Bad at Sports » Edra Soto

Top 5 Weekend Picks (11/4-11/6)

stephanieburke — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:00:55 +0000

Work by The Alliance of Pentaphilic Curators (Jason Dunda and Teena McClelland), John Arndt, Conrad Bakker, Dexter Sinister, Christa Donner, Kota Ezawa, Edie Fake, Eric Fleischauer, Stephen Lapthisophon, Jason Lazarus, Dani Leventhal, Aspen Mays, Mary Patten, Jenny Perlin, Public Collectors, Jason Salavon, Paul Lloyd Sargent, Cauleen Smith, Edra Soto, Stephanie Syjuco, Sergio Vega, and Philip von Zweck.

Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria St. Reception Friday, 5-8pm.

2. Water at SideCar

Work by Tom Burtonwood, Holly Holmes, and James Jankowiak.

SideCar, 411 Huehn St, Hammond, IN. Reception Saturday, 5-10pm.

3. A Paler Shade of Yellow at Kirk’s Apartment

Work by Larry Lee

Kirk’s Apartment, 3710 N Marshfield. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

4. Wax/Wane at ACRE Projects

Work by Liz McCarthy.

ACRE Projects, 1913 W 17th St. Reception Sunday, 4-8pm.

5. Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers: AN AMERICAN TALE OF SEX AND WONDER at The Renaissance Society

Reading by Mike Edison.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall Room 307. Reading begins at 2pm.

Top 6 Weekend Picks! (9/16-9/18)

stephanieburke — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 19:05:59 +0000

1. UPLIFT at Believe Inn

Work by work by Anthony Lewellen, Beth Pearlman, Chris Silva, Doug Fogelson, Eric Mecum, Jourdon Gullett, Justus Roe, Kim Frieders Tibbetts, Lauren Feece, Liza Berkoff, Matthew Hoffman, Renee Robbins, Robert Stevenson, Ruben Aguirre, and Tom Torluemke

Believe Inn is located at 2043 N Winchester Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. “Just Breathe Normally” at Autumn Space

Work by Brian Hubble

Autumn Space is located at 1700 W Irving Park Rd. Reception is Saturday from 6-9pm.

3. FLAT 10 (FBI 3) at Floor Length and Tux

Work by Edra Soto, Jon Bollo, Liz Nielsen, Erik Wenzel, Catie Olson, and EC Brown

Floor Length and Tux is located at 2332 W. Augusta #3. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

4. CLUB HELTER SKELTER at Manifest Exhibitions

Work by Stephen Collier

Manifest Exhibitions is located at 2950 N Allen Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

5. Combinations Described at Donald Young Gallery

Work by Bruce Nauman

Donald Young Gallery is located at 224 S. Michigan Ave., suite 266. Reception is Friday from 5-7pm.

6. Nomadic Text at What It Is

Curated by Jessica Cochran and Mia Ruyter, with work by Joseph Grigely, Mark Booth, Alex Valentine, Karen Reimer, Jason Pickleman, Stephanie Brooks, Steven Miglio, Robert Ransick, Rachel Foster and Rebecca Foster.

What It Is is located at 1155 Lyman, Oak Park. Reception is Sunday from 3-8pm.

Hybridity of Thought: An Interview with Edra Soto

Caroline Picard — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:00:25 +0000

Recently I had the chance to ask Edra Soto a number of questions about how she approaches her practice. While I’ve been well aware of her work for some time, most of my encounters have taken place when I’ve visited a show or caught images on-line; in other words, I haven’t before had a chance to talk to her specifically about what she’s up to. As always, these weekly posts are welcome opportunities to do just that: to approach artists I admire and ask them things. For instance, I’ve noticed that Edra integrates an idea of performance in her work–whether painting figures on a stage or fabricating a real one, I always get the sense that she’s trying to call attention (and therefore engage?) the spectator. In order to do so, she must adopts a certain hybridity, making use of different mediums to activate a concept from multiple directions, thereby reflecting multiple perspectives. There are a number of questions this brought to mind and I was excited to pursue some of them.

