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Nina Katchadourian (Armenian; born 1968, Stanford, California) is an Armenian–American artist. She is known for conceptual works that explore themes of mapping, translation, and public space. Her projects have been exhibited widely, including a solo show of video installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in July 2008.

Nina Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California in 1968, and grew up spending summers on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. She received a BA from Brown University in 1989, and an MFA from UCSD in 1993. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York in 1996. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Nina Katchadourian has worked in many media, including sculpture, photography, video, and sound. The underlying concept is often marked by an intrinsic sense of humor, characterized by a whimsical, intelligent, ironic and systemic reordering of natural processes. Her work is simple yet effective.

From white cubed commercial galleries to experimental project spaces, from closely packed artist studios to pop-up celebrations out in the dark, Nashville’s first Saturdays are bustling, vibrant, overbrimming with activity. Moving between openings at the beginning of October, I repeatedly heard the mock-lament that there was too much to do, too many places to be for any single night. The looming feeling of always-more fueled movement – walking and driving between galleries, negotiating crowded rooms, navigating shifting frames of mind and sight. Virginia Griswold’s pop-up exhibition Equal Parts at The Packing Plant, however, stopped me in my tracks.

Virginia Griswold, Equal Parts (all images courtesy of Virginia Griswold)

The walls in the gallery were unfinished, construction frozen before sheetrock hung. The crowd gathered around the small sawhorse table, bending low over the ceramic and resin objects, slowed the momentum of entering from other exhibitions. Joining the circumnavigating stream, I slowly observed the objects on the table. The stasis of the room lengthened my gaze, extended my ability to consider the work.

As I moved, the textures, lines, and colors of the objects reflected around and across the table – an osage orange, mushroom gills, vessels containing one another – the visual equivalent of musical themes shifting, shimmering in different forms, reappearing across time and space. This echoing revealed the ways in Griswold views the “table as site for transformation.” The table had always been in motion. Its initial stasis was an illusion of my eyes used to the outside world. My time spent within the work transformed singular, static objects into relationship with one another, enlivened the location, proximity, and contact of objects into conversations.

Griswold’s objects are lived with, accruing meaning in the moments of making and across days and weeks of time spent living through the same spaces. On initial viewing, they carry a weight that we cannot feel. They ghost objects we cannot know, recall memories we cannot imagine. The table transforms these long-known objects for Griswold, and the table begins the transformation of just-seen objects for the viewers.

In the weeks since viewing it, I have lived with the exhibition, sorting and filing the images and echoes, the feeling of the resin, the reflections of the objects I see in my coming and going. The transformation is no longer just within the objects and their relationships; the transformations live within the way I have slowed to watch for the “questionable state” Griswold strives for in her objects and accomplishes in Equal Parts. Her work lives on in that state, neither movement nor stasis, embodying the complexity and reality of our daily lives. As with all living objects, her work enters our lives, transforming the futures we find as we rejoin the movement of the exterior world, the ever-rushing into the night.

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This week we present an interview recorded live at EXPO Chicago with Latham Zearfoss one of the leaders of a decade long party called Chances Dances. You will have to tune in to almost, but not quite, the end where we actually break a little news.

You have time to catch their Gallery 400 show or hit them up on the internet at http://www.chancesdances.org/. Turns Out they know how to party, with everyone.

They continue to run two parties a month…

THIRD SATURDAYS at The Subterranean
2011 W. North Ave., Chicago, IL
10pm-3am / $5 Cover

SECOND TUESDAYS at Danny’s
1959 W. Dickens Ave., Chicago, IL
10pm-2am / FREE

Bad at Sports would like to congratulate the 2015 Propellor Fund Grant Recipients! 

Propeller Fund proudly announces the fifteen grant recipients for 2015. Selected from a pool of over one-hundred candidates, these small, self-organized, and radical projects are vital to Propeller’s mission of encouraging more varied models, spreading these activities into more diverse areas, and to spark ambitions beyond current formats in Chicago’s visual art world. Propeller Fund offers $50,000 (five grants at $6,000 and ten grants at $2,000) annually to artists producing a wide range of public culture.

