antena

Georgina Valverde: Moral Geometry

2009-11-19T19:03:00.000-08:00

Opening Friday December 4, from 6pm-10pm
December 4 - January 2, 2010

With performance by Microgig starting at 8:00 p.m.

In the introduction of The Book of Tea, Okakura Kakuzo speaks of “moral geometry” to explain how ‘The Philosophy of Tea,” or “Teaism,” embodies Eastern ideals related to purity, simplicity, and a sense of proportion to nature and the cosmos. “Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence,” says Kakuzo.

Moral Geometry makes sense out of the “sordid facts” of the quotidian: repetition, waste and consumption. Using the components of over 1600 teabags donated by friends and acquaintances, Georgina Valverde creates a body of work exploring the potential for repeated small actions to manifest form, beauty and meaning.

The centerpiece of Moral Geometry is a small building titled Teacage based on the Wardian case, a precursor of the modern terrarium. Working for the British East India Company in 1848, Robert Fortune used Wardian cases to smuggle 20,000 tea plants from Shanghai to start the first plantations in Assam, India. Teacage is a flexible structure that can be broken down into a series of screens or space dividers. As such, Teacage is a forum for performance, workshops and social encounters. The first event is a performance by Microgig. Other events will be announced.

Georgina Valverde was born in Mexico City in 1962. She has a BFA, 1987, in Painting and Printmaking and a BA, 1987, in Modern Languages from James Madison University, Va., and an MFA, 2003, from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Georgina’s work has been most recently featured at the Centro Jaime Sabines in Tuxtla Gutiérrez and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Tamaulipas, México, the University of Texas Pan-American, Edinburg, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. Her work has also been exhibited at the former Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art and the Cullacht Residency program at the Galway City Arts Center, Ireland among other venues.

This project is partially supported by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Also this month's Project Wall Space: Chris Wood

Recomposition:
The project, Recomposition, is the culmination of a five year long process. The first four years involved building the collection. It started off rather casual, but became more serious as time went on. The very initial collecting of the foods happened more out of a general aloofness toward the state of my refrigerator, but soon developed into a curiosity: What will grow next? Why are these milks aging differently? Hummus... really? In time, I grew attached to certain items of interest and refused to part with them, even at the prodding of friends, roommates and those who helped move them to a new apartment. Though the final product carries with it a touch of absurdity, it is an earnest representation of a set of objects I find interest in, particularly when viewed as a set. Through documentation and presentation, the characters are presented in a slightly more permanent, though still liminal condition.

Chris Wood, a native of Pittsburgh, earned a BFA in Illustration from the University of Dayton in 2001 and an MFA in Painting from Northern Illinois University in 2005. His work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions nationally. Currently he lives and works in Chicago, where he runs his studio and teaches at the Illinois Institute of Art Chicago. His recent work uses a diverse range of materials, from graphite, charcoal and acrylic to digital, photography, foil and food.

Opening Friday December 4, from 6pm-10pm
December 4 - January 2, 2010

ANTENA
1765 S. Laflin St.
Chicago IL 60608
www.antenapilsen.com
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
(773) 257-3534
Hours: by appointment only

Art review in the Loyola Phoenix

2009-11-11T16:19:00.000-08:00

On the state of the zombie:
Antena Gallery offers an introspective.
By by Stan Golovchuk

Walking through Zombie: A Mindless Affair, I couldn’t help but feel alive. The exhibit is an ambitious sprawl of mixed media art whose ideas on death and the unnatural manage to stand out in the onslaught of Halloween-themed entertainment offered in Chicago. Zombie could even be this season’s best kept secret, so it’s a good thing the Antena Gallery is keeping it active until Nov. 21.

Antena is a wing of Miguel Cortez’s studio apartment. Part zombie gallery exhibit, part living space surely sounds like an unnatural creation, but it’s actually less weird than it may seem.

The gallery is located in the heart of Pilsen, around the corner from the Jumping Bean Café and behind a green metal door. After knocking on the door thrice (because that seemed appropriate) I was welcomed by the smiling, laid back owner. Inside, I was led to the gallery and let loose on the exhibit. The grotesque, peculiar and chilling creations immediately absorb the viewer’s attention.

Zombie consists of 35 different works done by 32 artists. Practically every medium and material imaginable went into creating this exhibit, from oil on canvas, to film, meat, prose, leather and music, just to name a few. Every work is somehow unique and brilliant in its own way, but all together, the collection is mesmerizing.

A piece that I thought quite frightening was Andrea Jablonski’s “Clare and the Captured Moonlight.” Half of the piece is a painting of a tortured baby doll with torn hair and a gouged eye, adjacent to a bright crescent moon behind a railed window. This installation is accompanied by a clever poem that tells the story of how a doll named Clare was tormented by her owner and the revenge that followed suit.

A few feet down lies Jacob C. Hammes’ “Meat Phone.” This creation looks just like it sounds, and is vaguely reminiscent of a rejected prop from David Cronenberg’s movie, Videodrome.

On a few occasions, small or seemingly more discreet installations can startle, ones that jump out at the viewer when seen from the right angle.

Bert Stubler’s “Anabaptism” serves as a perfect example. It’s made from fimo, paint and wire, but it basically looks like an androgynous figurine sliding down the wall with a trail of blood. Its simplicity and small size might make it incongruous at first glance, but it becomes unforgettable once seen.

Some of the work is for sale, including a painting called “The Pure Harmony.” This oil on canvas painting by Vladimir Kharitonsky is priced at $3,000. If not for the cost, I would have bought it immediately. The 28” x 34” painting shows a man with a cabbage head posing next to his wife, who has a rabbit head. The work looks like a photo of an old sideshow act, both odd and intriguing. The subtle commentary on gender roles makes me wonder if it was painted after a break up.

