Design on the Edge

October 28, 2011 · Print This Article

Chicago loves big ideas. We love big buildings, big architects, and big plans. Why? Well, I suppose because they all have the power to stir the hearts of men. (Oh yea, and some women, too.) In the new book Design on the Edge: Chicago Architects Reimagine Neighborhoods, seven locations are tackled by the rock stars of Chicago architecture. Represented are: John Ronan, Jeanne Gang, Doug Garafalo and Xavier Vendrell, Sarah Dunn and Martin Felsen, Patricia Saldana Natke, Ross Wimer, and Darryl Crosby. The project is simple, each of these architects (or team) is assigned a neighborhood designated by an L stop, and they create a visionary design for the site—a way of rethinking what is already there.

Design on the Edge is really an exhibition catalog, but this one succeeds where others fail to be anymore than a memento of a past event. The book is divided logically into chapters  centered on each of the neighborhoods that are considered: Loyola Red Line, Addison Red Line, Addison Brown Line, Western Blue Line, 18th Street Pink Line, Midway Orange Line, 35th Street Green Line. With a short introduction by the architect or team, each section is full of images of the site reimagined as well as the sort of architectural renderings one would expect from a book like this. Although all of the sites have their points of interest, a few stand out as exemplary.

My favorite of these is the project by Ross Wimer of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He was assigned the Orange Line stop at Midway. Now, if you’ve even taken the L to Midway, then you know what an uninspiring bit of city the terminus of the Orange Line is. Since the site can’t actually be expanded, Wimer envisions ringing the airport with an attractive facade that invites the community to look into the airport. This reimagining includes restaurants and shops designed to bring the neighborhood into the airport. The specific thing I like most about this plan, is that at no point is Wimer trying to hide the airport or make it something that it is not. Instead, he wants to reframe Midway to highlight the way people used to conceive of it, as a gateway to the world. A place that is exciting in its own right. A place of neighborhood pride.

The most important thing to keep in mind with this catalog and the exhibition that it accompanies, is the intention of this project is not to implement these ideas. The heart of this project is really about imagining a different future, a different way things could be. I’m not sure what the contributors thought as they crafted these projects, but to me it seems that it must be liberating to create in a purely visionary way, to unmoor from the practicality of actually having to build project. If you love the city of Chicago, this book will be fascinating. The exhibition runs through July 1, 2012 at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Design on the Edge will give you a whole new way to envision our neighborhoods.

Design on the Edge: Chicago Architects Reimagine Neighborhoods
edited by Stanley Tigerman and William Martin
Chicago Architecture Foundation
paperback, $20

Give and Take Between Parts: An Interview with Andrew Oesch

October 26, 2011 · Print This Article

Print shops are inherently communal. The overall expense and maintenance of printing equipment is generally only possible when shared. Being in this space, the smell of ink alongside a regular hammering of various machines (there was a particularly well-used off-set printer) reinforced one of the things I love about print making — its communal backbone, something that seems ever present in the proliferation of posters and brightly colored images. While at this print shop, I ran into an old friend, Andrew Oesch. I met Andrew for the first time years ago in Chicago. Oesch is a printmaker who, at the moment, teaches comic book production. In the following conversation we talk more about Providence and the enduring exchange of influence between generations.

Caroline Picard: We first met when you came out for a show that Anne Elizabeth Moore had curated at The Green Lantern. That show was my first introduction to Providence and I was struck by the seeming resonance between the project you and Meg [Turner] installed, (“We Built This City Together”) and my later impressions of Providence itself. For instance, you had some amazing stories about the physical place you living in at the time: cavernous rooms in old warehouses with smaller rooms built inside and space heaters. A lot of communal creative space that at the same time was somehow hyper aware of its (specific) urban context. In We Built This City Together, people were invited to take pre-printed stickers of buildings, color them in and paste them on a wall. It was sort of like a social experiment to see how people would respond to one another. It sounds very much like what those communal living situations must have been like.  I’m starting to ramble, but can you talk a little bit about that?

