1. Solastalgia at Johalla Projects

Work by Jenny Kendler.

Johalla Projects is located at 1561 N Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Friday from 7-10pm.

2. Doubt Implies Guilt at DIG

Work by Bert Stabler, Nick Black, and Jasime Young.

DIG is located at 2003 N. Point #3. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

3. Either/Or/Both at Threewalls

Work by Hans Peter Sundquist, Samantha Bittman, Michael Milano, Casey Droege, and Stephanie Brooks.

Threewalls is located at 119 N. Peoria St., #2C. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

4. Transmit/Transmute at Comfort Station

Work by Adrian Moens.

Comfort Station is located at 2579 N. Milwaukee Ave. Reception is Saturday from 7-10pm.

5. Thieves In The Light at Julius Caesar

Work by Jesus Gonzalez Flores.

Julius Caesar is locate at 3144 W Carroll Ave, 2G. Reception is Sunday from 4-7pm.

"SMILE II," installation/performance stills 2010

The first time I met Aay, he was was giving a presentation at Version Fest in 2007. Aay, Ilana Percher and Rebecca Grady had just returned from Art Shanty Projects on Medicine Lake, where they installed a soft shanty/sculpture called The Soft Shop. They reinstalled this portable, cloth shanty in the Version’s basement, (where all the other art booths stood) and talked about their residency, hosting some of the same fiber workshops they had hosted in its original location in Minnesota. Since that first encounter I have benefited from Aay’s collaborative work in multiple ways. I have been to Chances to dance-dance-dance, a short story of mine was published in an on-line magazine he organizes called Monsters & Dust. I went to No Coast and convinced Aay to make some covers for the Green Lantern Press. I point this out because his work has impacted a wide audience of which I am a part. He creates public, collaborative platforms while producing a concise, independent body of work. Despite having appreciated his work for so long, I have never taken the opportunity to ask him about how these projects relate to one another, and even how he thinks about his own practice. To me, this interview is suited to the beginning of summer. It’s hot outside, the Critical Fierceness Grant is open again (until June 30th) for grant proposals, many artists and faculty alike are facing a new open schedule, and it’s good to remember the alchemical mixture in aesthetics, politics, the body and imagination.

Mess Hall's interior, just before the opening of Celebrate! Celebrate? The Politics and Tactics of Visualizing a People's History, organized by Nicolas Lampert of Justseeds (January 2010)

Caroline Picard: You’ve been in Chicago for a number of years and have continued to work with different organizations—I was thinking as far back as Diamonds/Texas Ballroom for instance, No Coast of course and many others—I was wondering if you could talk about your participation in those different organizations; how your role has varied? Do you feel like your participation in different communal structures has impacted your visual work?

Aay Preston-Myint: Well, Diamonds and Texas were two iterations/sections of the same artists collective in warehouse space in Bridgeport, back in the day. We all did our share of programming and running events, mostly art shows and music, and let’s not forget parties. No Coast was a similar collective/consensus structure but centered around the concept and physical space of a bookstore, shared studio space, in addition to an open community workshop. When I look at these and other organizations I’ve been involved with (the online curatorial project Monsters and Dust, the experimental cultural center Mess Hall, and the microgrant/queer dance party called Chances), the difference is not so much in work or ‘roles,’ but the content of each project itself. These are ventures that have all been run by consensus to serve a specific audience or community. As such, roles can shift depending on interest, ability, and the needs of our contingents. I think the impact on my own work has been that I have a desire to engage, entertain, and encourage dialogue through my practice. I enjoy using color, a richness in materials, humor, mystery/seduction, and participation to engage the viewer. Creating a gravitational pull, drawing people into an active space — that’s what all the organizations I work with have done.

CP: Do you categorize different aspects of your art practice?

APM: In a way those divisions (solo work, collaborations, and design/commissions) are often a matter of convenience — an easy way of categorizing, but the nature of the work is different too. I think my solo work has more of a clear narrative, using conceptual, material, and stylistic threads that weave in and out of the work. Collaborations of course deal with similar concepts and interests. However that work tends to take on forms, processes, or issues that I don’t always deal with on my own because of the influence of my partners — each collaboration tends to stand apart. The design work, while perhaps more aesthetically my own, is a whole other beast, often because it’s not used in an art context, and also because the content is decided by the client and maybe even pushed to the background. I think each category exhibits a different kind of development over time, and it can be interesting to compare how they are disparate but also influence one another. From the subject matter of my solo work, to the clients I choose to design for: there are connections that become apparent when you zoom out.

