Gallery 400 UIC Blog

Gallery 400 Website Launched!

2011-11-16T16:29:00.006-06:00

Our new website is finally live! We have officially moved all of our info and announcements to:

http://gallery400.uic.edu/

Check the new site for all current Gallery 400 related info. This blog is now retired, effective as of this post. But don't worry, there is a new blog on the new site and many other exciting features as well. Check it out now!

Voices: LaToya Ruby Frazier

2011-09-29T12:50:00.020-05:00

Momme Portrait Series (Shadow), 2008, gelatin silver print

LaToya Ruby Frazier
Wednesday, November 9, 5pm

LaToya Ruby Frazier (born 1982) explores her family’s intergenerational lineage through photographs and videos that blur the line between self-portraiture and social documentary. By appearing on both sides of the camera and engaging her mother as a co-creator of her images, Frazier effectively turns the traditional relationship between camera, subject, and author on its head. Shot in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s images capture the effects of the spectacular decline of this former steel mill town. Though her focus is specific, her work examines the role that family dynamics play both on a personal level and in society at large.

Her work has been included in the exhibitions Commercial Break, Garage Projects, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial, The Andy Warhol Museum; VideoStudio: Changing Same, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2011); Greater New York, MoMA/PS1, New York (2010); and Generational: Younger Than Jesus, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2009). She earned a BFA from Edinboro University, an MFA from Syracuse University, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the Associate Curator for the Mason Gross Galleries and teaches photography in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Links:

http://www.art21.org/newyorkcloseup/artists/latoya-ruby-frazier/

http://www.latoyarubyfrazier.com/

VOICES LECTURE: KEVIN KILLIAN

2011-09-19T14:55:00.009-05:00

Kevin Killian

In the Light

Thursday, September 29, 2011, 5:00 pm

Gallery 400 Lecture Room

Kevin Killian (born 1952) is a poet, novelist, critic, and playwright. A founder and former director of Small Press Traffic, and an original member of the notorious San Francisco-based “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian has long been a hidden favorite of gay literary San Francisco. In this talk, Killian gives an account of his career in screen-based media and discusses how a writer “takes his own life and wears his heart on his sleeve, mining his most neurotic and embarrassing moments for his art.”

Killian has published numerous books, including three short story collections: the Pen award-winning Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001), and Impossible Princess (2009)—winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Erotica. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), and Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper). He has written on the Bay Area art scene for numerous journals, including Framework, Artforum, and Artweek. With his wife Dodie Bellamy, he edits the long-running poetry zine, Mirage/Periodical.

UPCOMING VOICES LECTURE: RHEA ANASTAS

2011-09-15T12:30:00.009-05:00

Andrea Fraser, Untitled, 2003, still from videotape

Rhea Anastas

A Woman in an Orange Dress, A Man in a Blue Sweater, An Untitled Artwork by Andrea Fraser

Tuesday, September 27, 5pm

Gallery 400 Lecture Room

Rhea Anastas is an art historian and critic whose scholarship has appeared in numerous books, catalogues, and journals. She is currently the interim director of the Master of Arts program in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere at the Roski School of Fine Arts, University of Southern California, where she also serves as Assistant Professor of the Practice of Art Criticism. She is also a Visiting Critic in Residence in Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and Design. Anastas is currently writing a book about Andrea Fraser’s Untitled (2003).

From 2001 to 2008 Anastas taught at The Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture, Bard College. She was co-founder of Orchard—a cooperatively organized exhibition and event space in New York's Lower East Side, which ran from 2005 to 2008. Anastas co-edited Dan Graham: Works 1965-2000 and Witness to Her Art: Art and Writings by Adrian Piper, Mona Hatoum, Cady Noland, Jenny Holzer, Kara Walker, Daniela Rossell and Eau de Cologne. Recent articles include "The Artist Is a Currency," with Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea Fraser, Jutta Koether, and Glenn Ligon in Grey Room and "A Rendezvous Under the Counter: On David Joselit and Gareth James at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York," in Texte zur Kunst. Anastas received a BA and MA from Columbia University and a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Upcoming Screening: Second Self

2011-08-25T10:53:00.007-05:00

Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment, 1949, 16mm, 6:30 min. (still)

Second Self

Film and video screening curated by Jesse McLean

Wednesday, September 21, 7pm

Screened in tandem with Intimacies, on view at Gallery 400 September 9-October 22, 2011, this program of videos and films locates itself on the interstice between screen and receptive audience mind. The artists included have allowed the camera to function as a portal, and awarded the viewer access into their own lives, or at least the lives of their developed personas. Through this portal they impersonate celebrities (Schwanse), decide what to wear (Anger), what not to wear (Nelson), instruct (Youngman), guide (Rafman), kiss (Benglis), rage (Crocker), and desperately try to communicate (Acconci). These artists aren’t looking to be simply observed but rather to push outward at the audience, and demand a reaction. More desperate than angry, the gesture is an invitation for the viewer to step across the thin fabric of the screen and become someone new.

Featuring: Open Book by Vito Acconci (9:10 min., video, 1974), Puce Moment by Kenneth Anger (6:30 min., 16mm, 1949), Female Sensibility by Lynda Benglis (13:05 min., video, 1973), Leave Britney Alone! by Chris Crocker (2:12 min., video, 2007), Take Off by Gunvor Nelson (10:00 min., 16mm, 1972), Kool-Aid Man in Second Life: Interview by Nicholas O'Brien by Jon Rafman (18:01 min., video, 2009), k-a-t-e (s) by Nina Schwanse (10:41 min., video, 2010), ART THOUGHTZ: The Female Gaze, with Special Guest Tamara Suber (NSFW) by Hennessy Youngman (8:14 min., video, 2011).
Total Running Time 78:00 min.

Upcoming Exhibition: Intimacies

2011-08-18T15:37:00.005-05:00

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mom Making an Image of Me, 2008, silver gelatin print

Intimacies

Curated by John Neff and Lorelei Stewart

September 9-October 22, 2011

Reception: Friday, September 9, 5-8 pm

In the six artists’ works in Intimacies the camera is an active agent in the creation of social events, not just a recording instrument in the hands of an autonomous documentarian. The primarily photographic and video works, some of which include painting and sculptural elements, focus on charged interpersonal encounters. Beyond serving as indices of such encounters, the included artworks reveal the reconfigured effects of such exchanges, disclosing the complexity of authorship, agency, and viewership in today’s world.

Fall Internship Opportunities

2011-07-06T13:10:00.005-05:00

In school or recently out of school and looking for great on-the-job experience? Well, you're in luck because Gallery 400 is looking for amazing interns!

Internships at Gallery 400 offer education and professional work experience at a dynamic public art venue and university resource. Interns, working under the guidance of gallery staff, assist in the day-to-day gallery work, which ranges from special projects and research to clerical support. Gallery 400 welcomes internship applications from undergraduate or graduate students and recent college graduates.

Internships are currently available in the areas of Communications, Community Engagement, and Graphic Design. Appointments are typically a semester in length and require a commitment of 10-20 hours per week, depending on the appointment. A major in art history or fine art is not required. All internships are unpaid.

To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to uicgallery400@gmail.com with “internship” in the subject line by Monday, July 25.

Archive/Website Internship

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting in the final stages of the gallery’s effort to present its entire archive on its new website.

Job duties include:

Reviewing, editing, and updating the website
Drafting text for website
Managing contact with artists and constituents to ensure accuracy

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, writing skills, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge.

This is a non-paid internship.

Communications:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with gallery marketing for exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings, and other programs.

Job duties include:

Assisting the marketing staff to maintain the marketing calendar
Archiving press clippings
Assisting in updating social networking tools within established gallery conventions
Maintaining mailing list
Assisting with documenting exhibitions
Assisting with distribution of marketing materials

Community Engagement:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with outreach by creating visibility for Gallery 400, its exhibitions and programs, and in attracting new audiences.

Job duties include:

Conducting research on prospective audiences, both within the UIC community and in greater Chicago
Assisting in the development of student-oriented programming
Direct communication with student or campus groups
Coordinating and ensuring the availability of gallery resources to students
Developing teaching resources for educators
Assisting in social networking and marketing

This is a non-paid internship.

Graphic Design Internship

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting the gallery with the design of all marketing materials for exhibitions, film and video screenings, lectures, and other programs.

Job duties include:

Using Adobe InDesign and Illustrator templates to create posters and flyers
Creating new design for other printed and digital materials

This is a non-paid internship.

Gallery 400 invites proposals for exhibitions and new projects!

2011-07-06T13:04:00.009-05:00

Gallery 400 invites proposals for exhibitions and new projects! Established artists and recent MFAs, we'd love to hear from you!

Gallery 400 accepts exhibition proposals of new or existing work. In addition to exhibitions in the gallery space, Gallery 400 has the capacity to present a number of different projects, including public objects or architectural installations outside of the gallery; installations; events, seminars, or web-based projects; new media, video, and/or film installations; prototyping displays; sound works or radio plays; performance pieces; printed ephemera; and projects of a similar scope. We invite artists and curators from the Chicago area, as well as national and international proposals.

Proposals are accepted for the gallery's three exhibition spaces, one larger gallery (1,500 sq. ft.) and two smaller galleries (250 sq. ft. and 410 sq. ft.). Gallery staff and faculty advisors from the College of Architecture and the Arts at UIC review all proposals on a quarterly basis.

To propose an exhibition, please bundle all of your documents into a pdf binder (for information on how to create a pdf binder, please follow this link). Email the binder as an attachment to our email account dedicated solely to exhibition proposals: gallery400proposals@gmail.com. Please include your last name in the subject line of your email.

In your pdf binder, please include:

A resume.
An artist's statement and/or other background material.
An Exhibition Proposal. In the proposal please be specific and descriptive about what it is that will be created, how it will be achieved, and what larger implications you expect of the work - we call this the "what, how, and why."
Documentation of the work to be shown. Or, if the proposal is for new work, please include documentation that demonstrates your ability to complete the proposed project, work and possibly mock-ups for the new work.