Propeller Fund recognizes that such independent artist-organized events, informal roundtables and workshops, collectively organized exhibition spaces, and publishing endeavors constitute a large catalyst for the creative activity and vitality of the Chicago visual art world. These projects are responsible for much of the complexity and richness in the art community.

Propeller Fund 2015 Award Ceremony and Reception

This year’s recipients will be recognized in an award ceremony on Wednesday, November 18 at the Jane Addams Hull-House Residents’ Dining Hall. Join grant recipients and the community to celebrate with food, drink, and a reception.

Wednesday, November 18, 6–9pm
Jane Addams Hull-House Residents’ Dining Hall
800 South Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60607
Award Ceremony: 6:30pm
Awardee Reception: 7–9pm
Free and open to the public

Propeller fund would like to thank this year’s distinguished jury: Jen Delos Reyes, Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History at UIC and Founder and Director of Open Engagement (Chicago, IL); Deana Haggag, Director of The Contemporary (Baltimore, MD); Nicole Marraquin, Artist, Co-Organizer of Multiuso, and Associate Professor of Art Education at SAIC (Chicago, IL); Meida McNeal, Artistic/Creative Director of Honey Pot Performance and Arts and Culture Manager for the Chicago Parks District (Chicago, IL); and Astria Suparak, independent curator and author (Pittsburgh, PA). And much appreciation to the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, funder of Propeller Fund through its Regional Regranting Program.

2015 Awardees

$6000

BRUJOS (Stephanie Jeter, Ben Kolak, Ricardo Gamboa)

BRUJOS is a queer-of-color, radically politicized web series following four gay Latino doctoral candidates—that are also witches. They navigate magic, sexuality, and surviving a witch-hunt led by a secret society of white heteronormative male descendents of the first New World colonizers. BRUJOS blends Latino soap opera and U.S. sitcoms to deliver 12, seven-minute episodes developed through queer men of color testimonies, interviews with magic pracitioners, and cultural studies academics. In a world conditioned by white supremacy and inequality, BRUJOS makes visible people and ways of life that have been made invisible by dominant culture and mainstream media.

filmfront (Alan Medina, Malia Haines-Stewart, Alyx Christensen, Rudy Medina)

filmfront is a multidisciplinary project that uses the exhibition of film, video, and new media from around the world and down the street to facilitate exciting, challenging conversations that are open, free, and accessible to everyone. Curation is based on a collaborative model of programming in which artists, curators, and free thinkers are invited to work together to create exhibitions, interactive projects, performances, workshops, and lectures open to the community.

http://filmfront.org

Floating Museum (Faheem Majeed, Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford, Andrew Schachman)

Floating Museum is a mobile exhibition structure and structural interpretation of the DuSable Museum of African American History that will move by land and water through the city of Chicago in 2016 and 2017. The project blends creative place-making, activism, and exhibition design to make a platform for conversations, art viewing and community engagement.

https://museumfloating.tumblr.com

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street (Allison Glenn)

In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street is a public art exhibition that couples artists and practices with the materiality of the built environment. Through the use of junior billboards, sculpture, performance, media, and sound, the artists in the exhibition will consider landscape and the built environment, encouraging viewers to traverse rich and varied expanses of the city.

Report to the Public: An Untold Story of the Conservative Vice Lords (Benneth Lee, Lisa Junkin Lopez)

Benneth Lee will organize film screenings and train young people to lead tours expanding upon the exhibition, Report to the Public: An Untold Story of the Conservative Vice Lords. By training former gang members to become community docents and targeting youth audiences, the project demonstrates that young people in gangs are capable of addressing the most challenging issues in their communities. Report to the Public draws upon the thesis that gang members, like all of us, have “multiple, conflicting identities” and that we must affirm their positive identity formation in order to decrease violent and destructive behavior.

