Till it Sticks

Yesenia Bello and Nataliya Kotlova

Exhibition dates: March 2nd - 24th, 2019

Opening Reception: Friday March 2nd, 5-8pm

Yesenia Bello | Nataliya Kotlova

Till it Sticks is a collaborative sequence between Yesenia Bello and Nataliya Kotlova. Through a perpetual push-and-pull, a telepathic space, these works explore togetherness and what it means to find a middle ground between two separate stand points. Steps in combined decision-making and material play lead these artists to employ a methodical approach in devising new creative structures. Using fabric, rope, elastic, clay, rods, and hooks, Bello and Kotlova construct drawings in space, which explore an improvisational conversation: regarding resourcefulness and problem solving.

This act of a communal ‘searching for’ and ‘finding of’ a middle ground is a quiet exploration; one that thinks with the body and ruminates until resolved. Pulling from the social nature and history of fiber processes, Bello and Kotlova continue a collective dialogue. An approach to team building that seems a vital practice in our current times, taking matter into hand and working inventively to recompose surroundings.

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Yesenia Bello (b. 1994) lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her installations,drawings and sculptures have been presented locally at spaces including The Overlook Place, DfbrL8r Gallery, Clutch Gallery, and 6018 North. She was a HATCH Projects (2016-17) resident at Chicago Artists Coalition and attended the Oxbow and ACRE residency in 2018. Between 2011-2016 she was co-founder and organizer of Walla Fest. Current exhibitions include ‘My mouth is a motherlode’(solo) at Tiger Strikes Asteroid. She is a 2019 Center Program resident at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Nataliya Kotlova (b. 1993) lives and works in Chicago. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Rover (Chicago, IL), Woman Made Gallery (Chicago, IL), Lula Cafe (Chicago, IL), and DfbrL8r Gallery (Chicago, IL). Kotlova is currently the director of Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, IL.

Dig, Dig, Dig,

Work by Clay Mahn

Exhibition Dates: March 30th – April 28th, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday March 30th, 2019 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM

In ‘Dig,Dig,Dig’, Mahn presents an installation of nearly three dozen paintings which will shift in arrangement over the course of the exhibition. Inspired by the idiosyncrasies of repetition, each canvas contains a parallel motif: a single black line traversing the center of a chalky-white ground. Though each canvas is unique, they coalesce into a larger installation that questions process and purpose amidst Comfort Station’s distinctive space and architecture.  

Clay Mahn (b.1988, Missoula, MT) lives and works in Chicago, IL. His practice playfully engages elements of language, abstraction, and repetition through a precarious use of simple motifs, materials, and forms. Recent solo exhibitions include 'Softer Thoughts' at Devening Projects+Editions in Chicago, IL and 'Bad Habits' at FalseFront in Portland, OR. Mahn received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017 and his BFA from The University of Montana's College of Visual and Performing Arts in 2012.

Cockaigne

Malte Stiehl and Nick Van Zanten

Exhibition dates: May 4th - 29th, 2019

The venerable 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica explains that in Cockaigne “the rivers were of wine, the houses were built of cake and barley-sugar, the streets were paved with pastry, and the shops supplied goods for nothing. Roast geese and fowls wandered about inviting folks to eat them, and buttered larks fell from the skies like manna.” Even today, when the legend of the land of Cockaigne is largely forgotten, the word still brings to mind hedonism and vulgarity. With that in mind, artists Nick Van Zanten and Malte Stiehl will collaborate to create an appropriately fanciful sensory overload, working in their chosen media of LEDs, spandex, cotton candy, sequins, resin, plexiglas, mirrors, and just about whatever else they can lay their hands on as they press good ideas too far. As scarcity becomes plenty becomes too much the borders between subject and object, desire and repulsion will become unclear. As in an old Dutch painting of Cockaigne, impossible pleasures will be shown, if only to point out their folly.

