Wild Fragility

December 13th, 2019 — February 9th, 2020

FEATURING BONNIE PETERSON & BETH SHADUR

Wild Fragility features painted works by Beth Shadur, and fiber works by Bonnie Peterson, addressing the impact of man’s footprint on natural lands. Through their research, both artists convey in image and text the fragility of various lands, our most pristine environments, threatened by climate change, industry, tourism and overuse. Shadur exhibits works from her National Park Project, while Peterson exhibits geoscience embroideries.

PURCHASE CATALOGUE

Through the Lens: Unbending Life

DECEMBER 13TH, 2019— MARCH 6TH

Through the Lens: Unbending Life features well known Ukrainian artists Yevgeniy Pavlov (Kharkiv, Ukraine), Sergey Melnitchenko (Mykolaiv, Ukraine) and recently discovered Sophie Yablonska who traveled around the world with a camera in hand in the 1920-1930s. Three artists breaking the boundaries of accepted norms in order to connect with new and deeper insights into the human condition.

The show is a collaboration between UIMA and Rodovid press

Image: Sophia Jablonska, from the series Southeast Asia, ca. 1932

Forgotten Forms

October 11 - December 8, 2019

Forgotten Forms is a collaborative exhibition between members of the Chicago Cultural Alliance, the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture (NMPRAC), and the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (UIMA).

Investigating seemingly everyday objects to reveal a much greater story about neighborhood identity, placemaking and city life, the exhibition highlights the work of two emerging artists, both of whom explore structural elements of urban landscapes. Edra Soto revisits Puerto Rico’s vernacular architecture through her GRAFT installations and architectural interventions, and Yhelena Hall touches on the history of Chicago and explores a marginal state of detritus becoming artifacts through her series Polished Remnants.

Yhelena Hall was born in Ukraine and studied painting and graphics at the Kharkiv State Art College when she became fascinated by iconography and folk art. In 2003-2007, she had her graphic series exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries of Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2007, Yhelena was awarded Fulbright Scholarship to obtain her MFA degree at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Concentrating in Sculpture, she developed a number of nature-based performances and process-driven sculptures, some of which were exhibited in the Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz and the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York City. After her graduation in 2009, she participated in several art residencies throughout the Eastern Europe. In 2011, she received Rinat Akhmetov’s Foundation Grant to execute her piece focusing on the consumer identity and Ukrainian entertainment industry. Currently, based in Chicago, Yhelena continues working with sculptural media utilizing a broad range of materials with mechanical and electric elements.

Edra Soto was born in Puerto Rico and is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, educator, curator, and co-director of the outdoor project space THE FRANKLIN. She is invested in creating and providing visual and educational models propelled by empathy and generosity. Her recent projects are motivated by civic and social actions focus on fostering relationships with a wide range of communities. Most recently, Soto was awarded the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship and DCASE for Individual Artist Grant from the City of Chicago. Soto has attended residency programs at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), Beta-Local (PR), and Ragdale Foundation (IL), amongst others. She is a lecturer for the Contemporary Practices Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she holds an MFA, and a bachelor’s degree from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico.

Blue Collar

Opening Reception: 6-9pm, August 9th, 2019
On display from August 9th-October 6th, 2019

Blue Collar is an exhibition that has its roots in construction both physically and theoretically. Labor lends to an appreciation of the result of the task at hand. It is a dedication. The act of “putting in work” results in something being built to further our progression. That “work” translates not only into the physical task but also influence, investigation, perspective and trust in understanding. The works of both Cleveland Dean and Anthony Adcock envelop themselves in history, a dedication to mastery and a result that reflects not only aesthetic enjoyment but deep contemplation.

Blue Collar will feature new works from both artists’ catalogues inclusive of painting, sculptures and installations. The works of Cleveland and Anthony have a symbiotic relation to each other in how both artists explore the outward perceptions of the same unconventional materials yet explore the presentation of such in vastly different ways.

