Margaret Wharton: Spirited Vision

May 10 – June 14, 2014
Reception: Saturday, May 10, 3 – 6pm
Organized by Darby Garbe and Karen Azarnia

“My work describes the nature of what I know about humanness. It incorporates both destruction and construction. It begins with a mental notion and evolves through physical discovery. The result is a form I could have never imagined.”

– Margaret Wharton

The Riverside Art Center is honored to present Spirited Vision, a retrospective celebrating the life and work of the late Margaret Wharton.  A longtime Chicago-based artist, Wharton had a prolific and celebrated career.  Her work is included in a number of national museums and collections, and she has had lasting impact on multiple generations of artists.

Margaret Wharton received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975.  She was a founding member of Artemisia Gallery, a cooperative for women artists, in 1972.  Selected collections include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; the Whitney Museum of American Art, N.Y.; and the Seattle Art Museum, WA.  Wharton’s work is represented by Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Noelle Allen: Osmia

March 30 – April 26, 2014
Reception: Sunday, March 30, 3 – 6pm
Curated by Karen Azarnia

The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Osmia, featuring new work by Noelle Allen. Osmia, more commonly known as the Mason Bee, refers to a genus of solitary bees found worldwide which construct their nests from clay(1). Much like the Mason Bee, Allen’s sculptural practice is intensely focused around the activities of building, casting and constructing. With a recent insurgence of color, the process‐based work incorporates a variety of materials including resin, concrete, wax, twigs and plaster.

It is no accident that Allen’s latest work coincides with the onset of spring. Influenced by nature and an abundance of natural fauna and organic materials found in her own garden, the work ranges from sculpture to installation and drawing. The resulting objects suggest notions of growth, metamorphism, and rebirth. At the same time, interesting tensions abound. Imperfect, rough surfaces and marred beauty hint at elements of decay. The physical materiality of the work alludes to organic structures, tissue, membranes, skin and bone. The materials used to construct the work also suggest a suspension of growth and time, as if the pieces have been preserved in a kind of otherworldly stasis. It is at once a wondrous and unsettling world Allen creates, where ardent curiosity with the natural world embodies both scientific observation and the imagination.

‐Karen Azarnia

1 Farlex Inc.,The Free Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Osmia (accessed January 13, 2014).

RBHS: AP Art 2014

February 21 – March 22, 2014
Public Reception: Friday, February 21, 5 – 7pm

Riverside Brookfield High School, in conjunction with RAC, presents AP Art 2014. This annual group exhibition features artwork created by the current class of talented high school AP art students. A variety of mixed‐media work including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and more will be on display.

Participating artists include: Lucia Adami, Brigitte Barney, Parley Belsey, Paige Bottari, Rebecca Burke, Dana Callanan, Sasha Contreras, Diego Diaz De Leon, Katelyn Duffy, Angel Gonzalez, Jason Goo, Emily Kedzie, Vincent Lamanna, Emily Mangan, Tessa Murray, Kylie Payne, Eric Perez, Nina Ritacco, Nicholas Schliep, Andrea Spinasanto

Judith Mullen: A Crooked Path

Curated by Karen Azarnia
January 19 – February 15, 2014Reception: Sunday, January 19, 3 – 6pm, with talk at 4pm

The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present A Crooked Path, featuring painting, sculpture and installation by Judith Mullen. Over the past few years, Mullen has developed a daily routine walking through the forest near her home. During these excursions, the artist collects a variety of natural and man‐made objects that make their way back to the studio. Twigs, plastic, tree stumps and sawdust are combined with oil paint, canvas, plaster, paper and wax.

While referencing nature and our relationship to it, Mullen is not an environmentalist. Rather, her abstract work embodies an exploration of materials and meditation located through the process of making. Drawing upon influences such as Lee Bontecou and the recent exhibition Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949 ‐ 1962 at the MCA Chicago, Mullen is focused on “how you break things down and put them back together.” Maintaining openness, her intuitive experiments repurpose discarded, recycled and often deteriorated materials to craft something new.