On the opposite side of the room is a wall with two portable DVD players. At these stations, viewers can see short zombie films made by local filmmakers.

Organ Factory, which can be bought on DVD for $25, is a six-minute homage to the gore and conventions of traditional zombie cinema. Lots of organs are eaten in this short film, and the make-up looks as though legendary horror makeup artist Tom Savini might have designed it.

The other film is a funny commentary on the frustrations of dating zombie men. I’m SOOO over Zombies tells the stories of two girls and the challenges they face dating the undead. But to be honest, the women in this movie sound awfully shrewish: It’s surprising that their boyfriends haven’t eaten them yet.

The entire exhibit was put together by Cortez’s friend and contributing artist, Edra Soto. Visits are by appointment only, contact information for the artist and information on the exhibit is available at www.antenapilsen.com

Original post: http://www.loyolaphoenix.com/2.541/diversions/on-the-state-of-the-zombie-1.858989

(re)load : new media art

2009-04-29T18:49:00.001-07:00

Artists:
Catherine Forster
Amanda Gutierrez
Patrick Lichty
Shane Mecklenburger
Mari Ortiz
Rob Ray
Sara Schnadt
Michael Una

Opening Friday May 15 from 6pm-10pm
May 15 - June 13, 2009

New media art is an art genre that encompasses artworks created with new media technologies, including digital art, computer graphics, computer animation, virtual art, Internet art, interactive art technologies, computer robotics, and art as biotechnology. The term differentiates itself by its resulting cultural objects, which can be seen in opposition to those deriving from old media arts (i.e. traditional painting, sculpture, etc.). This show is a small portion of what some artists have created in Chicago.

ANTENA
1765 S. Laflin St.
Chicago IL 60608
www.antenapilsen.com
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Saturdays noon-5pm or by appointment

from Proximity Magazine

2009-04-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Primal Dildo

Paul Nudd and Nick Black at Antena
February 20 - March 21, 2009

A myth within a myth spoke to us unconsciously of a time before history in which a group of ape-people, known as the “primal horde,” cowered in fear before the arbitrary but absolute brutality of a male who neither shared nor gave away anything, but ate, penetrated, defiled, and pummeled anything and anyone he pleased. Eventually the feared male is killed, and the guilt causes the group to project reverence onto a “totem,” an animal or other such image that serves as a common ancestor and protector of the group, while the horror at communal castration causes the totem to be represented in magical erotic objects, or fetishes. Just as Freud’s archetypal birth of perversion was declared obsolete by the evolving consensus of the supposedly scientific psychoanalytic community, it became apparent that the anxiety caused by the desire to kill the violent, cruel, jealous, animalistic “primal father” was a strikingly appropriate motif for the denuded manhood of a sedentary, rootless, commodity-worshipping modern culture.

Mutant Toy by Nick Black. Courtesy of Antena Gallery.

In their show at Antena, “The Pour Rubber,” Paul Nudd and Nick Black have created a cabinet of curiosities that indexes every form of phobic jizz dripping from the hindbrain of modern masculinity. Among Nick Black’s frisky Frankensteined toy automata, a suspicious duck-billed Santa Claus farts loudly while bouncing a naked Chinese baby doll on his knee. In another, a brown-skinned baby dominatrix yanks the chain leash for a half-naked smiling white anchorman type on all fours in a little “Pet Shop” set, accompanied by the immortal strains of House of Pain’s “Jump Around.” Evil smoke pours from sundry openings in Paul Nudd’s large black sculptural heads. Nudd’s pieces also feature large drawings advertising unseemly balms, salves, and chutneys, and video screens portraying colorful fluids and solids emerging from and retreating within frantically quivering orifices. The ideas could be partially summarized as tongue-in-cheek dioramas of implied profanation, but Black’s delicate DIY engineering and Nudd’s effortless repurposing of graphic design and video production are so ruggedly handsome in their presentation than they elevate pubescent naughtiness to a level of Baroque grandeur.

This installation could be considered as a museum of triggers for anxieties linked to buried traumas and/or violations of deeply instilled boundaries. A museum, rather than a chamber of horrors, because the artists put their visual provocations into a well-lit space and abstract them beyond any clear depictions of brutality or obscenity. This taxonomically impersonal defanging of psychological and moral strictures recalls the analytical, affectless cruelty of the Marquis de Sade, a “primal father” for modernity if there ever was one.

But what the show celebrates is hilarity, playing off the letter against the spirit of laws around taboo. Black and Nudd express their mischief through imaginative fetishistic props that create erotic drama, a practice Gilles Deleuze associates with Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, namesake of sadism’s partner syndrome, masochism. Deleuze claims, opposing him to Sade, that “Masoch aspires to a world of suspense and waiting, and thus aestheticizes the real as a series of tableaux vivants.” These fetishes erase the “lack” of the mother’s phallus, and so this immersively titillating show leaves us with the secret truth of our era: the “primal father” is a dominant mother, an amazon lurking in the scat-fantasies of a few dozen generations with no fatherhood ideal. But through the corrosive power of office humor, the male employee of the MILF CEO secretly retains control. Without apology or vulgarity, Black and Nudd’s elegantly crafted work portray dilemnas at the heart of the modern gender divide with tenderness and some uncanny awe.

by Bert Stabler

http://proximitymagazine.com/2009/04/primal-dildo/

secret school opening april 3, 2009

2009-04-04T13:37:00.000-07:00

See photos from the opening here:
PICASA: http://picasaweb.google.com/lapsus05/SecretSchoolAntena02#
or FLICKR: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lapsus5/sets/72157616260972589/

next show opens April 3, 2009

2009-03-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

Secret School 05: Food at Antena, Chicago
In Collaboration with Alexander Stewart

Also this month:
Project Wall Space: Anni Holm
Monthly Video Series: Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Secret School is pleased to collaborate with Alexander Stewart to examine the importance of food in fostering social networks and the possibilities of barter exchange in decentralizing market systems. A food for art supply swap will begin the event at 6PM and last until 8PM, followed by a 90 minute program of videos that explore cultural relationships with food, including those of Patty Chang, Cecilia Ramirez-Corzo, Joey Frank, Andy Cahill, Liz Magic Laser and Dafna Maimon, Sophia Peer, Karen Tam, Pizza Dog, and a few other food-themed surprises. Secret School and Stewart will issue a corresponding book of recipes, essays, and anecdotes about food.