Nick Van Zanten (b. 1988 in Chicago, IL) creates assemblages that entangle sewn paintings and artist-made garments, designed to evoke a desiring gaze and begging to be held, touched, and worn, yet also abject – made of cheap fabric and not in the best of taste. These ‘Formfits’ elicit desire and, simultaneously, embarrassment at that desire. Van Zanten received his BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2018. He has exhibited throughout the United States, was a resident at VCCA, Yaddo, and the Wassaic Project, and has appeared in Art in America and New American Paintings.

Malte Stiehl (b. 1989 in Kassel, Germany) is an interdisciplinary artist who creates installation-based works that explore the notion of material agency through organic interplay between image, object, and the viewer. The installations serve as experimental setups in which rigorous investigation of human perception is accompanied by free formal improvisation. Materials degrade and transform over time, developing a life of their own. The inaccuracies and difficulties that result from the translation of an idea into a physical thing play a defining role in the process. Stiehl studied at the Hochschule für Künste Bremen in Germany, and was awarded a DAAD post-graduate scholarship in 2017. He will receive his MFA from UIC in May.

Respite Station

Luan Joy Sherman and Sair Goetz

Exhibition dates: June 2019

Respite Station is an incubator, archive, and experiment in community built through the collaborative writing practice and radio broadcasts by Luan Joy Sherman and sair goetz. This project aims to explore the depth and nuance of our queer and trans experiences by dissecting a wide range of quotidian topics and personal narratives, from passing and desirability politics to ventriloquism and color theory.

The closing reception marks the opening of the project into other spaces and will include ephemera from the making of this work.

Come Roaming

Holly Murkerson & Kaylee Wyant

Exhibition dates: July 2nd - August 8th, 2019

Closing Reception: Saturday August 3rd, 5 – 8pm

As co-directors of ADDS DONNA, the Chicago-based artist-run gallery, Holly Murkerson and Kaylee Wyant have long considered the exhibition space an extension of their individual practices. Their shared fascination with exhibition design — how proximities and display mechanisms affect the ultimate perception of individual artworks — has played out on multiple occasions, in their collaborative curatorial work as well as in each of their personal practices, by integrating backdrops, framing, and furniture with singular art objects.

In Come Roaming, Murkerson and Wyant activate, and then complicate the innate act of looking. Through a choreographed installation of their individual works and a collaborative sculpture that encourages myriad sight lines and body positions, they aim to amplify the movement of bodies and vision through the exhibition space. 

Multiple dualities are at play in this exhibition- interior and exterior, subject and object, figure and ground, abstraction and representation. Murkerson and Wyant’s individual works explore these relationships, as do the two sites of collaboration. The large screen in the front window unfolds and invites simultaneous looking and penetration; the cut-outs in the screen’s panels working both as windows and as points of entry. One may cast their view outward, using the cutout as a framing device, or, alternatively, revert their attention inward, toward their own body, by inserting arms, legs, ears, noses through the various portals. Moving farther into the space, one moves further inward; the adjacent darkened room with its covered walls directs vision as touch, inside the feeling body. 

Conversely, the static flat plane of the painting or photograph marks a boundary beyond which a viewer is only permitted to see so far. Murkerson’s body spreads and contorts over light-sensitive paper in the darkroom. Where limbs and torso eclipse the surface, a space is left open where an image may be held; body and image cohabitate and oscillate between figure and ground. In Wyant’s paintings, ambiguous forms writhe and unfold within a collapsed space. Would-be volumes are constrained by the boundaries of drawn lines and shallow perspective, as if fixed in the process of some transformative contortions. Within these still works, a kind of visual gymnastics is performed where identity is dislodged.   

Within the movement between surface and space, the visible and the withheld, an awareness unfolds that brings one back to the body; its blind spots and its limits sliding up against consciousness. 

Stillness Variations

Danny Floyd and Jeff Prokash

Exhibition Dates: October 5th - October 27, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday October 5th, 2019 from 5:00 to 8:00 PM

I should have continued to wait, should have better understood the breathing self, better forgotten the breathing body, forgotten the piano. I should have forgone any precise notion of improvisation. Instead my hands surrender to gravity and fall into an opening move I’ll describe as an eight-fingered gambit of three dissonantly offset version of the same chord dumped from a passing car. My brain jostles awake and I find myself assessing options for a next move. Don’t follow a first with a second – find another first one. I don’t know which direction I’m headed, but the fact of the piano tells me I need a plan and that’s not how to begin.