In constructing the pieces, which hover between painting and sculpture, the artist mines the gap between strength and fragility. According to Mullen, a work should look as if it’s about to “fall apart.” This tenuous balance incites a physical response in the viewer, one that speaks to ideas of transformation and change. Incorporating materials in different physical states, there is an inherent reference to organic life cycles. The acts of construction and reconfiguration speak to the cycle of personal trauma, recovery and resilience.
-Karen Azarnia

Dianna Frid + Allison Wade: Turn of Phrase

Curated by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Curator MCA Chicago
October 13 – November 16, 2013
Reception: October 13, 3 – 6pm
Closing Talk + Publication Launch: November 16, 3 – 6pm, with talk at 4pm

Catalogue Available
Click to download a PDF of Julie Rodriguez Widholm’s catalogue essay on Dianna Frid and Allison Wade: catalogue-essay-excerpt-allisondianna_web_sm

left: Allison Wade, and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable footnote (after Vladimir Nabokov), 2013, Aluminum, copper, wood, fabric, zipper, sand,
59-1/2” x 31” x 13”

right: Dianna Frid, Prosodic Transmission #1, 2013, Digital print mounted on cloth, embroidery thread, graphite, paint, Two-sided 11” x 8”

Turn of Phrase brings together all new work of Chicago-based artists Dianna Frid and Allison Wade. Both artists have backgrounds in fiber and material studies, and consider language from various perspectives ranging from book-making and appropriated texts from obituaries to quotations of poetry and syntax, with physical materials and sculptural form, paying special attention to surface, rhythm, and texture. Recalling the purposefully minimal, and at times abstract, composition and experience of poetry, together their work evokes questions about the language of sculpture, and the sculpture of language.

Dianna Frid was born in Mexico City and immigrated to Canada as a teenager. She currently lives in Chicago where she teaches at the University of Illinois. Frid makes two and three-dimensional objects as well as site-specific installations and artist’s books that are both corporeal and philosophical. Her work has been exhibited at the Drawing Center (NY), PS1-MOMA (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), the neues kunstforum (Cologne) and other public and private institutions. Reviews of her art works have been published in Art in America, artforum.com, Time Out Chicago, Sculpture International, Art in Print and other publications. For more information on her work visit www.diannafrid.net

Allison Wade currently lives and works in Chicago. She was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She holds a BA in English from Stanford University (1995) and MFA from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago (2012). Her work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at devening projects+editions, Chicago, and has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout Chicago, Baltimore, and Memphis. More work can be seen here: www.allisonwade.com

Julie Rodrigues Widholm is Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago where she has organized more than fifty exhibitions since 1999. She recently curated MCA Plaza Project: Amanda Ross-Ho; Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks; and Argentinean-artist Amalia Pica’s first American solo museum exhibition with MIT List Visual Arts Center. She is currently co-curating Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo’s first survey exhibition for 2015.  Since joining the MCA in 1999, she has curated international group exhibitions such as Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City, which was accompanied by a bi-lingual publication, as well as in-depth presentations of the MCA Collection, and worked on major international touring exhibitions such as Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, Luc Tuymans, and Richard Tuttle, among others.  In addition, she has curated solo exhibitions of dozens of Chicago-based artists including most recently Scott Reeder, Laura Letinsky, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Cauleen Smith. Widholm holds an M.A. in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and a B.A. in Art History and Political Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dianna Frid gratefully acknowledges the support from the CANADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS, which partially funded the work in this exhibition.

Order Turn of Phrase catalogue ($2 shipping charge included)

Alison Carey: New Kingdoms

September 8 – October 5, 2013
Public Reception: Sunday, September 8, 3:00 – 6:00pm
Curated by Anne Harris

The Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery is pleased to present New Kingdoms, an exhibition of photography and sculpture by Alison Carey. Carey is known for her biomorphic constructions ‐‐ elaborately staged dioramas populated by figurative inventions. Photography transforms these into dream worlds that range from the deepest surreal landscapes to the compressed microcosm inside a scientific slide. The nocturnal oddities inhabiting these spaces are species invented by Carey, possible “after the fall” replacements for life on earth after man‐made annihilation. Inspired by scientific innovations in tissue cultivation, they tweak our fascination with the grotesque while raising larger questions about viability, sustainability, invention, the dangers and responsibilities of creation, as well as the relationship between strangeness and beauty.