For Visual Arts, Design or Architecture include:

A minimum 10 and maximum 25 images of your work, one image per page of the pdf (website links are not accepted for images).
Be sure to integrate your image captions into the image presentation. Captions should include a title, date, dimensions, media and any other descriptive clarifying information for each work.
For proposals for new work, mockups of the planned work, in addition to past work, are accepted.

Please reduce image size so that emails do not exceed 10MB in size.

For Film, Video, Digital Art, Sound or Performance include:

A website, Youtube or Vimeo link(s) to documentation of your work.
A list of works featured on the link(s) along with the title, date and length of the submitted works. (Please note the order in which you’d like work to be viewed. We will view up to 15 minutes in initial review.)
Any descriptive information that will clarify the presentation.

Please be clear and informative when indicating how the work will be exhibited. This is particularly important for film, video, digital, performance, and sound work.

**Please note that Gallery 400 will no longer accept hard copy applications. In addition, we will not consider any application that is not submitted in the format described above.

If you have any questions, please contact the gallery at 312-996-6114 or at gallery400proposals@gmail.com.

Upcoming Exhibition

2011-05-31T12:02:00.007-05:00

File Type
Curated by Chaz Evans and Lorelei Stewart
June 17 - July 30, 2011
Opening reception: June 17, 5-8pm

Mike Andrews | Jon Cates | Channel TWo | Anthony Discenza | Constant Dullaart | Eric Fleischauer | Patrick Lichty | Ei Jane Janet Lin & Miao Jiaxin | Kristin Lucas | Todd Mattei | Jesse McLean | Chris Meerdo | Casey Reas | Steve Ruiz | Siebren Versteeg

The specificity of work in electronic media warrants investigations that refine categories past “the digital” or “the internet.” File Type is an exhibition which analyzes the cultural character of digital file formats such as the .pdf, .tiff, .jpeg etc. These and many other file types contain narratives that give specific bodies to the often invisible entities that construct electronic culture. Formats and file types represent ways that artwork in digital or internet media create particular standards of representation. What is often regarded as the minutiae of computer science have now become the parameters given to cultural agents. Or to put it in different terms, computer science is now a direct player in the construction of cultural identity, intentionally or not.

File Type explores the kinetic relationships that construct a network of electronic exchange. How have file types worked their way into, or in many cases have become, our cultural metaphors? What are the politics of implied aesthetics hidden within file formats that are regarded as transparent? What are the effects of expediency in using different formats in communication and exchange? Or perhaps most importantly what is the relationship between electronic formats and artistic practices, electronic or otherwise? Are these adjuncts and extensions of artistic practice necessarily a breakage from non-electronic media, or are they possibly fluid and interchangeable?

Clean out your studio and give to Gallery 400

2011-04-29T17:40:00.006-05:00

Got extra art supplies or building materials lying around the studio, but don't want to throw them away? Kill two birds with one stone and donate them to Gallery 400!

Gallery 400 is currently accepting donations in preparation for a series of Summer Orientation activities in collaboration with artist alumni Christopher Tourre, Erik Peterson, and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford. Please email uicgallery400@gmail.com, call 312-996-6114, or just stop by the gallery and drop stuff off.

David H. Haney Lecture

2011-04-01T12:49:00.002-05:00

David H. Haney
University of Kent, CREAte
Author of When Modern Was Green
Tuesday, April 19, 6.00 p.m.
Gallery 400, UIC
(400 S. Peoria St. Chicago)
Organized by the Lectures and Events Committee (Art History Department, UIC)

"Leberecht Migge and the Problem of Modern versus Conservative in Early Twentieth-Century German Landscape Architecture."

Leberecht Migge was arguably the most important landscape architect for German modernism of the Weimar era. The fact that he is relatively unknown outside of German landscape architecture history is not the focus of this paper, but rather, the problem of placing both Migge, and the field itself, within the context of the alleged historiographic divide between modern and conservative. Here we will consider the problem of style and formalistic categories in landscape architecture in relation to architecture, and the difficulties in distinguishing between interwoven intellectual and cultural movements in Germany at the time. The efficacy of placing German design during this period in opposing categories will also be questioned, again, particularly through the work of Migge, as well as those who have interpreted him.

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition #4

2011-03-18T16:16:00.004-05:00

UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image and New Media Arts. Featuring the work of Claire Arctander, Tim Nickodemus, JD Pirtle, Stephanie Tisza and Michael Radzeweicz.

April 26-30
Opening reception: Friday, April 29, 5-8 PM

Artist talks: Wednesday, April 27, 5:30 PM

Claire Arctander gets into exquisitely rough things.

Tim Nickodemus paints fragmented images from the body which lie between
the visual and the tactile.

JD Pirtle works equally as an artist, programmer, and creative
technologist to focus on visualizations and sonifications that bridge the
void between convention and technological horizon.

Stephanie Tisza makes videos that depict the poetics of place, character
and mood.

Michael Radziewicz makes sculpture and photography and lives by C.R.E.A.M.

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition #3

2011-03-18T16:07:00.004-05:00

UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image and New Media Arts. Featuring the work of Rebecca Beachy, Mike Gibisser, Chris Meerdo and Joe Pankowski.

April 19-23
Opening reception: Friday, April 22, 5-8 PM

Artist talks: Thursday, April 21 5:30 PM

Christopher Meerdo's work is located in the space between the absence and revealing of memory, its authenticity confirmed or denied through the use of photography, sculpture, and moving images.

Rebecca Beachy explores human processing, material intimacy and traumatic affect in the context of an ambivalent relationship with nature through sculpture and installation.

Mike Gibisser uses the poetics of the moving image while drawing on
scientific and cultural phenomena to investigate the nuance and
instability of time, memory, and affect.

Joe Pankowski has developed an ever-expanding daydream in countless
drawings, and has brought these to life using stop-motion animation and
out-dated technology to emphasize the mechanical absurdness found in his sketchbooks.

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition #2

2011-03-18T16:03:00.004-05:00

UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image and New Media Arts. Featuring the work of Jesus Duran, Raquel Ladensack, Paul Nelson, Min Song and Latham Zearfoss.

April 12-16.
Opening Reception: Friday, April 15, 5-8pm
Artist Talks: Wednesday, April 13, 5 pm

Jesus Duran creates while meditating on the effects technology has on social constructs, behaviours, physical actions and the sense of self.

Raquel Ladensack creates photographs and 16mm films that explore absence, shifting perspectives, and temporal frequencies.

Paul Nelson makes a lot of certain things.

Min Song makes two- and three-dimensional work that deal with space and surface.

Latham Zearfoss's work often centers on reclaiming historical and mythological texts, and revising them to incorporate radical notions of love and sex, possibility and probability.

2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition #1

2011-03-18T15:59:00.004-05:00

UIC MFA Thesis Exhibitions in Studio Arts, Photography, Moving Image and New Media Arts. Featuring the work of Melina Ausaikitis, Daniel Baird, Aay Preston-Myint and Brittany Ransom.

April 5-9.
Opening reception: April 8, 5-8 pm.

Aay Preston-Myint reconfigures and disrupts familiar objects and sites to depict a critically queer space: a proposition about bodies and relationships in our present and future, in which new iterations of violence and hierarchy compete with new iterations of expression and identity.

Melina Ausikaitis surrounds her audience with the interior of her head through performance, singing, and drawing. Moments of ecstatic aloneness are presented to the open air in all their shrinking and earnest uncomfortableness.

Daniel Baird creates work that is invested in the interplay between technological advancement, preservation and time.

Brittany Ransom makes work that probes the lines between human, animal, and environmental relations. Her work explores our society's dependence on emergent technologies and the conflicted relationship to nature, calling for a paradoxical co-evolution between the two.

More details: Teach 4 Amerika at UIC

2011-03-18T12:44:00.006-05:00

The Bruce High Quality Foundation's Teach 4 Amerika rally will be held at the Lecture Center Room A-1, 821 South Morgan Street, on Thursday, April 7 from 6 to 7:30 PM.

Teach 4 Amerika is a five-week, 11-city, coast-to-coast road trip that crosses state lines and institutional boundaries to inspire and enable local art students to define the future of their own educational experience. Traveling the byways of America in a limousine painted as a school bus, BHQF will bring together concerned educators, artists, arts administrators, and—most importantly—students to brainstorm on the future of art schools.

The project calls for a national rethinking of the current art education system, and will provide an opportunity to discuss issues facing artists seeking an education, as well as catalyze discussions with students. The Teach 4 Amerika tour is a rallying effort to begin this conversation on a national scale and to encourage a new generation of students, artists, and educators to imagine what is possible for art education in America.

Teach 4 Amerika will combine the spectacle and energy of a political rally with the substantive dialog of a conversation series, featuring a multimedia presentation, balloons, t-shirts, and music. In addition, on April 6 at Roots and Culture, BHQF will also organize an intimate conversation between students and a group of arts professionals to transform the ideas and optimism of the rallies into real change (RSVP to that event is required).

“Teach 4 Amerika aims to empower artists to create the education they need and not beholden them to a system that professionalizes them out of their own specificity,”

- Bruce High Quality Foundation.

To find out more:

About Teach 4 Amerika: www.teach4amerika.org

About BHQF: www.thebrucehighqualityfoundation.com

About BHQF University: www.bhqfu.org

New York Times profile on the school: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/arts/design/13roberta.html

Internship Opportunities at Gallery 400

2011-03-08T16:23:00.010-06:00

Are you looking for something to do this summer that is both fun and great on-the-job experience? Well, you're in luck, because Gallery 400 is looking for summer interns! Internships at Gallery 400 offer education and professional experience at a dynamic public art venue and university resource.

Appointments will run May 2011 - August 2011 and require a commitment of 10-20 hours per week, depending on appointment. These are unpaid internships. To apply, please send your cover letter and resume to UICgallery400@gmail.com with "internship" in the subject line by Monday, April 4.

So, send us your application and let us know why you would be a great addition to the Gallery 400 staff!

Archive:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with Gallery 400’s current effort to reorganize and digitize its archive in preparation for a new website and online archival database.

