Join us for a CLOSING RECEPTION for Todd Diederich: Luminous Flux this Sunday from 3-5PM.
Above: Todd Diederich, Silver Gate, 2013, 19 3/4 x 27 1/2 in., Archival Inkjet Print
JESSICA TAYLOR CAPONIGRO: BLACK DAMP
MAY 11 – JUNE 2, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 11 from 7-10PM
Gallery Hours: By Appointment Only
Johalla Projects is pleased to announce Jessica Taylor Caponigro: Black Damp, its first solo exhibition with Chicago artist Jessica Taylor Caponigro. The exhibition is curated by Aimee Quinkert. It will run from MAY 11 to JUNE 2. Please join us for an opening reception on Saturday, May 11 from 7-10pm.
Jessica Taylor Caponigro’s creative process explores a fascination with the vague familiarity of repetition in prosaic materials. While many of the patterns found within her work seem recognizable on a level, the themes are quite intimate and coexist with both the work’s accessibility and the artist’s personal experiences.
Black Damp examines the patterns and narrative situations translated by the film adaptation of a particular piece of literature. For example, DH Lawrence’s classic Sons and Lovers is partially responsible for some of these pieces, as they eclipse specific scenes and become more about the integral life experiences of the characters, as well as those of both the audience and the artist. The literal definition of the term “black damp” is “a non-explosive mine gas that cannot support life or flame.” Had one read Lawrence’s text or had an in-depth conversation with Caponigro about her upbringing and the historical context of the town in which she was raised, the underlying themes would be obviously parallel. Her deliberate choices affect the viewer’s perception, providing that each individual who encounters it has a somewhat communal, but uniquely distinct experience.
JESSICA TAYLOR CAPONIGRO – Before receiving her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jessica Taylor Caponigro attended Bryn Mawr College where she earned her BA in the History of Art. She has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Olive Harvey College, and Spudnik Press. She is currently an adjunct instructor at Harold Washington College. Jessica was the Spudnik Press Summer Artist in Residence and has been a resident artist at ACRE on two separate occasions. In addition to solo and group shows in Chicago, her work has been exhibited in Long Beach, Philadelphia, and Rome. Her work is in the permanent collections at California State University-Long Beach and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Books Collection. She was also featured in Johalla Projects’Wow-House group show. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
In addition to the pieces on exhibit, there will also be limited edition prints available for sale during the opening reception.
For more information, please contact Anna Cerniglia at johallaprojects@gmail.com.
If you’re in Chicago, you should check out Todd’s new exhibition at Johalla Projects on April 5th.
TODD DIEDERICH: LUMINOUS FLUX
APRIL 5 - APRIL 28, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, April 5 from 7-10pm
Johalla Projects is pleased to announce TODD DIEDERICH: LUMINOUS FLUX, its first solo exhibition with Chicago photographer Todd Diederich. The exhibition will run from APRIL 5 to APRIL 28. Please join us for an opening reception on Friday, April 5 from 7-10pm.
Todd Diederich’s photographs are cultural artifacts. The consummate anthropologist, Diederich spends time laboriously patrolling the city streets, using the camera as a method of transcription and interpretation. In its barest sense, LUMINOUS FLUX functions as an excuse to deliberate the perplexing, often bizarre personality that is Chicagoland. However, while each of Diederich’s photographs can serve as a literal document, as viewers we are transported to a different place – one bursting with character, color, and peculiarity. Claiming inspiration from the “energy sources throughout the cosmos”, Diederich has a knack for finding the pulse of the moment. It is with this very same capacity that he truly captures the flux, often discovering the very essence of human interaction and emotion. In this sense, Diederich’s LUMINOUS FLUX seizes the transformative moments of impulse and provides an opportunity to contemplate the fleeting.
TODD DIEDERICH: Creator, inventor, and channeler working through photographic imagery, digital video, and anything else that can leave a mark. Diederich is a former VICE magazine contributor and a 2010 Propeller Fund awardee. In addition to a 2011 solo exhibition at ACRE Projects, Diederich’s work has been featured in Oyster magazine, Paper Magazine, Complex, Design Bureau and the Chicago Reader. A monograph entitled Luminous Flux is soon to be released. Currently runs www.BeOddDieRich.com.
For more information, please contact Anna Cerniglia at johallaprojects@gmail.com.
YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL installed for the 35 DENTON Festival in DENTON, TX.
Find more information about Matthew Hoffman and the “You Are Beautiful” project here.