CP: Can you tell me a little bit about your background? How did you come to Chicago and how does it contrast with the other places that you’ve lived?

ES: I’ve been interested in the arts since I was a girl. I love theatre and wanted to be an actress. I also love music and used to write songs and sing them accompanying myself on the piano. I focused on visual arts during the last part of my high school years and ended up at the Escuelade Artes Plasticas de Puerto Rico, which is located at one of the most beautiful landmarks of the island: San Felipe del Morro, a 16th century Spanish fort. The school has a ridiculously beautiful view. Those were the days! I completed a bachelor’s degree in visual arts and started a minor in education. After graduating, I won a fellowship to live and work in Paris for a year. I was 25, and that experience changed my life. I still think of the person I was then and how I thought Puerto Rico was the last place on earth. At that time, I was a painter in the commercial art scene of Puerto Rico. I had no idea about the financial aspect [of the art world], the types of people I needed to meet, what a curator was… I was selling paintings for $5,000 dollars and being interviewed for the local newspapers. The gallery that was representing me at the time also represented the premier artist of Puerto Rico, Arnaldo Roche. He was a graduate from SAIC (1984), and the gallery owner kept telling me, “You should go to the Art Institute”…so, I did. Again, it radically changed my perspective. I learned to understand American sarcasm and cynicism and I learned about the real me, the one I didn’t understand when I lived in Puerto Rico. I stopped painting because I needed to explore the part I had denied myself because I thought it was unimportant, irrelevant. I always had the need to make things that were not paintings, but didn’t understand their importance.

Caroline Picard: What does your studio process look like? Do you need different frames of mind to accommodate different spatial impulses? Or do you find your sculptural pieces come from the same place as your 2D work?

Edra Soto: I don’t have a romantic studio process at all. I start with ideas on paper. I write my ideas and organize the concepts of what I want to do and how I want it to read, which leads me to the conception of the artwork. In my last three solo shows I used the same process. Before The Chacon-Soto Show, The Greatest Companions series was an explosion of ideas. I struck on something that took me way too long to find. It was a prolific time and I think I did not edit enough. I was completely emotionally connected. Since then I have been conscious of having to edit my work more.

I tested myself again with Forever (part of Forever Vegetal at Roots and Culture). Forever incorporated some of the images I started during the production of the Chacon-Soto Show that I felt were pertinent, drawing from the energy of The Chacon-Soto exhibition, but aesthetically with a more organic and dark variation. I wanted to change the look of the materials, reduce the scale and make a collection that was a hybrid; organic, fragmented and strange. I was confident that’s what I needed to break from the emotional burst that The MCA exhibition provoked in me. I’ve never felt so sad about taking down a show.

Producing work in different formats and materials comes from a very honest place. More than 20 years ago I questioned my urges to work in other formats and mediums. Obviously, I don’t restrict myself now. As an artist, I am interested and attracted to many types of formats and ways of communicating an idea.

To answer your question more directly, yes, everything comes from the same place.

C.P: One of the things that I’ve always loved about your drawings is your use of the line. Often you build up very complex textual areas on top of loose washes. I’ve also noticed a reoccurring motif of hair in your work, (like the wookie, or the dog, or also these phenomenal female(?) figures with massive manes). Could you talk a little bit about that?

E.S: You are very perceptive! I don’t think anyone has asked this before. Yes, I love the delicate aspects of drawing and painting, and I do it for my personal pleasure. In painting, I went from figurative to abstract ways of expressing myself during my college years. I’m afraid my work might be a strange matrimony of my love for both styles. I do not question it so much. I do feel comfortable flowing around…it keeps things fun. The hair issue: yes, yes, yes, I love to paint hair so much! I used to love to paint water when I was in college. For a while now, it’s been hair. My love for animals in general is very real. It is just meant to happen, I guess!