CP: Will you talk a little bit about your relationship to materials?

APM: Responding to materials have always been a key part of my work. For a while when I drew it was almost like I had an issue with attention span; I needed something to respond or anchor myself to, a fabric, wallpaper, a photograph — I disliked drawing on a blank surfaces. Now it’s more about responding to the social, historical, or affective associations with an object or material — rope, a flag, hair, light, even scent. I think in a body of work like mine — which is so about embodiment — the choice of materials is really key when interpreting form.

CP: I’m also really curious about your Hybrid Moments Project—can you talk about that a little?

APM: Hmm, yes — as you can tell from the text banner series that I made a couple years ago, I like to use pop songs as titles and content sometimes. After I made the first series of screen prints, Hybrid Moments seemed to be the right phrase to contain my work at the time — I think of the title more as a container than the name of a single “project.” I think it still works for the prints and maybe some of the discrete/smaller sculptures, but not so much for the larger sculptures anymore. But in general, it’s the body of work I’m engaged with now. The works make propositions of what mutating, unpredictable forms that community, identity, and the environment—both built and natural — may take on in an unspecified future moment — all through the lens of a critical queerness.

CP: Do you have a static, projected future point that your work is speaking to? Or does that future-vision shift, depending on what your working on?

APM: The future I depict is definitely mutable and unpredictable, that’s kind of the crux of my whole viewpoint. I think part of the criticality of my work is that our projections of the future never match up to what we imagine — I use mutation as a metaphor or allegory for that unpredictability. As soon as one struggle is overcome, new power relations form in place of old ones. Often abuses and rivalries emerge instead of coalitions. The future I imagine is always out of reach.

"It Gets Worse," open edition of digital/offset prints dimensions variable 2011-ongoing

CP: And your SMILE series too—that struck me, partly, because of the element of performance required. I was thinking about it because in Hybrid Moments you seem to be interested in gestures and the significance of those gestures, but then in that instance (am I right?) the resulting work is divorced from living people….

APM: That’s a great question because I think over time those two projects have influenced each other in ways I hadn’t anticipated and, at least in my mind, they aren’t differentiated anymore. The first iteration of SMILE was, I think, the first iteration of my continuing and relatively “mature” body of work. However at that time it was still lacking a specific goal or agenda in terms of content, despite having established the visual style and material concerns. I started Hybrid Moments soon after this, and through those works I began to lock down the kinds of gestures, characters, and ideas I am interested in. Queerness, futurity, power relations, color theory/theories, toxicity and mutation to name a few. So when I did SMILE a second time (at SFCamerawork in September 2010), it became folded into what had become my practice. Some objects that were previously presented as sculptures became props for SMILE — because all these works now inhabited the same world. I was delighted to see some of the situations in my drawings accidentally re-enacted in performance, and in turn, I’ve used the gestures and actions performed in SMILE to create new drawings (e.g. “Totem Ascending”, which was included in this year’s threewalls CSA). The SMILE performances have also helped me to rethink the concepts of figure, site, and the object/viewer relationship in my sculptural work.

"SMILE II," installation/performance stills 2010

The second part has to do with the research elements of my practice — looking, reading, writing. As I was working on my written thesis I was isolating these core concepts (embodiment, utopia, queerness, etc). The commonalities between the different works I make, and the works of others that I am influenced by. I started making lists, thought maps, and diagrams which would explode these concepts and then bring them back together in different configurations. With the encouragement of friends and teachers, these sketches and diagrams eventually became works in their own right.

APM: Oh yes, there is definitely a connection. However, in my research I don’t talk so much about the optical domination of one color over the other, as much as looking at the social constructs and hierarchies around color.  I’m interested in how colors carry associations with certain emotions, objects, situations, and even social and political movements and attitudes. I’ve been especially invested in mixed colors, day-glo colors, and pastel colors — my written thesis was titled “Who’s Afraid of Pink, Purple and Brown?” in contrast to Barnett Newman’s “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?” I’ve done an artist talk solely on the color pink. It’s a pretty amazing color, not enough people take it seriously. Transgression, difference, queerness, sex, repulsion, obsession, fantasy….it’s all there in that one color.