$2000

The Chicago ACT Collective (Sarah Atlas, William Estrada)

The Chicago ACT (Artists Creating Transformation) Collective is a diverse collective of artists creating work to support movements, struggles, and communities in Chicago. Through a partnership process, this project generates art that reflects on and responds to current and local needs identified by those most impacted. This project has many facets—building a collective of socially and politically engaged artists, forming partnerships with grassroots organizations and social justice movements, and producing prints, graphic arts, and visual campaigns for social change that promote collaboration and dialogue across multiple communities.

Fielding (Amber Ginsburg, Sara Black, Billy Dee)

Fielding is a collaborative art and design practice, a youth workshop series, a design/build service and a social justice initiative. Fielding leads workshops for girls, young women and gender variant youth to design and build structures while learning to use woodworking tools competently and confidently. In addition, a diverse core crew of skilled women and gender variant carpenters will respond to invitations (local, regional and international) to design and construct building projects.

Freedom Dreams (Alice Kim ) 

Freedom Dreams is a project that creatively connects Illinois prisoners serving long-term sentences with local and national artists. Their writings and visual art will be featured in a multi-media exhibit and series of events centered on the question: What does freedom look like?

HAIR CLUB (Suzanne Gold, Kelly Lloyd, Michal Lynn Shumate )

HAIR CLUB is a growing community of artists, writers, and scholars whose aim is to conduct a collaborative inquiry into the multi-valent topic of HAIR in our wider culture via conversation, publication and meaningful programming, and organizing HAIR-centered work across medium and discipline into thematic publications, exhibitions and events.

https://www.facebook.com/hairclub

Kitchen Space (Traci Fowler, Trevor Schmutz, Mirko Velimirovic)

The organizers of the project/exhibition space Kitchen Space will develop a cookbook that provides readers with a variety of recipes for main dishes, appetizers, drinks, etc. from the unique perspective of two artists who have to combat monthly exhibitions in the very kitchen they cook their meals.

https://www.facebook.com/kitchenspace

One Room (Kate Thomas, Devin Pendergast, Kitty Conde, Jessica Rosenbaum, Roxy De Luca, Jeanne Walker)

One Room is a social practice project that invites the public into conversations with CPS artist-teachers to playfully explore the complexity of a teaching practice within our current climate of constraints and monitoring. Artist teachers in conversation with the public will generate creative approaches to systemic problems.

Paper Work (Third Object: Gan Uyeda, Ann Meisinger, Raven Munsell, Elisabeth Smith)

Paper Work is an exhibition organized by Chicago-based curatorial collective Third Object that, through a central exhibition site and office-bound satellite locations, explores a range of current artistic responses to notions of bureaucracy, administration, and the ordering of information.

http://www.thirdobject.net

Social Furniture (John Preus, Jamie Kalven )

Social Furniture produces 2x4s out of materials salvaged from closed Chicago Public Schools. Working with Lathrop Community Partners and the Invisible Institute, we will work to develop projects that provide both a source of income for Lathrop residents and a forum for developing relationships between the developers and the residents. The 2x4s are both literal and figurative building materials to produce new structures.

UnJustified (Jacob Klippenstein, Crista Noel, Ric Wilson, Teresa Campagna, Deonta Terry) 

A series of screenings and discussions will debut a series of UnJustifiable mini-docs. The series will provide a retrospective and prospective look at Chicago Police violence from the 1800s to the present with a timeless focus on educating and engaging Chicagoans especially youth through dialogue led by community elders, analogue, and digital media.

W.A.R.P. Westtown Artist Residency Program (The Weaving Mill: Emily Winter, Matti Sloman, Eva Joly, Monika Kimrey, Envision Unlimited, and more)

W.A.R.P is a series of short-term residencies at The Weaving Mill, a small-scale production mill in Humboldt Park. In partnership with Envision Unlimited’s Westtown Center, The Weaving Mill pairs artists with developmental disabilities with visiting artists from the wider Chicago community. The groups are guided through a series of workshops that allow the artists to approach an unfamiliar industrial textile technology together.

