Freeark GALLERY & sculpture garden exhibitions
Sculpture Garden | Jordan Martins: stay out come in stay in come out
Jordan Martins’ site-specific installation consists of two barricade structures with a striped “dazzle” camouflage pattern based on the colors of the immediate surroundings of the location where they are placed. The patterns are designed to both attract attention and at the same time visually obfuscate the form of whatever or whomever is behind them. The barricades are constructed in a modular fashion to allow and suggest different configurations–a wall, a shelter, a fortress, a scattered cluster–with a bench built into the anterior side of each.
The barricade structure was chosen for its function as a barrier that is both firm but permeable: it marks a line between inside/outside, allowed/not-allowed, and public/private, but it functions differently according to who is implicitly or explicitly granted access to one side or the other. By making this installation re-configurable, various publics are encouraged to create their own spaces with it, or imagine how a structure that limits movement could be a space that is protective, inviting, or empowering.
With each new location that stay out come in stay in come out occupies, the patterns are added onto and adapted to respond to the particular visual conditions of those surroundings, leaving visible traces of the previous locations as they are adapted.
Artist’s Bio:
Jordan Martins is a Chicago based visual artist, curator, and educator. He received his MFA in visual arts from the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Salvador, Brazil in 2007, and is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and North Park University. He is the executive director of Comfort Station, a multi-disciplinary art space in Chicago. Martins’s visual work is based in collage processes, including painting, photography, video and installation, and he has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in exhibitions at The Mission, Evanston Art Center, LVL3, The Franklin, The Museu de Arte da Bahia, Goldfinch, and Experimental Sound Studio. He was a resident in the Chicago Artists Coalition’s HATCH program in 2013. Martins is co-director of the Perto da Lá <> Close to There, a multidisplinary project with international artists in Salvador, Brazil and Chicago.
Monica Rezman and Beth Bradfish: Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space
May 5 – June 15, 2019
Sculpture by Monica Rezman
Composter/Sound Artist Beth Bradfish
Opening reception Sunday, May 5, 3-6pm * Artists’ Talk Saturday May 25 at 2pm
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space, a collaborative two-person show by Chicago-based artists Monica Rezman and Beth Bradfish. Rezman, a visual artist, and Bradfish, a composer and sound artist, here combine sound art and visual art work in ways that are responsive to one another. Rezman has worked in abstraction for a number of years, producing sculptural works that originate from her classical drawing background – using everyday materials such as discarded cardboard, pieces of past drawings, and reclaimed coffee sacks. Bradfish, as a sound composer, creates sound environments for both aural and tactile experiences. In this exhibition Bradfish responds to Rezman’s work and the site with sound that resonates within the environment and seduces the viewer around and through the installed pieces. Sound Textures for Intimacies of Space is a play on the relationship between sound and vision, and asks the question, what if visual art could make sound?
Artist Bios:
Monica Rezman is a multi media artist using painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and textiles, exploring intimacy within abstraction through the representation of hair and everyday materials such as cardboard. She studied fine art and textile design at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Instituto Allende in Mexico, and classical drawing and painting in Italy and The School of Representational Art in Chicago. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally including at Govern State University Gallery, South Bend Regional Museum of Art and the Chicago Cultural Center. In 2017/2018 she was Artist-In-Residence at Field/Works, Chicago Artist Coalition and the Hyde Park Arts Center.
Beth Bradfish is a composer and sound artist dividing her time between Michigan and Chicago. In 2013, she was commissioned by Access Contemporary Music as part of the Open House Chicago celebration of the Chicago Architectural Foundation. Her work has been performed at Spectrum NYC, Constellation (Chicago), Issue Project Room (NYC) and she was selected as a featured composer in the Oscillations series of Experimental Sound Studio. She is president of Chicago Composers’ Consortium and teaches as an artist in residence at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. She has been awarded an artist residency fellowship at Ragdale and Field/Work, Chicago Artists Coalition. In 2018 she participated in the New Works Residency with Harvestworks New Media (NYC) and awarded an Individual Artist Support grant from DCASE, also receiving sponsorship at High Concept Laboratories (Chicago) in the same year. She received her MFA in Music Composition from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015.