I slam out the same chord a second time.

David Grubbs’ extended prose poem Now that the audience is assembled tells a story of a fictitious performance by a musician on an unnamed instrument. First, she must piece together the instrument out of a mountain-high pile of parts mixed in with innumerable mundane objects much to the boredom, wonderment, frustration, and confusion of the audience. She tries various combinations of assemblages and tests them out. A stickler for scores played correctly in the audience is angered by this improvisation, and insists on volunteering to turn the page of the score on the music stand for her. Despite this, the composer of the piece is present and encourages the deviation, which gradually devolves into scrapping the instrument entirely and erecting a scaffolding with gongs for the audience to play.

Stillness Variations engages a dialectic between improvisation and convention concerning how constituent parts cohere with each other in such a way that simultaneously follows the logic of site-responsiveness as well as free association. The potentiality for improvisation within predetermined paradigms is a spatial — and ultimately sculptural — concern for the artists. Breaking through rigidity into spontaneous thought experiments is a social or even political act as it favors play over hierarchy and dissolves authorial motivations. Deviations from anticipated linguistic norms unlock the mystery and potential for neurodivergent thinking as a productive mode. The magnetic pull between materials and modules takes precedence over presumed architectural fixity. Inspiration comes from variations on structure found in the music of Alice and John Coltrane and the spatial text experimentations of EE Cummings, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and Aram Saroyan.

Danny Floyd is an artist, researcher, curator, and educator based out of Chicago. He is the Exhibitions Director for ACRE and a lecturer of Visual & Critical Studies and Sculpture at SAIC. He founded Ballroom Projects, an artist-run space in Bridgeport, which he ran for four years. He currently co-directs another independent gallery called Adler & Floyd. He has held curatorial residencies with ACRE and Chicago Artists Coalition. He was also awarded the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation Curatorial Fellowship in 2017.

Jeff Prokash is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator in Chicago, IL. He received his MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 and his BFA in Art and Art History from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2008. Jeff Prokash attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. He has received awards and fellowships including the Eldon Danhausen Fellowship (2015) and the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship (2015), the John W. Kurtich Foundation Fellowship (2014) and the International Sculpture Center Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2014). He attended the China Taiyuan International Metal Sculpture Symposium organized by the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2014. His exhibitions include: Re-enacting the Contents of a Box, Randy Alexander Gallery, Chicago (solo, 2017) The Duck and the Document: True Stories of Postmodern Procedures, SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles (2017), T O’ Time, Pavillon Carré Baudouin, Paris (2016) What becomes of the Hole When the Cheese is Eaten?, Randy Alexander Gallery, Chicago (solo, 2016), Ground Floor, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2016). He is currently a lecturer in the Sculpture department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Root

Work by Marine Tempels and Ben Garbus

Exhibition Dates: November 2nd - 24th, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday November 2nd, 2019 from 6:00 to 9:00 PM

In nature as in language, roots exhibit a dynamic between growth and limitation - that which keeps a thing tethered also facilitates its expansion. The paintings in this show play with similar notions of structure and expansion as they relate to the written word, theories of place, flora, and everyday quandaries. 

 Marine Tempels is a Belgian-American painter living in Chicago, IL. Her paintings explore questions such as, What does it mean to understand a place? What does it mean to take the time to understand a place? What systems have left us feeling unrooted? 

 Ben Garbus is also a painter in Chicago. His paintings supplement an interest in grammar and making and breaking one’s own rules. He grew up in Massachusetts. 

The boy who chases the rainbow

Work by Ye Seom (Seomy) and Samuel Ezra Fisch

Exhibition Dates: November 30th 2019 - January 4th, 2020

Opening Reception: Saturday November 30th, 2019 from 5 - 8pm