CP: I’m also interested in “The Chacon-Soto Stage (la Tarima)”—partly because some of your paintings feel staged to me (as though the “action” of the work is presented as a finite visual occasion within a larger field—I suppose that goes back to my experience of heavily detailed portions occurring on simpler backgrounds, but also with some of your earlier work there seemed to be a very deliberate stage that was part of the painting). What interests me in particular about TCSS is the way you manifest a physical stage, appropriated from a television program, where suddenly what was once a 2-Dimensional experience, becomes contemporary and interactive….

ES: Most of the series of paintings I produced for the Chacon-Soto Show were culled from video stills of the Chacon Show that I watched on youtube. I selected hundreds of video clips, made prints, and used them to make the paintings. The colors, the retro look, were all very alluring and I just craved painting them. Painting them literally was not an option, but soon enough I started creating my own scenarios in those settings.

Nevertheless, I maintain clear goals as a conceptual artist to have my language and ways of communicating art to be relevant to contemporary life. My ideas about making spaces that became communal has always been a philosophical preoccupation as an artist. For instance: how to create a space of comfort for my audience? How to erase the boundaries between the audience as spectator and the audience as integral participator? The exhibition Homily at Ebersmoore gave me the opportunity to once again challenge myself into mastering my way of communicating, edit my ideas, and provide an installation with a variety of formats where the audience can decide when to keep a distance and when to get close.

CP: When you refer to yourself as a conceptual artist, I am struck by how you seem to contrast that with an earlier approach to art-making, wherein you were called and thought of yourself as a painter. How do you differentiate those gestures of painting for painting’s sake vs. conceptual work?

ES: I paint when I need to express an idea in painting, but I don’t dedicate my life exclusively to painting. For 8 years, before and after college, that’s all I did. Even at SAIC during the post-bac program, I painted. When I reached abstraction, I stared to think that I was done with painting, that I didn’t have anything else to say with it. I don’t think that anymore, but that’s how I stopped painting for a while. I started to paint again in 2008. For health reasons, I had to be in bed for a month and spent most of my time with my dog Foster. His loyalty inspired me and I developed my first series of paintings that was called ‘The Greatest Companions’, exhibited at Mutherland and Rowland Contemporary.

CP: In wanting to erase the boundaries between the audience and spectator and the audience as an integral participator—how do you make that distinction? (In particular with the way you hope people will interact with your work?) Also, where do you feel the tendency to be “spectator” in relation to art comes from?

ES: Scale generally provides the distinction. I will use the small scale of a painting and the very delicate details, for example, to provide a feeling of intimacy. Inversely, I will design a space (usually in sculpture format) where the spectator must introduce themselves physically to experience the space. Conceptual art can be challenging to a general audience. Because I come from a background where conceptual art was largely ignored, I think about the type of audience (and I include a younger me in that group) that might feel apprehensive about getting close to the artwork.

CP: You have a big project around the corner—Tell me about Dock6!

ES: Dock 6 is a collective of independent designers, furniture-makers and fabricators, including Dan Sullivan, my husband. They’ve been together since 2009 and have grown into what is now the Dock 6 Collective. They have an amazing workspace and have done open house events and collaborated with underground supper club Clandestino, curated by Vicki Fowler. For that event they fabricated a 50 foot modular dining table from salvageable material. Some of my work that Dan has fabricated for me has ended up being exhibited at their events. That’s how it occurred to me to propose to Dock 6 Collective the Design and Art Series. Aside from Dock 6 being an amazing space, this series will gather two communities, merging through this creative outlet. As curator, I am in charge of inviting the artists, and Dock 6 Collective invited architects and designers with whom to collaborate.

Among the artists featured are Kirsten Leenaars, who is currently working on a soap opera called On Our Way to Tomorrow, a companion of the ongoing exhibit Without You I’m Nothing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, curated by Tricia Van Eck.

Dan invited the Kujawa Architecture firm, who collaborated with Theaster Gates in the fabrication of his project for the Whitney Biennial. Their work is also reflected in the beautiful hotel rooms of Longman & Eagle.

This will be a one-night, one-day only event because it is being held at their workshop. We are incredibly excited to share this project with our artists, designers and architects communities in the hopes of generating more collaborative projects in the future. Our goal for now is to make this project happen twice per year.