APM: I think that grad school has been really invaluable to my process….until now I’ve never been able to totally commit myself to developing an artistic stance or worldview, and turn that into a cohesive body of work over time. I can really reflect on how one piece relates to the next, and engage in intense and productive critique from myself and others at a level previously unreached. As hinted at above, I’ve also been able to take advantage of scale and material in a way I hadn’t had the time or financial backing to do before. I’ve been really fortunate to attend a program (UIC) that fosters community, improvisation, self-critique, and collaboration, due to its size, and in particular, the awesomeness and warmth of my cohort. In that way, it really hasn’t been too much different than my DIY experiences. I think my class in particular has truly been like family.

CP: What are you working on right now?

APM: Interesting that you say that — well, the fact is, I’ve just graduated and am looking forward to a lot of travel this summer, and not really sure what kind of work awaits in the fall (residency? teaching? design? working at a bar? these are all options). This means that for the time being, I’m not going to have the large scale modes of production, storage, and display available to me during graduate school — so I unfortunately might have to put the brakes on the large sculptural work for now. It’s strange how time, place, and life situations can have as much, if not more, impact on the work you do as your own concept/process. That said, I’m focusing on prints, drawings and the web at the moment — things I can do at home and at my shared studio at Roxaboxen in Pilsen. Mostly developing the imagery in the Hybrid Moments prints and the It Gets Worse Series — my long-time No Coast collaborator Alex Valentine and I will be taking these and other print/book projects to the Tokyo Art Book fair in July. Also, I can finally put my nose to the grindstone on Monsters and Dust — which you yourself have also made an awesome contribution to. Our next issue is way overdue. But as soon as I get enough space I think I’d like to start working on a “living vomitorium” idea that has been at the back of my head for a while.

Bottomless Loop, wire, polyester, cotton, false flowers, plexiglas, poured enamel 10' x 12 ' x 2' 2011

CP: How do you determine if a show with your work is successful?

APM: I guess there are a few ways. Of course people might just like the whole thing, which feels great, but I’m often excited when people respond to the work that I’ve had the most doubts about, or the piece that I almost didn’t include. It reminds me to continue thinking outside of myself and to trust other people’s input. If the work motivates people to ask challenging questions rather than just congratulate, that’s great too. I also think a work is successful when people ask funny questions or give things names – “Is that a gloryhole?” or “I like this hair donut,” or “This one is the great birth mother, right?” or “What’s that smell?”

You can see more of Aay’s work by visiting his website.

1. TWEEN at Octagon Gallery

Work by Aaron Orsini, Adam Farcus, Adam Grossi, Alberto Aguilar, Alicja Zelazko, Angeline Evans, Arielle Bielak, Adam Trowbridge, Ben Russell, Big Bad Ron, Brandon Alvendia, Brian Wadford, Burak Birinci, Chris Hammes, E. Aaron Ross, Eric Fleischauer, Emily Keuhn, Hooliganship, Isak Berbic, Jake Myers, Jerimiah Chiu, Jesse Avina, Jon Satrom, Kevin Jennings, Kevin Robinson, Kirsten Leenaars, Kyle Fletcher, Laura Boban, Lara Stall, Mark Sansone, Michelle Harris, Michael Radziewicz, Miguel Cortez, PaperRad, Philip Parcellano, Philip von Zweck, Rob Ray, Silas Reeves, Steven Pate, Tim Pigot, Tom Burtonwood, Theo Darst and more.

Octagon Gallery is located at 1318 N Milwaukee Ave, #300. Reception Saturday, 7-10pm.

2. A Rod Stewart Little Richard Prince Charles Manson Family at LVL3

Work by Carson Fisk-Vittori, Derek Frech,  Justin Kemp, Joe Lacina, Joshua Pavlacky and Daniel Wallace

LVL3 is located at 1452 N Milwaukee Ave, 3. Reception Saturday, 6-10pm.

3. IF OUR WORLD PROTECTS at Monument 2

Work by Lenox-Lenox.

Monument 2 is located at 2007 N Point St. Reception Saturday, 7-10pm.

4. Registry & Milking at Threewalls

Work by Betsy Odom and Montgomery Perry Smith, respectively.

Threewalls is located at 119 N. Peoria St., #2C. Reception Friday, 6-9pm.

5. Marshland & 21st. C. Slideshows at Catherine Edelman Gallery

Work by Fred Stonehouse and Tim Tate, respectively.

Catherine Edelman Gallery is located at 300 W. Superior St. Reception Friday, 5-7pm.

