The Return of 'Birds I Have Known' @ August House Studio

The Return of “Birds I Have Known”

August House Studios

Opening Receptions:

Fri. May 7, 6 - 9 pm

Sat. May 8, 6 – 9 pm

Sun. May 9, 3 – 6 pm

Over 90 artists showcase their unique interpretation of the birdhouse. Join Jason Messinger and over 30 of the other artists Friday night, or come to one of other free reception dates and see the work first hand.

August House Studio

2113 W Roscoe, Chicago

Show runs May 7 – 29, 2010

Gallery hours wed-sun; 12 noon to 5pm

AugustHouseStudio.com

'Old Hills' Edward Master at Las Manos Gallery

Viewers may remember Edward Master's large-scale paper wall pieces, first introduced at the Crazy 8 show and reviewed here, with their cascading fields of vibrant patterns, exuberantly detailed forms stitched together into landscapes of pattern and huge shield-like shapes. One of the many references one might take from them was a fleeting sense of aerial views.

In "Old Hills", an installation of eight sculptures currently presented at The Evidence Against Us, a group show at the Los Manos Gallery, Master returns to the obsessively detailed while expanding this sense of the landscape from above. The artist creates, in miniature, glacial mountains from arctic landscapes, including a timely lava-flowing volcano. Presented handsomely on a low white pedestal, the work creates a swooning sense of seeing a mountain landscape from high above.

Unlike the brightly colorful paper pieces, these small wool mountains explore an astonishing range of similar muted cool color tones, creating a verisimilitude to the natural world in their color restraint. The use of carefully chosen colored embroidery threads add even more detail to these three-dimensional constructions. This sense of cool ice and ground is visually exploded by the juxtaposition of one larger mountain covered with varying shades of red, and the speckled red 'lava' on others, creating a visual shock to the eye that both subdues and enhances the reference to the real world.

These fabric sculptures are constructed from recycled wool sweaters, cut into small jagged strips, then soaked and hand-dyed with acrylic paints thinned with water. Each small felted-wool strip is painstakingly hand-stitched with embroidery thread into larger plate-like shapes, backed with fabric, then sewn together around hidden interior wire forms, creating beautifully abstracted mountains.

Beside a conceptual irony and humor in presenting hard mountains and earth in soft wool, and conflating the gigantic into the small, the work reveals an aesthetic delight in the real world. As individual pieces, each is a wonder of detail and beauty, as a whole they present a startling prescient sense of the power and majesty in geologic forms.

While beyond the scope of this review, the entire group show is quite interesting and handsomely curated, and should be seen before it ends next Sunday April 25th.

The Evidence Against Us
Edward Master and other artists
Las Manos Gallery
Show ends this April 25th.  
5220 North Clark Street
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 728-8910
Hours: Sat and Sun 12-5, or by appointment
Las Manos Gallery
Las Manos Gallery BLOG 

Edward Master on Crazy 8 

Jason Messinger Artist Talks at GoggleWorks Center for Arts

Chicago Artist Jason Messinger will be giving artist talks throughout the day at the GoggleWorks Second Sunday building-wide open-house event in April. 

Come out to hear the artist speak about his work, or stop by anytime for informal Q and A with the artist. 

Symbols & Sympathies
GoggleWorks Center for the Arts
201 Washington Street, Reading PA
Sunday, April 11
Artist Talks: 11:30 am and 1:30 pm
Informal Q and A : 11 am  4 pm
Show runs through April 18
GoggleWorks Center for the Arts

Symbols & Sympathies features Jason Messinger's signature ceramic tile murals and unique ceramic sculpture. The artwork explores the boundary between abstraction and representation, with the viewer becoming complicit in the 'meaning' of the work. All artwork at this exhibition are for sale, and for the first time ever, collectors may buy tiles individually - rather than only as sets - to make their own individualized mural. 

This solo show of signature ceramic tile murals and ceramic sculpture by Jason Messinger is scheduled to coincide with the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts 44^th Annual Conference held in nearby Philadelphia, PA  NCECA 2010, 44TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

March 31-April 3, 2010 • Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

This program partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Review and Listings: 
Reading Eagle NEW 
BCTV.org Listing 
 ArtSlant Listing

Darrell Roberts

Darrell Roberts's paintings are visual candy. Lush in color to the point of optical intensity, the works churn and vibrate with tension and release. The surfaces are more sculptural than flat picture plane, with surfaces almost vertiginous in their thickly applied strokes and sharply chiseled irregularities. 