Top 5 Weekend Picks! (1/14-1/16)

stephanieburke — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:01:53 +0000

1. Pleasures and Pursuits in Georgian England at Northwestern University Block Museum of Art

Work by Thomas Rowlandson.

Northwestern University Block Museum of Art is located at 40 Arts Circle Dr. Exhibition begins Friday.

2. Declaimed at 65Grand

Work by Nicholas Knight.

65Grand is located at 1369 W. Grand Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

3. Heads on Poles at Western Exhibitions

Work by Mike Andrews, Ali Bailey, Jason Robert Bell & Marni Kotak, Nick Black, Daniel Bruttig, Andrew Burkholder, Lilli Carré, Joseph Cassan, Mariano Chavez, Ryan Travis Christian, Vincent Como, Bruce Conkle, Jean-Louis Costes, Vincent Dermody, Mike Diana, Edie Fake, Scott Fife, R.E.H. Gordon, John Hankiewicz, Keith Herzik, Carol Jackson, Bob Jones, Chris Kerr, David Leggett, Mike Lopez, Teena McClelland, Dutes Miller, Miller & Shellabarger, Joe Miller, Andy Moore, Max Morris, Rachel Niffenegger, William J. O’Brien, Onsmith, David Paleo, John Parot, Michael Rea, Tyson Reeder, Dan Rhodehamel, Bruno Richard, John Riepenhoff, Kristen Romaniszak, Steve Ruiz, David Sandlin, Mike Schuh, Mindy Rose Schwartz, David Shrigley, Edith Sloat & Sophie Greenstalk, Edra Soto, Ryan Standfest, William Staples, Ben Stone, Bill Thelen, Jeremy Tinder, Sean Townley, Jim Trainor, Anne Van der Linden, Jason Villegas, Sarah Beth Woods, and Aaron Wrinkle.

Western Exhibitions is located at 119 N. Peoria St., suite 2A. Reception is Friday from 5-8pm.

4. He Opened Up Somewhere Along the Eastern Shore at iceberg projects

Work by Jason Hanasik.

iceberg projects is located at 7714 N Sheridan Rd. Reception is Saturday from 6-9pm.

5. Oooopa! at Johalla Projects

Work by Sean Fader.

Johalla Projects is located at 1561 N Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Sunday from 7-11pm.

Four for Fall | Centerfield on Art:21 blog

Claudine Isé — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 18:55:48 +0000

Our latest post is up over at art:21 blog. This week, we look at a few of the gallery exhibitions that have opened in Chicago over the past month. A brief teaser below:

Traditionally, fall is the time when galleries launch their new slate of exhibitions after a relatively slow-paced couple of summer months. Galleries tend to highlight some of the most prominent artists on their roster around this time, but it’s also common to use the Fall slot to introduce promising new up-and-comers. In Chicago, at least, all the hoopla around the fall openings (many of which took place on a single night several weeks ago) can feel a lot like a high school pep rally: the anticipatory fall preview lists and gallery guides, the minutely detailed gallery crawl maps and the inevitable “best of” Tweets that follow are ways of rousing ourselves from the complacencies of summer in order to get psyched for the upcoming art season.

All hype notwithstanding, fall invariably works its magic on me. I struggle with lazy gallery-going during the summer (and, let’s be honest here, sometimes during springtime too) yet feel a sense of urgency about seeing everything once September rolls around. I’m pleased to report that my efforts have been richly rewarded this season. There are so many interesting shows, and quite a few really excellent ones, taking place in Chicago right now there simply isn’t space to do justice to all of them here. Let’s start with exhibitions by two artists who were recently interviewed on Bad at Sports‘s podcast. Kehinde Wiley, on view through October 23 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, presented the latest iteration of his ongoing project World Stage: a series of portraits of young men of color from various cities around the world. Here, we find Wiley focusing on anonymous men from New Delhi, Mumbai and Sri Lanka, as opposed to the well-known rappers and athletes that had occasionally peopled his portraits in the past. (Read the post in its entirety here).

