Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 26, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday Feb 27, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 w 17th Street, Chicago 60608

If it can’t be 100 it better be 99., Digital Video Projection, 2012

ALMOST ALWAYS GETTING IT RIGHT is an exhibition of new work from Kate Bowen at ACRE. Set against a backdrop of a rural town surrounded by mountains, this exhibition is centered on an obsessive desire for physical perfection and the potential for such perfection to frustrate entropy and provide relief.  Bowen’s work explores common language that is used to construct a narrative as a method for expressing desire, understanding failure and coping with loss. In Almost Always Getting it Right she uses still and moving images to focus on themes beauty, repetition and impossibility.

KATE BOWEN is an artist living and working in Chicago. She is the Curator of Video Programming at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and a Teaching Artist at Senn High School. She received her MFA in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2011.

More information about Kate Bowen can be found at www.katembowen.com

SLOW
2153 W 21st Street, Chicago 60608

AUNTIE EM’S MOBILE HOME

There is the bleak and the before.

A place in between. Until it gets better. We know the assumptions that go along with the trailer park. Perhaps they just moved into the smaller apartment, or have a home whose toilet functions only by pouring a bucket down the hatch to imitate a flush. They may still host a really awesome dinner party. Even trashy homes embellish; there is decor. There may be pejorative terms like lipstick on a pig, but there is something about improving upon the meager, the ugly and the compromised. Finding beauty where it is. Or making beauty with what you have.

Stories have a way of beginning with few resources, uncertain characters, and unremarkable ethics. There are certain kinds of stories that begin with a character’s hard work. Perhaps the hero will find something from within that will drive her toward a cause, a choice. The act of deciding will better the circumstance. Perhaps the outcome is less clear than better. Good guys enter the adventure out of desperation as often as by choice. Surviving the eye of a storm. And the after.

TJ Proechel and Maggie Haas both tell stories that leave out trivial things like the plot, or even distinguished characters. There are whispers of getting things done—accomplishing. There are raw spots and signs of struggle, and limitation. Subjects are vaguely old school, but could just as easily be the hipster re-make. Theirs are stories of our times. Ultimately relatable, but not triumphant or redeeming.

TJ and Maggie enter the fray at different points—Maggie is perhaps more interested in compromised normalcy, coping with uncertainty and failure. TJ flirts with becoming a criminal or superhero, maybe both at the same time.

Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 26, 7-10pm
Open Hours: By Appointment Only

Roxaboxen Exhibitions
2130 W 21st Street, Chicago 60608

MORE OR LESS
Oppidan artist who analyzes the world as a critically apathetic cultural anthropologist by manipulating found objects and historically defined paradigms.

MATT MCWILLIAMS Born in Rockford. Lives in Chicago. BFA from UIC. Likes Pizza

More information about Roxaboxen Exhibitions can be found at www.roxaboxenminicastle.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 19, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday Feb 20, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 w 17th Street, Chicago 60608

ACCIDENTS OF GRAVITY is an exhibition of prints and sculptures invoking anxieties over trauma and loss, both past and present. On the wall are a series of wax transfer prints based on a photographic series destroyed in a house fire. The prints distort the original works into variations of black and white noise or static suggesting deteriorating vision, fading memories, and absence. The theme of gravity as a force is approached both in the physical sense and in describing the weight of experience. On the floor, an arrangement of objects pairing found and raw elements collected while traveling, sit precariously on top of minimally constructed tables. The materials of wood, porcelain, stainless steel, and coral are repeated as variable elements that present a range of relationships from the intended to the actual function, signifying the roles of observer, collector, and traveler.

MICHELLE ANNE HARRIS, Associate Professor Photography and Art Education (2011). BFA, 2008, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; MFA, 2010 Cranbrook Academy of Art Bloomfield Hills, MI. Exhibitions: Roots and Culture Contemporary Arts Center, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Buckham Gallery, Flint. Publications: Shots Magazine; Chicago Reader. Bibliography: Hour Detroit, Art Beat; James Madison University Literary and Arts Journal. Collections: Marriot Inc., Sherine Marzouk. Awards: Community Arts Assistance Program Grant, Steketee Scholarship, Ox-Bow Residency Program.