Bring a homemade dish or art supplies for entry. Arrive early for the swap, stay for the screening.

Return for open format crafting and snacking sessions, a.k.a. Crafternoons.
Noon-5PM every Saturday from April 4 - May 2. Bring snacks, crafts, and friends.

Secret School explores the importance of the hidden and invisible in the social identity of a community through a series of time-based events and collaborations. Ranging from the political to the personal, epic to the quotidian, unknown to unknowable, how do secrets function in the transfer and preservation of power? At a time in which oversaturation of readily available information already exceeds our capacity for adequate synthesis, how can the poetics of secrets cut through the logic of facts? When does the form of a secret supersede its content, and under what circumstances must information remain a secret? Secret School spans an indefinite number of sessions and range of spaces and extends from the aesthetic practice of building systems of social exchange.

For more information, visit secretschool.wordpress.com or email s3Cr37.5ch00l@gmail.com

Opening Friday April 3, 2009 from 6pm-10pm
April 3 - May 2, 2009

ANTENA
1765 S. Laflin St.
Chicago IL 60608
www.antenapilsen.com
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Saturdays noon-5pm or by appointment
773.344.1940

Refreshments provided by Red Stripe:

review in the Chicago Weekly

2009-03-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

The Surreal Life: Paul Nudd and Nick Black bring the weird to antena gallery
Written by: Melanie Treuhaft

One of Nick Black's Mutant Toys; courtesy of antena gallery

It was cold enough outside to catch me off-guard with the momentary conviction that Santa had set up shop in Miguel Cortez’s antena gallery. Sounds of running motors and clicking machinery came from an array of colorful objects placed sporadically throughout the room, creating a mechanical harmony. Viewers engaged with their surroundings, pulling knobs and tinkering with little objects: experiencing the artwork required participation. But the wholesome aspect of this first impression was disrupted upon surveying the small, high-ceilinged space more closely. The contraptions lining the walls revealed themselves not as charming teddy bears and dolls, but instead as mildly perverted reconstructions of old children’s toys. Artist Nick Black had dismantled the playthings, rearranged parts, and reassembled them into an “Orgy of Mutant Toys.”

Rubber seems to be almost entirely absent from the scene…until one sees it seeping through the walls by way of Paul Nudd’s drawings. Slimy greens and dirty browns assume organic forms resembling hairy amoebas and other oozing blobs. Each drawing features a short message, either a humorous catchphrase or a random combination of words, absorbed into the flow of the composition.

Nudd also furnishes the gallery with a large, black, smoke-emitting sculpture which blends in with its environment by clouding its own image. One corner of the room is dominated by its four hollow heads, each taller than the people staring through its eyes to the back inside surface. Each is connected to a tubular post, all four of which merge into one long tube at the base. A smoke machine positioned at the opening of the communal tube generates white smoke which slowly creeps into the room through the facial orifices. After a few rounds of smoke machine magic, the small room takes on a hazy atmosphere through which the distorted sculptures shimmer like relics from mystical religious ceremonies.

Amid the drawings, the mutant toys, and the four-headed smoke beast, podiums are dispersed throughout the room, supporting more darkly fanciful works of sculpture. This almost cluttered organization creates a surprisingly comfortable space in which viewers can feel right at home. Despite what some would probably consider unsettling imagery, the room facilitates a friendly, open environment in which to embrace such a collection. The curator seems to have meticulously thought out and arranged the objects in the space. What could have easily turned into a random muddle is successfully distributed throughout the gallery. In addition, the warm lighting helps maintain an atmosphere at ease with the disturbing art objects.

At the opening, Black fit right into the scene. He hurried to join any interested viewers, excited to share the story of the piece before them. His enthusiasm illustrates the vibe of the gallery and the type of genuine enthusiasm about experimentation in the arts that antena promotes. In the spirit of Cortez’s space, everyone excitedly engages with the art before them and shares ideas about new projects and events.

Black and Nudd have successfully created an environment in which the fanciful and bizarre both find a comfortable retreat. But while the installation provides an interesting aesthetic challenge, the art maintains itself at a certain relational distance from the observer. There is limited potential for breaking the ice between the fluidity of human emotion and the explicit absurdity of the images. That said, if you find yourself having a weird day, this exhibit will be thoroughly engaging, even refreshing.

antena gallery, 1765 S. Laflin St. Through March 21. Saturday, noon-5pm or by appointment. (773)344-1940. antenapilsen.com

http://chicagoweekly.net/2009/02/26/the-surreal-life-paul-nudd-and-nick-black-bring-the-weird-to-antena-gallery/#more-987