While Carey can be viewed in the context of other contemporary photographers who stage photographic vignettes ‐‐ from the “film‐scapes” of Gregory Crewdson to the still‐lives of Laura Letinsky or Jan Groover — she keeps better company with Ernst Haeckel, the 19th century naturalist and artist who promoted and attempted to expand upon Charles Darwin’s theories.  While much of Haeckel’s theoretical work proved erroneous, he left a legacy of meticulous illustrations that demonstrate his belief that the artist’s role in science required “scrupulosity and conscientiousness.” Carey subsumes herself in her own fictitious creations, in their compulsive production, their systematic evolution, and in the quirks of her own artistic practice. Her ever‐expanding studio occupies the large majority of her apartment, and she spends most nights, all night, molding and constructing her otherworldly environs. With the 19th century eccentricity of the devoted amateur Carey steps outside the contemporary art/photography conversation to straddle science. In doing so, she has devised a uniquely visual science fiction that immerses us in a future netherworld, a fantastical, hypnotic possibility — the consequence of our own demise.

Alison Carey received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988, and her MFA from the University of New Mexico in 2005. Her work is in public collections such as the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the New Mexico History Museum, and has been exhibited at such venues as the Pingyao International Photography Festival in Pingyao, China; the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Michael Mazzeo Gallery New York, NY; the Noorderlicht International Photo‐festival, the Netherlands; and the International Museum of Surgical Science, Chicago, IL. She currently lives in Chicago and is Associate Professor of Photography at Columbia College.

Tree House by Kathleen Thometz

May 18 – June 22, 2013
Reception: Friday, May 31, 6 – 8pm

The Riverside Arts Center is pleased to present Tree House, an exhibition featuring sculpture and installation by Kathleen Thometz. Thometz takes the idea of micro-living to a new level. Filling the gallery and sculpture garden with diminutive tree houses, forts, houseboats, and mobile homes, the works all exist on a miniature scale. As Thometz, explains, “Everyone needs a place to get away. Even if you can’t physically enter your own hut or fort, you can mentally and emotionally by meditating on one of these tiny homes.” With vibrant colors and a whimsical sense of play, Thometz deals with the need for personal space, escapism and control. Once inside you can pull up the ladder, float away from the dock or drive off. They are at once inviting and comforting, as Thometz is an adept world-maker. At the same time the work is uncanny, instilling a sense of longing and desire for an alternate reality always just out of reach.

Tripping

Tom McDonald and Janine Patten
April 6 – May 11, 2013
Reception: Saturday April 6, 6 – 8pm

Tripping is an exhibition of assemblage pieces by Thomas McDonald and landscape paintings by Janine Patten. The work is based upon their joint experiences backpacking and canoeing in the Upper Midwest.  Tom and Janine have spent a good deal of time exploring the lakes and rivers of Wisconsin, Michigan and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota.

Some of Janine’s landscape paintings serve as a record of a particular place on a particular day; while others integrate symbolic characters, images from pop culture or touristy roadside statues into wilderness landscapes calling into question the existence of a true ‘wilderness’. Tom’s camping and fishing assemblage works are reminiscent reliquaries to his past and present outdoor experiences.  By incorporating his fondness of early Italian Renaissance altarpieces and the Pop Art period, they express the personal spirituality he has gained from being in the wilderness.

Thomas McDonald received his MFA from University of Illinois Chicago in 1992, and his BFA in Printmaking from Northern Illinois University in 1985.  He is currently a studio arts instructor at Moraine Valley Community College, Morton College and the Riverside Arts Center.  He has exhibited nationally including numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his work is included in the Chicago Public Arts collection.  He is currently represented by Packer Schopf Gallery.

Janine Patten lives in Oak Park, IL with her husband, artist Tom McDonald.  Patten received her MFA from University of Illinois in 1993, and is currently an adjunct instructor at the DePaul University College of Education where she supervises student teachers in Art Education.  Over the years, Janine has experimented with a variety of media including sculpture, painting, installation and video.

AP Art 2013

March 1 – 30, 2013
Public Reception: Friday, March 1,  5 – 7pm

Riverside Brookfield High School, in conjunction with RAC, presents AP Art 2013.  Now in its fourth year, this annual group exhibition features artwork created by the current class of talented high school AP art students.

Participating artists:  Clare Bollnow, Paige Bottari, Elise Castelaz, Anna Dietz, Jason Goo, Morgan Goskusky Levin, Yagmur Guzeldereli, Allison Harris, Maxwell Harris-D’Amato, Victoria Hernandez, Megan Kennedy, Bailey Csech, Helen Moscinski, Mona Novikas, Jordan Peklo, Aaron Perez, Sean Pruett-Jones, Marciel Rodriguez, Deanasia Sanders, Krystyna Serhijchuk, Candice Shelbrack, Sophia Soluri, and Kate Wallner.