More information about Michelle Anne Harris can be found atwww.michelleanneharris.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 12, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday Feb 13, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 w 17th Street, Chicago 60608

BETA EYES
“Shit People Say” is a Youtube phenomenon, with millions of views around the world. It started with “Shit Girls Say,” in which a comedian compiled small clips of himself in drag performing stereotypes of women in various situations, portrayed as technophobic, needy, and self-absorbed. With the power of the internet, new versions of “Shit Girls Say” appeared with various cultural commentaries like: “Shit Black Girls Say,” “Shit White Girls say to Indian Girls,” and “Shit Straight Guys say to Lesbian Women.” Green considers whether these videos are a portal into a new era, where people can freely poke fun at our and others’ cultures, or merely a new conversation where disrespect is celebrated.

In an exploration of culture, race, and viral internet sharing, Green uses these videos as tutorials about different cultures. With the instant gratification of the internet, we are able to ingest one dimensional views of a group of people in three minutes. Imagine how someone who has never met a black male would feel after watching “Shit Black Guys Say” or other forms of viral entertainment? What happens to those people that do not fall into their typical cultural stereotypes that are so widely celebrated in mainstream popular culture? Beta Eyes explores that reality in a series of works featuring video, performance, and sculptural art pieces.

“The Blacker the Berry, The Sweeter the Juice, But Nobody Wants Diabetes.” documentation of performance, 2012

JAMES GREEN is an artist, designer, and illustrator living outside of Chicago. He received a BFA in both Graphic Design and Studio Art from the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. He works in a wide variety of media (including video, audio, sculpture, graphic design, photography, and performance) and is currently exploring technology and viral sharing in relation to popular culture and race.

More information about James Green can be found at www.jamestgreen.com

]]> http://www.acreresidency.org/212-beta-eyes-new-works-by-james-green/feed/ 0 http://www.acreresidency.org/210-apocalypse-in-the-pleasure-gardens-new-work-by-mikey-mcparlane/ http://www.acreresidency.org/210-apocalypse-in-the-pleasure-gardens-new-work-by-mikey-mcparlane/#comments Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:39:42 +0000 theacreproject http://www.acreresidency.org/?p=1254 APOCALYPSE IN THE PLEASURE GARDENS
a performance by MIKEY McPARLANE

Friday, February 10, 8-11pm

New Capital
3114 W Carroll Street

ACRE and NEW CAPITAL present a one night performance and installation on Friday, February 10, 2012 from 8-11pm at 3114 W Carroll Street, Chicago 60612. In July and August of 2011, NEW CAPITAL visited the ACRE Artist Residency in Steuben, Wisconsin. They met with ACRE residents and other Visiting Artists to discuss projects they were working on at the residency. From those conversations NEW CAPITAL developed a short series of events and exhibitions in partnership with ACRE, featuring the work of Mikey McParlane, Matthew Lane, Michael Sirianni, Lauren Payne, Jacob Chris Hammes, and Allison Yasukawa These projects by ACRE residents will be produced at NEW CAPITAL in 2012.

APOCALYPSE IN THE PLEASURE GARDENS

When Anger inaugurated the pleasure dome, he not only gave the viewer access to an inner world, but also permission and inspiration to describe one’s own figures, landscapes, and seductions. Although paths to the pleasure gardens are well-worn, their origins remain diverse.
Is it possible for an artist to re-perform recent histories without mimicking them, and is there any difference?

Mikey McParlane borrows from many sources to create environments of constant sensual pleasure and erotic display. In his videos, portraits of the artist inhabit and mutate into a field of endocrinological decay, couched in baroque splendor. McParlane’s apocalypse replaces expected references to social utopias with images of personal ornament that hypnotically oscillate as his movements quiver. These tableau vivants quiet the viewer to McParlane’s romantic expression of recognizably primal emotions.

During McPARLANE/Apocalypse in the Pleasure Gardens, the audience is invited to mingle with the work. The performance will take place from 8pm-11pm on Friday, February 10th.

MIKEY McPARLANE is an MFA candidate in Film, Video, New Media & Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He received a Bachelor of Humanities and Arts in Fine Art and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University.

