BAM! POW!

Artist, Anne Farley Gaines creates pop-up architecture with her radiantly colored Chicago Fireworks. The piece is a large-scale folding screen, built up with paper-mache and inserted with colored glass. Like any good architecture, Chicago Fireworks imparts a particular atmosphere - it is a world unto itself. Representations of Chicago landmarks - the Sears Tower, the Field Museum - are nestled in a kaleidoscopic explosion of spiraling comets, starbursts and a swirling sky, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Its vivid imagery and irregular texture create relentless movement, evoking the dynamism of the city.

By Rachel Brown

Fill My Eyes with That Double Vision

Laura Cloud and Pierre Millotte took to the sky for their collaborative effort, Sky Impressions: Double Visions Paris. For two days, they each documented the Paris atmosphere as it shifted from morning to afternoon to evening. The artistic material that resulted is two sets of comparison prints presenting divergent impressions of the same sky. The images are beautifully restrained - clearly labeled like scientific specimen and floating in side-by-side glass frames. Yet they are laced with romantic evocations of fleeting moments and the multiplicity of perspectives. Cloud and Millotte’s work documents the personal experience of perceiving and in doing, illustrates the variegated nature of reality.

Look for it at ARC today!

By Rachel Brown

Star Gazing

Homage to Miro is artist and educator, Michele Stutts’ tribute to the great Spanish surrealist, Joan Miro. Her arrangement of disparate found objects and painted splotches against a textured background brings Miro’s concepts into the third dimension. His style was “based on whimsical allusions to reality… (Metropolitan Museum of Art).” Embracing that whimsical approach, Stutts makes sly allusions to reality as well in her abstract collage. Recognizable scraps of our material world - bottle caps, ribbons, chopsticks - give substance and texture to Miro’s floating shapes. With her clever assemblage, Stutts brings Miro’s Constellations to earth.

Hurry to ARC before you miss it

By Rachel Brown

Primal Instinct

Civia Rosenberg’s Le Drape is a large -scale mixed media project composed of perforated packing material affixed to paper. Careful arrangement of these materials, however, reveal their expressive capabilities. Rosenberg tears out of them a secret torment. The perforated surface becomes the shredded remnant of some bloody event. Splashes of rust colored paint bloom into wounds. A kind of negative image of the violence that stains the tattered shard is recorded in the red and black splattering across the paper around it. Like a deteriorating carcass, the overall image confronts the viewer - forcing us to look at its insides, wrenched free and hanging limply across the wall.

Today is the last day to witness Le Drape at ARC

By Rachel Brown

Ordered Chaos

Abstract expressionist, Nancy Charak’s Ooh La La is a tangle of line and color. The stark white background, linear vocabulary and bright, primary colors create an aesthetically pleasing composition but there is madness in the violently slashed and scribbled shapes. The piece has a contained spontaneity. Although some markings stray from the bounds – mostly they are composed in a columnal stack. Faint, ghostly forms recede into the background – just memories of lines; while other, louder, more emphatic marks emerge to the foreground. At times, these undulating horizontal lines resemble erratic brain waves.

There’s something primal and child-like about this energetic, aggressive scrawl - it seems to trace unsayable sensations. The nest of lines is surrounded by a smooth expanse of calm white – like a padded cell corralling the frenzied, kinetic energy.

See it at ARC today!

By Rachel Brown

Trés Chic

In the Arts and Crafts tradition, Pamela Hobbs composes miniature scenes, photographs them and locks them away in shadowboxes. With Cartes Postales, Hobbs plays with a visceral Paris. A sepia tinged photograph of a curios cabinet is suspended against a background of craft paper printed with vintage French post cards. The cabinet within a photograph, within another cabinet creates multiple layers through which reality gets filtered until it has become a distillation – a memory of a dream of a memory.

The items in the cabinet – a high-heeled shoe, a doll head, a dress form, a dried flower – create a vignette of tiny, fetishized objects that play with conceptions of Paris as an antique city brimming with sophistication, fashion and romance. The entire composition, with its seemingly scattered post cards, like old love letters, invites the viewer to string the objects together in an imagined narrative. Encapsulated within the pine and glass box, the image seems to arrest the passing of time. It is an impression, captured like a rare butterfly beneath glass.

