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This week: First up, Sonnenzimmer! Duncan talks to Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi about the poster scene, the business of art and design and more! Then What’s the T’s Dana B. makes her podcast debut in an interview with Sarah Weber, whose solo exhibition at Rena Sternberg Gallery is open through December 28th.

SARAH WEBER (b. 1988) is an artist currently working in Chicago. She received her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts in 2011 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. Her work has recently been exhibited in Heaven Gallery (Chicago), Lloyd Dobler Gallery (Chicago), and Galerie Nord (Berlin). Sarah was the recipient of The Ox-Bow Scholarship, funded by the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Her first solo show at Rena Sternberg Gallery (Glencoe) will run through January 2014.

www.sarahannweber.com

Sonnenzimmer is the Chicago-based studio of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi. Merging backgrounds in typography, printmaking, graphic design and fine art, we create hand-crafted posters, books, and music packaging for a wide array of clients. Most of our projects are screen printed in-house. We are always up for the challenge of creating unique visuals for projects. If you are interested in working with us, don’t hesitate to contact us. To read about our process, check our FAQ page.

We’ve had somewhat of an elastic existence in our 7 year history. Beginning as a shared painting studio, equipped with industrial screen printing equipment, the venture quickly morphed into a design and print studio specializing in hand-crafted prints and design for some of the city’s most recognized cultural institutions. As image making is becoming more and more present in commerce and enjoying a true revival in print making and painting, we hope our mixture of fine and applied art will be looked at as complimentary assets. That people understand they are not mutually exclusive. We are interested in idiosyncratic imagery. This is explored through many lenses of an ongoing practice – may it be of collaborative, experimental, or commercial nature.

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This week: San Francisco checks in with a great interview. Bad at Sports contributors Brian Andrews and Patricia Maloney sat down with artist Takeshi Murata and sound designer Robert Beatty on November 9, 2013, at Ratio 3, in San Francisco, to discuss Murata’s most recent digitally animated video, OM Rider(2013). OM Rider follows two animated creatures: a wizened old man that Andrews describes as “half the Curious George Man in the Yellow Suit, half like the butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show,” and a hipster wolf, which rides a moped through a barren landscape and performs other aimless tasks. The video begins with the creature playing a synthesizer that gives the video its title. Om Rider contains Murata’s characteristic absurd humor and aesthetic, which mixes highly attuned lighting and composition with more retro modeling and minimalist, almost antiseptic spaces.

Takeshi Murata was born in 1974 in Chicago. In 1997, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied film, video, and animation. He currently lives and works in Saugerties, New York. Murata has exhibited at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Sikemma Jenkins & Co., New York; Gladstone Gallery, New York; and Salon 94, New York. Murata’s work is featured in the collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; and The Smithsonian Museum of American Art.

FYI, AP will post an excerpted text version of this interview on Dec. 3, and the link for that conversation should be:

http://www.artpractical.com/column/interview-with-takeshi-murata/

And here is a related review Brian wrote for his previous show: http://www.artpractical.com/review/get_your_ass_to_mars_andrews/

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This week: The Amanda Browder show rolls in to town! Amanda talks to Michael Velliquette and Oliver Warden

 

Michael Velliquette has a show up at DCKT Contemporary!

MICHAEL VELLIQUETTE (b. 1971) is a mixed media artist known for his densely detailed and dimensionally complex paper sculptures, installations, and drawings.He has recently had solo shows at DCKT Contemporary, New York, NY; Disjecta, Portland, OR; Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; and Rhodes College, Memphis, TN. His museum exhibitions include Slash: Paper Under the Knife at the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Art on Paper at the Weatherspoon Art Museum; and Psychedelic at the San Antonio Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Wisconsin Art; the Racine Art Museum; the Progressive Corporation; Western Bridge, Seattle; The John Michael Kohler Art Center; The Linda Pace Foundation; The State of Wisconsin; Boston Children’s Hospital and the San Antonio Museum of Art. A catalog chronicling his work from the past 10 years titled “Michael Velliquette: Lairs of the Unconscious” was released in 2011 through Devibooks Publishers.

Michael Velliquette is a Faculty Associate in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and organizes the independently run project space Lovey Town.

 

Then a conversation with Oliver Warden about his project Globall!