RBHS AP Art Show 2019
Marina Silvestri, 10th grade, “Toothbrushes.”
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden and Riverside Brookfield High School are excited to announce our 10th 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.
The exhibition of approximately 40 artworks is on view for three weeks, from April 6th through 27th. Come share the creativity of our community’s young artists by joining us for a celebratory reception on the evening of Friday April 13th from 6-8pm! Pizza from Paisans Pizzaria, light snacks and refreshments will be served. Thank you to our sponsors, Brookfield’s Paisans Pizzaria for providing food for the reception!
Undiscoverable Country
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden is pleased to announce Undiscoverable Country, a two-person exhibition with work by Kate McQuillen and Gina Hunt, guest curated by Robert Burnier. The opening reception will take place Sunday, February 24, 2019 from 3-6pm.
Out of virtually limitless nature, our concepts might be considered as attempts to bring order to chaos, to bring desire within reach. But as they grow and multiply, they become a new, mysterious forest, an ever expanding, perpetually untraversed land; an undiscoverable country. We look upon these synthetic landscapes, and wonder if we can ever know them, whether reconciliation with unknowing could be itself a kind of knowledge.
The works in this exhibition share a tension between precision and openness. Each of them goes to great lengths to create their manifestations and phenomena, and yet each finds itself at the precipice of a new level of uncertainty or a threshold between feeling and fact. Even as they succeed brilliantly in what they set out to do, they reveal something else about ourselves as viewers, about our notions as thinkers, that we may find harder to define. The works prompt us not to consider the usual breaking of boundaries that art commonly proclaims, but perhaps to consider what a boundary really consists of.
–Robert Burnier, Guest Curator
About the Artists:
Kate McQuillen, “No Concrete Plan”, acrylic on panel, 20” x 16” x 1.5”, 2019.
KATE MCQUILLEN works primarily as a printmaker who is exploring the limits of the process to create painting-like images rich in color and depth. The surfaces have a strong, direct, tactile matteness that plays against the near infinities of the spaces they seem to depict. If the Renaissance was fascinated with reproducing the structure of seeing and perspective, McQuillen appears to be employing a depth that reverberates both outwardly and inwardly, touching on the ways we see and the ways we draw from within to create what we see. The works are themselves lush presentations of color that have an immediacy and formal coherence but also will evade any particular, identifiable tonality. The subtlety of shifting hues and coruscating relationships bear up to extended looking and invite us to roam among the bright tensions within.
Agraduate of York University School of the Arts, Media, Performance and Design, in Toronto, Ontario, McQuillen is currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited extensively across the United States and Canada while making contributions as an art critic, writer and curator for the Super Duchess project space on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Recent exhibition venues for her work also include Johalla Project Space, Chicago, Goldfinch, Chicago and the Massey Klein Gallery, NYC.
Gina Hunt, “Partition”, Hand-dyed scrim, oak, brass nails, and brass hinges, dimensions variable depending on configuration; full dimensions measure 66 inches x 81 inches, 2018.
GINA HUNT is a painter and sculptor who explores physical, spatial relationships largely within the bounds of painting. The “pictures” emerge from a series of relationships among carefully calibrated, placed and offset lattices, grids and patterns. The canvas and its wooden support become image, object, and subject. Referencing the lineages of Op art, Process Art, and hard edged abstraction, her work presents an immediate aesthetic impact by challenging structures that draw the viewer deeper into experiencing them as objects as well as sites of perceptual phenomena. We are left to wonder about the “how” as we regard them pleasurably as form. The artist has developed an extensive language for approaching the construction of the works that brings a certain utility, craft, and drama into their making. Observational representation gives way to observational discovery, and the production of conditions for a broader, even cosmic experience. But if there is magic, it is of a decidedly earthbound origin, as playful forces among the parts turn structural integrity into other kinds of meaning.