Todd Diederich
Johalla Projects Presents:
DON’T FRET: Love in the Time of Online Dating
FEBRUARY 8 – FEBRUARY 27, 2013
Opening Reception: Friday, February 8 from 7-10PM
Gallery Hours: By Appointment Only
While many street artists seem to promote a blatantly rebellious or anti-authoritarian sentiment, Don’t Fret’s work is charming and blithe with hopeful undertones. A satirist and comedian, Don’t Fret can, through his work, make almost anything lighthearted and humorous by simply dictating the context. His almost poetic text overstates the obvious while his bright imagery and oddball characters set the scene.
His latest show, Love in the Time of Online Dating, will utilize his visual rhetoric and colorful characters to help create new landscapes that pointedly communicate the sometimes obnoxiously stereotypical goings on of everyday city life. The show will also include some conceptual and interactive pieces, as well as select pieces that were on view during the 2012 Scope Fair in Miami.
Don’t Fret is a human from Chicago. Known for his quirky and colorful characters, his work has graced walls in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Miami, Sao Paulo, Berlin, Prague, and Munich in the form of wheat pastes and murals. Don’t Fret was part of the Chicago Readers “Best of Chicago 2011″ winning “Best Use Of New Style In Old Art” and runner-up for “Best New Visual Artist”. Don’t Fret exhibited during this year’s Art Basel showing at SCOPE Art Fair.
In Collaboration with ACRE Projects
AS ABOVE SO BELOW
JANUARY 25 – JANUARY 31, 2013
Opening Reception: January 25 from 8-10PM
Gallery Hours: By Appointment Only
Connecting with nature and spirituality through process and invented ritual is the driving force within both Lauren Payne and Erin Washington’s work. Their processes intersect with a mutual desire to question the unknown. Presenting new works based upon the collaborators’ return to ACRE, As Above So Below will focus on where these disparate methodologies converge.
Erin Washington embraces materiality and labor to examine themes of vulnerability and permanence. Questioning how time structures transitions in ephemera, she creates mixed-media paintings, drawings, and sculptures which unravel time through the performance of their making, and their subsequent degradation. Erin employs fugitive and symbolic materials such as blackberries, lemon-juice, fire, ashes, moss, sugar, bone and saliva. Colors fade or pigments are burned: and the resulting objects emulate the cycles they describe. Her actions and products are in a constant state of flux, highlighting the disharmony between meaning, beauty, and a fundamentally messy universe. However, the temporality of the work’s making counters ambivalence; the immediate process and present-ness the work demands eclipses uncertainty…for the moment. Erin Washington received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Selected exhibitions include MDW fair, Julius Caesar, Murdertown, Columbia College NY, and Zolla Lieberman. More information atwww.erinwashington.com
Lauren Payne’s desire to connect is steeped in creating site-specific happenings and rituals in aims of thrusting the content beyond the personal pursuit of connection into a new mythological context by creating a space for shared experiences. Her work aims to illuminate a new understanding of the metaphysical through photography, video and daily performances. Lauren Payne received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2010. Selected Exhibitions include: ACRE in Miami, Design District, Miami, Florida; My Apocalypse, Hungerford Building, Rochester; Hammes/ Payne, New Capital, Chicago, Is This Thing On, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Magic > Nature False Front, Portland; White Lodge, High Concept Laboratories, Chicago; Out of the Woods, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit; Lauren Payne lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. www.laurenpayne.com
GRAFTS & RUPTURES: NEW WORK BY JORDAN MARTINS
JANUARY 19 - FEBRUARY 12, 2013
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 19 from 7-10PM
Rational Park
2557 W North Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647
Gallery Hours: 10-4, M-F
Chicago based visual artist Jordan Martins will exhibit new collage and mixed media work at Rational Park from January 19th until February 12th. Martins’ work features intuitively crafted worlds of candy-like bold color, vintage imagery and contrasting textures. Much like the spaceships and comic book hero drawings from his youth which built up complicated surfaces and rippled muscles through brute repetition, Martins’ collages create a space where new visual languages can develop and take shape. By manipulating and layering each fragment, he builds up to a larger, more captivating form. This multidimensional mashup results in wonderful tension between the chaos of the larger composition and the orderly, contained details of collage.
The title of one recent series, Ghost Nets, references a phenomenon in which fishing net scraps co-join in the ocean to form unruly conglomerations that both create provisional ecosystems and entrap and suffocate sea life—an apt metaphor for the images within the collage that take on new meaning when bound together with other images while remaining ensnared by their previous associations. Martins’s Ghost Nets are punctuated by bold shapes and patterns with whirling, dripping masses floating atop muted painted backdrops that possess a suspended quality like the nomadic, detritus-bound sea communities for which this series is named.
Live musical performance by: Ben Babbitt
For more information regarding this exhibition or about Rational Park, please contact everyone@rational-park.com.
Johalla Projects is in collaboration with Rational Park.