Raw Reckoning

Opening Reception: 6-9pm, June 7th, 2019
On display from June 7th-August 4th, 2019

Raw Reckoning is veteran Chicago artist Michael K. Paxton’s one-person exhibition of large-scale paintings and works on paper that derive their structure from the study of slide sections of the effect of black lung disease on coalminers. Paxton, a sixth generation West Virginian creates pillar size fields of chalk, charcoal, gesso and acrylic on raw canvas that embrace this ongoing devastation from coal in an effort to point to a place and people not heard from often in contemporary art. Through a well ingrained working process of size and materials, the open-ended approach of how each painting is developed produces a colorful and awkward work of aggressive mark making that refuses to stand still. Pushing hard against expectations an otherness surrounds his work as he looks for the exact point where his bone deep Appalachian heritage can carve out a place for a heart’s desire to speak of something important, personal and yet as common as dirt. 

Michael K. Paxton many awards include a grant from the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Inc., New York; Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Visual Art Award and two Professional Development Grants; Fellowships with both Air le Parc, Project and Research Center, Pampelonne, France and Jentel Artist Residency Program, Banner, Wyoming; a Marshall University Alumni Award of Distinction; five Professional Development Grants from Columbia College, Chicago and the documentary film “Work at Hand, Michael K. Paxton” Official Selection of the 17thAnnual Great Lakes International Film Festival. Major one-person exhibitions include Miami University Museum of Art, Oxford, Ohio; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Linda Matney Gallery, Williamsburg, VA.; Heuser Art Center, Bradley University, Peoria, IL, Linda Warren Projects, Chicago, IL; Laura Mesaros Gallery, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV. He has been published in New American Paintings; featured artist/educator in issue 8 of Line Work; been the subject of both radio and television features on NPR, Chicago and WVPBS and selected and published in Art and Soul, highlighting fifty of the most noted West Virginians in the Arts. 

He is an adjunct faculty member of Columbia College, Chicago since 2005 and has BA in Art from Marshall University, 1975 and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from The University of Georgia, 1979.

Brotherland: War in Ukraine

Opening Reception: 6-9pm, April 5th, 2019

Since protests in Kyiv drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014, eastern Ukraine has been convulsed by a separatist insurgency that evolved into a full-fledged war centered in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, an industrial region known as the Donbass.

After some four years, the war grinds on, stuck in an uneasy stalemate while delivering a steady stream of death and injury. For civilians living near the line of contact or within non-government-controlled areas, conflict is like the weather, an uncontrollable fact of life that shapes one’s day-to-day existence. Everyone continues their business as best they can with a practiced sense of normalcy.

For soldiers, enthusiasm for the cause, whether fueled by propaganda or patriotism, is tempered by the toil and terror of survival.

I’ve been photographing the war, and civilian life surrounding it, since its early days in April 2014, one of very few photographers to have continually worked on both sides. My portrayal emphasizes the incongruous absurdity inherent in armed conflict, the shock of the unimaginable juxtaposed with the utterly mundane. If anything is clear, it is that war is real, and it can happen anywhere.

The New UnNatural

February 1, 2019—March 31, 2019
Opening reception: February 1, 2019, 6—9pm

Curated by Robin Dluzen and Mary Lou Zelazny

In “The New UnNatural,” seven female artists examine the modern grotesque. The genre of the “grotesque” is ancient, with examples from every culture and period. Ranging from the fanciful to the hideous, hybridized figurative forms have been used by artists around the world as satire, commentary, ornamentation and ritual. For the artists in “The New UnNatural,” Laurie Hogin, Amanda Elizabeth Joseph, Renluka Maharaj, Julie Potratz, Chloe Seibert, Maria Tomasula and Mary Lou Zelazny, the attraction to rough or deformed amalgamations is both personal and political. 

In embracing the unsettling, the absurd and the repulsive, the artists in this exhibition eschew the notion of the “beautiful,” not as a feminist critique of “beauty” or its representation in art; rather, the grotesque offers a means of coping with the rising anxieties and overstimulation of our times: a callous of sorts to strengthen one’s ability to withstand inescapable bombardment of stimuli. 

So too does the grotesque provide a vehicle for power and self-assertion, especially in the hands of women. Through the violent, technicolor chimeras of Hogin’s paintings; Joseph’s hyperreal, emphatically flawed female bodies; Maharaj’s sensual, macabre rituals; Potratz’s exaggerated, uncanny costumed performances; Seibert’s ghastly, crudely wrought faces; Tomasula’s viscous still-lifes; and the mongrel, Frankenstein-ed figures of Zelazny’s works, each artist projects a vision of the unexpectedly terrifying that reveals a visceral female sensibility.