Andrew Oesch: I hadn’t thought about the ways that communal living might have been affecting my projects before. To put things in a little perspective artists have been living in large amounts of shared space for a while, it’s not a phenomena which is unique to Providence, right? Those opportunities often form along peripheral conditions…artists move into provisional spaces that are in transition or of unclear purpose. In my personal work I do look to  architecture — both its planning and history — for a lot of insight to the culture of a place.

A lot of the architecture and culture of Providence is informed by the industry at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a lot of manufacturing — textiles, tools, and costume jewelry. So there’s a fair amount of large brick mill complexes and a surprisingly dense amount of housing. In the early 1900s the peak population of Providence was around a million people.

With those historical notes in mind we come to the turn of the 21st century and all the large manufacturing is gone. The hemorrhaging of those industries started in the 70s and after a couple of decades the city is fairly depressed and its population is a quarter of what it once was. Some of the large mill complexes are there, though there are large vacant lots like broken teeth where a building might have burned down or was demolished. The buildings which remain are utilized in a variety of ways. Some have light manufacturing, some have small studios, some are flea markets, some are abandoned. The rent is cheap and landlords are permissive, so artists move in and things like Fort Thunder happen, and then they unhappen when the Real Estate market gets crazy.

One thing that I remember someone saying about why they live in these sorts of spaces is that unlike a house, these mills aren’t made for people to live in. So it feels weird to live in them; she chose to live in them to continually remind herself that she wasn’t normal, so she could remember that she feels weird.

I don’t what that says about my practice… I feel weird and temporary? And to answer my own unsure rhetorical question I would say, yes. I am interested in the how Robert Smithson talks about entropy. The city is a system that shifts over time. I don’t think it is moving towards an equilibrium…and it’s not a closed system, but I can create finite systems and invite people to participate in them through various art making methods. Does any of this thinking make me a good housemate? That might be me starting to ramble.

CP: What kind of space does printmaking have in Providence? Has that changed over the years? And how has it influenced your own printmaking practice?

AO: Well, I wouldn’t have a print making practice if I didn’t live in Providence…maybe that’s not true, but I began printing because I saw prints everywhere, and I was like “Oh, I wanna do that…”Print making and this place for the last 15ish years has been shaped by the Dirt Palace, and other less permanent industrial mill living places. It just so happens that many of the folks who live at these various places make screen prints. The biggest way these practices continue to change is because the sprawling mill living spaces are less common. Buildings have been renovated, demolished, or just outright condemned. And this hasn’t stop people from making, but it adds a provisional quality to everyones living situation. So that’s why places like the Dirt Palace are really important: it is owned by two artists committed to keeping the world weird, loud, and rad. The AS220 prinshop is important in a similar way because it represents another place of stability. The contrast is that at the Dirt Palace every surface is covered by something else — old packing, glitter, show flyers, doodles, old paper mache projects…the space amorphously switchs from personal space to cooking space to work space to library to printshop to dance party and back again, while As220′s printshop walls are more neutral. Their space is more obviously a printshop.

CP: While in Providence this summer, I noticed an interesting relationship between the city’s educational institutions and the non-commercial, in many cases DIY, art spaces. Like the Dirt Palace got some kind of cartoon-making-machine because Brown no longer needed it. Do you feel like the universities have enabled the art-making community somehow?

CP: Yeah, Brown, RISD, & Johnson+Wales impact the city a lot. In mundane ways there is (what I imagine to be typical) resentment of the impact the universitys have on the tax base, and universities can gobble up real estate, and are touted by business leaders+politicians for innovation. But I think your observation is totally spot on;for the a certain section of the art scene universities have excess resources artists can mine. There are some  proposterously giant ways that happens and a lot of small ones too. All the Youth Arts programs I have been involved with have a few hand-me-down silk screens from RISD’s print making department. And often at the end of the year there is a dearth of printing ink too.