Job duties include:

Assisting the gallery archivist in inventorying and organizing documentation and historical material.
Editing scanned images in Photoshop
Embedding metadata into digital images
Uploading digitized material onto the gallery’s website
Editing the archive for digital accessibility

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, writing skills, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge.

Communications:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with gallery marketing for the exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings, and other programs.

Job duties include:

Assisting the marketing staff to maintain the marketing calendar
Archiving press clippings
Assisting in updating social networking tools within established gallery conventions
Maintaining mailing list
Assisting with documenting exhibitions
Assisting with distribution of marketing materials

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization, attention to detail, and excellent proofreading skills. Familiarity with social networking websites, digital cameras, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge is preferred.

Design:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting the gallery with the design of all marketing materials for exhibitions, film and video screenings, lectures, and other programs.

Job duties include:

Using Adobe InDesign and Illustrator templates to create posters and flyers

Creating new designs for other printed and digital materials

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, excellent proofreading skills, ability to create materials in a timely manner, and ability to stay on task without supervision. Candidate should possess knowledge of Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Dreamweaver, and HTML. Please submit two designed objects with your application.

Outreach and Education:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with outreach by creating visibility for Gallery 400, its exhibitions and programs, and in attracting new audiences.

Job duties include:

Conducting research on prospective audiences, both within the UIC community and in greater Chicago
Assisting in the development of student-oriented programming
Direct communication with student or campus groups
Coordinating and ensuring the availability of gallery resources to students
Developing teaching resources for educators
Assisting in social networking and marketing

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization, familiarity with Chicago-area communities, attention to detail, ability to work independently, and excellent communication skills. Familiarity with social networking websites, digital cameras, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge is preferred.

Preparator:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in gaining art handling and installation experience in a professional gallery setting. This position is an excellent opportunity for students to develop valuable preparatory experience and polish their professional installation skills.

Job duties include:

Assisting in gallery installation and preparation (includes working with lighting, wall patching, painting and artwork installing)
Assisting with documentation and archiving of exhibitions
Assisting in the maintenance of Gallery 400 facilities

This position requires very good verbal communication skills and great interest in working with your hands. Candidates should possess familiarity with basic tools, excellent organizational and interpersonal skills, enthusiasm, and a proven track record of prioritizing and completing multiple assignments. Applicants must be able to lift 50 pounds. Basic knowledge and familiarity with a variety of tools, materials, and AV equipment is preferred.

The 2011 Spring Interns

2011-03-08T14:47:00.011-06:00

With a new semester underway we’re again excited to be working with a new group of interns. Gallery 400 would like to take a blog moment to introduce them to you.

Sophia Leiby is currently finishing her final semester at SAIC, working towards a BFA with an emphasis in printmaking and visual/critical studies. She was impressed by the exhibitions she'd seen at Gallery 400 and wanted to get more involved. As marketing intern, she regulates mailings, web postings, and other promotional projects.

On top of graduating this May from UIC with his BA in Art History and a minor in Cultural and Media Studies, Nicholas Stevens is pouring his body and soul into his thesis paper, organizing events for UIC's Art History Society, expressing his undying love for contemporary female pop icons, and working as communications and campus outreach intern for Gallery 400. His objectives at the gallery are to beef up our physical presence on campus, our virtual presence on social networking sites, and also to pull together various groups of people throughout the university and across disciplines in order to welcome them into the gallery space. Nicholas also plans to design a number of infrastructural social and educational events in order to bolster communication ties between art makers, art historians, and beyond.

Ronnie Zhang, one of the two new archive interns, is Canadian-American but was born in China. She just obtained American citizenship last July, and recently graduated from ISU with a BA in studio arts/photography. She works the graveyard shift at Gallery 400, sorting through a basement of decades-old boxes – a task that takes supreme concentration and meticulous avoidance of paper cuts. But she enjoys leafing through the correspondences; reading through how gallery and museum directors and collectors communicate and make the exhibitions happen.

Nathan Thomas, the other half of the archive team, stands out among our interns with epic facial hair, a flare for pure hue colored belts and a voracious appetite for all things archival. Studious by nature, Nathan is also a research assistant and full-time student at the School of Art and Design at UIC. Nathan first joined the archiving effort as a student volunteer from Julia Fish’s seminar class, and we’re excited to have the Pittsburgh native continuing his work this spring.

Renner Larson, a Graphic Design Major at Columbia College, is the first Gallery 400 design intern. Originally from Urbana, IL, Renner was interested in developing and applying his design skills in a work environment. Although he doesn’t believe a designer should preference colors outside of their inter-relationships, Renner’s favorite Typeface is Futura and his favorite font is Avenir Black.

Bruce High Quality Foundation at UIC

2011-03-01T15:27:00.009-06:00

The Bruce High Quality Foundation

TEACH 4 AMERIKA

April 7th, 6pm.
presented by Creative Time and hosted by Gallery 400 at UIC.

In the words of the BHQF:

"The idea of art education needs to be taken back from the self-fulfilling professional art education industrial complex and put in terms - economic, social, and practical - for artists on the ground." Teach 4 Amerika is a rallying effort to begin this conversation on a national scale and to encourage a new generation of students, artists, and educators to imagine what is possible for art education in America."

Find out more about BHQF.

Also, don't miss Teach 4 Amerika: The Conversation hosted at Roots and Culture.

Full details and exact location on UIC campus will be revealed soon.

Upcoming Voices Lecture

2011-02-23T16:26:00.003-06:00

RESCHEDULED!

Eileen Myles MYSELF (pornography)
Tuesday, March 15, 5 pm

Eileen Myles operates in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. She is a poet, novelist, and performer who has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Her experiences range from participation in workshops lead by Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, to interactions with the East Village art scene of the 1980’s, and running for President of the United States in 1992. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), a collection of essays on art, poetry and politics, was awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. Her most recent book, Inferno (a poet’s novel) (OR books, 2010), chronicles the coming of age story of a female writer discovering both her sexuality and creative drive in New York City during its punk and indie heyday.

Myles is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls; Cool for You; Sorry, Tree; and Not Me; and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Artforum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, Bookforum and AnOther Magazine. She is Professor Emeritus of writing and literature at University of California San Diego where she was head of the writing program from 2002 to 2007. In 2010, the Poetry Society of America awarded Myles the Shelley Prize.

Performance/Screening/Lecture

2011-02-23T16:20:00.001-06:00

Wu Tsang
Wildness-Work in Progress-Live Presentation
Monday, March 7, 7 pm

Wu Tsang presents a performative lecture & screening about his upcoming feature documentary WILDNESS, combining live narration and excerpts.

About the film: Wildness depicts the creativity and conflict that arises when queer avant-garde performance artists intersect with community at the historic Los Angeles bar Silver Platter, a 40-year-old, family-owned bar in the MacArthur park neighborhood of Los Angeles that serves as a refuge to the Latina transgender immigrant community.

In 2008, Director Wu Tsang teamed up with Ashland Mines (DJ TOTAL FREEDOM) and Daniel Pineda (1/2 DJ-team NGUZUNGUZU) to throw a weekly party at the bar on an off night of the week. They were inspired by the Silver Platter scene, and built an exciting collaboration with the owners and some of the regulars. For a brief period of time, this unlikely union produced an explosion of underground music, dancing, and art. But the party's rising popularity cast a more mainstream spotlight on the Silver Platter, raising questions about gentrification. Ultimately real life overcame the drama when the unexpected death of one of the owners transformed the fate of everyone involved.

Upcoming Voices Lecture

2011-02-23T16:03:00.003-06:00

Kalup Linzy
Wednesday, March 9, 5 pm

Kalup Linzy is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes videos, performances, and music. His satirical narratives —inspired by soap operas, telenovelas and Hollywood melodramas—deal with race, sexuality, gender, class, and the art world itself. Serving as writer, director, cinematographer, editor, and actor, he performs, often in drag, a series of memorable, defiant characters. Simultaneously salacious and poignant, Linzy's works fuse dramatic intensity with melodramatic irony and gut-busting comedy.

Linzy’s work has been shown in museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Kitchen (New York); the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles); the Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego); and Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney). His work is included in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem, and has been screened at The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, British Film Institute. Among his awards, Linzy was named a Guggenheim fellow in 2007, and in 2008 he received a Creative Capital Grant as well as a fellowship from the Jerome Foundation. In 2007, New York Magazine named him one of the ten most promising artists. Linzy graduated from the MFA program at the University of South Florida in 2003.

Upcoming Voices Lecture

2011-02-16T14:38:00.002-06:00

Dani Leventhal
Monday, February 28, 5:00 pm

At once tender and savage, Dani Leventhal’s video diaries capture the banal and horrific to reveal the transcendent beauty and pain of daily life. For example, in Show & Tell in the Land of Milk & Honey (2007), Leventhal juxtaposes bucolic shots of farm life with tales of sexual harassment and sick chickens. In the award-winning Draft 9 (2003), Leventhal cuts between skinned animals, salsa dancers, a Holocaust-survivor, and her own romantic liaisons to create, in the words of critic Genevieve Yue, “something that is extraordinarily immediate, both fresh and painful, hard to watch and yet impossible not to watch.” Leventhal’s works have been exhibited at venues internationally, including the Wexner Center for the Arts (OH); the Gene Siskel Film Center, Museum of Contemporary Photography (both Chicago); MoMA PS1 (New York); Rotterdam International Film Festival; and the Center for Contemporary Art (Tel Aviv), among others. In 2007 she received the Visual Arts Award from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, and also produced a limited edition book and video, Skim Milk and Soft Wax, at the Women’s Studio Workshop. Leventhal received a sculpture MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received a second MFA in Film/Video from Bard College.

Upcoming performances

2011-02-16T14:08:00.009-06:00

Edie Fake: Lock
Lee Relvas: Exhaust Yourself
an evening of performances
Wednesday, March 2, 7 pm

Lock is a metallic sonic scrapheap of psychic safe-cracking and emotional emergence. Exhaust Yourself is a musical meditation on scarcity and abundance, looked at through the deepwater prism of oil spills.