Stitched and Glued

The Handmade Photo Book
January 25 – February 23, 2013
Public Reception: Sunday, February 3, 3 – 6pm
Curated by Paul D’Amato

Participating Artists: Matthew Austin, Matt Avignone, Even Baden, Shawn Bush, Timothy Campos, Craig Cotsones, Barbara Diener, Jordan Fuller, Lenny Gilmore, Mike Killion, Kelsey Lindsey, Colleen Plumb, Marne Provost, Justin Schmitz, Jay Seawell, Daniel Shea, Brandon Sorg, Stephanie Tanner,Terttu Uibopuu, Victor Yanez‐Lazcano, and more.

RAC is pleased to present Stitched and Glued. This exhibition showcases a selection of handmade artists’ photo books produced by young photographers over the last five years. With the advent of e‐books and the disappearance of the bookstore, the book as an object has become an endangered species. Within a generation, this symbol of learning and human intellectual growth has virtually vanished from the cultural landscape. At the same time, however, the technology that has caused the extinction of the book as an object of cultural consumption has fostered a kind of re‐birth: the hand made artist book. With desktop publishing software and affordable high quality digital printers, artists are now able to marry technologies as old as monasteries with the latest digital innovations to produce unique hand made books with unprecedented ease. Photographers are experimenting with book design, narrative structures and materials and then printing, stitching and gluing books on basement ping pong tables everywhere.

About the curator: Paul D’Amato is an internationally recognized photographer. His work is in collections including the Metropolitan Museum Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Life Magazine, and Harpers Magazine. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, D’Amato’s first book, Barrio, was published in 2005 by The University of Chicago Press. He is represented by the Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago.

American Etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick

November 30, 2012 – January 12, 2013
Reception: Sunday, December 16, 3 – 6pm

RAC is pleased to present American Etchings, featuring new work by Tony Fitzpatrick.  A Chicago-based artist, these new etchings are part of an ongoing series that embodies the artist’s complex relationship to American identity and ideals.  A timely group of work following the recent presidential election, they are surprisingly intimate in scale, yet pack a punch with the dense use of imagery culled from Chicago street life, personal memories, contemporary politics and industrialization.  Fitzpatrick accompanies many of the etchings with a written narrative, in which he interweaves personal history and anecdotes with thoughts on contemporary social and political issues.  These highly personal works are at once revelatory and enigmatic, unabashedly brazen yet poetic, and possess a physical delicacy that is deeply powerful.

Fitzpatrick’s works are in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami.
For additional information on the artist visit http://tonyfitzpatrick.wordpress.com/.

ColorSpace by J Clayton

ColorSpace
Curated by Karen Azarnia

Project Space: Michelle Bolinger
RAC Garden: Michelle Grabner + Brad Killam

October 19 – November 24, 2012
Reception: Sunday, October 21, 3 – 6pm
Conversation with architect Thomas Jacobs + the artists at 4pm

J Clayton’s non-objective paintings celebrate color, while demonstrating a nuanced understanding of formal spatial relationships. Working in acrylic on raw canvas – an unforgiving medium – Clayton paints series of color spots marking points in space, establishing both structure and pathways of movement. Drawing upon her experience as an architect, she uses color as structure to create tension between apparent stability and potential dissolution. These color-space paintings are a reflection of an internal world mapped from a lifetime of gathering information, processing data, recognizing patterns and solving problems. For Clayton, her art making practice is her “way of thinking about the world.”

In the project space, RAC is pleased to present work by Michelle Bolinger. Intimate in scale, these recent paintings investigate elements of space, and the ways we interact with that space. Incorporating “faux architecture” as a structural element, Bolinger is interested in the balance between concrete geometry and atmosphere. While her older works reference landscape directly, often incorporating natural elements such as a raindrop or shell, recently Bolinger has started thinking about the works as islands. Specifically they are domestic, geographic, and cultural islands in which the drawing, density and trace of marks become an interwoven tangle of space.

Extended through March 30, 2013

With Noguchi’s influence in mind, Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam, a married couple who have collaborated on artworks and exhibitions since 1993, have created a single work to display within the Riverside Art Center garden. In a recent conversation with the artists, Killam noted: “The garden has a history with ceramic works, a few trees, crushed rock ground surface and a busy suburban location… a contemplative cube, made from wood and concrete, makes sense in that space.”

Public Conversation: Sunday, October 21st, 4pm
The Freeark Gallery will hold a public conversation with the exhibiting artists and architect Thomas Jacobs during the reception. The intersection of painting, architecture, and the formal investigation of space will be discussed.