But beyond the physical resources and material surpluses, these institutions have supported and spawned various organizations in town. New Urban Arts, Community Music Works, and AS220 Youth all ride a paradoxical relationship. Having been incubated by Brown, they nevertheless came into being because there was something that Brown was not providing. They exist because resentment and anger built up around the universities’ inability to engage with a corrupt under city. Resources were mis-appropriated by a twice imprisoned mayor (and many others) while the public school population had 80% of its kids receiving free or reduced lunch (the school bureaucratic euphemism for “really poor”). Even with that resentment, these folks were able to start their respective organizations with the support of fellowships from Brown, and a few key mentors, and the large pool of potential volunteers who attended those same universities. Now these organizations and programs are a little over a decade old and they are the compelling civic leaders to offer something outside of the ways in which Brown, RISD, and Johnson&Wales do public engagement.

So what does this mean for our city’s art scene? There is a generation of people who have grown up making art and hanging out with artists and mentors at these organizations; now grown up, that generation participates as emerging makers+artists+staffers, working and making alongside their former mentors. This is beautifully exemplified in this photo I really love of The “What Cheer?” Brigade, a loud and rowdy local brass band, taken by a young person who was a participant in AS220′s Youth Studios, where a couple other members of the band were running a street band workshop. The photo has one of the trumpet players filling up most of the frame and foreground of the image, and in a the soft focus of the background there’s another trumpet player and a trombonist, it’s a good image, but those three members pictured are no longer in the band, and the photographer is.

Spring Break Book Week: Illustration Workshop led by Andrew Oesch, photo by Jori Ketten

CP: How did you start teaching comics? 

Then we give those books to adults, who are equally as excited. We ask them to create adaptations using student characters. Soon we are going to put out our first anthology which features the student work and adult adaptations, so keep an eye out for that. (You can visit Secret Door Projects, to see how Ian G. Cozzens developed the Scar character).

Elms Curating the heck out of Phila!

October 24, 2011 · Print This Article

Good news for long time friend of Bad at Sports, Anthony Elms, he is heading to Philadelphia to curate for the Institute of Contemporary Art!

We say Hell Yes!

Anthony’s departure will be a major loss to this community but our loss, is there gain and it is nice to know that the Philadelphia recognized what we had. We are sure that this is just the beginning of some fabulous things for our friend and regular contributor, Anthony.

Well done.

Photo: Erin Leland

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART APPOINTS

ANTHONY ELMS AS NEW CURATOR  

PHILADELPHIA, PA

The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, is pleased to

announce that Anthony Elms will be joining the ICA as Associate Curator. Anthony

has worked as an independent curator and writer, and he was Assistant Director

of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois at Chicago for six years. He edits and is

the curator of WhiteWalls, an alternative space for artists’ publication projects

founded in the 1970s. Anthony is just completing work as part of the organizational

team behind this year’s PERFORMA visual art performance biennial in New York.

“It is common to think of museums like the ICA as non-collecting, but that isn’t true,”

Anthony said. “They do not have art objects, but they collect histories and

experiences with the artists that have exhibited. In that sense, I could not be

happier to join a museum with the distinguished and energetic collection of the ICA.”

“I am looking forward to having Anthony’s vision, and his passion for publications,

enrich the work of our stellar curatorial team,” says Robert Chaney, Interim Director.

“We met Anthony when he co-curated the Sun Ra exhibition that ICA hosted,

organized by Hyde Park Art Center,” adds Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner. “This is a

wonderful outcome to our first collaboration,” adds Senior Curator Ingrid Schaffner.

Anthony’s recent projects include Blast Counterblast; More Alive Than Those Who

Made Them; Glenn Ligon / A People on the Cover, and Unicorn Basking in the Light

of Three Glowing Suns. He was a co-curator of Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun

Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-1968, which enjoyed

enormous success when it traveled to ICA in 2009. His writings have appeared in

Afterall, Art Asia Pacific, Art Papers, Artforum, May Revue, Modern Painters, New

Art Examiner, and Time Out Chicago, and he has also written essays for numerous

catalogues. He received a BFA in painting from Michigan State University and an

MFA from the University of Chicago, and he continues to exhibit as an artist. In

addition, Anthony is an enthusiastic drummer and record collector. He is also

interested in ghosts. 