Upcoming Voices Lecture

2011-02-09T14:52:00.005-06:00

AA Bronson
Tuesday, February 22, 5:00 pm

AA Bronson is an artist, publisher and curator whose work emphasizes issues of collaboration, trauma, loss, death, and healing. He co-founded the group General Idea in 1969 with artists Jorge Zontal and Felix Partz. General Idea’s work played with mass media and popular culture, and was produced in nearly every conceivable medium— sculpture, painting, installation, video and performance work as well as artist’s books, photography, multiples, prints, and public art projects. Art Metropole, a Toronto archive and store for multiples, artist books, and ephemera, was founded by General Idea in 1974. The group ceased in 1994 with the deaths of Zontal and Partz from AIDS. A General Idea retrospective opened January 2010 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Working independently as an artist since 1994, Bronson was President of Printed Matter (NY) from 2004-2010. He has had solo exhibitions worldwide, and is in collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum (NY); and the National Gallery of Canada. Bronson presented his recent collaborative project, Invocation of the Queer Spirits, in New Orleans, Winnipeg, and New York; and his School for Young Shamans organizes group discussions around the world. Additionally, Bronson has edited many books and written extensively, including his memoir Negative Thoughts (2001), published by the MCA Chicago. He has taught at UCLA, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. Bronson is currently the artistic director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.

Upcoming Screening

2011-02-08T15:08:00.008-06:00

Afterlives and Other Agonies

Films and videos curated by Doug Ischar

Wednesday, February 16, 7 pm

Featuring:

Peggy Ahwesh, The Ape of Nature, 2010, 24’

Colin Campbell, The Woman from Malibu, 1976, 12’

Jennifer Montgomery, The Agonal Phase, 2010, 42’

Derived from the Greeks (no surprise), agony traveled a typically internalizing route, from

fetishized contest in sport to an umbrella term for all varieties of pain; the only requirement that the pain need be dreadful, at the limits of our endurance. Today’s agonies are as often psychic and social as they are physical. Our emotional habitat is one of increasing danger and, as we are reminded daily, treachery. Thus, while physical pain is still very much with us – its uses shamefully familiar – psychic pain, underscored by social and political pain, seems ever more inescapable. This is our epochal trauma—the one that ‘just won’t go away.’

Peggy Ahwesh’s The Ape of Nature (2010) is a split screen, single channel version of her first

gallery installation from 2009. A treatise on the malaise of post-industrial cultures, the lion’s

share of this film unfolds in a bucolic Hudson River mansion rather than an anachronistic factory environment. Ahwesh proposes an equation between women under hypnosis and the mindset induced by the current economic climate, observed in the men she films at work in a vestigial industry. The Ape of Nature eschews melodrama and the outright expression of anguish, there is a clinical, at times humorous, timbre to the film, one markedly at odds with its timely rueful observations.

Colin Campbell’s pioneering The Lady from Malibu (1976) is the first in a series of six tapes about a woman who lives in Southern California and talks about her life and the lifestyle of Los Angeles, which she documents in obsessive detail. This tape recounts the death of her husband in the Himalayas.

“The Agonal Phase’”—a biological term—denotes the end phases of the dying process, and

as the title of Jennifer Montgomery’s 2010 film, it forewarns of grief to come. Still, nothing

could forearm us against Montgomery’s steady gaze and unflinchingly lachrymose treatment of

both her mother’s passing and—yet more horrible and unforgivable—her father’s and her own

survival. The agony in The Agonal Phase is familial and deeply personal, but its acutely lived

and ruthlessly observed discomforts belong to us all. Like death, this film tries the viewer in

irredeemable ways. Its triumph is in refusing to comfort, in assuming a stubbornly democratic

stance toward its easily dramatized subjects: the remarkable and the not so remarkable (as if

there were any).

Eileen Myles POSTPONED

2011-02-01T12:20:00.007-06:00

Due to extreme weather, the Eileen Myles lecture has been postponed.
Please stay tuned for announcement of a rescheduled date. Apologies for
any inconvenience. Yes, we too are mourning the delay.

But don't forget next week:

Voices Lecture
Stanya Kahn
"It's Cool, I'm Good: videos on humor, trauma and faking it 'til its real"
Wednesday Feb 9, 5pm

As a videomaker, performer, and writer, Stanya Kahn combines storytelling with visceral performances, blurring the lines between fiction and reality to show how trauma can reconfigure language and the way we make meaning, thus giving rise to new forms of articulation. Kahn mixes humor and horror, blending beauty and banality to approach the alienation and violence of contemporary American life in her most recent, solo works Kathy, Sandra, and It’s Cool, I’m Good (2010).

Kahn’s work has been shown at venues internationally, including the 2010 California Biennial, the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Sundance Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art (NY); Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), the Getty Center (LA), the Hammer Museum (LA), Contemporary Center for Art (Vilnius, Lithuania), Gebauer Gallery (Berlin), and The Hayward Gallery (London), among many others. She was a founding member of the performance group/band CORE. Her writings appear in a number of journals and anthologies, including Nothing Moments, Soft Targets Journal of Art and Theory, LTTR Journal of Art and Writing, and Movement Research. Kahn received her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and currently teaches as adjunct faculty at UCLA.

Upcoming Voices Lectures

2011-01-18T13:45:00.008-06:00

Kerstin Honeit
Thursday, January 20, 5pm

German artist Kerstin Honeit investigates familial legacy, gender construction, and identity formation in her photographic and video works. Her exhibition at Gallery 400 is her first solo show in the United States. In the photographic series Becoming 10, Honeit assumes the identities of nine half-siblings she has never met. Honeit’s video installation On & Off is a further exploration of familial connection and dislocation in which the artist lip-synchs four women’s accounts of their father’s funerals. A second video installation, Position #1, considers women’s occupation of public space.

Honeit has exhibited her work internationally in venues such as Galerie LoBe Art (Berlin), Goldsmiths University of London, Kunstraum Bethanien (Berlin) and German Federal Ministry of Justice (Berlin). Honeit has also shown her films at numerous international festivals including the London Film Festival, MIX Film Festival (Milan), the Hong Kong Film Festival, the New Fest Film Festival (New York), and Outfest (Los Angeles). Honeit has received a number of awards for her work including the Goldrausch Scholarship and a Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung scholarship and traveling fellowship. She received her degree in Visual Arts and Sculpture from the Berlin-Weissensee School of Art.

Ernesto Oroza
Tuesday, January 25, 5pm

Ernesto Oroza is a Cuban-born artist, designer, and writer who currently lives and works in Aventura, Florida. His work primarily addresses contemporary media culture as well as conceptual design and architecture, including issues of improvised structures and objects retooled for new functions. Recent projects, Architecture of Necessity and Objects of Necessity, investigate the homespun, Frankenstein-like objects and architecture made by Cuban citizens in order to facilitate their survival. Architecture of Necessity is currently being shown at the Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Oroza’s work has been shown internationally at such venues as Haute Definition Gallery (Paris), The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, The Museum of Modern Art (New York), and Laboral Centro de Arte (Spain). He is the author of several books including RIKIMBILI: Une étude sur la désobéissance technologique et quelques formes de reinvention (RIKIMBILI: A Study on Disobedient Technologies and Other Forms of Reinvention) (Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2009). Oroza has served as visiting professor at Les Ateliers, École Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle (Paris) and professor at the Polytechnic Institute of Design of Havana and is currently the editor of the Object Aside Series (Name Publications, Miami). Oroza earned a degree at the Havana Superior Institute of Design.

Eileen Myles: MYSELF (pornography)
Tuesday, February 1, 5pm

Eileen Myles operates in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. She is a poet, novelist, and performer who has written extensively on art and writing and the cultural scene. Her experiences range from participation in workshops lead by Alice Notley and Ted Berrigan, to interactions with the East Village art scene of the 1980’s, and running for President of the United States in 1992. The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), a collection of essays on art, poetry and politics, was awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. Her most recent book, Inferno (a poet’s novel) (OR books, 2010), chronicles the coming of age story of a female writer discovering both her sexuality and creative drive in New York City during its punk and indie heyday.

Myles is the author of more than twenty books of poetry and prose, including Chelsea Girls; Cool for You; Sorry, Tree; and Not Me; and is the coeditor of The New Fuck You: Adventures in Lesbian Reading. She contributes to a wide number of publications including Artforum, Parkett, The Believer, Vice, Cabinet, The Nation, Bookforum and AnOther Magazine. She is Professor Emeritus of writing and literature at University of California San Diego where she was head of the writing program from 2002 to 2007. In 2010, the Poetry Society of America awarded Myles the Shelley Prize.

In the Gallery

2011-01-11T11:27:00.003-06:00

Kerstin Honeit
Ambiguity is My Weapon
January 18 - March 12, 2011

Opening Reception January 19, 5-8pm

In her first solo US exhibition, Berlin-based Honeit presents photographic and video works
exploring identity formation through the visible markers of familial legacy and gender
construction. In assuming the identities of nine-half siblings she has never met, enacting four
women’s accounts of their father’s funerals, and documenting women’s occupation of public
space, Honeit considers the public and private borders of gender identification in flux.

Bless this Mess

with Edie Fake, Forced into Femininity, Robin Hustle, & Lee Relvas

January 18 - March 12, 2011

Opening Reception January 19, 5-8pm

Mixing dreams, facts, and emotions in works in drawing, embroidery, installation, and

performance, four artists look at queer bodies in and outside of messy systems. Shuttling

across inside and outside, they get beautifully entangled in the queer chaos of it all.

Related Events:

Wednesday, January 19, 7 pm Performances: Blind Asylum: A Song Cycle by Forced into Femininity

and rrind, a musical performance by Lee Relvas & Bret Koontz

Thursday, January 20, 5 pm Lecture by Kerstin Honeit

Tuesday, February 1, 5pm Lecture by Eileen Myles

Wednesday, February 9, 5 pm Lecture by Stanya Kahn

Wednesday, February 16, 7 pm Film and Video Screening, curated by Doug Ischar

Tuesday, February 22, 5pm A.A. Bronson

Monday, February 28, 5 pm Lecture by Dani Leventhal

Wednesday, March 2, 7 pm Two Performances: Edie Fake and Lee Relvas

Thursday, March 3, 5pm Lecture by Kalup Linzy

Waving the Intern Flag

2011-01-05T14:40:00.015-06:00

Two opportunities ongoing at Gallery 400:

First, we are still accepting applications for Spring 2011 interns. We have positions available for students or recent graduates interested in marketing/communications and archiving.