The Pour Rubber

2009-01-26T16:04:00.000-08:00

"The Pour Rubber"
Individual & Collaborative Works by Paul Nudd & Nick Black

Opening Friday February 20, from 6pm-10pm
February 20 - March 21, 2009

The Pour Rubber is... Black Nudd - Smoldering Heads - ThunderCRUSTS - Two Rerouted Thrift Store Fog Machines - Black Blisters - Feb-lloweenies - Oozing Pour Rubber - Inflatable Heads - Open Rivers of Primal Muck - Werewolves in Pilsen - Double Tongues - Black Bush Cream - Canned Crusts - (((Wonky Thunderstick SOUND))) - Bathroom Glowballs - Double Deer Head Karaoke - Inflatable Godhead & Hair Gel Fountains - An Orgy of Mutant Toys - Melted Fun - Hyperactivity - Skunk Apes - Murky Streams of Ripened Sludge - Gallons of Sticky Fog Juice - Black Pig, Dog & Ape Tongues - Seven Heads & Headstones - Misc. Black Salves, Creams, Balms & Chutneys - Black Bush Pus - Rubber Masks in Black - Hard Black Great Stuff - Pour Rubber Molten Flesh - (((BLACK NUDD : NUDD SOUND))) - Thunderlusts - Warm, Slimy Cakes of Fake Rare Meat - Cave of the Mounds - Forty Black Dog & Donkey Tongues in Sticky Sweet Creams - KlusterLUSTS - Oceans of Dried Rubber - Black Fun Furs & Clays - Old Crusted Wigs and Loose Black Curly-Q's - Modern Art - Weeping Death Heads - Portraits of the Doomed - Rubber Blubber

Keith Herzik poster and Michael Bulka writing available.

PLUS!!!

"Beneath the Human Soul There Runs a River of Sludge: An Exhibition of Anonymous Children's Drawings from the Collection of Paul Nudd"

Nick Black was born in Chicago in 1958. He has attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts College of Art. Recent exhibitions include Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Uncle Freddy's Gallery, Highland, IN, and Joymore, Buddy Space, and Klein Art Works, all in Chicago. Nick has had key works at Art Chicago, the Stray Show, Version Fest, and the New Chicagoans.

Paul Nudd was born in Harpenden, England in 1976. He graduated in 2001 with an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Recent exhibitions include Jack the Pelican Presents, Brooklyn, Western Exhibitions, Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.

antena
1765 S. Laflin St.
Chicago IL 60608
www.antenapilsen.com
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Saturdays noon-5pm or by appointment
773.344.1940

article by Daniel Tucker

2009-01-22T16:09:00.000-08:00

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #2: Groups and Spaces

by Daniel Tucker

Hey Obamacrats! Lets learn about Chicago!

Since the time of my first article in this series on social/political art in Chicago, the whole world has had an introduction to this city through the lens of Barack Obama – who adopted the city as his hometown 20 years ago. What this event means for the world is yet to be seen. What this event means for Chicago is that the local culture and politics are going to come under greater scrutiny and more people are going to be trying to learn about and be introduced to this city.

The extraordinary amount of cultural production in Chicago wasn’t missed by Obama in his time in the city – he was actually on a foundation board (the Woods Fund) that gave out grants to community organizers and socially engaged art.

Visitors observations of artistic practice in Chicago consistently cite an extreme commitment and openness to collaboration. It could be that this derrives from some lack of pretention or commitment to egalitarian living. It could also be a pragmatic response to scarity of resources for cultural work. Regardless of the root cause, the city is undoubtedly ripe with art collectives and small collaborative initiatives. Interestingly, a number of those groups actually run cultural spaces or venues. Both the groups and the spaces will be discussed here, in an attemp to give an international audience a sense of the range of practices coexisting in this newly founded Obamaland.

One key art group HAHA began in 1988, initiated by Wendy Jacob, John Ploof and Laurie Palmer. Their twenty year long practice shifted focus regularly from the highly local and public to whimsical works made for galleries and museums throughout Europe and the U.S. Their forms ranged from Flood - a storefront community center on the north side of the city where vegetables for AIDS patients were grown and distributed, to a rooftop advertising unit on a taxi cab which could be programmed with site-specific text messages controlled by a GPS unit. Their approach to community, participation and pedagogy has had a strong influence on the local art scene, not least of which on the group Temporary Services (TS) directed by Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. TS has strongly defined the field of collaborative art in the city, with over ten years of public work, self-publishing and the facilitation of at least three different venues for presenting the work of other artists. TS’s work about ecology and economy has had a clear influence on collectives like Material Exchange, JAM, People Powered and InCUBATE. Their approach has made the nature and style of collaboration their material and subject matter with a number of projects literally dealing with how groups work together – most notably in their recent book simply entitled “Group Work.” As a group they have collaborated closely with other artists like Brendan McGaffey, Melinda Fries of ausgang.com and the couple duo Rob Kelly and Zena Sakowski aka The Biggest Fags Ever – sometimes leading to the renaming of a super-group known as the Biggest Temporary Gang Ever!

TS maintains groupsandspaces.net, a virtual platform for documenting collaborative art practice and has initiated a venue for forming new collaborative relationships known as Mess Hall – another storefront on the north side of the city just blocks away from where HAHA produced Flood in the mid 1990s. Five years later Mess Hall has minimal involvement from the original TS members and is run by a group of “keyholders” who are responsible for maintaining and coordinating the space’s weekly free events ranging from yoga to sewing workshops to reading groups and lectures by traveling activists and thinkers.

Other groups running venues in the city include the artist-run bookstores Golden Age and No Coast, both in the southern Pilsen neighborhood. Just down the street is Antena, the project space of Miguel Cortez and the Polvo collective who have also run magazines and galleries together for ten years.

Publishing and the administration of venues seem to go hand in hand. Three other important spaces – the Green Lantern Gallery, ThreeWalls residency and gallery, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere all publish their own magazines and pamphlets. All three venues are committed to educational festivals, seminars and workshops. They have also been committed individually and collaboratively to cataloging the proliferation of “alternative spaces”, non-commercial galleries and the ubiqutous apartment galleries that Chicago is known for. One important apartment gallery to collaborate with nearly everyone mentioned in this series is Vonzwek, founded by Philip Vonzwek in 2005.

