly sound art radio program Something Else (1995-2010) on WLUW, Chicago, director of the living room art gallery VONZWECK (2005-2008) and his office gallery D Gallery (2011-present). Solo projects have been presented at The Knockdown Center, NYC; INVISIBLE-EXPORTS, NYC; 65GRAND, Chicago; Performa 11, New York; NADA Hudson/INVISIBLE-EXPORTS; The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Gallery 400, Chicago; three-walls, Chicago. He is the founder of the Chicago Artificial Birding Society and President and CEO of Thornberry, producer of the world’s finest doorstops. He is represented by 65GRAND.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
32 East Quincy Street, Riverside, IL 60546
PLEASE NOTE OUR NEW WINTER GALLERY HOURS: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, & Saturday 1 – 5pm; Friday 1-4pm. Closed Sundays, Mondays and major holidays.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
For additional information, visit www.riversideartscenter.com
or contact Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Ise at claudineise.rac[at]gmail.com.
Sculpture Garden | Luis Sahagun: An Old God Renewed
Opens October 23, 2016 in the RAC Sculpture Garden
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 23 from 3-6pm
“In the beginning there was only darkness.
The atmosphere had no taste.
Anonymous ancestors magically appeared,
Alvaro’s History was erased.
Angels came to hear him sing,
For it was the rise of a new king.”
-Creation Story
Luis Sahagun
An Old God Renewed, 2016
wood, drywall, cement, screws, spray paint, acrylic, oil, resin, & metal
Courtesy the artist
Luis Sahagun creates paintings, sculptures and objects that serve as icons of an invented personal mythology. He is interested in the overlap of memory, imagination, and his own ancestral legacy and art, and describes himself as as “a quixotic artist who channels the working ethics of a construction worker on a romantic quest to use art to empower working class sensibilities.”
Sahagun’s practice is deeply informed by his experience as a laborer, construction worker and product designer. Instead of the painter’s traditional brush, palette knife and canvas, Sahagun employs saws, knives, and engineered wood particle board as his primary tools and media. These modes of production have led Sahagun to develop an idiosyncratic personal vernacular that remains proudly embedded within the everyday realities of his blue-collar upbringing. He describes his outdoor sculpture An Old God Renewed as “an anthropomorphic panther that serves as a portal for human souls to exit our realm and enter the mythology that I have constructed.” Within the Panther’s eye is a depiction of the moon, which provides the symbolic source of energy for the portal’s ability to function.
Importantly for Sahagun, the moon also represents a world where “the fallen…friends and family members that have been murdered due to the violence found within my own Chicago Southland community” now reside. The sculpture is Sahagun’s offering to this familiar yet strange, distant yet ever-present “old god,” the moon. Through symbol, metaphor, and mythic storytelling, Sahagun’s works construct a viscerally powerful alternative vision of Chicago community history, through which we may ponder the minute alongside the infinite, the mundane in concert with the divine.
Luis Sahagun
An Old God Renewed, 2016
(detail)
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 1 ‐ 5pm.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
Judith Brotman and Fraser Taylor: Missed (and Other) Connections
October 23 – November 26, 2016
Reception: Sunday, October 23, 3 – 6pm
Curated by Karen Azarnia
CATALOGUE AVAILABLE
Read a review of this exhibition in New City here.
The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Missed (and other) Connections, a two-person exhibition featuring work by Judith Brotman and Fraser Taylor. Brotman and Taylor reference form and the human body through the immediacy of mark – be it drawn, stitched, collaged, or sculpted. Having shared an artistic dialogue for many years as both friends and colleagues, both artists delve into the complex territory of relationships and connections between people. Navigating the often contradictory notions of identity, self-perception, longing and desire, Brotman and Taylor convey urgency and vulnerability, embodied through formal material choices and a sense of touch.
Fraser Taylor, Missed Connections no. 1, 2015, collage and ink on paper, 14” x 17”
Judith Brotman, Untitled (Dorian Gray), 2016, Mixed media. 9″L x 4 1/2″ W x 2 1/2″ D
For this exhibition, Judith Brotman’s work is inspired and informed by Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Many of her mixed-media sculpture pieces incorporate stitched and altered pages with fragments of the text. Like much of Brotman’s work, these pieces are ruminations on spaces of transformation and odd love stories. More specific to Wilde’s text is the focus on the complexity of human motivations that are frequently at odds with long standing self-perceptions.
Fraser Taylor’s work in this exhibition is motivated by his fascination with Masaccio’s Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden, 1424-27. This fresco inspired an extensive series of drawings, started in 2013. The work focuses on the emotional as well as physical aspects of the figures of Adam and Eve, the pictorial space they inhabit, and reflects on underlying conflicts between individuality and conformity. The drawings are made from observation, memory and association and are dependent on process, which encompass the unexpected and the unpredictable, intending to trap the urgency of gesture. The exhibition includes drawings, printed cloths, and sculptures, all a direct outcome of an aesthetic concern for the figure, nature, abstraction, and materiality.