Today is the last day to view Cartes Postales at ARC

By Rachel Brown

Bad Girls

The term “la gancha” or “the hook,” typically refers to women who are used in organized drug trafficking to lure male victims. In La Gancha 1 & 2, Rosemary Meza-Desplas removes the veil of glamour often draped over images of female criminals. Floating against a white backdrop, female figures seem to emerge from flame decals, wielding weapons in their outstretched hands.

Consistent with Meza-Desplas’s approach to figures, she strips their bodies of the glossy veneer that camouflages the realness of the female form. As delicate as the stippled watercolors that compose their features, these women are disarming gun slingers. Subtle displays of age - sagging skin, crow’s feet, spectacles - reveal life and complexity. Meza-Desplas takes the concept of the la gancha and re-humanizes her; allowing a new image to emerge from the flames like a phoenix.

Get your fix at ARC today and tomorrow only!

By Rachel Brown

Cheri Reif Naselli has the Blues

Cheri Reif Naselli’s Le Lac is a meditation in blue. Painted on a heavy, wooden block, the image wraps around the corners in a liquid embrace. It is a simple, timeless scene: gently peaking water and above, a subtle play of light and atmosphere - recalling Dutch landscapes - all awash in milky blues.

The lack of specificity lends the piece an enigmatic haze - evocative of the mysteries contained in the rippling of any deep water. We might wonder if what lies behind those clouds are mountains or just more water. The French title might suggest Lake Geneva, however, in Chicago we know that Le Lac, or The Lake only refers to Lake Michigan. Here, Reif Naselli has created a contextually transmutable landscape that transcends place and time and in doing, reveals the continuity of both.

Come contemplate it at ARC until October 29^th

By Rachel Brown

Twisted Homage

Mirjana Ugrinov’s Homage is a series of brilliantly colored, undulant curves suspended from the ceiling. Rolling and collapsing in on themselves, the pieces are like three triumphant flags - waving in tribute to colorist masters Ellsworth Kelly and Henri Matisse.

Ugrinov took an element of Kelly’s design - irregular forms that seem to float and animate his pieces - and reinterpreted it in three dimensions. She did the same thing with Matisse’s La Gerbe; capturing the vitality of his colorful cut-out shapes in a fluid 3 dimensional design, full of movement. Ugrinov makes clever use of the simple, rectangular shape of canvas. By curling the forms she reveals secret crevices and casts shadows - poetically referencing the way the genius of our idols can both inspire and elude us.

The flags are still there until October 29^th

By Rachel Brown

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Painter, Victoria Szilagyi combined an ancient technique with some very contemporary iconography in her latest series, Machinations. The tanned, pigtailed and silicon-endowed women (or girls, it’s hard to say which) that grace each piece from the collection were culled directly from pornography stills. Szilagyi used an encaustic process to great effect, creating swirling patterns and layers of texture that pulsate with energy and animate the figures. The result is a cartoonish image of a real subject that underscores the artificiality of both. As portraits, removed from any pornographic narrative, these faces read as pained, fearful or utterly demented. However, the recognizability of their source material is like a neon sign flashing in your peripheral vision -- revealing a disturbing incongruity.

Sneak a peak at ARC until October 29^th

By Rachel Brown

Jan Parker Spins a Good Yarn

Today kicks off Ooh-La-La Chicago, ARC’s annual members show! Throughout the month, ARC blog will be giving you a sneak peak at the work of each of the members and affiliates showcased in the exhibition!

First up is recent member and multi-media artist Jan Parker whose evocative installation is elegant in its simplicity but demanding of contemplation for all of its tangled complexity. Prefabricated Happiness: A Self Portrait is a 7 lb 8 oz ball of blood-red yarn, cradled between a smooth swath of the same yarn and a shiny, new rocking chair. The piece plays with notions of motherhood and manufacturing and perhaps teases out the parallels embedded in our conception of both. The image, both gentle and jarring, contains a psychological heaviness. Even the word, “yarn” is redolent of a yearning. The fabric from certain angles appears like a pregnant belly and is indeed pregnant with the viewer’s own projections of domestic bliss - acquired, avoided or sadly lost.

Ooh-La-La opening reception is Sunday, October 9^th

By Rachel Brown