Fortunately the city boasts several theoretically oriented group learning projects, including ARC109, Finding Our Roots, Freedom School Communiversity, Chicago Political Workshop/49^th st. Underground, the Midwest Radical Cultural Cooridor, Platypus and FeelTank. The latter three have strong commitments to considering the intersections of art and politics. All of the projects have significant, though unofficial, connections through their membership to local universities – leaving the significant challenge of making rigerous educational projects trancend the academy partially unresolved. Their contribution to the intellectual and theoretical development of the city’s self-identified political artists is hugely important.

The city has a rich theater tradition exemplified in the 200 producing neighborhood based theaters, forming an impressive constallation of hyper-local live entertainment within walking distance of peoples homes. David Issacson of Theater Oobleck has said “it is a point of pride that Chicago does political theater.” The theater scene is divided from the visual arts community, which is unfortunate because their physical infrastructure of venues could easily facilitate collaboration with other disciplines, serving as a home to multi-use activities of other artists and activists operating without a stable home.

There are a number of performance troupes blurring the lines between visual and performing arts with their art actions including Lucky Pierre, Chicago County Fair, the Neofuturists, and the now defunct Goat Island. Groups like the Drag Kings and Teatro Luna put gender politics on the stage, while the FeFees, Young Women’s Action Team and the now defunct Pink Bloque took them to the streets.

Public art groups like CAFF Collective, You Are Beautiful and Anti Gravity Surprise ask people to participate in the production of their own public space. Similarly, the youth-centered art groups Cooperative Image Group, University of Hip Hop and Kuumba Lynx all blend street art and graffiti in public space with Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspired educational and political work.

This city is indeed ripe with collaborative and social art and venues that faciliate its presentation and evolution. Without being able to pinpoint the source or motives for this, it is undoubtedly a virtue and a feature which makes working here easier and more sustainable for those interested in cultivating an artistic practice which can hope to transcend the logic of the commodity.

My previous article in this series dealt with the local history which preceeded these examples of groups and spaces. The next article will deal with the institutions both large and small, which hold the city’s culture together, or in some cases which keep it from evolving.

Daniel Tucker is the editor of AREAChicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

the first 2009 art opening

2008-12-19T17:59:00.001-08:00

Sebastian Alvarez

Project Wall Space: Huong Ngo
Monthly Video series: Patrick Holbrook

Opening Friday January 9, 2009 from 6pm-10pm
January 9 - February 7, 2009

"Words feel beneath" by Sebastian Alvarez is a piece that exists in different forms, as an image, as an installation, and as a performance. This work reflects about the human relation with the earth, the disappearance of the language of storytelling, and the environments to which we depend in order to create culture. What has ultimate value, is not what is measured and seen but what exists in the many realms of meanings and connections that lie beneath the tangible realities of the world, linking all things.

Sebastian Alvarez, born in Lima, Peru, is an interdisciplinary performance artist, who is interested in transforming his personal vision into social responsibility with new cultural imperatives that include a renewed sense of community, an ecological reintegration, and greater access to the mythic and archetypal bases of bio-restoration.

Also this month
Project Wall Space: Huong Ngo

Bio:
"Though I grew up in the verdant piedmont area of North Carolina, one of my earliest memories is closely inspecting the minute grid of a window screen and imagining the endless horizon of high-rise buildings in my birthplace, Hong Kong. Mine was one of only a handful of Vietnamese families in this area which Nascar racers and elementary school teachers alike fondly call "The New South." As a child, I devoted all of my creative energies towards making wearable gifts for loved ones, which they typically used once and then politely hid away. By middle school, I had already raised a brood of baby hamsters, started a small business, and learned to sew with a machine. With these achievements under my belt, I began reading only psychology textbooks, absurdist plays, and science journals in my attempt to understand the world.

My art investigates the tenuous nature of survival. Born as a refugee, my experiences are shaped by a sense of statelessness, flux, and displacement. I explore these themes to their utopian and dystopian ends through the creation of shelter, both physical and psychological. I appropriate futurist aesthetics to reposition the story of the refugee as contemporaneous with mythologies of the modern nomad. I combine the language of design and craft movements with the use of recycled industrial materials in order to challenge traditional notions of technological progress and question dominant modes of consumption and production. At the same time, I use strategies of collaboration, humor, and play, to allow for new economies of personal exchange and broach darker aspects of humanity such as war, fear, and isolation.

I received my MFA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and my BFA from the University of North Carolina. I have exhibited my works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the National Gallery in Prague, the Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco, the Neuberger Museum at SUNY Purchase, the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, as well as numerous non-profit and artist-run spaces. I have received the LMCC Swing Space Grant, the Chashama artist studio, and the Community Arts Assistance Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs."