J Clayton is a California non-objective painter, who lives and works in San Francisco’s Potrero / Mission arts district. • MFA in Studio | School of the Art Institute of Chicago  •  BA in Art / Art History | Rice University •

Chicago-based artist Michelle Bollinger received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her BFA from Indiana University, Bloomington.  Currently a visiting professor at the University of South Florida, Tampa the artist has exhibited widely including Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL: Regina Rex, Brooklyn, NY: the Chicago Cultural Center, IL: Roots and Culture, Chicago, IL: and most recently at the Sonnenschien Gallery, Lake Forest College, IL.

Michelle Grabner received her MFA from Northwestern University in 1990. She is Professor and Chair of Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a regular contributor to Artforum, Art-Agenda and X-tra. She has exhibited nationally and internationally including Musée d´art Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Tate St. Ives, UK; Stadtgalerie, Keil; Kunsthalle, Bern; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Midway, Minneapolis; Rocket, London; INOVA, Milwaukee; Southfirst, Brooklyn; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Milwaukee Art Museum among others. The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland is developing a survey exhibition of her work for scheduled for fall 2013. Brad Killam received his MFA from University of Illinois Chicago in 1993. He is currently Associate Professor of Art at College of DuPage. He has exhibited regularly in the United States and Europe since 1993, most recently at INOVA, Milwaukee, Gallery 16, San Francisco, Leo Koenig Projekte, NY, Julius Caesar, Chicago and Tanzschule Projects, Munich. Together Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam operate the artist space, The Suburban in Oak Park, IL and the kunsthalle, Poor Farm Exhibitions in Northeastern Wisconsin.

Tom Jacobs has been recognized by the national American Institute of Architects as 2012 Young Architect for his “tireless dedication and devotion to the practice of architecture, to his clients, team members, and students,” noting that “his guidance and aspiration for the profession is infectious.” He first joined Krueck+Sexton Architects in 1997 after receiving his Diploma of Architecture from the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1995. From 1999 to 2002, Tom worked for Herzog and deMeuron in Basel and San Francisco on the New de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, returning to K+S in 2002. Instrumental to many of the firm’s award-winning projects, Tom has served as Project Architect on such well-known projects as the Herman Miller Chicago Showroom, the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, and 1100 First Street in Washington DC.

Candida Alvarez | drawinggreen | September 14 - October 13, 2012

drawinggreen
September 14 – October 13, 2012
Reception: Sunday, September 23, 4 – 8pm
Public Conversation: Sunday, September 30, 4 – 6pm
Candida Alvarez speaks with critic Terry Myers
Curated by Anne Harris

Click here to read an essay on the work of Candida Alvarez written by Anne Harris

Preview and purchase the exhibition catalogue here: “Candida Alvarez: drawinggreen”

Read a review of “Candida Alvarez: drawinggreen” in New City here.

Inspired by place, comfort and her own portability, Alvarez will transform the Freeark Gallery into a “directed reflection on a travel memoir.” Through drawing, she responds to the garden, the wall, the space of the gallery, and the verdant convolutions of Riverside, an Olmsted designed oasis surrounded by Cook County’s relentless grid. “I see this exhibition as an opportunity to foreground the importance of my drawings as formal pictorial excavation into my thinking mind. The color green links my travels between Puerto Rico, Maui, Chicago and Riverside. It is memory, it is a meditation and it is pleasure.”

Candida Alvarez received her BA from Fordham University in 1977 and her MFA from Yale in 1997. Originally from Brooklyn, with roots in Puerto Rico, her work is included in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and has been exhibited at venues such as the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, SNO Contemporary Art Projects in Sidney, Australia, and Peregrine Program in Chicago. She will be having a solo exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, December 2012.

Urban Trace by Anne Evans

July 7 – August 3, 2012
Curated by Nancy Hejna

Urban Trace features new work by local artist Anne Evans. Evans’ main interest lies in found moments experienced through the mundane details of the urban landscape. Taking time to observe and document architectural and man-made elements in the urban setting are crucial to her practice. She is at once interested in the history and trace left behind by these marks, as well as the formal qualities. Engaging a variety of different mediums including photography, fiber and installation, Evans’ work often reveals abstract compositions through color, pattern, and surface. The work embodies a sense of time and decay, while revealing the inherent beauty of the passing moment.