What is GLOBALL?

GLOBALL is a new take on a social network created as a work of art by artist Oliver Warden.

“Basically, I want to pass seven wooden balls, one for each letter in GLOBALL, hand to hand, person to person, around the world.

On each of these wooden balls will be the instructions of what to do with it in multiple languages (three different ones for each ball) and in pictograms. When you receive a GLOBALL:

1. Take a picture of yourself with it and send the picture, your first name, your location and the time to our website www.wheresgloball.com.

2. Once on the website you can fill out a profile. There you can share your experience, connect with other GLOBALLers and follow your ball on its journey.

3. You’ll then be asked to pass the GLOBALL to a VERY GOOD FRIEND and explain the instructions.

Hopefully as each ball travels, everyone will think about words such as ‘share’ and ‘friend’ and ‘follow’. With a little luck, each GLOBALL will go on a voyage of friendship and connectivity around the world.”

Oliver

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This week: Scandal! Economics! Wendy’s ads from the 80′s!! We talk to Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette about It’s the Political Economy, Stupid.

The economic crisis that we face today has also become a major crisis for representative democracy. The very idea of the modern nation state is in jeopardy as the deterritorialized flow of finance capital melts down all that was once solid into raw material for market speculation. It is the social order itself, and the very notion of governance with its archaic promise of security and happiness that has become another kind of modern ruin.

It’s the Political Economy, Stupid brings together an international group of artists who focus on the current crisis in a sustained and critical manner. Rather than acquiesce to the current calamity, this exhibition asks if it is not time to push back against the disciplinary dictates of the capitalist logic and, by use of artistic means, launch a rescue of the very notion of the social itself.

This traveling group exhibition, curated by the Austrian-American team of Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette, is on view at Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago through December 14. The show derives its title from the slogan which in the early 1990s came to define then presidential candidate Bill Clinton’s campaign, “It’s the economy, stupid”.

PRESS QUOTES:

“In the wake of the capitalist crisis, very few cultural institutions have dared to address the horrors of greed that plague us in such a direct and haunting way as the Austrian Cultural Forum.” - Alexander Cavaluzzo, Hyperallergic.com, Feb. 13, 2012

“Curated by Gregory Sholette and Oliver Ressler, this is a good old political exhibition, full of sarcasm, hope, protest, and information.” - William Corwin, Saatchi Online Magazine, Feb. 21, 2012

A “confrontational, intellectual, and occasionally amusing group show, which squarely aligns itself with the Occupy movement.” - Robert Shuster, The Village Voice, Feb. 8, 2012

“Curated by Oliver Ressler and Gregory Sholette, this is a smart exhibition that I suspect will be preaching to the converted, but in style.  [...]  This is the gallery version of Occupy Wall Street.” - Andrea Kirsh, Feb. 14, 2012, theartblog.org

“Visible from the sidewalk on a block that the Austrian Cultural Forum shares with Cartier, Ferragamo and Tourneau, the work [by Dread Scott] affirms a disheartening truth about the cultural mindset this well-curated exhibition aims to critique: many would prefer to see their money burn than have it distributed equitably.” -David Markus, Art in America, Mar. 28, 2012

“Ressler’s and Sholette’s show does indeed achieve its objectives, occupying the Austrian Cultural Forum through a diverse range of artworks stemming from the 2008 crisis of finance capitalism. It does so principally by drawing together a selection of works which both educate and entertain, offering invaluable information and welcome critical reflection.” - Thom Donovan, Art:21 Blog, Apr. 16, 2012

 

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This week: Duncan, Richard, and Jason Dunda talk to a cast of thousands led by Jen Delos Reyes!
Jen Delos Reyes is an artist originally from Winnipeg, MB, Canada. Her research interests include the history of socially engaged art, group work, band dynamics, folk music, and artists’ social roles.

She has exhibited works across North America and Europe, and has contributed writing to various catalogues and institutional publications. She has received numerous grants and awards including a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant. Jen is the founder and director of Open Engagement, a conference on socially engaged art practice and herself speaks widely on Art and Social Practice at conferences and institutions around the world.

Jen is currently an Assistant Professor at Portland State University where she teaches in the Art and Social Practice MFA program.

photo credit: Motoya Nakamura