Monthly Video series: Patrick Holbrook

Bio:
Patrick Holbrook lives and works in Chicago. His work examines the spaces and movements of commodities and people, the intersections of power structures, ideological expression in engineered and cultural forms, cultural memory, and speculative possibilities of alternative ways of living. Based in video and digital media, but including other materials and objects, it has been shown at venues such as the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, and in solo exhibitions at Eyedrum and the Saltworks Gallery Project Room in Atlanta, A\V Space in Rochester NY, and Washington State University Tri-Cities. He is an Adjunct Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College, has been a visiting artist at Rhode Island School of Design, Scripps College, and The University of Memphis, and was an Assistant Professor at the Georgia College & State University Art Department from 2002 to 2007, where he started the digital media area. He grew up in New Hampshire and received an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, a B.A. from Hampshire College, and plays music with The Wood Knots.

antena
1765 S. Laflin St.
Chicago IL 60608
www.antenapilsen.com
antenapilsen (at) gmail.com
Saturdays noon-5pm or by appointment
773.344.1940

antena @ bridge art fair in miami

2008-11-19T18:34:00.001-08:00

Antena @ Bridge Art Fair Miami Beach
December 4-7, 2008

BRIDGE MIAMI BEACH
Following its enormous critical and commercial successes in 2006 and 2007, Bridge is pleased to announce our third installment in Miami Beach. Held at both the Catalina and Maxine Hotels, Bridge Miami leads the South Beach satellite art market, located a mere two blocks from Art Basel. Visitors can browse nearly 80 rooms of the freshest and most innovative works in international emerging and contemporary art.

Arguably the largest convergence of contemporary art and design takes place during Art Basel Miami in this annual, star-studded, citywide celebration of new art internationalism. Consistently a muscular destination market, Miami shows absolutely no signs of stopping, and continues to astound as far and beyond the top-performing art-fair circuit in the United States.

The Catalina and Maxine Hotels
1732 Collins Avenue
Miami, Florida
GOOGLE MAP

ANTENA
Room #201

Artists exhibiting with Antena:
Edra Soto
Gisela Insuaste
Gretel Garcia
Huong Ngo
Jaime Mendoza
Jesus Oviedo
Miguel Cortez
Saul Aguirre

See full schedule HERE

Time Lapse: a video art group show

2008-11-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

Time Lapse:
a video art group show curated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin

Works by:
Bidzina Kanchaveli
Joseph Winchester
Leanneau White
Arthur Augustynowicz
Robert Milton
and more...

Opening Friday November 21, 2008 from 6pm-10pm
November 21 - December 20

Time Lapse is last in a series of four exhibitions: Time Travelers, Time Machine, Time Lapse, and Time Lapse: Antena, curated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin. Time Travelers, was shown at Polvo in Chicago, 2007; Time Machine in Washington DC at Meat Market Gallery this past summer; Time Lapse in Nashville, Tn at Vanderbilt University and Time Lapse: Antenna will be shown in the same Chicago space where the project began bringing us back in time to the beginning.

Time Lapse is single channel video art show; all videos are displayed through a single projector one after another in the style of film screenings and time-lapse photography. Time unfolds and is captured systematically by an optical lens and/or digital media, the subjects of the videos are often overlapping, there is not an intimate knowing but a careful study of sequence, there are also holes, lapses and mistakes, there are doubts in the work.

And while it may appear obvious to time travelers that there need only be ONE time based art show for travelers to coordinate their time machines to that exact date and place, no time traveling devices were detected at the first show and the subsequent efforts have been made to make sure there is progress in this time space continuum while leaving open the idea that once this information is recorded it will likely be changed by the time travelers, machines and lapses who frequent these events from a future and past date in "time".

Amelia Winger-Bearskin is a Video/Performance Artists who is currently teaching at Vanderbilt University, Nashville Tn in the areas of Video, Performance and Drawing. She is a featured artists for the Perpetual Art Machine [PAM] and is currently creating solo video and installation works about Andrew Jackson and his home in Nashville Tn. She is also currently working on a new series of video art curations in the near future.

Patrick Lichty's opening

2008-10-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Antena featured in the Chicago Reader

2008-09-11T21:37:00.000-07:00

Best Bets | Antena

In 1996 Miguel Cortez cofounded Polvo, a Pilsen collective whose ventures included print and online magazines and one of the city’s best independent galleries. Polvo closed the gallery in 2007, but Cortez’s new space, Antena, is keeping up the same high standards of diverse and thought-provoking work. October brings a solo show by Patrick Lichty, whose CV includes work with anticorporate pranksters RTMark. Lichty’s Spire Reloaded comprises various electronic depictions of Berwyn’s late, beloved “car-kebab,” from straight-up photos to an online “virtual sculpture” and a ten-minute expansion of the 12-second appearance of the spire in Wayne’s World.

That’s followed in November by Time Elapse, curated by Amelia Winger-Bearskin, who’ll present her own video art as well as that of a selection of artists largely from Austin, Texas. A trained opera singer, Winger-Bearskin takes a meditative approach to everyday experiences, creating mesmerizing work that combines the layered harmonics of mantra-like vocals with blurry, manipulated imagery of landscapes and bodies. A continuation of a project begun last year at Polvo, Time Elapse will also feature work by Joseph Winchester—whose elegant abstractions evoke the history of experimental film, video, and sound art—and Lanneau White, whose lo-fi battledork aesthetic evokes the west coast performance troupe, My Barbarian, and the Dungeon Majesty fantasy serial, but adds depth by addressing issues of race and otherness. Antena is just one facet of the bustling Pilsen art world; Plaines Project, Vega Estates, No Coast, and Golden Age are all worth visiting in the coming months too. Arrow Spire Reloaded opens Fri 10/10, 5 PM, and runs through 11/8. Time Elapse opens Fri 11/21, 6 PM, and runs through 12/20. Sat noon-5 or by appointment, 1765 S. Laflin, antenapilsen.com. —Albert Stabler

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/fallarts08/art/antena/

Jaime Mendoza opening night - August 29, 2008

2008-09-03T17:31:00.000-07:00

see more photos here: http://picasaweb.google.com/lapsus05/JaimeMendozaOpeningAugust292008Antena?pli=1#

article in NEW CITY

2008-09-03T17:20:00.000-07:00

Fall Openings: Art Not Necessarily for Sale

Many new and established art galleries function as gallery spaces and homes. Outside the clusters of galleries, these spaces, such as Pilsen’s Antena, Oak Park’s Suburban and Albany Park’s Swimming Pool Project Space make room for art beside the furniture. Profit is not the motive; rather, it’s all about exposure, for artists and viewers, and creative expression. “We have an art world that doesn’t value artists,” notes Michelle Grabner, co-owner of the nine-year-old Suburban gallery. “Dealers and curators are running the shots, artists really don’t have the kind of control and decision making they once had.”

