Jake Vodgs: Company Cuties

August 27, 2017

Multidisciplinary artist Jake Vogds fabricates conceptual, toy-like objects and paintings that speak to his practice as both a pop-singer and performance artist. With most of his vocal inspiration coming from Black female artists, Vogds finds it essential to create physical works that call out and question the inherent appropriation laced within his voice. Microphones in object-drag as parrots sensualize this self-parody, using strategies of camp, humor, and accelerationism to dismantle systems of privilege within the pop-scene as well as the self. Stuffed-animal product-self-portraits mock and reveal the shape-shifting, mind-colonizing aspects of whiteness in hopes of trapping this trauma in surrealist riddles.

Artist Website:
Jake Vodgs

Angie Saiz: Jauria

May 21, 2017

Angie Saiz (Chile, 1977) is a visual artist with production of works in painting, photography, public intervention, video installation, and sound art. Her work develops aesthetic problems based on the biographical imagery and the intersection and crisis between new technologies and the concepts of time, limbo, and ruin. She has exhibited in important spaces in Chile, such as MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Visual Arts MAVI, and Galería Metropolitana.

Artist Website:
Angie Saiz

Adam Farcus: Protest Song

May 14, 2017

Visitors are invited to enact the score, Protest Song, and create protest songs with language generated through automatic writing by Adam Farcus while they were watching and listening to Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. Automatic writing is a Surrealist technique where the movement of the hand is separated from what the eyes see and the mind thinks, with the goal of tapping into subconscious thoughts and feelings.

Exhibition Info:
Link to Protest Songs
PDF version of Protest Song zine

Artist Website:
Adam Farcus

Grant Gill: Extra-spectral

April 23, 2017

Magenta, not found within the natural spectrum of light, fires off the red and blue cones inside the human eye. In this unusual combination, the brain is forced to assemble a new, distinct color. In a way, magenta is a paradox in color comprehension, it is an illusion. Extra-spectral plays with magenta-colored gels that both vanish and introduce information to photographs, creating illusions within a viewing experience. The gels are held in monolithic structures and require the viewer to dance around them, not granting images in full, rather in pieces.

Artist Website:
Grant Gill

Ben Cook: Image Construction

February 26, 2017

The processes of drawing on Snapchat photos, rendering layered shapes in Photoshop, cropping, concealing, grids and abstracting palettes from video games or blogs all come together to create images that exist in an awkward, in-between state. They exist fluidly in both a digital and physical world as both photographs disseminated digitally and works displayed in brick and mortar locations.

Artist Website:
Ben Cook

Richard Medina: Sex Land Power

November 20, 2016

Richard Medina’s work takes the form of paintings, sculptures, performances, and videos. In his practice, he invests in rigid existing structures and uses them to generate new work. Medina has a fascination with the American Southwest as a cultural, historical, geographical, and topographical site. In particular, he is drawn to artwork that deals with the iconography of the West and speaks to the problematic nature of a space practically designed for hyper-masculine roles and rituals. Medina finds Westerns interesting for this very reason. Films that exist in a vacuum of tropes and archetypes that are purely fictional but are nonetheless trapped inside a historical time period often burrow deeper into their genre instead of attempting to transcend their boundaries, creating and recreating settings and situations—concepts of landscape as it relates to the American Southwest.

Artist Website:
Richard Medina

Sophie Ansell: Discount Dreams

October 26, 2016

As an artist working in film and performance, storytelling is key to Sophie Ansell’s practice. Her work explores narratives, in particular, the stories which are fed to us as a society. Tales of Hollywood Glamour and Benefits Scroungers, Disney Fairytales and The Deficit, Beauty Standards and Austerity Measures. Some of these stories are thrilling, some are simple and some are boring but all are told so subtly and frequently that they threaten to become fact. Ansell uses dark humor to question and critique these modern media and political narratives.

Artist Website:
Sophie Ansell

Jon Henry: VOMB

October 16, 2016

For millennia, humans have (unknowingly) worshiped the VOMB. Yet, it was only about 30,000 years ago with the invention of glitter that humans could begin to materialize their devotion and dedication of the VOMB, which lead to further discoveries and devotees. This exhibition gathers together various objects related to the VOMB in regards to the 'myths' of creation, power struggles, and theology.

Artist Website:
Jon Henry

Joey Knox: YOU ASKED FOR IT

September 18, 2016

YOU ASKED FOR IT is an exploration of the significant social value placed on childhood celebrations and milestones. These defining touchstones mask a true identity behind a veil of exuberantly inexpensive decorations and momentary but fleeting joy. Within these constructs, it is expectations that create predisposition and shape our sense of want and desire.

Gender is both established and confined through events like birthdays. Words, colors, and behaviors begin to have strongly weighted connotations, all of which come to shape much of what guides us in early and later sexual identity.

Artist Website:
Joey Knox

Patricia Keck: When Birds Sleep

July 10, 2016

I have felt out of step with the focus of mainstream society. We seem to move forward in such a clumsy way both rebuilding and destroying in the same breath. As a child I would daydream of being someone else leading a life separate from the one around me. As an artist I have become both the participant and the observer. Now my adult daydreams enable me to communicate through gesture and attitude reactions to events that occur in the lives that are common to all people.

Artist Website:
Patricia Keck

Erik L. Peterson: Ink & Water

April 17, 2016

Erik L. Peterson is a pro-bono public artist, sculptor, curator living in Chicago. He is best known for his large-scale urban interventions, Face Value and Inner State, and signature edible ice cream sculptures, CreamCycle and Soft Palate. Public performances employing sculptural elements like Two Tow'n and Square Dance, are camouflaged urban spectacles, while the annual Southwest Wisconsin Make Your Own Softball League game gathers artists who build their own bats and balls in order to play. Additionally, Peterson is a founder of Hyde Park Kunstverein, a community museum and solo project space in Chicago.

Artist Website:
Erik L. Peterson

Linda Ding: General Merchandise

February 21, 2016

Ding’s work interprets the complexities of mass-produced goods and television commercials. Alongside simplified colors and forms drawn from food packaging, her work delves into bridging the consumer cultural divide as a first-generation American. She is influenced by television programs such as The Simpsons, Jeopardy, and Wheel of Fortune. Watching television and movies is how she connects to American culture and humor. From infomercials and “As Seen on TV” products, cheap and readily available consumer goods have come to epitomize American standards of abundance and wealth. Ding continues to seek the symbolic meaning found in objects through their commodity value and representation.

Artist Website:
Linda Ding

Adam Turl: Kick the Cat

October 25, 2015

The installation tells the story of the artist, Mary Hoagland, a Peoria native and former member of the 13 Baristas Art Collective, forced to move into her brother's garage after a serious car accident. The title comes from the rank-and-file union newsletter produced by Caterpillar workers in the 1990s. In her paintings, Mary tells fictionalized stories of the children and grandchildren of laid-off Cat workers and other residents of the greater Peoria area. This includes a young Mary, who, in a bid to stop global warming, kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil so that he will never again see, or fail to see, his own shadow.

Artist Website:
Adam Turl

Sara Peak Convery

August 9, 2015

The installation includes previously created work: 3 prints from 1988, an oil canvas from 2006/7, and part of a triptych from 2012. The canvas Sleepless is one of my rare attempts to paint from an idea without a visual source to reference. What A Piece of Work Is Man (2012) was a visual amalgamation of 3 disparate photographic sources: a celebrity photo, a snapshot of my grandfather, and an advertisement.

Artist Website:
Sara Peak Convery