Interview with Edra Soto: Heaven, Hell and ‘the Jesus of Dogs’

Claudine Isé — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 20:36:55 +0000

In Memory of Who I Was

“Forever Vegetal” is the head-scratching title given to two concurrent solo shows at Roots and Culture featuring new work by Brian McNearney and Edra Soto. The exhibition opened earlier in December and will close this weekend on January 16th. Over the weekend I spoke (o.k., emailed with) Edra Soto about the new works she created for the exhibition, which tackle all the Big Issues: Life and Death, Heaven and Hell, Roman Catholicism, Michael Jackson’s pet mouse Ben, and Soto’s loveable canine, Foster, aka “the Jesus of Dogs.”

Your show at Roots and Culture begins with a piece that takes the form of a shrine and is titled “In Memory of Who I Was.” To me it seems to frame the entire show.

Edra Soto: “In Memory of Who I Was” is a shrine that commemorates my innocence, my past and the person I will never be again. I was also trying to make a memorial for myself as form of representing a transition. It’s never been a problem for me to find ways of representing art, but when I’ve been involved in great projects that have taken a lot of time and emotional investment, like my latest show at the MCA, it was making perfect sense for me to “kill myself” theoretically, to be able to speak about something different. There are a few transitional pieces in the show.
Initially, I was trying to make an art piece that compiled photos of me from childhood to the present, and have a small memorial of who I was until yesterday. I have explored the concept of time passing with memorials, like in A Year In Review and Landfill exhibited at Gallery 400 and Memorial at Polvo, all in 2005.
What I like the most about this piece is that it seems to be confusing to some of the audience that have seen it. It’s a completely intentional set up of a digital picture that looks faded by the sun and an arrangement of dry roses.

In your exhibition statement, you mention the influence the Roman Catholic church had on you during your childhood. The works in this show seem to bounce back and forth between a tongue-and-cheek approach to religion and one that is completely earnest. Can you tell us a bit more about the ideas behind two of the pieces included in the first room, one of which is titled “Communion” — which to me resonates as a vision of the Church’s promise to unite the human/mundane and the divine (through transubstantiation, the miracle of Mary, etc.) and the other titled “This is the Darkest Hour” — which makes me think of a door knocker you’d see at the gates of Hell?

Edra Soto: Talking to curator Julie Rodrigues [of Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art], I realized that I have two different ways of explaining my work. One is the story of how I came up with the idea, which tends to be too long and maybe unnecessary, and the other one is the resolved concept that I hope is the one people read when they look at my work…not necessarily something that will always happen. “Communion” was conceived in Puerto Rico while staying at a hospital taking care of my mom. I understand the concept of communion, according to the Catholic Church, as accepting the body of Christ. I also see it as unconditional love. That’s why I represent this concept by placing two winged figurines that are attached by their head through a prism type of organism that could be a cloud or a rainbow. The two figurines are part of my parents’ commercial ceramic legacy [ed. note: Soto's parents were ceramic artists who owned and operated a commercial ceramic business]. Those two pieces are little mice with wings that were never painted. Some days after finding these figurines, I saw a movie on television about the story of the Jackson 5. In between all the eccentricities that compose Michael Jackson’s life, there was a story of him talking to a little mouse named Mr. Ben in the kitchen at night with a flashlight.

This Is the Darkest Hour

The figurines find seem more exiting and cosmical, since–I know they were strange for some people–but for them to have some connection with a story was almost impossible for me to put together until I saw the story of little Ben. This is consistent with my fascination and tendency to bounce from the very personal to the popular/fictional culture and life of people I do not know. As I have told people in the past,I grew up in front of a TV, so popular culture is part of my language, but I’m determined not to have it be the only defining tone of my work.
On “This is the Darkest Hour,” I was seeking to make a representation of what hell could possibly sound or be like if transformed into some kind of embodiment. I chose as a point of departure, a mask of a lamb that I found on Halloween and made a cast of it. I kept thinking about the idea of a black sheep to represent this character…endearing and scary at the same time. On my perception of Hell I see a very ostentatious place, and I also see heavy metal music and darkness. This is the first time I got to collaborate on a piece with my husband Dan Sullivan, who is the guitarist and one of the writers for local metal band Arriver. I already made the connection of what song I wanted to use for this piece, and it just happens to be one of the songs he wrote call “This Dark Corner of the Continent”. The lyrics are not present in the loop I asked to be extracted from the song. I thought the austere sound is remarkable by itself. As I mention in my statement, I was motivated mostly by other artists’ interpretations of the ideas of Heaven and Hell (in religious art, contemporary art, and music).