Hunt creates abstract paintings, sculptures, and site-specific installations as interdisciplinary platforms to research the complexities of vision and the subjectivity of visual experience. Gina has presented her work nationally and internationally in solo exhibitions at The Franklin, 65Grand, University Galleries at Illinois State University, and Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar, along with group shows at Chicago Artists Coalition, Alan Koppel Gallery, Cleve Carney Art Gallery, Drew University, Baby Blue Gallery, Practise, DEMO Project, E. Tay Gallery, Elmhurst Art Museum, Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, and Front Room Gallery, among others. Hunt has received artist residency awards from Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, Hinge Arts, and the Badlands National Park. Her work has been featured in reviews and publications such as The Rib, Gulf Times (Doha, Qatar), Salt Hill, and New American Paintings. Hunt currently lives and works in Chicago, where she is a faculty member within the Drawing, Painting and Printmaking Department at Loyola University Chicago.
About the guest curator:
ROBERT BURNIER (American, b. 1969) is an artist who lives and works in Chicago. He received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute in Painting and Drawing in 2016. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania (1991). Exhibitions include Black Tibernius at the Chicago Riverwalk, Of No Particular King, at Arts Club of Chicago, Primary, at Korn Gallery, Drew University, New Jersey, Lip To My Ear, at Vacation Gallery, New York, Objectified, at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, So That Justice Should be Tyrant, at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Ghost Nature, curated by Caroline Picard, at Gallery 400, Chicago, IL and La Box, Bourges, France, The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle at the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, Imaginary Landscapes, curated by Allison Glenn, at Chicago Urban Art Society and Jenny From the Color Block, at the Cincinnati Art Academy. His work has been exhibited at art fairs in Miami, New York, Chicago and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has served on the boards of several arts organizations, including Heaven Gallery and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Chicago.
Sculpture Garden Installation: Lynn Basa, “Nomads”
Lynn Basa, Nomads, 2019 (detail). Mixed media, papier-mâché, wire, garden torches.
Nomads are a troupe of paintings migrating through Chicago on their way to becoming something else.
Lynn Basa’s paintings have started taking on lives of their own. At first, she says, they would merely “whisper free associations to her inner voice” as she was working on them. But then the voices became so distinct while making the works in her Happy Place series that she began to let the paintings speak for themselves and even included an interview with them in the exhibition catalogue. The group of paintings that followed, known as the Pods, “left the wall and spun a tale of being found in the woods where they were created by ‘animals with thumbs,’ creatures who had no knowledge of art history and were free of self-judgment,” as the artist describes it. Basa sees Nomads as the latest manifestation of this evolution. “With them, creative time overlaps with physical space and time. These paintings need to exist, then leave, to make room for whatever is supposed to happen next.”
About the artist
LYNN BASA is a full-time artist with a studio in Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood. She is a painter who also does public art commissions. She is the founder of The Corner Project, a community-based practice focused on the people and places of Milwaukee Avenue between Kimball and Central Park. She is the author of The Artist’s Guide to Public Art, which will be updated and reissued as a second edition in 2019.
Lynn Basa’s Nomads is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
Natalie Krick: Natural Deceptions
Natalie Krick, “Me posing as Mom posing as Marilyn,” 2014.
RAC is pleased to announce Natural Deceptions, the first solo exhibition in the Chicago area by Seattle-based photographer Natalie Krick. Inspired by magazine spreads and celebrity pinups, Natural Deceptions is a biting yet witty sendup of popular portrayals of feminine beauty and sexuality. Krick’s photographs are fueled by a conflicting attraction and aversion to images of glamorous women. Along with her mother and sister, she poses for the camera, reimagining the highly formalized images that taught them what it meant to be beautiful. Krick favors a harsh flash and vivid color to accentuate the superficiality and the façade of glamour that are the hallmarks of fashion media. “My mother, my sister, and I perform for each other, for the camera, and ultimately for you,” says Krick. “We impersonate each other and ourselves, emulating imagery that taught us to be beautiful.” The resulting images, piercing portraits and fragmented studies of their stylized bodies, mimic the allure and artifice found in magazines while mocking the idea that such images are easy on the eyes. Krick’s charged photographs, enthralling as any glossy picture, portray beauty as at once synthetic, flawed, threatening, seductive and garish.
