Monday, May 28, 2012

6/2: ARTIFACTS FROM THE BASEMENT OF THE CHURCH OF CONTEMPORARY ART new works by ANGELA WATTERS

ARTIFACTS FROM THE BASEMENT OF THE CHURCH OF CONTEMPORARY ART
new works by ANGELA WATTERS
JUNE 2-4, 2012

Opening Reception: Sunday, June 3, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Saturday, June 2, 1-4pm
Monday, June 4, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street, Chicago 60608
 
 
ARTIFACTS FROM THE BASEMENT OF THE CHURCH OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Church of Contemporary Art co-founder, Angela Watters, will be sharing the sculpture, painting, and photography from CoCA’s permanent collection for the exhibition, Artifacts from the Basement of the Church of Contemporary Art.  CoCA pairs the rituals and relics of religion with the seductive allure of contemporary art.  Our communion ceremony consists of a diet of gourmet-cubed marshmallows and Kool-Aid spiked with vodka (the body and blood of art). No matter what you identify as, “We are what you need.” On June 2nd and 3rd there will be sliding scale counseling sessions given by CoCA members in the gallery in conjunction with the exhibition and CoCA’s June 1st performance at Defibrillator Gallery for the Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival at 7PM. Please contact info@angelawatters.com to schedule your counseling session. 

ANGELA WATTERS is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator. She is a 2012-2013 recipient of a Terminal Award for new media for The Poor House, a participatory project about the student loan debt problem. As founding member and lead organizer of The Foster Collective she organized a collective response to the 2010 Gulf oil spill on gas station paper towels, which has been exhibited in several cities across the country. She received her BFA in Photography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and her MFA from Columbia College Chicago. This summer she will be artist-in-residence at the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis.
 
More information about Angela Watters can be found at www.angelawatters.com
 
 

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Fundraiser for Cobalt Studio

COLLAGE COLLAB for COBALT 
Fundraiser

Friday, May 25th / 6-9pm
Cobalt Studio
1950 W. 21st St, Storefront
Chicago IL

Cobalt Studio needs your help to keep our doors open. We'd like to keep things Going, Growing and Evolving at Cobalt with shows and events that engage and stimulate the Pilsen community. The theme for the night will be on Collaboration & Collage works paper.

What to expect:
  •  Art, Music, Drinks & tons of fun
  •  Support us by getting raffle tickets to win original artwork by talented Chicago artists / Raffle tickets: $2 or (3/$5)
  •  Have a blast making your own collage work. Materials will be provided but you are welcome to bring your own
Artists:Contact us if you'd like to make a donation of artwork for the raffle or in any other way!cobaltartstudio@gmail.com Deadline to submit is 5/18/12

Monday, May 21, 2012

5/27: PACKING HEAT // new works by TIFFANY FUNK

PACKING HEAT
new works by TIFFANY FUNK
MAY 27-28, 2012

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 27, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, May 28, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street, Chicago 60608



PACKING HEAT
Tiffany Funk’s work explores the fallout of the proliferation of military technology in everyday life.  So much of the technology we use provokes feelings of anxiety and dread despite appearing – or being marketed – to calm and protect us.  Funk investigates how the violence endemic to our prosthetics – the ubiquitous software and hardware that entertains, educates, preserves and protects – reifies a power structure that feeds off wartime anxiety.  This war begins at the permeable border of the body, where the ability to visualize, reconstruct, and extend ourselves is surrendered to powers that continually abstract, capitalize, and militarize.
 
TIFFANY FUNK is an artist based in Chicago.  She makes use of diverse technological mediums in order to explore how we invent, mobilize, and navigate the troubled symbiotic relationships we share with our technological tools.  She received her MFA this spring from the University of Illinois at Chicago in New Media, and is currently researching and writing her dissertation entitled The Prosthetic Aesthetic: An Art of Missing Parts.
 
More information about Tiffany Funk can be found at www.tiffanyannfunk.com

5/27: FAITH MADE // new works by ADAM FARCUS + ALLISON TRUMBO + MICHAEL A. MORRIS

FAITH MADE
new works by ADAM FARCUS, ALLISON TRUMBO & MICHAEL A. MORRIS
MAY 27 – July 8, 2012

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 27, 4-7pm

Adds Donna
4223 W Lake Street, Chicago 60624

FAITH MADE questions the surface manifestations of those things deep within us, how ritual, tradition, and objects endowed with magical properties have the power to console, motivate and mystify our lives.

Faith Made examines the balancing act that takes place between the rational and emotive faculties, between the desire for the consolation that belief provides and the need to question accepted narratives. As William James observed in his lecture on “The Reality of the Unseen”, “our impulsive belief is here always what sets up the original body of truth, and our articulately verbalized philosophy is but its showy translation into formulas. The unreasoned and immediate assurance is the deep thing in us; the reasoned argument is but a surface exhibition. Instinct leads, intelligence does but follow.”

Though the three artists in Faith Made begin from a place of personal narrative, the resulting work is evidence of a variety of different approaches that attend to notions of family, faith, sentimentality, and the esoteric. The works presented here originate from a place of hope as much as from one of cynicism.