Abstract in the purest and most classical sense, they maintain a sense of internal regularity that makes them a visual feast for the eyes. In the tradition of sculpture, their ever-present materiality confronts us. Roberts regulates not only the thickness of the paint, but the granularity of the surface itself. With colors that burn with intensity, and forms that practically beg our fingers to stroke their unbridled surfaces, each piece becomes a micro-landscape of almost hallucinogenic perception. If Darrell Roberts work was a drug, it would be a Schedule I psychedelic. Luckily for us, art is still unregulated by the DEA.

Darrell Roberts studio is in the Cornelia Arts Building, and his work is represented through the McCormick Gallery
Darrell-Roberts.com
ThomasMcCormick.com
CorneliaArtsBuilding.com 

Cornelia Arts March Open House

CORNELIA ARTS MARCH OPEN HOUSE
Friday March 12, 6 - 10 pm
1800 West Cornelia, Chicago
Entrance on Ravenswood


ONE NIGHT ONLY!
Join over 30 artists in a fun reception and free event showcasing artwork in a variety of mediums, in the working studios of the Cornelia Arts Building Artists and Artisans.

CorneliaArtsBuilding.com

Cornelia Arts Building participants for this event include:

JASON MESSINGER,
SCOTT SIMONS,
NANCY CHARAK,
DARRELL ROBERTS,
KEVIN SWALLOW,
JOHANNAH SILVA,
TIFFANY STRONSKY,
JEFF BRYNER,
EMILY ROYNESDAL,
TRACY SYPERSKI,
GUILLERMO CARRILLO
ALLEY MARANTO,
BETH KAMHI,
BASIA KROL,
SUSANNE SIEGEL,
KATHERINE DRAKE CHIAL,
DOUG FROHMAN , ,
VANESSA HIRSCHOWITZ,
JODI RAE BROWNSTEIN,
JUDY ZEDDIES,
JAMES PARENTI,
JUDY LICHTENSTEIN,
JUDY SCHUMACHER
Matt Nichols,
Alex "Q",
Joan Minsky

Anthony Bowers

Veronica Bruce

Lauren Harlowe,

AND MORE !

Jason Messinger @ GoggleWorks in Reading PA

SYMBOLS & SYMPATHIES
solo show of ceramic artwork by Jason Messinger
March 4 – April 18, 2010

GoggleWorks Center for the Arts
201 Washington Street, Reading PA 

Free Opening Reception:
Thursday March 4,
5:30 - 7:30 pm

GoggleWorks Center for the Arts

Featuring Jason Messinger's signature ceramic tile murals and unique ceramic sculpture. All artwork at this exhibition are for sale, and for the first time ever, collectors will be allowed to buy tiles individually - rather than only as sets - to make their own individualized mural. 

This solo show of signature ceramic tile murals and ceramic sculpture by Jason Messinger is scheduled to coincide with the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts 44^th Annual Conference held in nearby Philadelphia, PA; NCECA 2010, 44TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE  March 31-April 3, 2010 • Philadelphia, PA

This program partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

To preview more artwork for this show see listing: ArtSlant Listing

LUSH LIFE - Joey Wozniak at Eyeporium Gallery

It has been not quite a year since I started this blog on Artists in Chicago, so it is only fitting that I return to the first artist I reviewed;  Joey Wozniak, who has a solo show opening in February at Eyeporium Gallery in Wicker Park. 'Lush Life' continues the artist's exploration of vibrant color and beauty.

Joey Wozniak's multi-layered paintings might almost be considered sculptural. Thickly applied paints are pushed through hand-drawn and hand-cut stencils to create surfaces that are practically bas-relief in depth. By scraping and removing successive layers of paint, Wozniak leaves a palimpsest of images that float atmospherically behind the heavily applied final layers. In his sure and practiced hand, the final results are paradoxically both fleetingly atmospheric, and supremely compositionally balanced.

Wozniak's subject matter veers from floral blooms that burn with their own radiant light, to wry figures in fantasical costumes or ornate period dress, and human-animal chimeras. A subtle humor invades much of his work, teasing expectations by interspersing colonial dressed figures with those of indigenous costumes, replacing tribal jewelry with Ipods and ray-guns, or placing a pitchforked devil alongside monkeys on leashes. Always a visual treat, this show is not to be missed.