We had a tremendous fall semester where our interns accomplished great feats like installing exhibitions:

working at opening receptions:

and finding archive treasures:

From the words of recent Gallery 400 interns:

"As Marketing Intern at Gallery 400 I let Chicagoans know when they could pick up their free Stephanie Syjuco sculpture and became well acquainted with Steve Reinke's video work. I created press clippings and introduced the Gallery to new people using social networking sites like Flickr and Facebook. For the first time I witnessed the entire process of an exhibition's creation-- from artist, to curator, to realization, to being discovered by the public."

-Katharine Harvath, Marketing Intern

"As the copy editor for Gallery 400's archive project, I was charged with the not-so-small task of reading and editing the blurbs written for every exhibit put on here since 1982. While seemingly monumental, the work has been interesting, challenging and especially rewarding; it's like three semesters of Art History classes crammed into one semester-long internship! It's a pretty good deal, and the people aren't so bad either (actually - they're pretty awesome)."

- Rebecca Miller, Archive Intern

Full application guidelines are available here. The deadline in January 14. As always, if you have any questions about what the internship program at Gallery 400 is like, drop us a line at UICgallery400@gmail.com.

Second, Philip von Zweck’s public flagpole sculpture Temporary Allegiance is ready to fly your flag. After some downtime last summer, the flagpole re-emerged, ready for business, last semester. We have been happy to fly recent flags from Trinity Christian College, Kirsten Leenaars, and Tim Pigott.

The project works as both a public sculpture and a space for freedom of expression open to all. Are you an artist who has a flag-based idea? An organization that would like to send a message? A flag enthusiast who simply loves seeing things flap in the breeze? All of the above and more are welcome to submit a flag. The notion of what a flag can be in the project is understood in a very broad sense, so as long as its safe to fly let us know your idea.

When a flag flies it gets documented and shared on the Temporary Allegiance blog and facebook page, so that flags can unfurl in both physical and virtual space. You can find full submission guidelines on the blog as well. Also feel free to email pvonzweck@yahoo.com if you have any further questions.

with its alert it signals you that it is already too late

2010-12-20T10:28:00.014-06:00

Last Thursday evening, with a little time to kill, I was sitting in a restaurant in Logan Square, talking enthusiastically to a friend who had just seen Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (1949). I promised to make him a copy of the soundtrack, which is one of my favorites. Finished with my food, I left the restaurant and took the train down to Gallery 400 to see Steve Reinke’s screening Do You Find Your Thoughts and Actions Unduly Influenced by Unseen Murmuring Voices? The first film in the lineup was Erik Bünger’s the third man (2010), a film and performance Bünger created while a resident at the Impakt Foundation in Utrecht, where Reinke was also in residence at the time. The film opened with the music I had just been remembering so excitedly, and I wanted to laugh at the strangeness of the coincidence. I wanted to laugh harder (and less mirthfully) as the film progressed. Bünger began to make an argument for music – especially music as catchy as Anton Karas’ bouncing and haunted zither – as a evil meme, a self-replicating demon that takes control of the human brain and forces the body to rhythmically move.

And, sinisterly, as I sit here writing this, I am tapping my foot, because some part of my sorely infected brain is humming to itself “da dum ta dum ta dum…ta dum. Da dum ta dum ta dum… ta dum. Da dum ta dum ta dum, tadadadadum, ta dum…ta dum…ta dum…”

Both Reinke and Bünger make use of the archive both as a source and as a subject, and both create works whose fraught relationships with archives somewhat resemble another scene Bünger used in his film, in which Julie Andrews as the guitar-wielding Austrian governess, points to each of the Von Trapp children in turn, pulling an unconscious song from their throats. Like the children who have been assigned a note to express on command, the sounds and images the two artists twist and remix to their own ends no longer have autonomous identities. They are conducted into complex meaning without any thought of their own; their contexts manipulated by an outside mind. Just as in the original The Third Man, where facts – the car accident, Harry Lime’s body, Kurtz and Popescu – are shifting and feeble, so in both Reinke’s and Bünger’s works, the seemingly familiar takes on uncanny new meaning as the context changes.

In The Tiny Ventriloquist, Reinke describes the archive as “a mausoleum that pretends to be a vast garden”, as contrasted with memory, “an irradiated zoo in which the various animals are mutating extravagantly and dying slowly.” In order to function as an archivist, one has to suspend any disbelief in facts, in so far as the work is concerned. There were only so many pieces in a show, and they had specific names. This painting was red and blue, not purple and grey. The line-up of artists, the texts of the press releases, the dates and the lectures and the financial records all have a true and a false. But actually moving through an archive has much more in common with the irradiated zoo at times than it does with the mausoleum. The material creates new meaning each time it is accessed, each time it is manipulated, each time is it considered again by the eyes of the future. This potential can be seen through Bünger’s lens as a kind of mimetic evolution, in which the information mutates in order to continue its solitary goal of replication.

Caroline Carlsmith

Archivist

Gallery 400

Happy Holidays

2010-12-17T14:12:00.008-06:00

Seasons greetings and good tidings from Gallery 400.

Tomorrow 12/18 we will be open from 1pm to 6pm for the final day of Steve Reinke's The Tiny Ventriloquist.

We reopen 1/18 with Kerstin Honeit's Ambiguity is My Weapon and more! Stay tuned for more announcements on that exhibition.

image credit: Bossys Feltworks

Internship Opportunities at Gallery 400

2010-12-07T13:24:00.010-06:00

In school or recently out of school and looking for great on-the-job experience? You're in luck, because Gallery 400 is looking for amazing interns for the Spring 2011 semester! Internships at Gallery 400 offer education and professional experience at a dynamic public art venue and university resource.

Appointments will go through May 2011 and require a commitment of 10-20 hours per week, depending on appointment. To apply, please send your cover letter and resume to uicgallery400@gmail.com by Tuesday, January 4, 2011. So send us your application and let us know why you would be a great addition to the Gallery 400 staff!

MARKETING INTERNSHIP:

Gallery 400 seek an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with Gallery Marketing of the exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings and other programs.

Job Duties include:

Assisting the marketing staff to maintain the marketing calendar
Archiving press clippings
Assist in updating social networking tools within established gallery conventions
Maintain mailing list
Assist with documenting exhibitions
Assist with distribution of marketing materials

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, excellent proofreading skills. Familiarity with social networking websites, digital cameras and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge is preferred.

This is a non-paid internship.

ARCHIVE INTERNSHIP:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting with Gallery 400’s current effort to reorganize and digitize its archive in preparation for a new website and online archival database.

Job Duties include:

Assisting the gallery archivist in inventorying and organizing documentation and historical material.
Editing scanned images in Photoshop
Embedding metadata into digital images
Uploading digitized material onto the gallery’s website
Editing the archive for digital accessibility

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, writing skills, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge.

This is a non-paid internship.

Video screening curated by Steve Reinke

2010-11-19T14:58:00.005-06:00

Do You Find Your Thoughts & Actions Unduly Influenced by Unseen Murmuring Voices?

Video screening curated by Steve Reinke

Wednesday, December 1, 7 pm

Do you find your thoughts & actions unduly influenced by unseen murmuring voices? Those are the ghost-puppets, constantly, continuously feeding you instructions,
information, and lies. (Mostly lies.) Watch these videos and learn how to change
your ghost-puppets into puppet-ghosts. Puppet-ghosts are benign and playful.
(Fleeting-improvised.) Collect them all.

Featuring:

Eric Bunger, The Third Man, 2010, 49’24”

Deirdre Logue, Per Se, 2005, 4’

Alex Grant, The Gardener, 2005, 5’

Lisa Steele, A Very Personal Story, 1974, 19’50”

Donigan Cumming, Locke’s Way, 2003, 21’

Jonathan Culp, Death Mask, 2004, 5’

It's a New Day! Submit your Exhibition Proposal to g400!

2010-11-19T12:13:00.043-06:00

After hours spent getting CDs stuck in our computers, enduring paper cuts, and dreaming of a better future for our exhibition proposal process, we have decided that things need to change at Gallery 400. And so, we are excitedly saying, "out with the old and in with the new." We're going digital!

Gallery 400 has a new exhibition proposal process and we are inviting you to send us your submissions! Established artists and recent MFAs, we'd love to hear from you.

The old exhibition proposal process... unwieldy and not fun!

We have no new mail...send us your exhibition proposal!

Gallery 400 invites proposals for exhibitions and new projects.

To propose an exhibition, please bundle all of your documents into a pdf binder (for information on how to create a pdf binder, please follow this link). Email the binder as an attachment to our new email account dedicated solely to exhibition proposals: gallery400proposals@gmail.com.

In your pdf binder, please include:

1. A resume.

2. An artist's statement and/or other background material.

3. An Exhibition Proposal. In the proposal please be specific and descriptive about what it is that will be created, how it will be achieved, and what larger implications you expect of the work - we call this the "what, how, and why."

4. Documentation of the work to be shown. Or, if the proposal is for new work, please include documentation that demonstrates your ability to complete the proposed project, work and possibly mock-ups for the new work.

For Visual Arts, Design or Architecture include:

A minimum 10 and maximum 25 images of your work, one image per page of the pdf (website links are not accepted for images).
Be sure to integrate your image captions into the image presentation. Captions should include a title, date, dimensions, media and any other descriptive clarifying information for each work.
For proposals for new work, mockups of the planned work, in addition to past work, are accepted.
Please reduce image size so that emails do not exceed 10MB in size.