More information about Mikey McParlane can be found at vimeo.com/mikeymcparlane

Opening Reception: Friday, February 10, 7-10pm
Open Hours: Saturdays & Sundays 12-5pm
And by appointment

Johalla Projects
1821 w Hubbard St Suite 110, Chicago 60622

REASONS TO CUT INTO THE EARTH

• An archaeological dig: a prevalent way to recover human history is through archaeological excavation. Archaeology is a loose discipline. The methods of unearthing are scientific and restrained, but the things you look for when digging like an archaeologist are numerous and sometimes completely unknown.
• To see what’s growing underneath. She dug holes into the earth all summer, her hair tied up in a bandana. She built a studio in the woods, using the holes she dug as molds into which she poured colored wax, capturing flowers, insects, and weeds in the viscous bright liquid. (When big chunks of glaciers get stuck in earth, they create giant pools of ice that result in holes when they melt. Geologists call these holes “kettles,” and lakes often form in these depressions.) When she was a young girl in West Virginia, she dug holes to explore the parts of the world that were just barely invisible but still attainable to her. The work that she did digging those holes was unprofessionalized and undifferentiated. She could have been looking for fossils or diamonds or evidence of human history before her.
• A geology sample: this object contains a hidden story that helps to analyze the history of the land. Geology samples are beautiful tubes of stratified sediment, about as wide as tennis ball containers, created through special methods of drilling. You have to learn the language of the colors and textures of compacted sediment layering the cylinder to tell a story about the hidden parts of the earth. See: archaeology.
• Quarries and mines: this is a very violent thing to do. People who are paid to do this work often die. Sometimes it creates lakes to swim in after. (She grew up swimming in a quarry, so even to this day she cannot think of quarries without the warmth of that memory coming over her.) With quarries and mines, you are looking for something valuable, for treasures that you will bring elsewhere.
• Gardening: this is also a fairly violent way to cut into the earth, depending on what you’re gardening and whether you plan to pull it up or look at.

Page 5

In previous works, Norton uses prefabricated molds in a controlled studio environment to create geometric forms of wax and resin with plants embedded inside. In these newer works, she take these traditional studio materials and cast them into the earth, layering plants and other life inside.

Above, “Page 5”, is an excerpt from a chapter in “Art in the Earth: A Field Guide from the Soil to the Studio”, an artist book that will be included in the exhibition. Heidi is collaborating on this book project with writer Monica Westin. One version, using appropriated album boxes, will take the form of an artist monograph and field guide. A second variation will be available as a limited edition artist book.

Casting of Rockface in the Paleozoic Plateau Region, Archival Pigment Print, 42×53, 2012

HEIDI NORTON received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. Her work has been exhibited all over Chicago in venues such as Monique Meloche Gallery, Dominican University, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, and Northern Illinois University Gallery. Nationally and internationally, Norton’s has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Knitting Factory in New York, as well as in Los Angeles, London, and Valenica, Spain. Norton was published in My Green City by Gestalten in 2011 and her artist profile was featured in the May/June issue of Art Ltd. This past year she had solo shows in San Francisco at Hungry Man Gallery, EBERSMOORE and NEIU in Chicago. Her solo exhibition at EBERSMOORE was reviewed in the September 2011 issue of Frieze and she was voted Solo Show of the Year by New City, 2011 and Top 10 Art Exhibition in Chicago, 2011 by TimeOut. She is represented by EBERSMOORE gallery in Chicago.

More information about Heidi Norton can be found at www.heidi-norton.com

ONCE, WE WERE GIANTS
new works by MONTGOMERY KIM
February 2-4, 2012

Opening Reception: Thursday, February 2, 7-10pm
Open Hours: Saturday, February 4, 1-3pm
or by appointment
contact info@acreresidency.org to schedule an appointment

Johalla Projects
1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 110, Chicago 60622

ONCE, WE WERE GIANTS
In our era of super-technologies and hyper-infrastructures, the gap between body and mind seems to become exponentially smaller and blurred. The link between the physical world around us and ideology seamlessly blend into one another, as one is borne from the other in no discernible order. The niches we establish are formed by ever more calculated measures, which we perceive as extensions of our selves. In so doing, our person- our physical being – not only becomes one with external stimuli, but exists with infinite potential. It is possible now for us to immortalize our selves, not through God, but by becoming gods of our own.