Communion

Earlier last year, preparing for a lecture I did on William Blake for the Artist Connect series at The Art Institute of Chicago I realized that my Iris Chacon work had a mystical quality, intensely honest but not necessarily recognizable at first sight. When I started pairing my work to Blake’s, I saw a unexpected similarity (especially in the compositions) that moved me deeply. People in the audience during the lecture asked me if I based my work on William Blake’s paintings. I discovered Blake’s paintings after making my own, so the answer was no. That moment has stayed with me and I have carried on with my reflections and conceptual developments.

The conflation of human and animal forms is a visual trope we’ve seen before in your work, as in the drawings shown in your MCA 12 x 12 show combining your features with that of a gorilla (all drawn by other artists). In your Roots and Culture show, we see numerous pieces in which animals figure prominently. Can you tell us more about two of the drawings in the show, “The Jesus of Dogs” and “The Lion and the Lamb”?
Edra Soto: Different from the mutations other artists made of my portraits for the Chacon-Soto Show, I portray my pets as part of my ecclesiastical roster. I had them assume the role of Jesus and The Lion and the Lamb. My pets’ idiosyncrasies tend to be the subject of many conversations among my husband and I and our friends (since we have no children). I found my dog in my neighborhood a couple of years ago. He has been instrumental in episodes of my life that manifest themselves in different ways in my artwork. My husband nicknamed my dog Foster “The Jesus of Dogs,” mainly because Foster is an incredibly nice and beautiful dog (and sort of looks like Chewbacca).

My cat on the other hand has challenged our compassion and patience through the years, but we have held on to him and him to us.

The Jesus of Dogs

Where does the imagery in your work spring from? Do images like the ring of dirt-encrusted stuffed animals in “Forever” or the Goth-inflected funereal wreath dripping from the eyes of the lamb in “This Is the Darkest Hour” come into your head all at once or intuitively like a dream or a vision, or do they develop over time and through processes of revision, in a more recombinatory fashion?
Edra Soto: The first thing I do before starting to make a body of work is research my theme. I look for every possible reference that I can find, read from all kinds of sources, take a lot of notes, do a lot of writing. I then come up with a concept and the repertoire. The titles are developed as if I was making a record and these are the hits I want in to include. Forever, for example, came from the idea of making a tombstone that reflected eternal light, or the light that shines forever, or the life that will never be forgotten. It has an obvious influence from pop culture (the “Billie Jean” video by Michael Jackson). I’ve always been a huge fan, and do not mind that the reference can be seen in that manner, but I try to avoid the literal reference so as to keep the subject more universal.

Light Within the Dark

Although you use recognizable iconography in your sculpture and installations, the connections between the different element can be difficult for the viewer to tease out. There is a cryptic nature to it. You are drawing from a personal lexicon of cultural symbols/images — the gorilla, for example, which appeared
in The Chacon-Soto Show at the MCA and again in your installation “Crying for the Beast” at the Artists Run Chicago exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center. Given that a lot of your imagery stems from a personal take on popular culture (including popular religious culture), how do you imagine someone who doesn’t share those memories/cultural history might find points of entry into your work?

Edra Soto: Hopefully, the images that I’m utilizing to represent these concepts are universal enough to transcend any perceptual differences. It is an important and difficult question that I ask myself all the time during art making. I try to be as generous as I can in my expression without compromising my integrity.

Zombies Live at Antena Gallery Tonight

Claudine Isé — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:33:20 +0000

Don’t forget that tonight is the opening for Zombies: A Mindless Affair at Antena Gallery.