For Film, Video, Digital Art, Sound or Performance include:

A website, Youtube or Vimeo link(s) to documentation of your work.
A list of works featured on the link(s) along with the title, date and length of the submitted works. (Please note the order in which you’d like work to be viewed. We will view up to 15 minutes in initial review.)
Any descriptive information that will clarify the presentation.

Please be clear and informative when indicating how the work will be exhibited. This is particularly important for film, video, digital, performance, and sound work.

**Please note that Gallery 400 will no longer accept hard copy applications - so be green and send us your proposal via email! In addition, we will not consider any applications that are not submitted in the format described above.

If you should have any questions, please contact the gallery at 312-996-6114 or at gallery400proposals@gmail.com.

The Incredible Interns

2010-11-08T16:46:00.007-06:00

It can get a little lonely in the office at Gallery 400. Sometimes I look up from an undifferentiated stream of hours spent editing photos, listening to podcasts, and scanning archive material only to realize I've barely had a conversation with anyone all day. Not that we don't have our fun - that's what the hulk hands (with electronic smashing sounds!) we saved from last year's Free Store are for. But recently Gallery 400 has gotten a little more lively. This is because we have a new and exciting group of interns this autumn to keep us on our toes, to laugh at our jokes, and to patiently watch the gallery when it's time for Hulk Smash.
Katherine Harvath, interning in the marketing department, graduated from SAIC's painting program in 2009. She previously interned at Tony Wight Gallery, and has been working at Gallery 400 since September. Still painting and interested in curating, Katherine is learning through her internship about social media, writing press releases, twittering, and finding new audiences for the Gallery.

Katherine Harvath, Marketing Intern

Our preparator intern Liz Heller is a recent BFA graduate from Columbia College in Chicago. Liz assists the staff in preparing the gallery for new shows, handling artwork and general gallery maintenance. Her sculpture and installation background was part of the impetus for her interest in this position, and she is learning the skills needed to install her own works in the future.

Liz Heller, Preparator Intern

As the new website nears completion, I've been lucky to have the help of several interns in organizing and digitizing archive material in preparation for its publication. Archive intern Joshua Clarfelt, another recent Columbia College graduate with a background in photography, has for the past several months been working to complete a reorganization and inventory of the physical archive. In addition to Josh, we're lucky to have two new archive interns in the gallery as well. Rebecca Miller, an archive/copy-editing intern, recently relocated back to the midwest after spending two years in graduate school in Boston. She is very much enjoying her new-found "freedom," exploring the city of Chicago and getting to know Gallery 400. When not copy-editing exhibition blurbs for the gallery, Rebecca runs, tutors, watches sports and takes pictures (which can be found on her blog). The archive team has also been joined a Serhii Chrucky, who graduated this August from UIC with a BFA in photography and a minor in art history. Formerly an assistant at Flatfile Galleries, Serhii is a founder of Forgotten Chicago, an organization which researches, documents, and interprets overlooked aspects of Chicago's built landscape. At Gallery 400, he applies his photo-editing skills to the tweaking of scanned slides from over 30 years of the gallery's exhibition history.

Joshua Clarfelt, Archive Intern

Rebecca Miller, Archive/Copy Editing Intern

Serhii Chrucky, Archive Intern

The hard work and dedication of these interns is a large part of what keeps this gallery running, not to mention their tolerance when it comes to the occasional quirks of the rest of the staff. We're all looking forward to having you around the office this fall!

Caroline Carlsmith
Archivist
Gallery 400

Mike Wolf on Temporary Allegiance

2010-11-04T16:52:00.027-05:00

The following essay on flags was written in 2006:

Marking Boundaries and Littoral Zones
By Mike Wolf and the network of cumulative art

In the labyrinth of boundaries
In a common but questionable fantasy there once was a wilderness without boundaries, until anxious and powerful life-forms saw a need to mark their territories and categorize their places. Many artists to this day conspire in this carving of space. These artists made marking territories of power their job[1]. In the world we know it is not unreasonable to say that all territory is defined, occupied, marked, and over-determined. More often than not this process is undertaken by the anxious and powerful. One approach an artist could take in a world like this is to draw demarcated zones into question, perhaps laying a groundwork from which to contest boundaries. This is a messy business in a world where most boundaries of consequence, the ones worth fighting for, define power and spheres of influence, and are preserved by being highly mutable, hidden from obvious attack, and in constant flux. That’s by design; it makes any challenge difficult. You’d be a clever artist to manage that terrain.

Of course, flags are understood as highly visible markers of territories. “Territory” in this essay functions as a good generic term that can describe both physical places, like the green on a golf course or a suburban lawn, and ideological constructs like a corporation, a state, or a social milieu. Flying over these territories, flags help people in power define territories of influence from the top down.

Orwellian furniture
Flags are not the only way to mark territory. A much more ubiquitous form of marking the urban landscape is advertising. Beginning in 2002 Chicagoans joined several other major cities around the world (mostly the northern hemisphere, but the push is on in the southern hemisphere) in entering a 20 year contract with the French-based company JC Decaux, which makes “street furniture” that first and foremost provides comfortable places for advertisement. Bus shelters and newspaper boxes were first to appear, with other elements slowly added. If you depend on public transportation to move about the city you may have quickly discovered that the new shelters—while arguably better looking and less scarce than the old ones —are less adequate in sheltering against harsh Chicago weather. The design leaves openings on all sides of the structure as well as the bottom. Considering, also, that the benches in the bus shelters incorporate uncomfortable ridges to prevent people from reclining, it is clear that human comfort was not a priority. (I have found though that it is possible to hang a hammock very nicely on a diagonal between corner posts). These structures are shelters for advertisements before they are shelters for people with their thick etch-resistant glass boxes to keep ad copy dry and tidy. Indeed JC Decaux is an advertising company not a public servant (one can’t help but wonder if the designer has ever riden a bus or been to Chicago). Most recently JC Decaux installed 75 advertising panels downtown. Not only do they have the negative aesthetic function of intensifying commercial pollution, they also block the goddamn sidewalk! Adding insult to injury these advertising panels are labeled “City Information.” What a miserable idea. The structures’ presence along the walkways of the city define the street as a commercial space. Like television, the shelters, newspaper boxes and “information panels” are technologies designed and used to reinforce a consumer culture. Also, like television, as an expressive vehicle these structures are only readily available to the few who can pay. (Local concerns left unannounced: lost cats, public meetings, better produce, the dirty beat cop, Timmy is dealing drugs, free roof shingles up for grabs, the cooling center opens at 6am.)

Ad panel blocking sidewalk, downtown Chicago.

JC Decaux staff maintains the shelters and panels; and the company has exclusive rights to sell the advertising space in the structures. They outsource the fabrication of the shelters to a local company, Chicago Scenic Studio (who in turn outsource the fabrication of different components to many others), which designs and makes theater scenery, television studio sets, trade show props and so on. Indeed, the street is a theater. Chicago Scenic Studio is located on Goose Island, an island in the near north side of Chicago formed on its west side by the north branch of the Chicago River and on its east side by a canal dredged out in 1800’s for clay used in a nearby brick yard. This same period also saw the establishment of a squatted community of immigrants who worked in the brickyard and other industrial facilities on Goose Island[2]. You can walk—or roll—there and see stacked pieces of the bus shelters outside the Chicago Scenic building, like boats stored for the winter, except for every season, for twenty years. Take a few steps south from Chicago Scenic on North Branch Street and you’ll see a warning sign on a building, “This property is protected by closed circuit TV.” That’s a misleading sign, cameras can’t protect, they can only watch. A little further south you’ll see familiar green street signs marking the intersection of North Branch and Eastman streets (they sing!), and you’ll notice a third sign. It’s brown. It reads “Honorary Chicago Scenic Studio Way.” This indicates a friendly relationship between Chicago Scenic Studio and the local alderman. Here we have another example of how power demarcates territories. A recent effort to give a brown honorary street sign to a stretch of Monroe Street near Western Avenue on the west side of Chicago wasn’t nearly as friendly.

JC Decaux bus shelter tops stored in the Chicago Scenic Studios yard on Goose Island.

It’s an honor to meet you, Alderman.

In 1969 Chicago Police murdered Fred Hampton at the age of 21 while sleeping in an apartment at ----[need exact address] West Monroe Street. Some evidence suggests he may have been drugged, which made it easier for the cops to blast him full of bullets. At the time Hampton was the state chairman of the Black Panther Party in Illinois. He was instrumental in brokering peace agreements between rival gangs (coining the phrase “rainbow coalition” still used to this day by Jesse Jackson), organizing better recreational facilities for young people, establishing a free medical clinic, and a free breakfast program in a number of public schools. He worked to answer the needs of a disenfranchised and abandoned community. In early 2006 Alderwoman Madeline Haithcock brought a proposal before the City Council in response to a request from Fred Hampton Jr. to recognize the importance of his father by giving the stretch of Monroe Street where his father was slain the honorary name of “Chairman Fred Hampton Way.” Police and others protested the proposal on the basis that Hampton and the Black Panthers advocated the killing of police. Maybe that is a reasonable response to the abandonment and abuse they knew. The brutality Hampton and his community experienced still exists in parts of Chicago[3]. Eventually Alderwoman Haithcock backed down. Apparently neither Hampton Jr. nor the many people passionately backing the proposal had enough friends. Part of me wishes there was an Honorary Chairman Fred Hampton Way, but another part of me asks why? There are better ways of honoring Hampton’s work out on the streets and in schools. For starters, I suggest reading about him. I know first hand that reading about Fred Hampton is much more rewarding and interesting than reading about Chicago Scenic Studios, or JC Decaux for that matter [4].

Hampton was a charismatic leader who acted from a ground of a thousand conversations, a thousand acts of generosity, and a thousand hours of work. It is by this kind of process that we negotiate our survival with each other. He was someone, among many more around him, who took matters into his own hands, working to answer the common needs he saw in his community.

What can artists possibly do in the theater of the street that begins to echo the tenacious social responsibility Fred Hampton felt, or the vast global reach of JC Decaux? Is this even needed? Yes, or at the least some notion of social responsibility.