Filling that void, art spaces such as Suburban and Antena allow artists free reign in terms of artistic and curatorial control. Antena, a new space that opened in March, is run out of founder Miguel Cortez’s apartment. “Artists are allowed to repaint the walls, transform the space for a show,” Cortez says, who shifted focus to his new space after running Pilsen’s Polvo gallery for years. Polvo continues to publish a quarterly magazine with artist profiles.

Art openings at both Suburban and Antena provide a gathering spot for the arts community. At Suburban, openings now take place on Sunday afternoons in the yard of Grabner’s house, with bratwurst and beer during the warm months, coffee and sweets during the winter. Antena’s openings, which take place in Cortez’s apartment, are equally informal. And through these events artists gain access to networks and visibility.

“We are neither a commercial nor a non-profit space,” notes Grabner. And the same goes for Antena, which aims to be a forum for artists in need of a middle ground alternative space.

Swimming Pool Project Space, opened July 2008, appearing as a commercial storefront, provides a springboard for emerging contemporary artists from Chicago and abroad. Pool parties—openings that take place around the glossy blue wooden floor that resembles a swimming pool—provide a place for artists and community members to interact. “This where people meet, artists or not, it’s public space where conversation occurs, not a bar but an art space,” says co-owner Liz Nielsen. The next exhibition, “Video as Video: Rewind to Form,” is curated by art critic Alicia Eler and artist Peregrine Honig, and opens September 20. (Marla Seidell)

http://art.newcity.com/2008/09/03/fall-openings-art-not-necessarily-for-sale/

Tania Kupczak review from Timeout Chicago

2008-08-07T19:17:00.001-07:00

Tania Kupczak

Tania Kupczak, 3 losses (still), 2008.

A young woman in a heavy coat trudges through snow-covered fields. It’s unclear how much fun this is for her, but on a hot Chicago summer day, Seattle-based artist Tania Kupczak’s encounter with the deep snows of Vermont—the subject of her video 3 losses (2008)—is a refreshing reminder we won’t always feel as though we’re moving through a soup of grime and humidity.

In the video, the artist’s ambiguous voiceovers allude to romantic troubles without specifying what has happened or who was involved. The second of its three sections, which begins with a tearful Kupczak lying in the snow and ends with her calmly continuing her journey, clearly suggests a connection between her stormy external and internal conditions. But this isn’t a cheesy chick flick: Kupczak cleverly incorporates the weather into the monologues she delivers to unseen listeners, explaining that one relationship featured “a flurry of touches, but no accumulation.”

In her mixed-media installation snow_leylines (2003), Kupczak plays a recording of herself walking the same path through the snow at different times. As we hear every crunch and crackle of her steps when the temperature is low and then watery, sliding sounds as it rises into the 40s, the artist’s catalog of her everyday movements—she recites the temperature and other details (“full moon”)—leaves us in a meditative state. Kupczak’s meteorology-inspired abstract “system maps” (pale networks of symbols such as clouds and raindrops) are less compelling than her video and audio work, in which she reveals the beauty of our mundane struggles with winter.

— Lauren Weinberg

-----Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick preview----

2008-06-05T23:21:00.000-07:00

review in Chicago Weekly newspaper

2008-05-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

What Makes a Man Start Fires?: A new exhibit at the antena gallery mediates the relationship between the viewer and the world

By Emma Ellis

You haven’t felt the meaning of stimulus overload until you’ve felt it in the hands of artist Noelle Mason. Immediately upon walking into the one-room antena gallery, a barrage of slaps, gasps, and giggles welcomes the newcomer. You progress through the physically interactive show, weaving across cables, tiptoeing over broken bits of a chandelier that lies crashed in the center of the gallery’s floor, and bending over to view certain pieces properly. While standing near the two walls where about half the pieces are located, you can’t even step backwards without bumping into “Li’l Sparky”—an electric chair.

Using an intrusive shock therapy-type method, Noelle Mason created the show “What makes a man start fires” with the intention of getting people “to act, to really metaphorically start this fire—to cause change towards something that is better for us as a society.” Much of her work in the show serves to demonstrate how inured the audience is to what she calls “mediating objects,” and force viewers’ participation in ideas from which their culture tends to distance itself.
In “Bob and Weave,” for example, the audience witnesses a video of a fistfight between Mason and a large man projected onto a wall. As the tussle progresses, Mason’s bloodied face bumps in and out of the camera’s frame, the back of her opponent’s head impeding our view most of the time. The viewer is confronted with an image physically too large and too loud to avoid.

Mason’s other visual work is geared to achieve a similarly jarring response. She explains that, normally, “the television is kind of a wall, but also a window in some ways.” The television screen, like a car’s windshield or a white picket fence, is a “mediating object” in that it serves to separate the viewer from what it portrays. The show, however, compels the viewer to transgress these divisions and in so doing makes the audience more aware of the gap created by such mediating objects.

After taking part in “Mise en Scene,” another work that creates understanding by involving the viewer, one cannot help but wonder how many television screens it takes to make us savages. During “Mise en Scene,” the screens serve as a visual gateway to the interior of a white eight by eight foot cube, within which a barely clothed performer stands on a box with wire electrodes attached to her legs and arms. The viewer watches and listens to a television video of other viewers pressing a red button and observing, on another television set, the woman convulsing in pain.