LUSH LIFE
Solo Show of Joey Wozniak
Eyeporium Gallery
1543 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL
Opening Reception:
Friday, Feb 5th, 7 - 10 pm
Show Runs Feb 5 through March 1

Joey Wozniak/Lush Life; Listing on Artslant

All works by Joey Wozniak

Alan Emerson Hicks

Recently viewed at a open-studio reception, Alan Emerson Hicks' new body of work combines the repetitive process-driven traditions of such fiber-art forms as basketry and weaving, with the 'new materials' movement of contemporary art to use non-traditional material as the art medium. The artist focuses on the plastic left-overs from our endlessly consumptive society. In the Safety Tower series, he takes the most innocuous of items, the 'safety rings' that are now attached to the bottom of bottle caps to deter and detect tampering, and transforms them into elegant towers of sublime shapes, evoking the basketry traditions of many cultures, but also pointing to a uniquely modern convocation of consumer culture.

In "Chipped Vessel", Alan Emerson Hicks takes used potato chip and other snack bags, and, with fishing line and cable ties, transforms them into rings that again create tower-like forms of subtle complexity and beauty. The seeming weakness of the material is turned surprisingly resilient, somewhat like Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesics. The same alchemy is performed with trash bags in the "Baghdad Tower" series, creating droopy stalagmite-like forms.

In "Babel", plastic caps from various products, as well as the odd plastic toy, create a column of dot-like forms that speak to both recycling ethics and the plastic palette of our modern culture. The form mirrors the roundness of the caps and the vessels from they come. Topped with a ring of white caps, much like a bubbling head of froth on a beer, the shape of the work is hollow, creating tension by being both 'full' and 'empty'. The use of occasional toys and bright colors creates a fun atmosphere, in contrast to the artwork's refined aesthetic nature.

Alan Emerson Hicks has focused this new work not just on recycled 'left-overs' but all plastic materials, sometimes pairing a visual vibrancy with actual dynamic movement. A new version of his work "Video Column" takes the outmoded material of video tape and transforms it into a tendril-like ceiling-high column of black reflections that billow softly like a sea creature, due to a cleverly hidden fan. The sculpture "Ice" takes white clothes hangers and turns them into a gigantic diamond shape, which spins continually with a motor, creating a piece that is at once aesthetically commanding and intellectually funny.  Always maintaining a sense of both beauty and intellectual rigor, Alan Emerson Hicks's artwork is both satisfying and surprising.

From Top: Babel, 2009; Ice, 2009; Safety Tower Sans White, 2009;  
Video Column II, 2009; Chipped Vessel, 2009

Alan's work can be seen at Crazy 8 Art

Emerson Studio Open House

Emerson Studio Open House
(The Studio of Alan Emerson Hicks)
Saturday,
August 29, 2009
6:00pm - 10:00pm

Studio located inside
JK Chicago
1800 W Cuyler
Chicago, IL
(773) 501-7730

Marya Veeck

Marya Veeck creates elaborate and beautifully detailed tableaus of dollhouse furniture, natural objects, and old toys that reveal elliptic metaphors of submerged feelings. Her skillful renderings of objects forgotten and small, place us in a world as detailed as a novel and as personal as a memory. Her oil paintings create a sense of inner radiance, as scintillating colors emerge from the edges of objects, glinting from behind their surfaces, in a manner that suggests an undeniable vital or life force animating seemingly inanimate objects. The glow of florescent color keys the viewer to the objects' metaphoric strength, and gives the viewer an altered emotional perception.

Veeck's paintings are part autobiographical, but with the names and places changed into wind-up birds and wooden toy clowns, dried seed pods and antique farm implements. Broken winged birds and dollhouses point, perhaps, to emotional losses and childhood environments, tiny cages and chairs to relationships stilted and supportive. Never overt, Veeck's paintings reveal their moods slowly, with everything cloaked in their own hidden significance, creating moods alternately wistful, nostalgic, and ebullient. Marya Veeck recreates the classic still-life into a unique snapshot of memories, as emotionally and densely narrative as her fascinatingly detailed picture plane.