Emergent publics [5]
It is gratifying to see people question what is public. The drive to begin to answer this question is a decentralized effort, with complex and nuanced possibilities sprouting up as far away as the most remote farmlands and the deepest caverns, and as nearby as the roof of my apartment and the molecules in my body. Nobody owns this question. Laurie Palmer writes, for example, “public is an action, not a place.”[6] She describes a shore, not a boundary but a zone of interaction. The meeting of the water and the soil bears a complex and dynamic ecosystem. But, she points out that in Chicago soil often ends abruptly at a retaining wall and water laps hopelessly against a steel barrier—an arrangement that reflects an obsolete, anachronistic approach to dealing with the flux of a shore. Somehow engineers and architects are continually unable to make room for a shore in their vision of Chicago.

Still, there are some places where you can find some semblance of a littoral, or shore, zone in the city. Finding them can be a pleasure, or it can be disturbing to witness the beleaguered life forms you encounter there. I think it’s a matter of socialization, when confronted with a space whose defining features are flexible and shifting what do we do? The answer isn’t obvious. Do we shop? Pay an admission fee? No, we should find others there and remember how to talk to them without the structure of workplace protocol or commerce to tell us how. We improvise. Of course there is a danger that our creativity will fail us and we will merely reproduce the familiar. Hey, you gotta start somewhere! Need to shop? Try a farmers’ market, get some fresh local produce, but also act as a connoisseur of social activity. What details make this place unique? After the market has closed up, go back to the plaza and take another close look at the place. What else is possible here? What other acts are possible? What confrontations? What desires fulfilled? What could be shared? How can it be like a shore?

Back to flags
There is undeniable pleasure to be had in flag waving. Find a long, sturdy pole that you can easily lift and affix a large piece of fabric to one end, then find yourself a good, wide-open space (a roof, a ball field, or a major intersection around three a.m.) and give the thing a good flail. It is akin to bouncing a ball, so basic a pleasure, watch the fabric ripple and feel the air drag against your muscles. The pleasure, the emotional effect of this act changes character as you consider the possible symbols or imagery to affix to the fabric.

Earlier I said, “flags help people in power delineate territories of influence from the top down.” This isn’t the only way to use a flag. After all, all flags start at the bottom. Forgive my provocative stance. Maybe a flag can be used to mark a littoral zone, a particular time of life, an ecosystem that sustains dynamic and varied activities. Maybe in such a zone the flag isn’t always the same, it changes from day to day or week to week depending on mood or need. In the way a tide moves in and out depositing life and material along the shore, these flags could bring different meanings to place and people. Here, some flags will provoke, some confront, others will be humorous, or confusing. The zones these flags mark will extend varied distances and the flags will activate multiple social circles.

I’m thinking someone could come up with a way to easily convert a light or utility pole into a flagpole using commonly available materials. Think of the flags we could fly. Would anonymous acts of this sort, committed under hiding be part of a democratic system? Now I consider Temporary Allegiance.

Temporary Allegiance is a project initiated by Philip von Zweck. It is a 25-foot flagpole that is open for the use of people in the greater-Chicago area on a first-come-first-served basis for the period of one week. Temporaryallegiance.org (the project web page) explains that the initiative “seeks to provide the community with a democratized space that fosters expression free of the veil of anonymity.” People wishing to respond to flags are given contact information for the flag makers [7].

A changing flag is more appealing than an honorary street or more advertising because it could open up more space for disenfranchised voices. Certainly their are limitations, it’s only a flag, for one thing. Can you overcome the social and economic blockages that exclude some people? This question is important because I want to think of this changing flag as an experiment in democracy, or more accurately, an experiment in micro-democracy. “Micro-democracy” is a term for a commitment to realizing democratic decision-making principles in small communities, households, or work places, despite those localities possibly being subjugated to greater systems that may not be democratic ones. Micro-democracy might be a way of making a little social equality where there is none, or where there just isn’t enough. Micro-democracy puts the onus on all of us to understand the needs of the people we are in contact with to negotiate our survival.

Notes:
1 I’m afraid I may have stolen some of this idea from A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuse and Guattari.
2 Historical information about Goose Island comes from the Encyclopedia of Chicago online. (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/300045.html)
3 Jamie Kalven’s Kicking the Pigeon is one place where you can read about police brutality in Chicago today. It’s free at www.viewfromtheground.com.
4 Historical info about Fred Hampton is from The Black Commentator, issue 67 (http://www.blackcommentator.com/67/67_hampton.html). Info about the effort to give him an honorary street name is from a Chicago Sun-Times article, “Street Name Sparks Outrage” February 28, 2006 (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-panther28.html).
5 This is the title of a short book by Ian Angus that I read while trying to write this thing. The book emphasizes the importance of social movements and grassroots participation as the basis for healthy democracy.
6 This is from the catalog essay for State and Lake, a group show that included my artwork.
7 Philip sites the following passage as an important reference for the project:
“All space is already occupied by the enemy, which has even reshaped its elementary laws, its geometry, to its own purposes. Authentic urbanism will appear when the absence of this occupation is created in certain zones. What we call construction starts there. It can be clarified by the positive void concept developed by modern physics. Materializing freedom means beginning by appropriating a few patches of the surface of a domesticated planet.” From “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism” by Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem, 1961.The full text can be read for free at the Situationist International Online - http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/bureau.html

Upcoming Voices Lectures

2010-10-26T12:15:00.002-05:00

John Marriott, artist
Tuesday, November 2, 5 pm

John Marriott is a Vancouver-born artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He works in video, installation, performance, and urban interventions, and is also an active writer and curator. Marriott’s projects are often funny, parodies of existing art works or genres, verbal or visual puns, or other types of silliness. Gary Michael Dault has described Marriott’s work as “so darned genial it’s positively disarming.” In 2002, his video, Vegetative States (a collaboration with Steve Reinke), screened at the International Festival of Film and Video in Rotterdam (Netherlands).

Marriott’s work has been seen internationally in venues such as the Power Plant, The 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and the Toronto Sculpture Garden (all Toronto); The Impakt Festival (Utrecht); and 25HRS (Barcelona). In 1998, his street performance series, Art that Says Hello(various locations), received critical praise in Artforum. His videos have been screened at many festivals, including Medienkunstpreis at the ZKM (Germany) and the Lausanne Underground Festival (Switzerland). Marriott’s writing has been published in catalogues including A Better Place and Diane Borsato: The Chinatown Foray, books such as Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, and magazines including Canadian Art, C Magazine, Mix Magazine and Prefix Photo.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, artist
Tuesday, November 9, 6 pm

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter who lives and works in Chicago. Her small, abstract paintings demand attentive viewers who can let down their guard. Without stepping into sentimentality, Hartung imbues her paintings with feeling, energy, and mood. Most recently, Zuckerman-Hartung had a solo exhibition, Laziest Girl in Town, at Rowley Kennerk Gallery in Chicago.

Zuckerman-Hartung’s work has been shown internationally, featured in exhibitions at Alogon Gallery (Chicago); Lisa Cooley Fine Art (New York); and Jacky Strenz Gallery (Frankfurt, Germany); among others. She is a co-founder of Julius Caesar, an artist-run exhibition space in Chicago. She is also the author of Notes on Susan Sontag (2009). She received her BA in 1998 from The Evergreen State College, (Olympia, WA) and her MFA in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Zuckerman-Hartung is currently a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Cauleen Smith, filmmaker
Thursday, November 11, 5 pm

Cauleen Smith is a filmmaker whose work reflects upon the everyday possibilities of the black imagination. The 2008 video project, The Fullness of Time, repurposes the languages of physicists and astronomers to decode the rage, grief, elation, and hope that surround the contemporary reality of New Orleans. The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band, Smith’s most recent project, was produced as part of an artist-in-residence at threewalls Gallery (Chicago). The first component of The Solar Flare Arkestral Marching Band includes five marching band flash mob street performances inspired by Sun Ra’s Arkestra; the end result will be a larger video, audio, and writing project.

Smith’s films have been featured in group exhibitions at the Houston Contemporary Art Museum; the Blanton Museum (Austin); and the New Museum (New York). Beginning in 1994, she wrote, directed, and produced her first narrative feature film, Drylongso (1998), which was selected for the American Spectrum of Sundance Film Festival, and won best feature film at both the Urbanworld Film Festival and the Los Angeles Pan-African Film Festival. Smith earned her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently the Acting Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Visual Arts.

Nicholas Frank, artist, curator, writer
“Manufacturing Consensus”
Tuesday, November 16, 5 pm

Nicholas Frank is curator at the Institute of Visual Arts (Inova) and a co-founder of the Milwaukee International. Recently, Frank’s curating, artmaking, platforming, and writing activities have coalesced into an overall boundary-blurred discipline. His paintings can take narrative form, his writings become sculpture, and curating sometimes becomes performance.

Frank ran the Hermetic Gallery in Milwaukee from 1993-2001. His organized projects and artworks have been exhibited internationally including at the Tate Modern (London); Kölnischer Kunstverein (Cologne); Swiss Institute, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise’s Passerby and Small A Projects (New York); Angstrom Gallery (Los Angeles); Locust Projects (Miami); Hyde Park Art Center, Rowley Kennerk Gallery and Golden Age (Chicago); MOCAD (Detroit); The Poor Farm, Wisconsin Academy Gallery, Milwaukee Art Museum, Green Gallery, Dean Jensen Gallery and the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts (Wisconsin); among others. He has written on art and other subjects for New Art Examiner,Purple, X-tra, Sculpture and Artpapers. Frank is represented by Western Exhibitions. Most recently, his work was included in the 2010 Wisconsin Triennial.

Steve Reinke, artist
Thursday, November 18, 5 pm

In conjunction with his Gallery 400 exhibition (see below), Chicago-based, Canadian-born artist Steve Reinke speaks about his artwork.