And get there early, because from 6:30 – 7:00pm there’ll be a discussion between author Scott Kenemore, artist Mindy Rose Schuartz and collaborators Teena McClelland and Michelle Maynard from Death by Design Co. about “the darkness that enlightens their work” moderated by exhibition curator Edra Soto.

There will also be a screening of the film “Throb” made by Death by Design Co. immediately after the conversation.

SALAD-CHURCH-EXERCISE

Meg Onli — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 18:05:47 +0000

Featuring work by:

Michael Bancroft, Noah Berlatsky, Dayton Castleman, CThrough Outfit, Chelsea Culp, Derek Erdman, Gina Grafos, Jacob C. Hammes, Jaime Lynn Henderson, Hideous Beast, Thaddeus Kellstadt, Paul Mack, Rachel Pollak, Yvie Raij, Oliverio Rodriguez, Christopher Santiago, Dewayne Slightweight, Edra Soto, Bert Stabler, Matthew Steinke, Susannah Kite Strang

Curated by Bert Stabler

Co-Prosperity Sphere
3219 S. Morgan, Chicago.

Open hours 1-4 pm Saturday July 11, Saturday July 18. Closing party Saturday July 18,

For more info check out Proximity’s site.

Top…4? for 7/3, 7/4 & 7/5

stephanieburke — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 02:15:43 +0000

Here’s what I’d go to, if I were you…
1. Co-Prosperity Sphere

Bert Stabler is bending you brain this 4th of July with SALAD-CHURCH-EXERCISE: A show about self-improvement through self-denial. With work by over 20 local artists, a massive salad potluck, and taglines like, “While large-scale organs of control, such as schools, hospitals, and prisons, enforce the social contract through a restriction of choice and a remote delegation of authority, personal or cultural techniques for redirecting and mastering libido, the inner primordial chaos we carry within, can be found in the options represented by salad, church, and exercise.” How could you go wrong. You can take the Orange Line to Ashland, Saturday from 2-6pm.

2. Julius Cæsar

For the day after Independency Day, lets raise our torn jean jacket clad arms an Question Authority! Mmm…high school. But seriously, Kaylee Rae Wyant and Jerome Acks are doing something cool over at Julius Caesar called Hear Here. Framed as work “examining the many ideals and complexities encompassing freedom, democracy and revolution” it should be interesting to contemplate after a flag choked day of “patriotism”.

3. BEN RUSSELL

How many ways can you put your own name on a show? Well, if you are Ben Russell, as many as humanly possibly. How is “Ben Russell, presented by Ben Russell, at Ben Russell” for ya? Weird thing is, it ain’t a solo show. Ben Russell is a new space in Pilsen, go there and check out work by Marco Kane Braunschweiler, Martine Syms, Paul Chan, Miguel Cortez, Roxane Hopper, Julie Rudder, and Kelly Kaczynsk are doing their performance piece at 9pm the opening night. Drop by for the Sunday opening from 6-10pm.

4. MCA

As a celebration of the closing of the Bucky Fuller exibition, the MCA is hosting Jen & Ira & You at the MCA Meet Buckminster Fuller Meeting the Hippies in Golden Gate Park, a performance piece by Jennifer Karmin & Ira S. Murfin. Ever wondered why hippies loved this son of the atomic age? Well, here’s your chance to find out. The performance is free with the cost of admission, so if you get into the MCA free, you’re good to go.

Bad at Sports » Edra Soto

Top 5 Weekend Picks (11/4-11/6)

Related Posts

Top 6 Weekend Picks! (9/16-9/18)

Related Posts

Hybridity of Thought: An Interview with Edra Soto

Related Posts

Top 5 Weekend Picks! (1/14-1/16)

Related Posts

Four for Fall | Centerfield on Art:21 blog

Related Posts

Interview with Edra Soto: Heaven, Hell and ‘the Jesus of Dogs’

Related Posts

Zombies Live at Antena Gallery Tonight

Related Posts

SALAD-CHURCH-EXERCISE

Related Posts

Top…4? for 7/3, 7/4 & 7/5

Related Posts