Mainspring

The most recent exhibition at ARC gallery, Mainspring, is one of harmonious combinations. Jessica Gondek has beautifully married continuing art themes including old vs. new and mechanical vs. natural. Her works are a combination of digital print and woodcut that work together to create startling images. One of her works, Fusee Pod, is an art piece that you cannot easily look away from. The bright and imperfect lines of the woodcut draw the eye in, but the 3-dimensional elements keep you there. You find yourself seeing new details that you didn't see earlier, and you wonder how these elements fuse together so harmoniously. It is a piece that one can easily get lost in and return with more questions. I would highly recommend seeing this exhibit to experience the dialogue between hand and machine.

By: Morgan Phillips

March Exhibitions at ARC

ARC member Victoria Szilagyi presents a collection of work entitled "War and Piece". The series is a combination of two different forms, one being embroidered works with ink and thread on canvas showing women in entangled positions. Her idea of how paramount the power of women is shown through the situations depicted.

She also works with encaustic, heated wax with color pigments, to create fictional scenes of tragedy, mystery and brutality. The scenes depicted leave the viewer imagining a great story, full of adventure and turns.

This exhibition is in conjunction with Mainspring by Jessica Gondek. Her abstract works are inkjet prints that reveal the process of wood cuts. Her use of line and motion give the appearance of futuristic technology. They are intriguing due to the technical processes she uses, it's easy to get lost in the process of her art making. The intermingling of new and old approaches play against each other and promote a collision between the intuitive hand derived images vs. mechanically mediated ones. On the picture plane a war is being waged between the neutrality of the computer and the fallibility of the human hand.

Differing from the other two artists, Yeohyun Ahn brings a different aesthetic to the gallery with her collection in TYPE+CODE II. She uses repetition of a single letter or symbol as a design element to create a completed form. She uses multimedia to show her creative process. She has an animation that presents the steps of her work. Her representations of typography show her fascination with language and linguistics.

These exhibitions will be the last for the gallery space on Superior Street as we prepare for our move into Bucktown. The show will be held to March 24, 2012.