Top 5 Weekend Picks!
April 30, 2015 · Print This Article
Work by Gabriel Sierra.
The Renaissance Society is located at 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Cobb Hall 418. Reception Sunday, 4-7pm.
2. The Grass Has Eyes at Comfort Station
Work by Heidi Norton.
Comfort Station is located at 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. Reception Friday, 6-10pm.
3. FAMILIAR MALAISE at ACRE Projects
Work by Joe Yorty, Cara Chan, Austen Brown and Ruslana Lichtzier.
ACRE Projects is located at 1913 W. 17th St. Reception Sunday, 4-8pm.
4. Refractions at Silent Funny
Work by Luftwerk.
Silent Funny is located at 4106 W. Chicago Ave. Reception Friday, 6-10pm.
5. Kissing in Heaven at Chicago Artists Coalition
Work by Allison Lacher, Andy Roche, Hideous Beast and Snow Yungxue Fu.
Chicago Artists Coalition is located at 217 N. Carpenter St. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.
Rolled Over 2010 acrylic, wood, and masonite 56″ x 96″
By Kevin Blake
This is a recurring dream.
I am suspended over an in-ground pool of which I can only see a portion. The pool juts out of the bottom left corner of the frame–a rectangular frame. The edge of the pool makes an L shape–horizontally to the middle of the frame and at a right angle to the bottom boundary. The negative space is a surrounding sun-bleached concrete–an infinite wall contained only by the imaginary frame of the image. My limbs are sprawled out as if they are tied to an invisible force that keeps me from retracting. I lay idle just inches from the water, but I cannot touch. I cannot feel the textures. I cannot sense the temperature, though it appears to be warm–it appears to be late afternoon. It appears to be desert-like. Arid. Crisp. Cloudless. Stark.
The same external force that keeps me afloat, pulls me wildly in a spinning motion to an extreme height where I can see the pool in its entirety. As I reach the apex of this pull, it allows me a brief pause before dropping me and stopping me just inches before I hit the water. It leaves me there, in what feels like dangerous proximity to a glass-like surface. I have no physical control. No power. I can only wait to be pulled from idle and dropped again. As I plunge toward the pool, the water disappears, and I break through the powerless dream–returning to a powerless reality. I wake up with the feeling of being dropped that often plagues the dreams of many. That uneasiness. That bubble in the stomach. That rush to the brain.
The value of a dream is only quantifiable in the mind of the dreamer. It becomes something more than a dream only when a metaphor is established–and thereby attached–as the answer to an otherwise abstract experience. Like spinning around with a blindfold and trying to find people in the dark, the recurring dream becomes something more, when anticipatory and imaginative thinking creates an alteration of behavior, a change in consciousness, or a way to find things in the dark. It can become the blueprint for an artistic practice.
Natural Imaginings as if I Was Em’rynn 2015 irregular shaped painting, acrylic on paper on MDF 60″ x 53.25″
In Tom Torluemke’s latest offering at Linda Warren Projects, Blind Man’s Bluff, the artist seems to be fueled by the necessity to communicate his ideas–both to himself and to a perceived audience. Here, metaphors(capitulated by the title of the exhibition) are born in cultural experience, unadulterated thought, and dreams–they are the conduit by which this artist transmits his signals in this densely populated exhibition.
The main gallery is filled with paintings, mostly executed with acrylic paint on irregularly shaped MDF panels. This device is useful. It appears to extend his metaphor. To exemplify the oddity that is his commodity–his ideas. Torluemke’s ideas may be his bread and butter, but his ability to execute and transmute his thoughts into compelling objects, is equally evolved.
Torluemke’s metaphors come alive in works like Day Dream 2015. This decisively cut panel adopts the profile of a man–a shape that is repeated again and again to develop the edge of the painting. A surreal landscape occupies the mind. Faces form the face. Dark matter makes the shadowy abyss beyond the dream. Paint is liberally applied to these slick surfaces, making it a joy to discover the miniature paint galaxies in the depths of the work.