The process for producing these works has been one of collecting and combining distinct visual elements from one overarching theme, and combining them in a collage-like manner. The elements presented in a piece, though visually cohesive, are meant to be brought together in the viewer’s mind in an intuitive manner. The shapes, colors, and objects brought together in these works exist through a kind of dream logic, whereby these elements ebb and flow between being singular parts and being a singular unit.

The primary conceptual concern was a term used by economists to describe excess consumption and over-saturation. This law of diminishing marginal utility was once described to Kim as follows:

“You purchase one whole cake for $5. It is a delicious cake and you are allowed to eat as much as you please. You are not, however, allowed to take any of it home. So you stuff your face with as much cake as possible. After the second or third slice, you will most likely not be enjoying your cake anymore. But you’ve paid for the whole cake and it would seem a waste to not get your money’s worth. What you do not realize is that the $5 dollars you paid is gone, and that there is only one peak point of satisfaction when consuming anything. Anything after this point is either dissatisfying and burdensome, or completely neutralized in its worth.”

Montgomery (Bum Joo) Kim works primarily with wood and pre-made objects. Kim explores themes of intercultural exchange and globalization and their effects on social consciousness. By looking at traditional imagery through the lens of contemporaneity, the objects and scenarios Kim creates are paradoxical attempts at nostalgia; they are memorabilia from a potential past, present or future.

MONTGOMERY (BUM JOO) KIM is a sculptor from Mexico City, Mexico. He graduated from The School of the Art Institute in 2011 with a BFA with a focus in Sculpture, for which he was awarded the Edward Ryerson Fellowship award. He is currently based in Chicago, and works for the Chicago Urban Art Society as a Gallery Assistant and Project Director for the same gallery’s THE LAND: Artist Residency Program.

More information about Montgomery Kim can be found at www.montgomerybkim.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, February 5, 7-10pm
Open Hours: Saturdays 12-3pm

Roxaboxen Exhibitions
2130 w 21st Street, Chicago 60608

from DEER/ GROUND (book), photograph with deer bone shards, tanned deer hide, concrete

GROUND
With formal and ephemeral gestures of processing and repair, Rebecca Beachy’s sculpture recasts narratives of animal bodies as use objects: deer ground up by hand and returned to the site of collision as highway dust, repairing cracks in the asphalt; a muslin pillow accumulates the down from birds that collided with windows; the stain in a copy paper box is the evidence of having held an injured duck. The work, concerned with the damaged interstice between the wild and human structures, articulates physical engagement as an ethical gauge, positioning meaning as resting first in the material and the concrete. This sculptural presence is used to foreground questions regarding humans as animals, especially the question of the human relationship with gravity and mortality, and hopes to show the complexities in the interconnections between animals, people, and the ground on which both meet, collide, and dwell.

REBECCA BEACHY (b.1982) is a Chicago based artist, born and raised on a farm in Colorado, who works primarily in sculpture and installation. She is a recent recipient of both an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown in numerous locations including Edinbugh, Scotland, Dallas, Boulder and Chicago with recent and upcoming exhibitions at Gallery 400, SHOP (Southside Hub of Production), Roxaboxen and Eel Space in Chicago. She currently has an essay published in the latest edition of Puerto del Sol. Most recently, Beachy has been raising chickens and apprenticing as a taxidermist for the Chicago Academy of Scientists at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum.

More information about Rebecca Beachy can be found at www.rebeccabeachy.com

Opening Reception: Sunday, Feb 5, 4-8pm
Open Hours: Monday, Feb 6, noon-4pm

ACRE Projects
1913 W 17th Street

I’d Languish in your Dust, 2012, Inkjet Photograph and Typewritten Newsprint

I’D LANGUISH IN YOUR DUST.
Sex is both universal and completely unique. It is so personal that it feels like you’re inventing it. But often, photography about sex is clinical, to the point where sex is mistaken for a visual experience rather than a visceral one. This work is extremely personal, so each piece interprets emotions and thoughts as they are felt through my body. My goal is to express these experiences honestly and with vulnerability. Text acts as a memory catalyst, allowing the viewer to emotionally enter the work and recall their own intimate experiences. Bound together by red and the circle, the text is enlivened by photography, video, and installation, creating a incubator of intimacy and the transformative memory of being in love.