Guest Post by Dan Gunn

Artist Mindy Rose Schwartz has shown her sculpture and installations throughout the United States with exhibitions in Houston, TX; Brooklyn, NY; St. Louis and Kansas City, MO; Miami, FL and Chicago. Her work has been written about in artnet Magazine, Beautiful Decay (online), Time Out Chicago, The Chicago Tribune, Newcity, ArtForum, Frieze Magazine, Art in America and Whitewalls.  Schwartz earned her MFA at the University of Illinois, Chicago. I caught up with her after the close of her most recent show of work at Threewalls. The following is our conversation.

"Credenza". Image courtesy of the artist.

DG: How do you think about your materials?

MRS: The materials and processes I use have to make sense in relation to the meaning of the piece.  So, for example, in this body of work, one of my reference points are remembered objects from the house I grew up in.  So my use of ceramics, macramé, white stones, and gold chain are materials I came in contact with in my past and have resurfaced to add to a palette of materials for sculpture.  I am also interested in processes and skills that I learned while growing up, before I made it to art school.  Why do I know how to make every type of lanyard key chain, or a macramé belt, or to crochet a yarmulke, or to paper mache? They are a window into specific class, cultural and gender specific moments that shaped my experience.

DG: What else makes up those “reference points”?

MRS:  As I was developing my proposal for Threewalls, I wanted to transform the gallery space into an idealized and symbolic domestic space. There is a smaller room as you enter, a large grand space in the center and a smaller more intimate space at the end.  As you walk through, I thought of the first room as the foyer, the next as a living room and the last, a sunroom. In a home these are the spaces that you pass through, or only use on occasion or special occasion, not the every day living spaces.

The sculptures in each of the spaces are an amalgamation of the furniture, objects and people that would reside there. They reflect the kind of pictorial or fictive aspect that each of those rooms implies.   Some of the sculptures in the living room space are: Chandelier, Credenza, and Vanity. I mean the credenza, what is it for? Who has room for the credenza? It’s a piece of furniture that’s purpose is to hold and display decorative objects and fancy dishes. The Chandelier too has a type of aspiration to it, a light that is dressed up in its finest jewels. These objects and what they represent become starting points to imagine their transformation into something else.

DG: Then what about the sunroom?

MRS: I was trying to create a space that was sort of mournful and had a kind of longing to it, but peaceful too. The sunroom has a sun in it, of course.  It is created through a technique called, string art, which was a craft process I learned in fifth grade.  It was supposed to teach that straight lines create a curve. The piece is called The Tender Light of Hope. In the living room space, it has its counter part in a piece called, The Depths of Bleak Despair.  These two pieces provide a kind of emotional bracketing for the show.

Two other pieces in the space are called Friends, and A Peaceful Man.  Friends are two, coil pot, heads sitting on the remnants of my grandmother’s mink coat. The coat was handed down through the family, repurposed, refashioned and redistributed as: a sporty jacket, a hat and some earmuffs. A Peaceful Man is also just a head, but his beard and mustache swoops down to form his legs and sprout a flower. I thought of it as my “Giacometti moment”.

"The Tender Light of Hope" and "A Peaceful Man" Image courtesy of the artist

DG: You mentioned collectibles, how do they factor in? What kind of symbolism lies within them?

MRS: I was trying to find a way to get the figure back into my sculpture, in an effective way. As a sculptor, you’re kind of off the hook.  You don’t really have to use the figure, because the viewer is the figure. The sculpture exists in the same space as your body. There is this uncanny weirdness when you perceive your body in relationship to this representation of one. That begs the question. How does it get in there and not be a statue. Statues are hil-ar-e-ous! They’re so heavy. There is funniness to them.  How to show the body… I tried to think of them along those lines then, to not be “figurative” but “figurine-ative”

Figurines and decorative objects have a strange life span to them, right? They sit in the home in one spot for a whole lifetime. Then they get handed down, auctioned off or go to a thrift store and go to another house to sit in one spot for another lifetime.

The collectible object is really a way many people experience sculpture in their everyday lives.  It is like the three dimensional version of a Picasso poster or, depending on your taste, a Margaret Keen poster.  That is how I experienced it mostly, more often through home decorating than a trip to the art museum or a stroll through a sculpture park. So there are these mass-produced objects that one way or another make it into your life and stay. Over time it will look very different and mean something very different to whoever has it. In fact two identical objects become fundamentally very different things. I’m trying to show how my history with specific objects morphs their form and how I perceive them with the their stories still attached.

Of the definite genres of collectible figurines some interest me more then others. I particularly admire ones that address the landscape or nature.  I made my versions of this type for Credenza.  There are also characters that reoccur across many different brands of collectible objects; the CLASSIC mainstays of every family of Precious Moments, Lladro, or Royal Dalton are the harlequin, mime and ballerina.  I made a series of those characters for the “Vanity” piece.