About Propeller Fund

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago and threewalls. Propeller Fund provides grants to artists, curators, and groups living and working in Cook County, Illinois, and seeks to support projects that are independent, informal, and self-organized. Propeller Fund receives support from Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts through the Regional Regranting Program.

Further descriptions of Propeller Fund projects can be found here.

I was standing with Rolando, looking at ¿por qué no fui tu amigo?, a solo show by Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, curated by Chris Sharp, currently on view at Kurimanzutto, in the rear gallery. We were looking at an array of audiovisual equipment — rechargeable batteries nestled in their recharger, an audio recorder, a printer, a hard drive, an iMac, a mouse, a keyboard, a couple GoPros, some stands for cameras or audio, headphones, and so on — on the floor of the gallery, against the smooth white walls. Rolando was telling me, pointing to the thick-stock, laminated gallery notes he was holding — he had the ones for Aguilar Ruvalcaba’s show, I had the ones for Minerva Cuevas’s show, in the main gallery — that the equipment had been used to shoot a video, that would later be shown elsewhere, and that now it was for sale on MercadoLibre, the eBay of the Spanish- and Portugese-speaking world. I was saying something stupid about how great of a MercadoLibre photo it probably was, or was going to be, when a gallery attendent walked in and asked us, in Spanish, “do you understand?”

In his later writing, Roland Barthes employed the figure as an organizing element. In each figure, anecdote, history, and philosphy collide, usually with notes in the margin about where they are from: Symposium, Taoism, Werther, A.C. Barthes describes the figure beautifully, longingly, as “what in the straining body can be immobilized,” something that sticks in the memory, but is somehow incomplete, something that we catch in a moment, “insofar as we can recognize.” The figure is necessarily incomplete, and in its incompleteness foregrounds that which suspends it. For me, this is the best way, or perhaps the only way, to talk about ¿por qué no fui tu amigo? There are three figures in the show: first, an ad in the newspaper am, distributed in the state of Guanajuato, in central Mexico; the second, two white-backed counterfeit bills, one MX$100 and one MX$200, each folded as if it were a tiny book; the third, the audiovisual equipment set up for a prosumer photo that Rolando and I were standing in front of when the attendent walked in. The blunt visual presentation of each figure—everything looks like exactly what it is—bounces attention away, into the notes or the guided presentation, teasing, cajoling, or maybe just forcing the viewer to learn about the various trajectories and interpretations that each figure strains between. It is in this learning that each figure becomes more complex, begins to blur, and the beauty of the show emerges.

The show is arranged in narrative order, beginning with an the ad in the newspaper am, which is distributed in the state of Guanajuato in central Mexico, where Aguilar Ruvalcaba is from. The ad originally appeared in am on December 31, 2014; and January 2 and 3, 2015. This is the first context in which the ad appears, and the first public to whom it appears. This public, people in the state of Guanajuato who purchase am for MX$10 and have an interest in the classifieds, viewed the ad in its original context, as an ad. At this point, being viewed by the classifieds-reading public of Guanajuato, the ad is not an artwork, it is an ad. It does not matter, at this point, that Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, an artist, has printed this ad, hoping to use it as the starting point for a body of artwork. It does not matter that Daniel’s father, Juan Manuel Aguilar, owed a debt to BBVA-Bancomer, nor that Daniel has recently received a grant for emerging artists from BBVA-Bancomer. It does not matter that Daniel has decided to use this grant from BBVA-Bancomer to try to pay off somebody else’s debt to BBVA-Bancomer, more specifically somebody else named Juan Manuel Aguilar, not a particularly uncommon name. The ad is constricted by its context, in the paper, spread across somebody’s lap, or a table, or a bar, maybe rolled up in a ball and stuffed under the grill to get the coals going. Maybe a few people in Mexico City knew about the ad, knew about it as an artwork, but am is not distributed in Mexico City. They couldn’t help. The classifieds person-seeking ad, though, is a sort of visual-literary form, and this particular ad is interesting within that form. It is situated in tense relation between the sort of extortion schemes typified by the Nigerian prince e-mail, self-help product advertisements, and missing persons advertisements. Especially here in Mexico, where extortion, phony aspiration, and disappearance are all common, sometimes compounded into one: a few months ago I read that cartels often use the form of the aspirational ad—”this job could change your life!” sort of thing—to lure people into building tunnels, transporting goods, etc, for them, usually killing those hired once the job is done. Importantly, these are qualities available to any person in Mexico reading the classifieds; it is not necessary to be part of any sort of art-appreciating public to see any of these relationships. These are qualities the ad holds as an ad, and nothing more. Indeed, this is one of the things most engaging about ¿por qué no fui tu amigo?, how deftly it engages everyday visual forms without hiding behind a mask of faux-irony.

