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Textu(r)al
work by J B Daniel
curator: Jens Brasch
June 24 - July 29, 2006
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Textu(r)al,
the Freeark Gallery's newest exhibition, features the
artwork of JB Daniel and is curated by the artist Jens
Brasch. JB Daniel makes art full time in his studio in
Chicago's Southside Historic Pullman District. Daniel
uses alternative media - gunpowder, wire, speakers, etc.
- to create series and installations. His work is highly
conceptual and engages the observer by combining diverse
elements. For example, in his Bang Series, Daniel unifies
seemingly unrelated topics. In the piece, Ideologies,
Cat Names and Types of Pasta (part of the Bang Series),
the combination of the said ingredients equivocates the
mundane (cat names and pasta) with the profound (ideologies).
This work blurs the meaning of words and makes one wonder
if Populism is simply a political movement or the name
of Daniel's cat.
All of Daniel's work plays with the ideas of texture and
text, forcing the observer to question the conventions
that hold the obvious in place. Using non-traditional
material in the construction of his conceptual pieces,
Daniel tries to undermine what one knows and how one knows
in an attempt to free the observer, the art, and the artist
from the constraints of the everyday. By using art to
deconstruct modern customs of communicating, seeing, hearing,
and observing, Daniel hopes to create a new modern mythology.
There will be a closing discussion
with the artist on Saturday July 29 from 5:30-7:30pm.
Refreshments will be provided.
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Ideologies,
Cat Names, Types of Pasta
roll caps with imposed letters, 2005 |
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JAZZ
Michael Wille, Rob Davis, and Jason
Fraser
curator: John Fraser
May 20 - June 17, 2006
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Curated by the artist, John Fraser,
"Jazz" explores the meaning of Wille, Davis
and Shelby's works as they interplay on the walls of
the Freeark Gallery. As Shelby studies the impossible
and unseen through painting influenced by satellite
imagery, microscopic photography, and other elements
beyond the scope of the immediate human environment,
Wille, through abstraction, finds the subtleties contained
within the large and conspicuous remnants of the city
of Rome. Davis' work – sculpture that renders
furniture design completely dysfunctional – improvises
on the themes of subtlety and function contained within
the other artists' work.
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Michael Wille, "Crossing
(Rome No. 69)," acrylic and graphite on paper,
12" X 12", 2005. |
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Chance Encounters
Stephen Mueller & Mary Strasevicius
April 8 - May 6, 2006
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Chance Encounters was curated by Professor Susan Sensemann
of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The artists'
work exemplifies the processes of abstraction in which
relationships of form and color are determined through
organic juxtapositions. Blue encounters brown, orange
interacts with green, and forms develop as if guided by
happenstance. However, each artist draws from an archive
of images that pertain to memory and personal history.
Forms are reminiscent of bottles, boats, and whirling
dervishes and color seduces the eye of the viewer into
a game of chance. In both Chicago-area artists' work pictorial
spaces become collective environments that are active,
whimsical, and delicate in structure.
In the work of Stephen Mueller, as stated by Stephen Luecking,
Professor at DePaul University, "…the look
and feel of maps has an extended history…His Bookabie
Turn paintings have a subtle but definite suggestion of
large-scale geography…The images are cleanly rendered
like line illustrations from a text book on surreal science.
His imagery is not studiously chosen, but gleaned according
to what strikes his fancy. Mueller attempts to garner
his data subjectively and without pre-judgments. His goal
is to guard against setting pre-conditions that might
ossify perception."
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Mary Strasevicius states "My inspiration comes
from all experience….As I create, my stream of
consciousness unfolds organically. The creative act
is a natural, intuitive process with an intelligence
of its own. My images arise from improvisation in combination
with structure, which is strongly influenced by classic
jazz ( i.e. E.Dolphy, J.Coltrane, C.Mingus, etc.). Color
builds space through applying thin glossy veils of color
transparencies. The drawing qualities of the line, shape
and space are in intimate relationships with each other
as they interact in opposition and harmony all at once.
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Judy
Langston / Burleigh Kronquist
Both Langston and Kronquist use
multi-media elements to comment on ou
modern surroundings and our place in society.
March 4 - April 1, 2006 |
JUDY
LANGSTON
Artist Statement
The work including in this exhibition incorporates humor
to comment on popular culture and how we respond to media
messages. So often popular media figures such as movie
stars and sports figures influence who we worship, who
we try to be like, and who we try to be. My work highlights
what we buy into and what we do to ourselves in an effort
to be like our idols and how unthinking and silly we can
be in the process.
BURLEIGH KRONQUIST
Artist statement
For several years, I have been painting on found materials
of one kind or another: books, newspaper pages, xeroxes,
magazine covers, playing cards, photographs. The paintings
are abstract, but I am energized by the presence of these
underlying "real world" elements even when they
completely obscure the surfaces on which they are painted.
In the Carpe Noctem ( Seize the Night) series I have located
paintings on photographs of one of the most obtrusive
sites of commercial culture: the billboard. I want the
paintings — here only a portion of the photograph's
surface — to work as paintings. At the same time,
I am interested in the tension that arises when these
disparate worlds converge.
Robert Rauschenberg speaks of working in the space between
art and life. I'm after something slightly different;
namely the tiny, hard-to-locate place where art and "life"
bump into each other, and if I'm lucky, duke it out to
a 15-round draw.
