All posts tagged: Goldfinch

The Creep by Em Kettner; a six-legged, woven, porcelain figure looks straight ahead

Review: Em Kettner’s Play the Fool, at Goldfinch

Published by Amanda Dee

“Something is good not because it is achieved but because another kind of truth about the human situation, another experience of what it is to be human, in short, another valid sensibility, is being revealed.” —Sustan Sontag, Notes on ‘Camp’  If you don’t look closely enough, you’ll miss one of the 27 works on display at Goldfinch Gallery in Em Kettner’s solo exhibition “Play the Fool.” If you look too closely, you won’t have enough time with each one. Overthink it and you’ll miss something; rush through, and you’ll miss something else. A performance of misdirection, “Play the Fool” eludes easy description, pointing to precisely what makes it sing.   The porcelain figures could be cradled in the palms of your hands. They are the size of tchotchkes with the intricate detail of a talisman. To make out their facial expressions, you must narrow the distance between you to a few inches. Many of the faces gaze back at you or at their companions like they’re about to spill the T (and you aren’t quite sure …

A Projection Into ‘Paths Between Two Steps’ by Soo Shin

Published by Amanda Dee

The lymph nodes in my neck are swollen. Poisonous balloons expanding in my throat. I am guilty of my breath, my touch, how they could infect others. I bike to see my partner at Rosehill Cemetery, where we had planned to meet, and I tell him about the wretched mass I sense inside me, surrounding me. So we decide to stay safe, six feet apart, where we will stay for at least a week. We visit his grandparents’ graves, stones placed upon them. He is saying something to me as I draw in and out, in and out wet salty breaths, six feet away. I have never missed a touch so close to me so deeply—I can’t stand it. I go, six feet, then 20, then miles, until I am separated from the one I love. And I am thinking now, as many of us are, what it means to love and to live from a distance.  I am wondering the same thing as I again click through the virtual version of “Paths Between Two …

A view of the Archive of Touch exhibition at Goldfinch Gallery from the entrance of the room. Photo by Daniel Hojnacki.

Review: Processing An Archive of Touch at Goldfinch Gallery

Published by Amanda Dee

“To persist at an encounter with the poor little world is the work of the artist. A test, and I think we do it for each other. To enact a critical metaphysics out of love, to ask and play and choke and fail, to posit small actions as consequential, emphatic, necessary, to insist on painting as an archive of touch, is hopeful, is hungry. My community exceeds me, the gift somehow never leaves my hands.” – Dana DeGiulio The creative act for the artist lends gravity to small actions, as motions and brush strokes become big decisions. In the group exhibition “An Archive of Touch,” each artist reconsidered their decisions through the lens of the titular concept, creating as a process of archiving touch. The output: documents of acrylics, carved clays, oils, stoneware, yarn; histories of relationships with objects, others, and themselves. Residing in East Garfield Park at Goldfinch Gallery through August 3, “An Archive of Touch” is comprised of works by Yesenia Bello, Dana DeGiulio, Andreas Fischer, Alejandro Jiménez-Flores, Joyce Lung, SaraNoa Mark, and …

November Art Picks

Published by Sixty Inches From Center

Our Art Picks are created in collaboration with The Visualist, Chicago’s leading visual arts calendar, and cross-promoted through Windy City Times, one of the longest locally-published LGBTQ weeklies with a national reach. This is a growing list, so check back often for new additions. Throughout 2018 we will be highlighting exhibitions and events that are part of Art Design Chicago , a year-long celebration of the unique and vital role Chicago plays as America’s crossroads of art and design, creativity and commerce, organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art. As part of an editorial partnership with Illinois Humanities, Sixty will also be highlighting events that are part of Envisioning Justice , a 19-month project that looks into how Chicagoans and Chicago artists respond to the the impact of incarceration in local communities and how the arts and humanities are used to devise strategies for lessening this impact. November Art Picks Thurs, Nov 1, 11am Art Against the Flow Summit  Ace Hotel Chicago: 311 N Morgan St, Chicago, IL 60607 Free Thurs, Nov 1, 2-4pm Chicago New Media Symposium  Gallery 400: 400 S Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607 Free Thurs, …