Day Dream 2015 irregular shaped painting, acrylic on paper on MDF 60″ x 49.5″
In the smaller gallery a more intimate but more direct version of Torluemke’s metaphor adorn the walls. The drawings are made while blindfolded, with one continuous line–details are added later. What is interesting to me about these works is less the product(though I like the drawings), and more so, the idea of creating an action born in metaphor. If Torluemke feels like his artistic process is often like doing a frankenstein walk blindfolded in the dark, as a child does in Blind Man’s Bluff, then it is this thought, this metaphor, that has driven him to thoroughly explore and excavate this idea and all of its potential. As a dream only becomes understandable by way of syntactic dissection and cultural grounding, so too must a metaphor be broken down into its component parts for reassembly as something new. Something learned. Something useful to the pursuant.
Happy Smokers 2014 charcoal and graphic on board 32″ x 40″
There is a multiplicity in these works that contextualize the conditions under which these objects are made. I can sense an urgency. I can feel the excitement. I can see ideas mutate on the surfaces. The work seems to be in constant transition–from panel, to sculpture, to blindfolded drawing and back again. Torluemke’s process plays out like a dream as he traverses from one unexpected place to the next. There are no answers here, only snippets of dreams. Remnants of action. Links to a lineage of ideas that are constantly evolving.
By following the hunch, pursuing the dream, and unraveling the metaphor, Torluemke seems to have developed a method for finding his way in the dark.
Linda Warren Projects
327 N Aberdeen Suite 151
Chicago, IL
Gallery Y & Gallery X: Tom Torluemke, “Blind Man’s Bluff”
April 17 – June 13, 2015
Opening Reception: Friday, April 17, 2015, 6-9pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 16, 2015, 3-5pm
Episode 504: Tanya Zimbardo
April 27, 2015 · Print This Article
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This week Brian and Patricia sit down with curator Tanya Zimbardo during her residency at Krowswork, a center for Video and Visionary Art, in Oakland. Tanya is a San Francisco-based curator. Her research and writing is primarily centered on conceptual art and experimental media in California in the 1970s and 1980s. She is co-curating the group survey Public Works: Artists’ Interventions 1970s – Now at Mills College Art Museum this fall.
As the Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, she curated select film and video screenings and co-organized the past two SECA Art Award exhibitions and overview Fifty Years of Bay Area Art: The SECA Awards, among other exhibitions. She has contributed essays to several SFMOMA publications, most recently West Coast Visions(2015, Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul). As a guest contributor to Open Space (2012?14), Zimbardo highlighted various site works, public interventions, and artist-run spaces in the Bay Area, including Receipt of Delivery, her weekly series featuring exhibition mailers.
The Krowswork Residencies feature a diverse range of visionary artists and artwork—from graffiti to poetry and from elaborate sci-fi video installations to Kabalistic painting. These Krowswork Residents present their own work, host conversations and events, and in some cases present the work of others. Each Resident is implicitly or explicitly in conversation with those who come before and after, as well as in dialogue with the total arc of the year.
http://krowswork.com/
Guest post by Vanessa Gravenor
Fraser Taylor, Black Flowers, 2009-11 Courtesy of Threewalls.
Fraser Taylor’s show Orchard/Dirge, on view at Threewalls gallery in Chicago, combines sculptures that suggest states of kinesthesis with drawings and paintings blackened to abject states. When entering the main room, one sees a cluster of metallic rods welded together to form angular shapes. These shapes both recall architectural origins but also clusters of beings: animals in a pack.
Fraser Taylor, Black Flowers, 2009-11 Courtesy of Threewalls.
Austere and lustrous, the forms harken (like a hymn) back upon different artistic moments in the 20th century. Reminiscent of Russian Constructivism because of the linear and angular bisection of space, these specific forms in the sculptural installation Black Flowers recall Tatlin’s The Proposed Monument to the Third International. In this way, the work pays homage to the utopian vision of art being linked to political life.