Michael Rea’s Wooden Wonderland for Nerds

October 24, 2011 · Print This Article

Guest Post by Jeriah Hildwine

The Elmhurst Art Museum’s recent exhibition, “Michael Rea: Soirée” (July 8 – September 4, 2011) brought together a large grouping of this artist’s work.  I caught the show just a couple of days before it closed, and it gave me a chance to reflect on Rea’s work.

Michael Rea is a sculptor, with a 2007 MFA from UW Madison, and is represented in Chicago by Ebersmoore.  His past exhibitions have included a group show at Unit B in Pilsen, run by Kimberly Aubuchon, the Rockford Midwestern, and a solo show at Butcher Shop Dogmatic, run by Michael Thomas.  That show led to his meeting Ed Marszewzki, who invited him to participate in the Version Festival and represented him through his artist management identity Reuben Kincade.  In January 2010, Rea was included in a group show at Western Exhibitions, which led to a solo show at Ebersmoore, and representation by them.  They showed his work at the Special Projects section of NEXT, and his solo show at Ebersmoore was in November 2010.

Rea makes things out of wood.  For the most part, they’re stereotypically masculine sorts of objects:  robots, weapons, and lots of references to nerd culture like Star Wars.  The wood is left pointedly unfinished and has the look of a plain, light wood like pine, fir, or poplar.  The surface and visible construction of the objects makes them very approachable, inviting.  You want to hold them, to touch them.  They are as much toys as they are works of art.

Jeriah Hildwine with work by Michael Rea, at Ebersmoore.

Rea’s show at EAM closed on September 4th, but his work didn’t have to stay in storage for long.  “Tsavo Manhunters,” his lion-hunting mech, appeared shortly thereafter at the Chicago Urban Art Society, where it was included in the exhibition Wood Worked, curated by Chicago Urban Art Society’s Co-Founder and Chief Curator, Peter Kepha, along with CUAS Pop-Up Satellite Space Curator Kevin Wilson.  Mike Rea’s work is virtually synonymous with the theme of Chicago artists working with wood, and would have been extremely conspicuous by his absence had he not been a part of that exhibition.

Not included in that show was Conrad Freiburg, who also does some very impressive woodwork, although he works in other media as well, and typically uses wood as a means to an end, whereas Rea uses it for its own sake.  I think of these two artists in contrast with one another.  Freiburg uses a variety of carefully chosen woods, the color and grain of each being selected for a specific purpose, and shapes them with a meticulous fit and finish to serve as beautiful vessels for some pretty far-out ideas.  Rea on the other hand uses plain wood, typical hardware-store pine, and frequently assembles it with a less-is-more aesthetic, numerous dowels and half-rounds and slats cut and assembled into fantastic forms, but with their nature still clearly visible.  In other areas (the clenched fist on “Suit for Stephen Hawking,” the lions’ heads in “Tsavo Manhunters”) small, shaped blocks of wood are assembled into complex forms, asserting their “woodenness” particularly by seeming so much the wrong material for the job.

Michael Rea, "Olympia"

Not that Rea’s commitment to wood is absolute.  In “Olympia,” a sort of Star Wars/Nirvana scene in which Chewbacca appears to reenact Kurt Cobain’s in-bed suicide (with his trademark bowcaster in place of Cobain’s shotgun), burlap, rope, and yarn serve alongside the wooden bed and bowcaster.  Chewbacca’s fur is brown yarn, and his missing head is replaced by a spray of strands of red yarn.  Red yarn serves as blood in other of Rea’s works, including the hilariously titled, “My Anaconda Don’t Want None,” in which the eponymous snake (made of wood, of course) is cut into several lengths and impaled on a stake (suited to the exhibition, “Heads On Poles,” at Western Exhibitions).  Each of the snake’s wounds is created by a mass of dripping red yarn.

