Issue No. 229: LAST NITE: Nothing Lasts Forever

Erik R. Peterson & Student Work

2., 1. & 3. by Erik R. Peterson

4. by Erik R. Peterson flanked by his students' work

Kelley Schulke (background left: work of George Keller)

Krissy Schulke

Krissy Schulke (detail)

Krsissy Schulke

Krissy Schulke

"Nest" - Krissy Schulke

Krissy Schulke (installation view)

Krissy Schulke (obverse view, detail)

Krissy Schulke (installation view)

Krissy Schulke (exterior/obverse installation view)

Krissy Schulke (exterior/obverse installation view)

Krissy Schulke (exertior/obverse installation view)

The asTHMatic

Celina Paddock & Damion

Allen Vandever & friends

Damion & Pinky

Issue No: 228: TONITE: Nothing Lasts Forever

"4" - Erik R. Peterson

Friday 19 Oktober 2012 - 6:00pm until 10:00pm

Rezidentz Collective is pleased to bring you the opening reception of:
*Nothing Lasts Forever: Making Sense of the Mess*
The insatiable consumption of everything - products, people, resources, and all that lies between - leaves a mess. Broken souls, discarded electronics, last night's dinner, the only thing our throw-away culture is certain to create is waste. What meaning can we make of this?

Rezidentz Collective hosts a night of meaning that has been made from the mess. Featuring 2-D art, circuit bending devices and recycled glass blowing.

Artwork by:
asThMatic
George Keller
Erik Peterson
Kelley Schulke
Kristine Schulke
Allen Vandever
and others.....

REZIDENTZ IS LOCATED IN CHICAGO (BRIDGEPORT) AT 3145 S. MORGAN ST.

Issue No. 224: EXTENDED! Curated by Allen Vandever (9/22/2012)

All photos: Erik R. Peterson

Issue No. 219: John Neff

John Neff September 5 – October 28, 2012

Reception: Wednesday, September 5, 6 – 9pm New York

Golden Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new photographs by John Neff.

This exhibition signals a shift in Neff’s work away from the development of multi-media conceptual projects and toward the production of discrete photographic artworks. For the past eighteen months, the artist has been photographing his immediate environment using cameras assembled from altered consumer grade scanners and early twentieth century large and medium format camera parts. These devices capture images using a slow-moving linear scanning array, rather than a full-field sensor, and are prone to unpredictable mechanical and optical irregularities. Additionally, they are built without range- or viewfinders, requiring that compositional adjustments be made between, rather than before, individual exposures. This means that, in order to achieve a compelling likeness of his sitters, Neff requires their extensive cooperation in the time-consuming framing and exposure process.

Stylistically, the scanner photographs recall the straight photography of American Modernism, an important strain of 20th century art whose rich potentials for contemporary photography lie largely dormant. Pointedly self-conscious in their relationship to the art history of their medium, the pictures are also -- and perhaps primarily -- traces of intimate social encounters. Their subjects are not neutral; they are foci of the artist’s attachments, sometimes of his love. While working on these pictures, Neff carried his tripod-mounted scanner camera and laptop (the scanners were powered by, and the images stored to, a standard laptop) with him, occasionally "stopping" social encounters to photograph notable gestures, postures or scenes. The pictures are documents, but perversely so; in them, the instantaneous capture of decisive moments is slowed to thirty or more seconds, creating images that lie somewhere between spontaneous and staged. The photographs are the work of relationships between the photographer's intentions, the scanner camera's eccentricities and the sitters' actions: images resulting from three agencies performing in -- occasionally dissonant -- concert. A digital document containing the entire series and an essay written by artist Doug Ischar will be available for download through the gallery’s website.