The video-recorded audience members sought to connect with the woman inside the box, but as one of the audience members shrewdly observed, “the only way to communicate with her is to shock her.” In a telling shot a man with black-rimmed glasses repeatedly jabbed the button while looking at the screen, and turned to an off-camera friend while laughing and pointing at the television.

Mason also uses mediating objects to explore the transformation of traditionally cherished American individualism, which she describes “as a very noble kind of effort that got mangled and turned into [a] fearful position where you lock yourself inside of your tract home.”

In the piece “Open House,” the viewer is treated to posters of the detailed architectural plans of “Cul de Sac,” which the program says was made “using prefabricated building materials” such as plastic siding, and then watches a video performance of Mason and several others who built themselves inside this suburban equivalent of Thoreau’s house on Walden pond. It might take more than an axe and some whiskey to change the new individualism they are fighting, but at that moment that’s all it takes to destroy the pristine house from the inside out.

antena, 1765 S Laflin St. Through May 24. Saturday, 12-5 pm, or by appointment. http://www.antenapilsen.com/current.html

photos from Noelle Mason show

2008-05-10T14:17:00.000-07:00

Noelle Mason

2008-05-09T10:12:00.000-07:00

CRAZY: Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick

2008-05-05T18:29:00.000-07:00

CRAZY
Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick

Opening Friday June 6, 2008 from 6pm-10pm
june 6 - july 5

"Love can sometimes be magic. But magic can sometimes just be an illusion."
- Ali Javan (Inventor of the gas laser)

Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick are artists and ex-lovers. Their show, Crazy, brings together artwork that deals with love, intimacy, illusions and magic. There's an interaction of these terms that coexist and mingle to create an area that can be perceived as love or the absence of it. The artists question this interaction and how its plays into their personal lives and how its exists within social paradigms. The materialization of this is evident in things like personal ads. love songs, glamor shots and perfume.

Gretel Garcia Cuba was born in Havana Cuba and raised in Miami Florida since the age of 3. She received her BFA from the University of Miami with a concentration in Sculpture and a minor in Print-making. Her exhibitions include 15/Caliber (Barbra Gilmen Gallery- Miami), No Home Show (curated by Robert Chambers, Home of Eugena Vargas, Miami), Blanc,( Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington D.C.), Echelon: who is watching you? (POLVO, Chicago), Stiching Deluxe (Orleans Street Gallery, Chicago) and more recently several exhibitions in Happy Dog Gallery in Chicago. Her curatorial work includes the Motel Show - a one night exhibition in the San Juan Motel in Calle Ocho of Miami. She currently resides in Chicago.

Frank Wick was born the morning of December 4th,1970 in southern Illinois. Since then he has managed to show artwork at the Miami Art Museum, Projektraum 54 in Basel Switzerland, 2020 Projects in Miami and had his one and only solo show at The University of Tennessee Chattanooga: White Elephant. He pays his taxes like everyone else, eats and drinks too much and generally makes an attempt at keeping sane in light of what could be considered a mad world. His work tends to reflect upon that world and its inherent problems. He once said, quietly, “The world is grossly over-populated.” He didn’t elaborate but continued to sip his beer and stare at the Joey-heavy episode of Friends on the television mounted above the bar. He was also heard to mutter, “ Fuck all this. ” The statement went largely unnoticed but the sentiment was there. Frank works in a major natural history museum faux-painting replicas and making mounts for prehistoric objects and Native American artifacts.

DOWNLOAD PDF (1.2mb) PRESS RELEASE HERE

antena
1765 S. Laflin, St.
Chicago, IL 60608
info (at) antenapilsen (dot) com
myspace: http://www.myspace.com/antenapilsen
Hours: saturdays Noon-5pm or by appointment

current show recommended by timeoutchicago

2008-05-02T18:22:00.000-07:00

Art & Design

Time Out Chicago / Issue 166 : May 1–7, 2008

Dust might

Noelle Mason, Bob and Weave, 2008.

Polvo’s closure last December was a sad loss for Pilsen’s gallery scene. But cofounder Miguel Cortez says antena, his new project space around the corner, should pick up where Polvo—which took its name from the Spanish word for dust—left off. In antena’s first show (“What makes a man start fires?”) Noelle Mason uses cultural phenomena such as Superman’s X-ray vision to investigate America’s violent and security-obsessed culture. It runs through May 24.

— Lauren Weinberg

tonight's opening

2008-04-25T21:46:00.000-07:00

Noelle Mason

2008-04-24T18:16:00.000-07:00

antena

Georgina Valverde: Moral Geometry

Art review in the Loyola Phoenix

On the state of the zombie:Antena Gallery offers an introspective.By by Stan Golovchuk

(re)load : new media art

from Proximity Magazine

Primal Dildo

secret school opening april 3, 2009

next show opens April 3, 2009

review in the Chicago Weekly

The Pour Rubber

article by Daniel Tucker

the first 2009 art opening

antena @ bridge art fair in miami

Time Lapse: a video art group show

Patrick Lichty's opening

Antena featured in the Chicago Reader

Jaime Mendoza opening night - August 29, 2008

article in NEW CITY

Fall Openings: Art Not Necessarily for Sale

Tania Kupczak review from Timeout Chicago

Tania Kupczak

-----Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick preview----

review in Chicago Weekly newspaper

What Makes a Man Start Fires?: A new exhibit at the antena gallery mediates the relationship between the viewer and the world

photos from Noelle Mason show

Noelle Mason

CRAZY: Gretel Garcia and Frank Wick

current show recommended by timeoutchicago

Dust might

tonight's opening

Noelle Mason

On the state of the zombie:
Antena Gallery offers an introspective.
By by Stan Golovchuk