We accept the yarn as blood, and ropes as coax cables, and so on, because of their context.  The unpainted wood, the visible seams, and the milled mouldings give us permission to suspend our disbelief:  they are honest enough about what they are, that we don’t fear being thought foolish for not questioning them.

Jeriah Hildwine is an artist, educator, and art writer for Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Magazine.  Jeriah lives and works in Chicago, with his wife Stephanie Burke.

Barbara Kasten Talks With Heidi Norton

October 21, 2011 · Print This Article

GUEST POST BY HEIDI NORTON

As a photography student of the mid/late 90′s, Barbara Kasten was of great significance to me. I lost track of her during the first decade of the millennium, as the contemporaries of the Becher’s school (Gursky, Ruff, Struth) dominated the art market with their dry, representational Deadpan Photography. Now, as an educator 11 years later, I relish in Kasten’s renaissance. Abstraction is transcendental to me, but above all, I see Kasten as a pioneer of contemporary relevance.

Most people know her as photographer, but Barbara Kasten is an artist. Photography is a material to her, the camera’s use- very calculated and intentional. She treats it with equal significance to the rest of her materials–mesh, plexi, screen, mirror, glass, and light. Her influences are vast and span many decades: Irwin’s light and space movement of the late 60′s; Judd’s studies and use of modern industrial material; Post-Minimalism, and its tendencies toward performance; Process art; Site-Specific art; and Abstraction of the 40′s (Moholy Nagy), 90′s, and present. She is presently celebrating her first solo show in Chicago at Tony Wight gallery, Ineluctable, which runs through October 22^nd.

Barbara Kasten, Ineluctable at Tony Wight Gallery

Barbara and I sit down and talk art–mostly me picking her mind. But flattered I am, as she is inquisitive about my work as well. See below!

H: Material became important to you very early on in your career. You were trained as a sculpture and a fibers artist. As a fibers instructor, you used fiberglass screen as a teaching tool to model 3d forms. Talk about your transition from fiberglass as a 3-D sculpting tool to its appearance in your first Cyanotype, Untitled 13, 1974. When and how was the camera introduced?

My first photographic works were photograms. When I discovered the industrial screen as a way to create 3D weaving maquettes, I also tried creating a 2D illusionistic rendition in the form of a photogram. That was in 1974, and I still use the same material today in the Studio Constructs.  In the process of arranging the photograms. I liked the way that shadows were captured in negative shapes.  I was also making life size arrangements using packing boxes and other geometric forms I built for that purpose.  At that time, Polaroid was a new color photographic medium; so when I was offered some 8×10 Polaroid film, I learned how to use my first camera, an 8×10 view camera.

Barbara Kasten, Untitled 6, 1976, Cyanotype photogram

H: Speaking of the camera, let’s talk about the relationship between the image created, the materials (light, plexi, screen), and the exhibited object (the print or projection). When we spoke, you talked about the “several stages of development before the image is where it should be”. Please explain this. Can you talk about the integral relationship between the construction/sculpture and how it is mediated through the camera? A minimalist like Robert Morris might have said that there is a “dematerialization of the object via the process of it being photographed.” Do you see the camera and photographic print as more, less, or equal in relevance to the process and materials?

Barbara Kasten, Studio Construct 125, 2011, Archival pigment print

B: Process has been the core of all of my work- whether it was the sculptural fiber pieces I did in Poland while on a Fulbright, the photograms in the early 70′s or the most recent Studio Constructs and video work.  The shadow- and the light that causes it- has been my conceptual grounding.  I am not interested in the object itself but how it serves as the means of recording light and shadow.  The photograph becomes the object when the light is merged with form and shadow on a 2d surface. It’s really the light that completes the action, whether it is in direct contact with light sensitive material or passing thru the lens of a camera.  The Studio Constructs go through many configurations before I arrive at the final image….The ‘sculpture’ stays set up in the studio giving me time to live with it and the images I make of it.  I can expose many pieces of film before I’m happy with it.  Why not digital…many reasons but the main one is that I like a slower process so I can think about the work as I make it.