–Paul D’Amato, Guest Curator
Visit Skylark Editions to purchase the book Natalie Krick: Natural Deceptions
About the Artist
Natalie Krick (b. 1986, Portland, Oregon) currently lives in Seattle. She received her BFA in photography from the School of Visual Arts in 2008 and her MFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2012. She has recently exhibited at SOIL Gallery, Seattle; Webber Represents, London; Aperture Gallery, New York; and Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago. In 2015 she received an Individual Photographer’s Fellowship from the Aaron Siskind Foundation.
RAC Spotlight | Kim Piotrowski
“Lost Laurels”, 2018. Acrylic ink, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72” x 54”
The RAC is pleased to present Kim Piotrowski’s solo exhibition While Here. This is part of RAC’s Spotlight Exhibitionseries, which highlights artists who are part of the RAC community.
For sixteen years Kim Piotrowski has balanced parenting and art-making here in Riverside. In that time, she’s made hundreds of paintings and drawings, exhibited across the country and in Europe, while developing a vivid body of work notable for its fluid restlessness. Although defined as an abstract painter, she still depicts. Guns, crowns, beds, water and war are among her subject matter, but all congeal and melt into Piotrowsk’s marks — torqued, attenuated, with a graphic snap and deftness. Her touch is liquid and gentle. The overall effect, even in tiny pieces, combines intimacy with the monumental baroque. Mass spirals and space unfolds into painted worlds that are both tangible and enigmatic.
This site-specific exhibition will represent Piotrowski’s artistic growth and her personal balancing act. Every year of her life in Riverside will be represented in an installation that will fill the entire Freeark Gallery as well as our Flex Space. Old and new work will hang together, connected by marks—a visual thread formed by painting, drawing, writing and personal ephemera applied directly to the gallery walls. Our entire space will transform into a grand-scale embodiment of private experience — extroverted action depicting sixteen years of life, love, and painting.
–Anne Harris
Kim Piotrowski at the beginning stages of her painting “Lost Laurels”, 2018. Acrylic ink, acrylic and flashe on canvas, 72” x 54”
Studio of Kim Piotrowski in Riverside, IL.
Kim Piotrowski at work in her Riverside, IL studio.
Daughters Stella (8) and Cora (10) in the studio with ‘Corner Lot”, 2011 mixed media on Yupo paper, 60” x 120”
Andreas Fischer: Are You OK?
Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.
Curated by Freeark Gallery Director Claudine Isé
Artist’s Talk: Saturday, November 10, 3-5pm
“Are You OK?” continues Chicago artist Andreas Fischer’s longstanding inquiry into the meanings, roles, pleasures and possibilities of painting today. In a recent artist’s statement, Fischer writes that “confusion is all we really have, particularly about the everyday – the usual, the common – mainly because they seem so neutral. Nothing is neutral, right? There is also confusion about whether qualifications of those concepts resist exploding well enough for them to mean anything. Your everyday is not our everyday. Can we talk about this?” Fischer’s exhibition at RAC stages the conversation these words invite. Each of Fischer’s paintings is a conundrum, positing itself simultaneously as a mirror, a window, an arena, as a form of escape and an indexical confrontation with who he, the artist, and we, his viewers, think we are. So too, Fischer’s paintings put forth propositions, statements, mixed-messages, affirmations, apologies and perhaps most importantly, a series of open-ended questions, starting with: ‘Are you OK?’ Which may in turn lead to other questions, like: ‘Is it ok for me to be me? For you to be you? For us to be ourselves, together?’ In this way, Fischer’s paintings combine the metaphorical, the lyrical and the literal as they enact the questions and struggles of what it means to be human together, with and through the medium of painting.
–Claudine Isé, Director, Freeark Gallery + Sculpture Garden
Top image caption:
Andreas Fischer, “Phillip Drummond explaining to Willis and Arnold that his ancestor bought and sold their ancestors,” 2018. Acrylic, pencil, cut fabric, and oil on canvas.
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”