Adam Farcus’ Penny Hex creates a spiritual seal on viewers which grants them the luck of hundreds of lucky pennies, while Entry challenges the mystical power that we give to such objects and rituals. It’s Just Meant To Be, a film installation by Michael Morris, presents an incantatory collection of platitudes that fail to provide solace at the loss of a loved one. In other works such as Blue Movie and Wheel and Axle Machine, Morris addresses the technologies that preserve some part of a person: their body, their voice, or their gaze. Allison Trumbo’s video installation, which includes both Visualization Exercises That Work Like Magic and Creating Abundance in 10 Minutes Flat, parallel personal and media induced visions of romance and spirituality with the crudeness of superficiality perpetuated by pop culture.

ALLISON TRUMBO is a violin teacher and co-director of a music school on the north side of Chicago. Her work is often prompted by her experience as a nurturing motivator accompanied by the childlike fantasies that are often required to inspire her classes.

ADAM FARCUS is a Chicago (soon to be Baltimore) based artist, writer, and teacher. Through subjects such as death, joy, poetry, identity, and belief, his work elevates the banal to unexpected heights while simultaneously placing the magical in an accessible, even common, realm.

MICHAEL A. MORRIS is an artist and educator based in Dallas, Texas. His works in film, video, installation, and performance draw on personal narratives and experience to explore the implications of recording technologies for belief, interpretation, and perception.

Monday, May 14, 2012

HOW THINGS STAND

HOW THINGS STAND
new works by JANINE BIUNNO
MAY 20-21, 2012

Opening Reception: Sunday, May 20, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, May 21, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street, Chicago 60608
HOW THINGS STAND
Janine Biunno's body of work exhibited in How Things Stand is visually informed by the continual gathering of images, both via photographing her daily commute across New York City and by simultaneously searching the internet for existing imagery of the same spaces. These reference images, equal parts original and digitally sourced, investigate the relationship between representation and interpretation in the built environment. As an artist Biunno is primarily interested in the often overlooked in-between spaces and physical boundaries of the structures that comprise cities. The work presented here is a distillation of the dense visual information of urban space. How Things Stand includes thirty Constructivist-inspired paper cutouts and an accompanying take-away zine of a selection of the reference materials, intended to provide context to the minimalist works.



JANINE BIUNNO is an interdisciplinary artist currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work typically interprets the subjective view of the city dweller, addressing how the architecture and infrastructure found in the cities we inhabit function as signifiers for location, identity and economy. Janine earned her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Tufts University and BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. She currently works for architect Steven Holl, as the Director of Publications. 

More info about Janine Biunno can be found at www.janinebiunno.com

Friday, May 11, 2012

Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Amelia Winger-Bearskin
video presentation


Friday, June 1, 2012 @ 7pm
FREE ADMISSION



Amelia Winger-Bearskin is currently an Assistant Professor of Studio Art and Cinema Studies at Vanderbilt University in the area of Time Based Media Arts and Performance, in Nashville, Tn. She was classically trained as an Opera Singer in Rochester NY at the Eastman conservatory of music, and then finished her Undergraduate degree at George Mason University in 2000. While at GMU she studied sculpture and time based art and received her BAIS in Performance Art. She went on to do her MFA in Transmedia (time based art) at University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She was in the group show Art in the Age of the Internet at the Chelsea Art Museum in 2007 and was a featured video and performance artist at Basel in Miami, Scope at the Lincoln Center and other art fairs consistently since 2007 as an artist at large for the perpetual art machine [PAM]. She has been focusing her performances primarily on Asian performance festivals this year as she finds that regionally Asia has created a unique method of support for Performance Art, she has performed at the 10th Annual OPEN ART Performance Art festival in Beijing, China, The Performance Art Network PANAsia '09 in Seoul, South Korea, the TAMA TUPADA 2010 Media and Performance festival in the Philippines. She recently spent a month in Sao Paulo Brazil where she performed as the first American performance artist to be invited to the Verbo Performance Art Festival and was part of an international scholar exchange sponsored by University of Sao Paulo and Vanderbilt University VIO and Art Department. Spring /Summer 2012 she will have a sound/video/multimedia installation throughtout the Nashville International Airport and will be in Tasmania, Australia to do an artist in residence at the University of Tasmania.


She is the Editor-in-Chief of Art Art Zine a new online publication of art and society for the South and the Director of the Women's Art League of Tennessee (W.A.L)

ANTENA
1755 S. Laflin, St.
Chicago, IL 60608
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Hours: by appointment
(773) 340-3516

The Road to Candyland: NICK BLACK




The Road to Candyland: 
NICK BLACK
Opening Friday May 18 from 7pm-10pm
May 18- June 9, 2012

"Dear Friends
I've roamed the thrift stores, discount dollar stores, and alleys of Chicago and burbs in vain search of the fallen icons from the glorious golden age of consumption now come to a shattering end. These new sculptures will hold no bars in slamming together every cheep, cheesy, sexist, office male humor, misogynistic, homophobic, racist cliché in the book in a personal attempt to come to terms with a guilt ridden past, towards the neurotic reality of a failed future. As usual, I'll be laying on the satirical self-depreciating humor thick and heavy.
Hope you can make it." -Nick Black

Nick Black was born in Chicago in 1958. He has attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Uncle Freddy's Gallery, Highland, IN, and Joymore, Buddy Space, and Klein Art Works, all in Chicago. Nick has had key works at Art Chicago, the Stray Show, Version Fest, and the New Chicagoans.http://www.flickr.com/photos/nbtoy/sets/72157607672560085/

Antena
1765 S. Laflin, St.
Chicago, IL 60608
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Hours: by appointment
(773) 340-3516