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vessel/nonvessel
glass and ceramics works by
K. Acerra, Jill Birschbach, Julie Brock, Pearl J. Dick,
Heather Hug, Cheryl Noel, Holly Wolf-Mattick
January 29- February 25, 2006 |
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Comments
on vessel/non-vessel, JULIE LAFFIN, CURATOR
Some of the artists in vessel/non-vessel create obsessive
works with lots of repetition; 100 test tubes filled
with organic materials (K. Acerra), multiple bottles
that add up to sculptural installations (Julie Brock),
masses of tubular pieces that fit into large glass cubes
(Holly Wolf-Mattick), hundreds of human heads rendered
in glass (Peark J. Dick).
Other works contemplate the very idea of the "vessel"
and its functionality. For example, Jill Birschbach
makes clay vessels that cannot actually contain anything.
Some of these pieces have rounded bottoms, making them
precarious when placed on a flat surface. Cheryl Noel
creates "twin" pieces, works in which a bond
between 2 pieces is created. This twinning makes the
viewer unsure if the pieces are moving closer together
or pulling farther away from one another or both. K.
Acerra also makes vessels that are intentionally collapsed
before firing them, creating low-functional vessels
that may represent the shapes of natural objects, such
as deflated breasts.
Loosely stated, the works included in vessel/non-vessel
represent the tension or competition between the utilitarian
functions of objects made from traditional mediums and
their more aesthetic /conceptual aspects and meanings.
Many of the vessels in the show are non-traditional
forms made from conventional mediums. However, these
works stretch our notions of what "traditional"
vessels are and, in some instances, move out of the
traditional and into the non-functional and over-functional
realm.
Julie Brock Artist's Statement
Julie Brock started studying and working with glass
under the instruction of Sharon Gilbert from Talisman
Glass Studio in Chicago, Illinois in 2000. She studied
interior design at Columbia College in Chicago, and
is currently doing both design and glass full time.
Shape, form, space, light, and the relationships those
aspects play with multiple pieces integrated together
is the main focus of her current work.
"It is an illimitable medium... and i can't wait
to never find the end of it."
Jill Birschbach
Jill Birschbach strives to create forms that are implausible
and contrary in appearance with a beautiful and inviting
surface. The work is hand-built using thin, extremely
gritty stoneware slabs that are allowed to stiffen before
construction. Once they are bisqued they are fired in
a soda kiln to add extra texture and surface variation/depth.
The work derives its impact through contradiction and
the tension this creates. It has curved bases, "missing"
pieces, cracks and joints, which make it appear unstable,
but it stands. The thin slabs suggest weakness and fragility,
when in actuality they have survived at least one -and
as many as three- firings to 2400°F. The scale and
volume of the forms hint at function, but there is no
utilitarian object that meets this criterion.
To Brischcach, clay is a natural medium to explore these
concepts- it is inherently a contradiction. At one stage
it is soft and malleable, in another, rigid and cold.
K. ACERRA ARTIST'S STATEMENT
K. Acerra has always been fascinated with plants and
has collected or has been given a variety of plants
and plant fragments from many the many places she has
lived - Louisiana, Florida, New Hampshire, Virginia,
Pennsylvania, Maryland, and more. Stopper Growth, the
series displayed in "vessel/non-vessel" is
a series of work based on growth and decay.
Stopper Growth grew out of some chance happenings as
well as a very clear idea of what symbolism would be
connected to the material used. The glass tubes - science,glass
being fragile,tubes reproductive. The plant material
and the functionality and essentialness of plants -
beauty, food, survival, intricate network of design,
color, texture. The porcelain - porcelain is purest
of clays, organic, it being a stopper and representing
growth at the same time, "stopper growth"
it also has obvious connections to collecting, gathering,growth,
containment and remembrance- each tube for me contains
a little history from a time and place from which I
can recall and reflect and since it is a visual piece
I wanted to celebrate the beauty that is all around
us and that can go unnoticed when small and be thought
of as insignificant.
CHERYL NOEL ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Unlike architecture, glass is immediate, fluid, and
fragile.
Glass allows the exploration of form, color and light
in a way that architecture never could.
My work explores the materiality of glass and is an
attempt to express the motion of it in it's molten state.
Gestural in nature, it is a collection, interaction,
and relationship between vessels. |
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Student
and Member Art Show
December 2 – January 14, 2006 |
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"After
the Fact"
Steven Carrelli, Katherine Schofield,
Brad Silverstein & Ian Weaver
October 29 -
November 26
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After the event, after the pleasure,
the pain, the loss, the gain, after the triumph if not
the crime, later, the artist turns to the evidence and
re-presents it, carefully. After the fact. Indeed the
work of the four artists included in this exhibition
devotes considerable attention to that which has little
apparent aesthetic importance or interest. What had
been discarded to the margins is revived to new possibility.
Maybe.
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Katherine Schofield's work seems on
first glance to be quite different than the other three
artists -- all quite obviously engaged with the conventions
of trompe l'oeil. Certainly her installation might suggest
an altogether different direction. Never the less the
paintings which comprise her installation have a similar
"just the facts" character in that they are
developed in fairly direct response to the physical
characteristics of found crushed pop cans. |
In Brad Silverstein's paintings of
Polaroids of trophies the glow of nostalgia receives
the unflinching stare of the camera (again). The significance
of specific achievement that trophies normally carry
has been blurred. All that is left is the painted image
suggesting somewhat mysteriously: look again. |
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Ian Weaver's mind-boggling replications of his family's
documents are so straight forward and exact as to seem
self-less. Yet, ironically, the commitment involved
in making these works lends them a compelling intensity
and sense of significance that is fully in keeping with
his highly personal broader project of revisiting his
family's history. |
In replicating abstractions created
from tape and cardboard Steven Carrelli gives credence
to materials that exist - normally - only to serve,
package and protect. When rendered in the techniques
of the Renaissance these curious hybrids of art povera
and geometric abstraction float gracefully between absurdity
and reverence. |
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