Posts tagged: chicago
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.
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.
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:
Andrew Mausert-Mooney’s Studio Audience (WEATHER PATTERNS)
JANUARY 11 – 16, 2013
Opening Reception: January 11, 2013 from 8-10PM
Gallery Hours: By Appointment Only
Join Andrew Mausert-Mooney and collaborators* on January 11th for an evening of cinematic vivisection.
**On one end of the gallery there is a set. An actor performs a series of gestures amidst props, camera persons, a musician, projected backdrops and a studio audience. Simultaneously, at the other end of the gallery, the resulting video piece (WEATHER PATTERNS) – restricted by frame, dismissive of scale, married by cut – is presented via live feed on a monitor.
The performance repeats, like a voice pronouncing a word until only sound can be heard, for the duration of the opening. At the end of the night a single iteration of the video is selected to run, opposite the empty set, for the remainder of the show.
This opening is produced in collaboration with ACRE Projects.
Andrew Mausert-Mooney (b. 1986) is a Chicago-based artist working with 16mm film,video, performance and installation. Andrew’s work has showed in festivals, galleries and exhibition series around the world including the American Film Institute, CineVegas, Chicago Underground, Gallery 400, the Sullivan Gallery and Other Cinema. He recently received his MFA from the University of Illinois-Chicago in the Spring of 2012.
*Kimberly Christian, Edward Dignan, Marriana Milhorat, and Tim Nickodemus
**As a preview of the work, the artist has provided the above information.
Ian Whitmore is now installed at the CTA’s Damen Blue Line station! Stop by and check out the public work! Don’t forget his opening at Johalla Projects this Saturday from 7-11PM.
NOWHERE: Photographs & Artist Books by Ian J. Whitmore
NOVEMBER 3 – DECEMBER 1, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 3, 7-11 PM
Gallery Hours: By appointment only
Nowhere is an ambiguous yet ubiquitous space. It is woven into our civic and commercial landscape as irresponsible and irrelevant decoration. In these images, we see spaces that we move through every day but rarely acknowledge for their functional purpose or aesthetic value. How we engage with these spaces speaks to how we neglectfully pass through our own culture and cities and more importantly our interactions with one another.
Through these photographs, Ian explores the ironic and garish nature of what surrounds us. By drawing the viewer into the banal and confronting the illusion that these environments are important and of interest, the mirage quickly dissolves, unveiling impotence and benign ornamentation.
Those promising paths that once led us forward, reaching into the horizon, have been cleared away and accessorized. Following the rhythm of Progress, our civic body ceaselessly expands and the horizon draws near—collapsing in on us— as it becomes clear that we have arrived nowhere in particular.
About the artist: Ian J. Whitmore was born and raised in Nebraska. He earned his BFA at University of Nebraska–Lincoln and later his MFA at Indiana University–Bloomington.
He has exhibited work nationally; most recently at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University, the Chicago Cultural Center, University of Mary Washington, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, the Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, and the South Bend Regional Museum of Art.
A former Adjunct Instructor in the Photography Department at Columbia College, Ian is now an Assistant Professor of Art at Portland State University in Oregon.
Ian is currently engaged in a long-term artist book project titled Onomasticon: A Vocabulary for Nowhere derived from the body of work you see in this installation.
For more information, contact Anna Cerniglia at johallaprojects@gmail.com.
Night Visions: New Work by Heather Gabel
OCTOBER 12 – OCTOBER 28, 2012
Opening Reception: Friday, October 12, 7-10 PM
Gallery Hours: By appointment only
While much of Heather’s earlier work deals with beautifully macabre imagery intertwined with stark lines and the graceful opulence of the past, Night Visions seeks to explore emptiness and loss, personal connectivity with the dead, and the preponderance of a spiritual after life—something more. Gabel’s new work also interrogates the inherently obsessive nature of grief while embracing the compulsive, and often consuming, self-created rituals custom-tailored to free the feelings we wish not to suffer, but the raw pathos that is unifying and undeniably human. While these experiences shape and change us; sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, a compression of time and personal, intimate histories foster an environment where a glitch in the records of memory can be highlighted, manipulated, and expressed.
The show will include new mixed media collage, photographs, prints, and shirts.
About the Artist: Born in Windsor, Canada in 1977, Heather started drawing and painting since she was a tiny child and has never stopped since. She attended the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit on a photography scholarship and finished her arts education at Columbia College in Chicago with a bachelor of Fine Arts degree. She exhibits both nationally and internationally, at present.
Her work is at once nostalgic and contemporary as she is inspired to create imagined situations culled from her best dreams and worst nightmares offering a look into what was, what is and what will never be. Experienced with many mediums, she combines, photography, painting and collage in a unique fashion to create iconic images that have a lasting impact on the viewer.
For more information, contact johallaprojects@gmail.com.
We will be posting some our Pitchfork Fest installation mentions and features over the next couple of days, so keep checking back!
Here is one feature on WBEZ 91.5′s website. They posted our time-lapse video!
Check it out here: http://www.wbez.org/blogs/bez/2012-07/pitchfork-day-1-time-lapse-art-installation-100873
Something we’re excited to announce:
New this year, Pitchfork Music Festival will feature two large-scale art installations from Chicago-based Johalla Projects. Pitchfork enlisted Johalla Projects’s Director Anna Cerniglia to produce the two installations from local-Chicago artists Matthew Hoffman and Andrea Jablonski. Hoffman will create a large sculpture next to the Blue Stage, spelling out “THESE MOMENTS” in eight foot tall wooden letters, elevated twelve feet high and 80 feet wide. Jablonski will transform the VIP Area by covering trees with hundreds of balloons of various shapes, sizes and colors, including glow-in-the-dark and LED balloons, morphing the trees into sculptures and canopies.
For more information, images or interview opportunities, contact Jaclyn Mellini, Johalla Projects Press Manager, at jamellini@gmail.com or 847.209.7426.
Check this link for more info from Pitchfork: http://p4k.in/MchFiS