Claire Ashley + Jefferson Godard

RAC sculpture garden:
Let us go then, you and I

June 1 – July 27, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 6 – 9pm
Curated by Karen Azarnia

RAC is pleased to present a collaborative installation by Jefferson Godard and Claire Ashley. The piece will at once reflect and engender dialogue between the respective disciplines of each collaborator. With a background in architecture, Godard is also an avid video collector and curator. Ashley is an artist whose work conflates boundaries between artistic disciplines. Her inflatable sculptures expand the dialogue between painting, sculpture and performance. Together they will present a site-specific installation in the RAC sculpture garden. RAC students will be invited to paint on the piece, as a means to foster community-based participation.

Push – Pull

May 26 – June 30, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 6 – 9pm
Curated by Karen Azarnia

Participating Artists: Claire Ashley, Dana DeGiulio, Anne Harris, Lindsey Hook, Richard Hull, Brian Kapernekas, Eric Lebofsky, Stacza Lipinski, Sangram Majumdar, Kim Piotrowski, Carly Silverman, Kyle Staver

This group painting exhibition explores the ongoing dialogue between abstraction and representation. The work presented is unified on the most fundamental level: it all exists as materials on a surface. While the work spans a varied spectrum, with some artists engaging the conversation through perception moving towards the invented or imagined, and vice versa, all move towards a singular point. They all demonstrate an interest in investigating material surface, often with a high degree of innovative playfulness.
Some of the painted surfaces emphasize flatness in the search for shape and color, others embody illusionistic space, and yet others foreground varied textures and a strong sense of physical materiality. The figure-ground relationship in the works adds additional layers of complexity, as imagery is pushed, pulled, lost, found, suggested, hidden and revealed.

Life Force by Nnenna Okore

April 14 – May 18, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 14, 5 – 8pm
Curated by John Harmon

Raised in Nsukka, Nigeria, Okore’s largely abstract works are inspired by textures, colors and landscapes of her milieu. Finding reusable value in discarded materials, Okore enriches her work with layers of meaning through familiar processes. Both in her home country Nigeria and United States, she relies on the use of flotsam or discarded objects, which are transformed into intricate sculpture and installations through repetitive and labor-intensive techniques. Some of her processes include weaving, sewing, rolling, twisting and dyeing, which she learned by watching local Nigerians perform daily tasks. Most of Okore’s works explore detailed surfaces and organic formations.

Okore is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Art Department at North Park University, Chicago. Her works have been exhibited internationally in museums and galleries in Chicago, New York City, London, Paris, Cancun, Sao Paulo and Copenhagen. She is a recipient of the 2012 Fulbright Scholar Award; and has also been recognized by the Chicago Tribune, BBC and New York Times.

RBHS 2012

Riverside Brookfield High School
AP Art 2012
March 2 – April 7, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, March 2, 6 – 8pm

Riverside Brookfield High School, in conjunction with RAC, presents AP Art 2012. Now in it’s third year, this annual group exhibition features artwork created by the current class of talented high school AP art students. A variety of mixed-media work including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and installation will be on display.

Living Large by Maria Vergara

January 27 – February 25, 2012Opening Reception: Saturday, January 28, 5 – 8pm
Curated by Karen Azarnia

RAC presents Living Large, an exhibition of new paintings by Maria Vergara. Vergara’s previous work explores the public fascination with celebrity culture and decadence. As painter Susanna Coffey writes:

“The playful aspect of Maria Vergara’s work begins with the not so playful cult of celebrity, a cult that seems to be in control of our public imagination today. She twists and turns the painted queens, princesses, heiresses and movie stars until they and the worlds they inhabit look as grotesque as they really are.”

In her recent paintings, Vergara expands on themes of decadent materialism and excess. Depicting luxurious home interiors, she presents opulent rooms in the Baroque style. The patterns Vergara uses are intricate and compulsive, in an attempt to visually overwhelm the viewer. This use of pattern serves to signify excessive wealth and social status, or as Vergara states, to depict “expensive hoarders.” By referencing the art historical past, Vergara comments on current socio-economic issues. She also builds complex layers of meaning in the work, as the paintings embody contradictory impulses of pleasure, desire and revulsion.

Ms. Vergara received an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009, and a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2005. She is the recipient of a Merit Scholarship from SAIC and has exhibited her work both locally and nationally.  http://www.mariaastridvergara.com/

RAC Students + Members

RAC Students + Members
December 2, 2011 – January 14, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, December 2, 6 – 9pm