Find Marya Veeck's gallery on line at: MaryaVeeck.com

Images- from top:
"We Had Some Good Machines But They Don't Work No More"
"Calling Up Childhood at Will" &
"deail of Calling Up Childhood at Will"
"Etui Woman"

Other Sites by Jason Messinger

If you enjoy Artists Of Chicago,
you might also enjoy these sites

JasonMessingerArt.blogspot.com
- news and notes of artist Jason Messinger

JasonMessingerWrites.blogspot.com
- short fantasy fiction, poetry, and biographical essays
by writer and artist Jason Messinger

JasonMessingerArt.com
- the main site for Jason Messinger;
including full gallery of artwork both sold and available,
links to other sites, CV/bio, and more

Crazy8Art.com
- a virtual Gallery of several Chicago area artists

Thanks for following!

Absolute Fantasy @ Mars Gallery, featuring Alan Emerson Hicks

Absolute Fantasy
Artwork by Alan Emerson Hicks,
Sean Williams, and Sabina Cosic.
Curated by Susan Aurinko of FLATFILE galleries

Opening Reception
Friday, July 24
6:00pm - 9:00pm
Mars Gallery
1139 W. Fulton Ave., Chicago, IL
www.marsgallery.com/
Show runs July 24-August 22, 2009

Shown: ETMMMVII20088K
(Emerson Time Machine) by Alan Emerson Hicks

"Time machines are conceptual sculptures built biannually. They are created in odd numbered years and displayed the following even numbered year. They are a part of the "temporal sculpture" series (sculptures with a time element). Time machines are partially audience participatory. The viewer is given the opportunity to sit on or stand in front of the piece and have a temporal experience with it. A reel of video tape is destroyed during this experience which will eventually get used on the piece."

Kass Copeland

Kass Copeland's work at first blush may remind one of the seminal artworks of Joseph Cornell; assemblages in a box format with a keen sense of intimacy and nostalgia built into their varied old-time photographs and engravings, subtly moving parts, and motifs of birds and night skies. But Kass Copeland's works are not mere imitations, but are aspects of a richly created world-view that in some ways is more accessible and more nuanced than Joseph Cornell's.

Many motifs run through her work, mournful black and white or subtly tinted daguerreotypes, antique parts from an earlier industrial age, finely crafted wooden boxes and chests with doors that open and hinges that swing, birds and feathers and insects, hands and rings, tattered text and exposed watch parts, and eyes - eyes that look back at the viewer with a vulnerable expressiveness that lies at the core of Copeland's work.

While Cornell's assemblages were often so specific to be coolly abstract in their meanings, Copeland never fails to create an emotional resonance with her viewer. Longing, loneliness, joy, sorrow, nostalgia, melancholy, wistfulness, hopefulness all find their voice in her astounding body of work. Kass Copeland's color palette tends toward a restrained range of earth tones, subtle tints, gold and silver, dark rich reds and ambers, and beautiful woods. But her emotional palette is complex and complete, drawing the viewer immediately into her cleverly devised constructions, then lingering far more in one's memory, like a wistful old song that keeps playing in your head, long after one has heard it.






Image titles, from top, all works by Kass Copeland;
The Bird Watcher, 2008,
The Peace Machine, 2008,
Leon's Gold, 2008,
Inter-Dimensional Peepholes, 2009

Find Kass Copeland's gallery on line at:
http://kasscopeland.wix.com/kasscopeland

3-D 12 Artists Exhibit at South Haven Center for the Arts

NOW Sculpture Exhibit: June 19 - July 26

"While exhibiting at various venues, the Chicago-based 3-D 12 artists have identified their commonly held environmental interests and concerns. Their personal perceptions on the issue cover as broad a range as their materials of choice. Decomposed lost and found objects, recycled plastic and metal, salvaged scrap wood, earth and water are some materials which are effectively reconfigured to translate their ideas into physical forms. The sculptural works take on subjective and collective meaning to contribute to a genuine meta-landscape."

The 3-D 12 artists are: Shelley Gilchrist, Peter Gray, Alan Emerson Hicks, Ruyell Ho, Beth Kamhi, Jim MacRoberts, Bill Moll, Mimi Peterson, Robert Putnam, Eric H. Steele, and Michelle Stone.