Aside from the emulated realism of collectible objects, I love the sincerity of those that adopt a modernist “look” as their most prominent style.   There is nothing like the grace or elegance of an abstract dancer’s elongated neck or the motion of flowing dance attire captured in porcelain or electroplated aluminum.

Detail of "Credenza". Image courtesy of the artist.

DG: So you see the forms of décor as the remnants of Modernism?

Well, I guess this comes back to how and when I experienced Modernism as a  trickle down influence in popular culture during the seventies.  I saw a lot of Hollywood musicals growing up.  Most of these movies started out on Broadway and one of the byproducts of their translation into cinema, seemed to be these inexplicable dance sequence that would interrupt the regular narrative of the story to express some kind of emotional drama or conflict in the story. The Dream Sequence Ballet in Oklahoma and the Rumble scene in West Side Story are real stand- outs.  The main characters come onto these angular abstract sets and work it all out through Modern dance.  The piece Dream Sequence Ballerina has a little stage set and dancer’s graceful head as a fantasy interlude atop a modernist piece of ceramics.

DG: As you think about the decorative object, is there also a kind of spiritualism, mysticism or “pop-religion” that is also reflected in it?

MRS:  Objects are very powerful, especially in how they can absorb meaning or deflect it, depending on the context.  There are a couple pieces in the show that allude to religious Jewish objects. For instance The Hands of God in the foyer,  references a religious object call the “yad”.  “Yad literally means ‘hand’ in Hebrew.  It is an object that is used to read from the Torah because you are not allowed to touch the scroll.  It is an ornate stick about seven inches long with a very realistic hand on the end of it. They really are amazing looking objects. I made two yads. These long skinny arms with big hands swoop down from the ceiling. They are the hands of God giving birth and from their palms emerge people. The figures are these half formed little homunculus men.

"The Hands of God". Image courtesy of the artist.

Other figurative references are more specific to cultural or historical milieu. I’m thinking of the Credenza, actually, it’s feet are the “keep on trucking” foot and it’s pointing hand is from the “I’m with Stupid” Tee Shirt.

DG: Ha! So how does humor function in your work, is it important?

MRS: I try to combine several different emotions in one object like: Sad and pretty, or funny and strange, so there is more than one way to read the work at the same time. Humor is definitely in the mix.  I think through humor and often, unlikely connections result in something amusing. Another aspect to humor in my work is through bad taste.  Humor itself often has a double edge to it.  It can be really nice and really mean at the same time.

DG: Can you discuss your relationship to process and craftsmanship?

MRS: The finished object shows the history of how it’s made. There is a particular look to materials when you first learn a skill that I happen to really like.  There is a type of enthusiasm and inventiveness that translates to the work as you try and form it into something. This has a unique type of meaning that is very different then something that has no loose ends.  The final look of the work has to support the meaning of it.

DG: How do you know when you’ve gone too far, or haven’t gone far enough with your sculptures?

MRS: If it doesn’t have a kind of balance between emotional responses it’s not finished. For example I made a piece for the show where I wanted to reference something whimsical but to actually express a totally different feeling. The piece t ended up just being whimsical. There was no tension in it.  I’ll still work on it, but it definitely didn’t make the cut. There is a fine line between trying to make work about something and just making the thing in and of itself.

Dan Gunn is an artist, writer and educator living in Chicago.

1. Uncle Freddy’s All-Stars at Co-Prosperity Sphere

Work by Em’rynn Artunian, Thomas Hagen, and Billy Pozzo.

Co-Prosperity Sphere is located at 3219 S. Morgan St. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. Uh-Oh It’s Magic at Threewalls

Work by Ben Russell.

Threewalls is located at 119 N. Peoria St., #2C. Reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

3. Dawoud Bey: Early Portraits at Stephen Daiter Gallery

Early work by Dawoud Bey.

Stephen Daiter Gallery is located at 311 W. Superior St., #408. Reception is Friday from 5-8pm.

4. Black at Peregrineprogram

Work by Candida Alvarez.

Peregrineprogram is located at 500 W. Cermak Rd., #727. Reception is Saturday from 1-4pm.

5. Waiting for Daylight at Iceberg Projects

Work by Dana Carter.

Iceberg Projects is located at 7714 N. Sheridan Rd. Reception is Saturday from 6-9pm.