All posts tagged: mixed media

Image: Installation view of Out of Time at Aspect/Ratio. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo by Nick Albertson.

Out of Time by Cass Davis at Aspect/Ratio Gallery

Published by Christina Nafziger

The exhibition Out of Time by Cass Davis is an investigation of personal history, collective history, and gendered violence. The work oscillates between soft/tactile, and ghostly/alarming. Rooted in imagery that is (for better or for worse) deeply Midwestern, the work shown is aesthetically punctured by three-parts: textile works that hold faded images of religious revivals, assemblages of childhood objects embedded in earth and flowers, and photographs and moving images with lighting and tones that simultaneously haunt and render hyper-real. They are crisp as a recent memory yet as nebulous as a dream. Together, the works embody a deeply personal and real vision of the American Midwest—and when I say “real,” I don’t just mean the artist’s actual experience of it, which is also undeniably present, but also real in the sense that the images and text incorporated into Davis’s works are directly from historical documents located in their hometown. Davis grew up in Pekin, IL in an evangelical Christian community where speaking in tongues at revivals was commonplace. Much of the imagery uncovered and brought …

Piece of Mind: The Growth of a Supportive and Nurturing Arts Community

Published by Alexander Martin

When I first moved to the Midwest and began settling into my new home in Peoria, I was immediately captured by the growing art community. Being a part of academia for so long, I had not yet lived somewhere with an arts community that developed outside of a university or college. I attended my first First Friday in Peoria, a local event with gallery crawls, studio visits, and openings, meeting so many people pursuing their passion in this city. The variety of artists at various points in their career, doing so many different things, truly astounded me. There were local artisans creating wares and goods for the community, artists making a living off of their work by selling at fairs and local businesses, academics making their work and passing their knowledge on to their pupils, artists maintaining a studio practice and taking advantage of all of the space and resources in the community, and those who were new, attending their first events and figuring out their voice in the art-ecosystem. The variety of people working in such …

“Natural Wonder” at the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria

Published by Jessica Bingham

This review is part of our Sixty Regional project which partners with artists, writers, and artist-run spaces to highlight art happening throughout the Midwest and Illinois. Written by Jessica Bingham, artist, curator, and co-founder of Project 1612, this review examines “Natural Wonder”, a two-person exhibition by Bethany Carlson Coffin and Stephanie Sailer at the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria, Illinois. Distance, whether out of necessity or inability to be close, is the common thread within the works in the exhibition Natural Wonder currently at the Contemporary Art Center in Peoria, IL. As the elevator doors opened to reveal the exhibition, I felt instantly calm, yet curious. Curious about the strange forms living on the pristine white pedestals and lost within the intricate paintings and drawings that graced the walls of the gallery. The pieces spark a sense of wonder and yearning for answers about experiences we cannot possibly understand or completely fathom; they compliment each other—they are quiet, contemplative, and coexisting. The exhibition pairs together the delicate drawings and monochromatic paintings of Bethany Carlson Coffin and the supple mixed media sculptures of …

Review: Static Cling @ Heaven Gallery

Published by S. Nicole Lane

It’s always been interesting, walking into Heaven Gallery and browsing the vintage shop connected to the space on the right hand side. Gold brooches, gaudy necklaces, and fur hats line the wall as the gallery’s cat wanders in to sprawl out on the floor. It’s a gallery I’ve frequented for the past five years. It’s comforting, it’s familiar. It’s no surprise then that two Chicago artists, Nico Gardner and Lauren Carter, decided to respond to Heaven’s unique space and the clothes that fill the empty areas. Nico and Lauren simultaneously nod their heads at the tables filled with the contents from your grandmother’s jewelry box, creating their own reimagining of these pieces through their artwork. Memory, nostalgia, and identity are influential in the collection of pieces inhabiting the gallery. When entering the room, visitors are greeted with a piece entitled Keepsake: two tiny, sculptural, found containers in the shape of rabbits resting on a wall shelf. Lauren adds in hair and nail clippings into her work as a reminder that these objects carry some weight—a human’s contact, a …

Body Passages: Exploring Visual Art with Poets Lorraine Harrell and David Nekimken

Published by Marya Spont-Lemus

This is the second article in an ongoing series about Body Passages, a partnership between Chicago Danztheatre Ensemble and The Chicago Poetry Center (the first is here). This series gives brief looks into a 10-month, interdisciplinary creative process between Body Passages poets and dancers, documenting and reflecting on aspects of that process as it happens. On an afternoon in early May, I showed up to watch an “open rehearsal” at the Chicago Cultural Center’s dance studio only to find myself a participant. This opportunity became even more exciting when the people I was there to see—Lorraine Harrell and David Nekimken, two delightful and effervescent poets who were in residence through Body Passages—invited me to join them as they sought inspiration and inputs in the galleries. We spent an hour together exploring the Cultural Center’s first-floor exhibitions, as the pair shared their observations and perspectives about visual artworks, made connections to their own lives and practices, and generated ideas for a joint creative project—an interdisciplinary, in progress work, prompted by their participation in Body Passages. A …

Art at Work: Georgia Schwender at Fermilab Art Gallery

Published by Nina Wexelblatt

In this series, we explore the idea of art institutions with a primary audience deliberately or functionally outside the field of art. These venues primarily focus on completely unrelated disciplines, but are also invested in art collecting, exhibition, or production. For this installment, we look about an hour west of Chicago to the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab: one of the most advanced particle accelerators in the world. There, government scientists research the frontiers of particle physics, from quarks to dark matter. Wilson Hall, the lab’s central building, is named for founder Robert Rathbun Wilson, a Manhattan Project physicist and the artist of several massive public sculptures that pepper the campus. It also houses the Fermilab Art Gallery, which Wilson established to explore his dual interests in science and aesthetics. Search “art at Fermilab” online today and, in addition to the gallery and artist-in-residence program, you might learn about “art,” the laboratory’s software workflow protocol. “art is an event-processing framework for particle physics experiments,” the website explains. Though the name is a coincidence, …

Sadie Benning’s Shared Eye at Renaissance Society

Published by Robyn Day

There are limits to how far artists can push works of art, but few test them as forcefully as Sadie Benning. Benning’s installation on view now at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society attempts to give viewers a Shared Eye on US politics and history, conjuring a kind of collective memory through the rhythmic sequencing of panels and our subjective interpretations of their interpolations. That aim might already be a mouthful, but Benning does not stop there. Taking leeway with what she calls the “complexities” of visual media, she wanders far afield into contemporary art’s hottest clichés. Cut up and reassembled from digital snapshots, found photos, trinkets, and painted segments, Benning’s panels collapse and expand media. As physical objects, they are neither here nor there, neither the one nor the other. Unfortunately, the artist takes the same postmodern tack to their subject matter, willing it to hover in the ether and float away at first sight. The operative word here might be “edgy.” Work that cannot be defined as belonging to any one medium is in …