This is John Neff's second solo exhibition with Golden Gallery. The first, John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon, was presented in Chicago late spring 2011. That exhibition processed the life and work of artist Robert Blanchon through the partial recreation of a 1995 artwork, Untitled (aroma / 1981). Neff lives and works in Chicago. His work is held in the collections of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York. The artist wishes to thank Eileen Mueller and Walker Blackwell of Latitude’s Artist In Residence program for their essential contributions to the realization of this exhibition.
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The gallery is located at 120 Elizabeth Street, between Grand and Broome. Gallery hours are Thursday – Sunday: 11am – 6pm, or by appointment. For further details please email info@goldengallery.co

Golden Gallery's press release.

Issue No. 200: John Kramer Shows New Work in Group Show Friday

Mirth, Delight, AWE opens at Co-Prosperity Sphere in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago on Friday 22 June.  6 - 9 pm. John Arthur Kramer, is among the artists showing.

John says, "My work explores social politics in American culture. Issues of acceptance and alienation are explored and presented in irreverent ways, often referencing art history. Gimmicks and tricks are given as much credit as the simple, geometric forms which they often inhabit. Common detritus is glued and taped, stretched and pulled, twisted and knotted in a highly tactile, transformative process. Serious subject matter manifests itself in campy disguises with brattish attitude, pushing the boundaries of trust and allowing for personal "baggage" to guide the viewing experience. Craft is garishly exposed while repetition and organization suggests a masculine domesticity, exposing and questioning traditional gender roles. The impermanence of non-traditional materials used raises questions of value and authenticity, while suggesting a critique of modern, "throw-away" society. Embedded meanings in the materials offer a primer which helps decode the narrative."
John has consistently demonstrated an ability to uproot himself from one urban - or SUBurban - cultural tribe then transplant himself into another. It is from these not always queer-friendly intersections that he
creates poignant artwork about his experience. Much of this work identifies signifiers of good taste and codifications of high social and financial status taken from communities within which high art is un-present. 

The macho vocabulary of new urban kitsch is a motif omnipresent in the matrix of John's landscape. Conversely, there is also a recurrence of an amused examination of d-list female icons of the 1990s like Kathy Ireland. Women who have made it to the middle but think they're on top.

 Finally, John also enjoys dissecting queer sexual sub-stereotypes like piss pigs through a DuChampian-via Eva Hesse-sometimes-Fluxist lens as you can see in this photo of a structure assembled from jock straps and yellow lights woven into a triangular formation. I look forward to seeing these as well as other provocative and humorous pieces Friday at Co-Prosperity Sphere. 3219 S. Morgan St. Chicago, IL. 60608.

Mirth, Delight, AWE runs 22 June - 8 July 2012.

Erik R. Peterson

Issue No. 198: Material Assumptions: Paper as Dialogue

Glenn Ligon, Self Portrait at Eleven Years Old, 2004.

June 15–August 11, 2012



Center for Book and Paper Arts

Columbia College Chicago

1104 South Wabash Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605-1996

Exhibiting artists

From Dieu Donné, New York: Polly Apfelbaum, Sonya Blesofsky, Mel Bochner, Nina Bovasso, Beth Campbell, Chuck Close, Ian Cooper, Glenn Ligon, Matt Keegan, William Kentridge, Jessica Stockholder, Richard Tuttle

Newly commissioned works by: Deborah Boardman, Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza, Dan Devening, Susan Goethel Campbell, Daniel Luedtke, Niall McClelland, Kate McQuillen, Zoe Nelson, Julie Schenkelberg, Ian Schneller, Matthew Shlian, Anna Tsantir


About the exhibition
Hand papermaking is an artistic process that begins with the raw materials pulp and fiber and ends in works on paper, sculpture, new media, performance, and beyond. This exhibition asks to consider not only the utility and potential of paper itself, but also the collaborative process of hand papermaking at the intersection of interdisciplinary arts and crafts. 


For the exhibition, the Center for Book and Paper Arts asked thirteen artists to create new work using handmade paper produced to their specifications by graduate students in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago. At the core of the collaborative process was ongoing dialogue concerning not only the paper itself, but also each artist's creative methodology and studio practice. 