Then Juan Manuel Aguilar called. As the story goes, Juan Manuel Aguilar had two debts, a large one and a small one. The artwork could be created: the fake bills are printed in an edition to match the large debt of Juan Manuel Aguilar, and will be sold for an equivalent amount of real bills to an heir to the BBVA-Bancomer fortune; the audiovisual equipment could be purchased and used to shoot a video, supporting the provision of the BBVA-Bancomer grant that asked for part to be used in “production.” Finally, the ad could appear in its second context, in the gallery. In the gallery, the ad, which is no different than the nearly 50,000 ads printed in the three days of am’s production, is an artwork, in limited edition, presented to an artworld audience by a gallery attendent who explains it as such. Here it exists in relation to a history of artworks that have appeared in public newspapers, and here it holds a different kind of significance, a different sort of interest. Whereas many artistic interventions into public newspapers involve some degree of poetry, symbolism, or irony, this ad seeking people named Juan Manuel Aguilar who owes a debt to BBVA-Bancomer is exactly that, an ad seeking people named Juan Manuel Aguilar who owes a debt to BBVA-Bancomer. The “general” public, the ficitional public invented by all specialized fields to designate all those who are not in that field, who are assumed to receive something “beneficial” from art, often tied to antiquated ideas of enlightenment or genius, receive nothing. Juan Manuel Aguilar, one particular Juan Manuel Aguilar who decided, against the odds, to call, receives debt relief. This is also not aspirational—”just try!”—for if Daniel were a cartel, Mr Manuel would likely be dead.

Indeed, in the gallery, towards an artworld audience, the ad is almost hostile. There is nothing beautiful about it, there is no evident hand of genius. It does not neatly tie in with global discussions of any sort, being tied inextricably to two individuals, both named Juan Manuel Aguilar, to a Mexican financial institution, BBVA-Bancomer, to the particular local strangeness of BBVA-Bancomer giving grants to emerging artists. The ordinariness of the ad—sure, it’s a little weird, but it’s definitely not a piece by Jenny Holzer, you know? it makes no effort to explain or contain itself, it doesn’t get deep and it certainly isn’t universal—bounces the viewer’s attention elsewhere. This, I suppose, is where the notes and/or the explanation comes in: they are necessary to see the work. They are necessary to see the ad straining between its trajectories between the newstand and the grill as 50,000 papers, the newstand and the gallery as a limited edition, the newstand and the collector’s home, the newstand and the homes of any number Juans Manuel Aguilar; straining between being unread and unnoticed in print or presented online with the importance accordant to one of more important galleries of Mexico City; being interpreted by the concerned parents or fried or lover of one Juan Manuel Aguilar as a bad idea, don’t call, you’ve heard about this kind of thing, and another very different Juan Manuel Aguilar as perhaps not so bad an idea, why not give it a try?

Each figure in ¿por qué no fui tu amigo? is like the first, straining in some way between locations, trajectories, interpretations, their mundanity initially deflecting attention to the web of possible trajectories and probable interpretations suspending them in their current position, making them shiver and blur. I am tempted to call this contingency “radical,” but of course it isn’t, it is a very mundane, very commonplace contingency. In their mundane contingency, the figures that comprise ¿por qué no fui tu amigo? reflect the daily strain of most objects and most bodies, caught in a momentary, yet brutally constricting, context, straining anonymously towards the next.