ABOUT:
Judith Brotman
Judith Brotman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago. Brotman received her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies. Her work includes mixed media installations and theatrical immersive environments which occupy a space between sculpture and drawing. More recent work incorporates language/text based conceptual projects which are also meditations on the possibility of transformation. Brotman has exhibited extensively in Chicago and throughout the US. Exhibitions include: Threewalls, Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Gallery 400, Illinois State Museum, The Bike Room, INOVA, the DeVos Art Museum, Hampshire College, Smart Museum of Art, SOFA Chicago, The Society of Arts & Crafts, Boston, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Brotman currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Fraser Taylor
Raised in Glasgow, Scotland, Fraser Taylor is an interdisciplinary visual artist who lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in printed textiles from Glasgow School of Art, Taylor continued his studies at the Royal College of Art in London where he earned a Master of Arts. Taylors work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Mackintosh Museum at Glasgow School of Art; Gallery Boards, Paris; Galeria Jorge Alcolea, Madrid; Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney; Axis Gallery, Tokyo; Baryshnikov Art Center, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Aurobora Press, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, and Threewalls, Chicago; In 2001 he was appointed the Visiting Artist in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he continues to serve as Adjunct Professor.
Karen Azarnia
Karen Azarnia is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and curator. She received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at Terrain Exhibitions, Oak Park, IL; the Union League Club of Chicago, IL; The Riverside Arts Center, IL; and recent group exhibitions at the Chicago Artists Coalition, IL; Elder Gallery, Nebraska Wesleyan University, Lincoln, NE; and Comfort Station, Chicago, IL. She is a grant recipient from the Illinois Arts Council and the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and has been included in Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post and Newcity. She is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For more information visit www.karenazarnia.com.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
Gallery hours: Tue-Sat, 1 ‐ 5pm.
For additional information contact Claudine Isé, Freeark Gallery Director, claudineise.rac@gmail.com
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
PURCHASE THE “MISSED AND OTHER CONNECTIONS” EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Published on the occasion of the exhibition “Judith Brotman & Fraser Taylor: Missed (and Other) Connections” at the Riverside Arts Center, this full-color catalogue features essays on the works of Brotman and Taylor by exhibition curator Karen Azarnia, Scott J Hunter, and Annie Morse.
Click below to read an excerpt from the catalogue (“The Space Between,” essay on the work of Judith Brotman and Fraser Taylor by exhibition curator Karen Azarnia).
The Space Between essay by Karen Azarnia
Catalogue price includes $2.00 shipping charge.
Riva Lehrer: Exquisite Radical | September 4 - October 15, 2016
September 4 – October 15, 2016
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 4, 3 ‐ 6pm
Closing Reception & Artist Talk with Riva Lehrer and Anne Harris Saturday October 15, 2-5pm
Reading and Artist Talk begins at 3pm
Exhibition curated by Anne Harris
Full-color exhibition catalogue with an essay by Anne Harris available for purchase
The RAC is pleased to present Riva Lehrer’s solo exhibition Exquisite Radical. Riva Lehrer’s figurative paintings and drawings challenge conventional notions of beauty. She exquisitely depicts bodies we are told not to look at, certainly not to stare at—not to see. She does this through portraiture, which traditionally focuses on unique individuals deemed worthy of being “the stars of their own lives.” (1)
Riva Lehrer, “66 Degrees,” 2016. 24″ x 36”, acrylic on wood panel.
Born with spina bifida, Riva was told in art school that “bodies like yours are not acceptable subject matter for art.” (2) She has gone on to radicalize that which is labeled deformed, forcing us to see a new beauty through her anti-normal lens. With this, we’re given emotional intensity, insight, empathy, dignity and intelligence, all wrapped in fantastical narratives and the seductive luxury of rendered illusion. — Anne Harris
About the Artist
Riva Lehrer is a Chicago-based artist, writer and activist for the disabled. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited at museums such as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. She’s been the recipient of awards such as The Carol J. Gill Award for Disability Culture, The Wynn Newhouse Award for Artists of Excellence, and a 3Arts Residency Fellowship at the University of Illinois.
Riva’s writing grapples with topics ranging from beauty to feminism to disability culture, as exemplified in essays such as “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” published in Sex and Disability. She has created and been the subject of documentary films such as The Paper Mirror, which follows her collaboration with the graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. Her TEDx talk, “Valuable Bodies,” outlines her evolution as an artist, and describes a primary challenge in her work—to replace pity with empathy, persuading the able-bodied to relate as protagonists to the disabled.
This exhibition is free and open to the public.
This program is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and sponsorship from the Riverside Township.
(1) Riva Lehrer, “Valuable Bodies,” TEDxGrandRapids, June 30, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjAzDqDRyK4
(2) Ibid.
Purchase Riva Lehrer Exhibition Catalogue
The Riverside Art Center’s “Riva Lehrer: Exquisite Radical” catalogue is available bundled with a copy of the 2004 catalogue “Riva Lehrer: Circle Stories,” or can be purchased individually. A limited number of “Exquisite Radical” catalogues signed by Riva Lehrer and Anne Harris are also available while supplies last – first come, first served.
Please click on the link below to read an essay by Anne Harris and to preview “Riva Lehrer: Exquisite Radical”.
Thank you for purchasing an exhibition catalogue! All proceeds from the purchase of this catalogue provide direct support to the Riverside Arts Center’s programs.