Just as the shapes seem to construct and recall these modernist roots, they also enter into a state of entropy and disintegration by suggesting a Giacometti-style disintegration of the figure. Contextually, Alberto Giacometti was incited by an overexposure to violence after WWI. He embodied a sort of cataract gaze and was concerned with redefining seeing when sight was impossible. Fraser’s context is not post-world-wars but the AIDS epidemic in the 80’s and 90’s where he lost many friends to the disease. The exhibition write-up explains that purging of color “spoke of the wider index of loss” that all mass death brings.
Fraser Taylor, Scalloway, Silk-screen on canvas, 2015 Courtesy of Threewalls.
In the adjacent room, there are banners that match this already precedent visual language. Again, abstract forms and ink turn to figuration. This figuration decisively recalls post-war abstraction because of the reduction of the body to pure expression, the body broken under panoptic watch, and of the individual that becomes part of industrial production.
The connection to William Kentridge seems inevitable especially in Taylor’s handling of the suited form. Kentridge animated videos use the materiality of charcoal to reference the obliterated landscape of South Africa for mining, which references the colonized body. In Kentridge’s work, human figures become landscapes only for the landscape to be erased and blotted out by the figure. There is a shiftless, transcendental character that Taylor’s work shares with Kentridge’s particularly the bannered work most recently completed (2009-11). However, Taylor’s reference is not the black body under colonial or post-colonial Africa but the black body in America. In the sculpture installation Black Flower, on view in the main space, the exhibition write-up explains that the title references African-American painter, trumpeter, and jazz poet Ted Joans who aspired to incite revolution through a manifesto written in 1968. One can see the impact of beat poetry and soul music in the kinetic movements of banners in the project space.
Fraser Taylor, Scalloway, Silk-screen on canvas, 2015 Courtesy of Threewalls.
The remainder of Taylor’s work is comprised of three large square paintings all featuring a singular large inky mass. This inky mass appears to first be a negative field but shifts to become a birds eye view of a head. In one painting Peculiarities no6, there are several collaged images on the black surface. One image is a line drawing of phalluses, the other a print out of a neck, and another a pinky red color blotch. While the main bodily organ running through the show is the phallus, with some of the sculptures resembling Yayoi Kusama’s white, sterile penile sculptures, the paintings’ negativity suggests theoretical feminine or queer space. In this, I call upon second-wave feminist theory presented by Kristeva expressing how while the space of the feminine is the space of negativity it is also the space of the new. Furthering these theories, third wave feminist author Griselda Pollock describes how the space of the feminine is a radical space for encounter and con-division. Fraser’s work seems to embody a post-colonial third-space between the feminine and the queer that shifts between forms, genders, identities, and landscapes delivering the gazer somewhere inside this void-space of creation.
Fraser Taylor’s Orchard/Dirge is on view until May 23rd, 2015.
Top 5 Weekend Picks! (4/24-4/26)
April 23, 2015 · Print This Article
1. VERSIONFEST 2015: 100 Watts
The 15th annual Versionfest, held throughout Bridgeport and debuting Lumpen Radio.
VERSIONFEST takes place at various locations throughout Bridgeport and events range in price from free to $85. Versionfest runs from 4/23-5/3.
2. The Mayor at The Hills Esthetic Center
Work by Marcel Alcala.
The Hills Esthetic Center is located at 128 N. Campbell St. Reception is Saturday, 7pm.
3. Double Dialogues at DfbrL8r
Presenting work by Manuel Vason, in collaboration with Guillermo Gomex-Pena, Heather Cassils, Jamie McMurry, Keijaun Thomas, Linda Montano, Marilyn Arsem, Mat Fraser and Zachery Drucker.
DfbrL8r is located at 1463 W. Chicago Ave. Performance and discussion Saturday, 8-11pm.
4. When Are We? at Comfort Station
A happening by Heinze Flores (Alejandro Jimenez Flores and Paul Philipp Heinze)
Comfort Station is located at 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. Happening Friday, 8:30-10:30pm.
Work by Maya Mackrandilal.
THE MISSION is located at 1431 W. Chicago Ave. Closing reception Friday, 6-8pm.