A second part of the exhibition features works created by artists in-residence at Dieu Donné, a New York-based non-profit artist workspace dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of contemporary art in the hand papermaking process. There, residencies afford both emerging and established artists an opportunity to see how handmade paper can work for them in important ways.

In this case "handmadeness" points not to a certain aesthetic or visual trope, but to realms of possibility. Material Assumptions calls into question our expectations of handmade paper in terms of its aesthetic and raison d'être, dynamically affirming its relevance as an interdisciplinary and contemporary artistic mode of activity. 


Public events: Friday, June 15

Opening reception: 4–7pm
Panel discussion: Group Effort: Hand Papermaking, Collaboration and Contemporary Art, 6:30pm


About the Center for Book & Paper Arts
The Center for Book and Paper Arts is dedicated to the research, teaching, and promotion of the interdisciplinary practices that support the book arts and hand papermaking as contemporary art media.

The Center is part of the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at Columbia College Chicago, and in addition to housing both graduate and undergraduate classes for that department, it publishes a critical journal and artists' books, mounts exhibitions, hosts artist residencies, sponsors symposia and public programs, and provides advanced study through a workshop program.


Media Contacts
Steve Kauffman: T 312 369 7383 / skauffman@colum.edu
Erin Purdy: T 312 369 8695 / epurdy@colum.edu
Jessica Cochran, Curator of Exhibitions: jcochran@colum.edu

Issue No. 190: ICO Exhibit

Mimi Peterson (detail)

Donna Hapac

Donna Hapac (detail)

Nikki Renee Anderson

Forms & Fragments

On Thursday 26 April, I attended the opening reception of Forms & Fragments at the InterContinental Chicago O'Hare Hotel in Rosemont, Illinois. My expectations of classic "Motel Room Art" and a tacky "Starving Artist Sale" quickly dissipated upon entering The Art Museo section of the lobby. This group show featuring 3-D wall constructions is subtly integrated with artwork from the InterContinental's permanent collection which includes Modern masters such as Rauschenberg. The labyrinth of first floor corridors are designed to also serve as an exhibition space. On display during my visit was an impressive smattering of contemporary painting, photography and mixed media work including local legend Tony Fitzpatrick.

Forms & Fragments was curated by the Schneider Gallery (http://schneidergallerychicago.com) in partnership with artist/curator Mimi Peterson for The Art Museo. It includes her work as well as ceramic pieces by Nikki Renee Anderson (http://nikkireneeanderson.com) rife with a veiled, biomorphic eroticism in her sculptural representations of the adolescent feminine experience where the mapping of identity begins.

Fiber artist, Donna Hapac's (http://donnahapac.com) forms are crafted to not only hang on walls (as they are seen in the show), but can also be placed on surfaces to function as free-standing pieces in order to be activated by the effects of ambient light. I love her use of press-on nails as ready-made materials with which she constructs marine-like, quasi-bioluminescent forms.

Shelley Gilchrist (http://shelleygilchrist.com) presents a series of cheerful encaustics referencing reductive, 70s-style decorative arts. Simple, abstracted land and seascapes are composed of curvilinear, tricolored bands and wavering stripes nodding to the nostalgia of childhood memories of the family rec. room without coming on as dated or kitsch.

Mimi Peterson (http://mimipetersonartist.com) works with found materials from both the natural and industrial worlds. Centerpieces for her high-concept weavings addresses the fragility of life induced by the imbalanced eco-system. In her six sculptures, she draws the viewer into her nests of twisted metal only to be confronted by a chilly, post-apocalyptic aftermath.

Forms & Fragments runs now through 30 July in The Art Museo (located in the main lobby of the ICO) at 5300 N. River Road in Rosemont, Illinois. To top off a day of culture, there are several high-end dining and/or drinks options on site.


Erik Peterson