Photos:
top: new work by Alan Emerson Hicks, plastic, 2009
bottom: new work by Beth Khami, ceramic, metal, 2009

NOW Sculpture, featuring 3-D 12
June 19 - July 26
South Haven Center for the Arts
600 Phoenix St, South Haven, MI 49090
(269)637-1041

NOW Sculpture @ South Haven Arts

South Haven Center for the Arts
http://SouthHavenArts.org/

Alan Emerson Hicks
http://Crazy8Art.com/

Beth Khami
http://bethkamhi.com/

Nancy Pirri

Artist Nancy Pirri sculpts women from clay that evoke lost histories and mythic pasts. Focusing on traditional classical female forms, Pirri brings the curvaceous nature of the female body forward, creating works that are both sensual and enticing. The artist uses a variety of thickly applied glazes with rough and uneven textures. The forms are sometimes truncated and given torn edges and distressed surfaces to create a sense of rawness and antiquity. Her newest work transfers these classical images into painterly applications on classic vessel-forms.


Pirri references the sculptural and vessel-form vernaculars of many disparate cultures in her worldly women. Evoking the past through the uses of fragmented forms and rich surfaces, the women are vaulted into archtypes of noble strength and timeless beauty, like the venerated icons of a goddess cult, or portrayals of a long-lost empress-queen. Ceramic is a medium paradoxically having both seeming fragility as well as a lasting durability that can outlive the cultures that produce it. By harkening to the forms of the past, Nancy Pirri gives her own work the durable strength and the regal power of the best examples of classical sculptures and vessels.


You can see Nancy's work at her website:
NPGraphx.com

and at an upcoming exhibit this month:

'Serene La Femme' ~ Celebrating the Female Form

This collection of work is a contemporary twist on the timeless beauty of the female form as a muse, featuring innovative techniques in platinum photography by Ted Preuss, ceramic methods and figurative sculpture by Audry Cramblit and Nancy Pirri, and paintings by Mary Qian.

Show will exhibit for 10 days.

A percentage of sales will be donated to Chicago’s Union League Civic & Arts Foundation.

Where: The Palette & Chisel ~ 1012 North Dearborn • Chicago, IL 60610 (map it)

Opening Reception: Friday, May 29, 2009 • 6 to 10pm

Open House: Saturday, May 30, 2009 • 1 to 6pm

Closing Reception: Sunday, June 7, 2009 • 2 to 6pm

UnTwelve Concert: Saturday, June 6, 2009 - 8:00pm ~ UnTwelve ensemble featuring special guest guitarist Dante Rosati.

DANNY MANSMITH "SCRAP"

Scrap artist Danny Mansmith combines disparate elements in fabric, paper, photography, and thread into structural forms and tableaux. Danny Mansmith connects the unrelated

into a new conglomerate whole, building figures and structures with a visual syntax uniquely his own. Utilizing scrap papers and fabrics, Mansmith stitches pieces together into elaborate patchwork surfaces. The works are embellished with scrolling stitching in contrasting threads, which veer from frenzied embellishments into map tracery into loose landscapes into elongated-forms. Creating both recognizable shapes and obscured patterns, Mansmith constructs flat and three-dimensional forms both figurative and abstract. He also creates clothing and wearable art, unique accessories, and everyday objects that are anything but everyday. His looping gestural figures curl out of their silhouettes; while the pendulous abstract forms erupt in threaded exclamations. His sculptural objects subvert our expectations in their impossible materials and crazy patchwork surfaces. Mansmith brings exuberant joy to the everyday by rearranging the old into new and the common into the extraordinary. One of my personal artistic heroes.

Find his gallery on line at:
Danny Mansmith

and purchase work directly through his Etsy store at:
Danny Mansmith on Etsy

Julie Wishmeyer

Julie Wishmeyer follows individual pursuits in her expressive work while keeping a universal sense of beauty at her creative core. Wishmeyer melds the pop imagery of modern life with the traditions of ancient cultures into portraits of womanhood and beauty. Using beads, plastic doo-daws, and other seemingly 'cheap' materials, she creates tension between the viewer's expectations and the Barouqe beauty of each piece. Her sequin paintings combine the vernacular of feminine dress with themes of high-art history and emotional expression. Her tribal-like masks and sculptures encrust their forms with baubles of our time and her mirror series takes the female gaze into the idealized forms of childhood. Inspired by Pop art and consumer culture, Julie Wishmeyer shares a vision that is singular and inspired.

Find locations for her work at her website:
Julie Wishmeyer