B: How about you, Heidi? You currently have a show up at Northeastern University, Not to Touch the Earth (Reception this Friday, Oct. 21st,  from 6-9). In some of your work, the photograph seems to be a document of your process and in other work, the plants or objects are integral to the piece by their physical inclusion.  Talk about these different approaches and how you decide when to create a sculptural piece versus a ‘recording of the piece’ -if you see it that way.  If not, how do you think about the role of the plants?  Does the photograph play a different role in each of these approaches?  Tell me about the importance of the object in your work.

Heidi Norton, Installation view

H: All of this work began from the image Whitescape, 2010, where I painted all the objects, including the plants, white by hand. Several weeks later, I was at my studio and noticed that the Dieffenbachia plant I used had begun to grow out of the paint. The painted leaves died and fell off and new life began to sprout from the center. I was intrigued by this–a very pleasant surprise– as painting the plants had left me feeling guilty.  The material of the paint was killing, yet at the same time preserving and stimulating growth. I included that same Dieffenbachia plant in the piece Deconstructed Rebirth- my third still life construction made for the camera. In that piece you see the new sprout and the decayed white leaves hanging from the plant. Almost a year later in My Dieffenbachia Plant with Tarp (Protection), the same plant reappears as a whole new plant. Only through the use of the camera as a recording mechanism is one able to see the inclusion of this narrative. With the camera’s ability to freeze time we can see the plants in varying states through life to disparity to death. Evolution of a Plant is a more literal example of this idea.  I think of the “New Age Still Life” series as sculptural construction. Like yours, these have several stages of development before they become images or objects on the wall. Higherself and Mango are shot in a studio with a plexi-glass shelving unit that was created to compress the space further within the 2D plane.  In the sculptural objects- glass and wax pieces- the plants are pressed to glass or embedded in wax. These materials are also meant to preserve, freeze, and maybe illicit death. The pieces are meant to activate one another; whereas the photographs are fixed- frozen in one state, in the way that Barthes talk about the “Death of an Image”. He sees death implicit in each photograph. He is struck by how the photograph moves you back through time, how you always have the past with you- the photograph as a kind of resurrection. The sculptures will transition in front of your eyes over a span of time based on the nature of the plant. Plants in various states between life and death, wax melting, the color of the plants from green to brown- they are in constant flux.

Heidi Norton, Explore Every Aspect of the Finite, 2011

H: In the Alex Klein essay that accompanied the group show at Shane Campbell in 2010, “Terminus Ante Quem” she compares your process to that of process and earthworks artist, Robert Smithson. She writes, “he famously challenged what he saw as the misperception that art objects function as a kind of culmination or terminus as quem of artistic achievement.” Basically stating that the object supersedes the process, or the process is a building up to the object. People see your works, the final product, a very polished and refined photograph or projection, different than the “documentation” of the 70s. How has being grouped into a movement of photographers whose work is notable for its formal beauty and technical execution changed how the work is interpreted?

B: I happen to like beautiful objects, but beauty alone isn’t enough.  Some investigations of beauty can bring out the underpinnings of a structure or idea or process that doesn’t possess that same kind of beauty as the surface. However, I think that my process is important to the understanding of the work which ultimately becomes an object…. a beautiful object. The traditional photographic process is different than mine.  I carry on a continual dialogue with the subject, changing each step along the way, much like a painter might do. The process is intense and intimate and can include aspects of performance, documentation and sculpture.

H: You mentioned you are reading Donald Judd’s essay on the “specificity of objects” and the discussion of the “under developed rectangle”. Please explain it’s relevance to your work. We talked about using light on reflective surface to break or reconstruct space within your work and that reduction is the abstraction. Talk more about this.

B: I was in a show at Ballroom Marfa this year and visiting the Chinati Foundation re-sparked my interest in Judd.  Just to witness his immersion into the simple architecture of a small western town and how it became an extension of his vision and art. The barracks, containing row after row of polished, reflective boxes illuminated by the Texas sun, was an incredible experience of landscape and geometry merging through the medium of the sun.  Judd is straightforward and yet incredibly complex.  Its a position that I hope to develop more in my work and thinking.

H: Architecture within the constructed space and the architecture of the gallery seem integral to the work and installation. Please discuss the distinction between phenomenological space and imagined space, and how unambiguous, or understandable for that matter, the difference is between the two experiences.

B: An example of how I like to incorporate architecture is in the installation of ‘Ineluctable’.  The three 11×14 silver gelatin prints are positioned so as to include the corner when the viewer looks towards the work.  Upon close observation, one becomes aware that there is a corner in each of the pieces that reinforces and establishes the importance of the architectural element in situ.  The video ‘Corner’ also plays with the identity of generic structural architecture and light projection that alters its dimensionality.

Barbara Kasten, Installation view, photograms on right

B: What about the space and environments you create in the gallery’s space? Do you think of your work as environmental installations?  For instance the inclusion of architectural pedestals as in the piece, Michael 2011, shown in Jason Foumberg’s September 2011 Frieze review, or the collaborative piece with Karsten Lund, presenting shelves of books that were focused on plant life in “Not to See the Sun” exhibit at Ebersmoore last April?

H: I am interested in creating an atmosphere or environment in all of my spaces- the gallery, the studio, my apartment. When making work, I like to assume the personality of an avid plant collector, a botanist- my studio is a hybrid of herbarium and art studio.  I speak mantras to my plants. There is dirt, roots, wax, film and photographs everywhere. I am a creator and nurturer of things and sometimes these things have difficulty co-existing in the same space—precious archival pigment prints shot with 4×5 transparency film made on expensive baryta inkjet paper do not mingle well with dirt, wax and resin. But I like this mix- taking something precious like a photographic print or plant and submerging it into hot wax–pushing the integrity of the material outside of it’s natural limits.  Michael, the piece you mentioned, is maybe a good example of when these two polarities collide—to me, it’s both photographic and sculptural. When I created the display stands for the piece, I intended for them to not look like pedestals that reference high art. I wanted them to assume some anonymous person’s makeshift constructions. “After the Fires of a Little Sun”, the installation of books and mirror, are to reference a mantle and book collection.  Not necessarily my own collection (though all the books are/have been used for personal research and relate in some abstract way to my work), but maybe someone whose interests vary from botany, to color theory, to a 1970s back-to-the-land manual. The project grafts new imagery and typewritten text directly onto the pages of existing books. The artist and writer’s responses become merged with the research materials, producing an unconventional artist’s monograph/zine, fueled by the symbiotic combination of three elements: the original texts, the writer’s typewritten thoughts, and the artist’s wide-ranging visuals. The effect of leafing through this material (now collected in one volume) is a bit like stumbling upon some anonymous person’s avid research materials — perhaps a mad botanist with a flair for detours into the histories of art and counter-culture.

Heidi Norton, Installation at Northeastern Illinois University. Through October 28th

Ineluctable is on view until October 22nd at Tony Wight Gallery. 

Not to Touch the Earth is on view until October 28th at Northeastern Illinois. Opening Reception, October 2nd, 6-9pm.

Heidi Norton received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. She lives and works in Chicago. Norton has presented solo exhibitions in Chicago and San Francisco. Group exhibitions include How Do I Look at Monique Meloche Gallery, The World as Text at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, Snapshot at Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, and the Knitting Factory in New York. Norton was published in My Green City (Gestalten) in 2011 and her spring show at Not to See the Sun, EbersMoore was reviewed in Frieze, September 2011. She currently is collaborating with writer Claudine Ise in a seasonal column for Bad At Sports called Mantras for Plants. Norton is represented by EBERSMOORE gallery in Chicago. She is faculty in the photography department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.