Reinke has exhibited and screened his videos at a number of venues, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa); the Power Plant and the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto); the International Film Festival Rotterdam (Netherlands); the Argos Festival (Brussels); the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art; and the Tate Modern (London). Throughout the 1990s he produced the ambitious collection The 100 Videos, and a book of his scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing: Scripts 1997 – 2005, was published by Coach House (Toronto). He has also co-edited several books, including By the Skin of Their Tongues: Artist Video Scripts (co-edited with Nelson Henricks, 1997), Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video (with Tom Taylor, 2000), and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (with Chris Gehman, 2005). In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. He is currently Associate Professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.

Socially Engaged Art Show-N-Tell

2010-10-22T14:11:00.011-05:00

The Free Store at Gallery 400, January 2010

Are you a creator or facilitator of socially engaged artwork? This is the first in a string of events to document our city's history in this arena. (The book project aspect of this endeavor has been awarded a Propeller Fund grant.)

Chicago projects show-n-tell at Experimental Station
Saturday November 13th, 2010 3-6pm

"Socially engaged art; political art; critical art; community art; public art; conceptual art; relational art - no matter what you call it, there is no question that a lot of artistic practices at the intersection of community, politics and everyday life are taking place in Chicago today (and have been for quite some time!). A group of us (Temporary Services, Stephanie Smith, Rebecca Zorach, Abby Satinsky, Lori Waxman, Daniel Tucker, Jerome Grand, Dan S. Wang and others) have been talking about getting folks involved in this kind of work locally together for an event where we would talk about what kind of work we have been involved in and observing taking place in the city and how it could best be archived for us and future generations to access. We didn't want to get everyone in a room with a pre-determined shape already in place and so our hope is that this event would allow us to all brainstorm collaboratively about what kind of categories would best represent the current and historical artistic activities we want to document. And since we are getting folks together, it also seemed like we should spread out lots of materials for folks to look at and get a sense of together, and for some interviews to be conducted in a video-interview booth about discreet histories of Chicago arts.

A couple of projects have already been conceived of (potentially library special collections, a museum collection at the Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum) and plans are underway for a book that Daniel Tucker received funding through the Propeller Fund to create and we want to know about what else people might want to do. There is no point in putting lots of energy and work into building a history if the people involved in that history cannot be a part of conceptualizing how it should be presented to the world. That is what we want to do together on Nov 13th.

Please come and bring a collaborator.

Bring ephemera from projects past that you want to share with other people!"

RSVP to Helen Cowdrey hcowdrey@uchicago.edu by Friday, November 5th

Missing Trash Can

2010-10-22T13:10:00.003-05:00

A mysterious trash can bandit (named Gwendolyn) has made off with our restroom trash can! But not without conscientiously replacing it with an ersatz can complete with photo to remind us of the old one.

Steve Reinke: The Tiny Ventriloquist

2010-10-21T16:31:00.003-05:00

Steve Reinke: The Tiny Ventriloquist

November 2 – December 18

Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 3, 5-8 pm

With endearing wit, Chicago-based, Canadian-born Steve Reinke makes work in a mock confessional mode about sex, death, and whatever comes between sex and death. This exhibition premieres a new suite of videos, The Tiny Ventriloquist, commissioned by Gallery 400, as well as works in various other media: drawing, needlepoint, etc. New and recent collaborative videos are also featured alongside solo works by the collaborators: Dani Leventhal, John Marriott, Jessie Mott, and James Richards. The exhibition is accompanied by the upcoming publication of Reinke’s book The Shimmering Beast.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. Coach House Press published a book of Reinke’s scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing, in 2004. He is currently an associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.

Further information:

http://www.myrectumisnotagrave.com/

http://blog.musicisplaying.com/

UPCOMING LECTURE

2010-10-21T16:24:00.008-05:00

Dream a Little Dream, 2009

John Marriott

Tuesday November 2, 5pm

Gallery 400 Lecture Room

John Marriott is a Vancouver-born artist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He works in video, installation, performance, and urban interventions, and is also an active writer and curator. Marriott’s projects are often funny, parodies of existing art works or genres, verbal or visual puns, or other types of silliness. Gary Michael Dault has described Marriott’s work as “so darned genial it’s positively disarming.” In 2002, his video, Vegetative States (a collaboration with Steve Reinke), screened at the International Festival of Film and Video in Rotterdam (Netherlands).

Marriott’s work has been seen internationally in venues such as The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, The 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art and the Toronto Sculpture Garden (all Toronto); The Impakt Festival (Utrecht); and 25HRS (Barcelona). In 1998, his street performance series, Art that Says Hello (various locations), received critical praise in Artforum. His videos have been screened at many festivals, including Medienkunstpreis at the ZKM (Germany) and the Lausanne Underground Festival (Switzerland). Marriott’s writing has been published in catalogues including A Better Place and Diane Borsato: The Chinatown Foray, books such as Suggestive Poses: Artists and Critics Respond to Censorship, and magazines including Canadian Art, C Magazine, Mix Magazine and Prefix Photo.

Propeller Fund Event Announcement

2010-10-14T16:44:00.003-05:00

Propeller Fund announces a public celebration in honor of the 15 winners of the initial Propeller Fund awards.

First Awards Celebration
Thursday, October 28, 6 pm
The Great Space
Art + Design Hall, 5th Floor
University of Illinois at Chicago
400 South Peoria Street
Chicago, IL 60607

Come celebrate the winners and the visual arts community with food, drink and music.

The five jurists for the first round of awards, Hannah Feldman, Dan Peterman, Georgina Valverde, Cleo Wilson and Propeller Fund representatives, selected 15 winners from over 140 applications.

Propeller Fund was initiated in 2010 to build the small, self-organized operations that constitute a large catalyst for the creative activity and vitality of the Chicago visual art world. Support is provided to visual arts projects that are: independent, informal, and self-organized.

Winners will be announced shortly.

For more information:
Propeller Fund
312-432-3972
info@propellerfund.org

To find out how you can support Propeller Fund, contact us: info@propellerfund.org

Launched in May 2010, Propeller Fund is administered jointly by Gallery 400, UIC and threewalls. Initial support for the program is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts as part of its initiative to promote informal and independently organized visual arts activities across the United States.

Upcoming Lecture

2010-10-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

John Hartle (University of Amsterdam)

Modernisme Noir – Re/Visions of Art, Aesthetics and Politics

October 26th, 1pm

There is an increasing focus in contemporary art on aesthetical concepts that cite the ideas of form as represented by classical Modernism in their relation to New York School, White Cube and international style, and in this way call for a reassessment of modernism (rather than bowing out to it with a hint of post-modern irony). “Formal” recourse of this kind to the formulas of form characteristic of Modernism coincides with “co-related” statements of political modernity and its dysfunctional propensity. We would like to call this trend in contemporary art “Modernisme Noir”, which can be described as the “double mimesis” (F. Thürlemann) of Modernism.

What is special and historically characteristic of Modernism Noir is not so much its critical response to the utopian and universal claim made by a form of Modernism that presupposes directly translatable rationality of form and the notion of irreversible progress. These characteristics had already been subjected to criticism by the proponents of post-modern irony. Instead, in contrast to post-modern irony and the renunciation of the modernistic-utopian project, there is an intrinsically self-contradictory element in Modernisme Noir. This means that there is as much a need to retain the civilising quintessence of Modernism as there is an inclination to succumb to the fascination of clarity of form in Modernism. But this is also no longer possible without drawing to attention the catastrophic implications of modern-day promises of salvation and the globalisation of Modernism.

The aesthetics of Modernism that has become simply ornamental, that has become abstract and formalistic in the field of painting and object art, functional and factual in architecture and design, thus reasserts itself as the aesthetics of sublimity, representing a complex commentary not only on aesthetical Modernism but also on political modernity. Predominantly minimalist form elements give way to historically-determined political impressions of emotional shock. The aesthetics of sublimity thus injects the aesthetic tradition of Modernism itself with a sense of emotional involvement which as a result of this very disassociation engenders reflexivity in art-related and social issues. Gregor Schneider’s perfectly designed Guantanamo-obstacle track “White Torture”, Santiago Sierra’s minimalist objects, presented or incorporated by paid welfare recipients, the “avant-garde Historicism” in the paintings of Luc Tuymans and Wilhelm Sasnal, the gruesome, aseptic rooms of Martin Creed, the existential void of Martin Boyce’s design – these and other strategies emphasize form-related aesthetical techniques of contemporary art, which, in sceptical response to modernity, highlight the complicity of aesthetic Modernism and political modernity.

With the help of select and specific analyses and against the theoretical background of these approaches the aim here is to create a profile of a contemporary revision of Modernism and modernity which forms a distinctive factor influencing contemporary art.

INTERNSHIP OPPORTUNITIES AT G400

2010-10-13T15:14:00.011-05:00

In school or recently out of school and looking for great on-the-job experience? Well, you're in luck, because Gallery 400 is looking for amazing interns! Internships at Gallery 400 offer education and professional experience at a dynamic public art venue and university resource.

Appointments will go through January 2011 and require a commitment of 10-20 hours per week, depending on appointment. To apply, please send your cover letter and resume to uicgallery400@gmail.com by Friday, October 29. Please see below for more information.

Design Intern Position:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting the gallery with the design of all marketing materials for exhibitions, film and video screenings, lectures, and other programs.

Job duties include:

Using Adobe InDesign and Illustrator templates to create posters and flyers
Creating new design for other printed and digital materials

Archive/Copy Editor Intern Position:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting Gallery 400’s current effort to reorganize and digitize its archive in preparation for a new website and online archival database. We are looking for a grammar whiz with a strong background in writing and an interest in recent Chicago art history.

Job duties include:

Copy editing exhibition descriptions for the upcoming new website
Assisting the Archivist with writing and editing captions for digital images
Embedding metadata into digital images
Reviewing and editing website

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, excellent writing skills, and an interest in art and art history. Web experience is an advantage, but not required. Please submit a short writing sample (1-2 pages) along with your application.

This is a non-paid internship.

Archive/Photo Editing Intern Position:

Gallery 400 seeks an undergraduate or graduate student intern interested in assisting Gallery 400’s current effort to reorganize and digitize its archive in preparation for a new website and online archival database.

Job duties include:

Organizing digital images
Assisting the Archivist with editing scanned slides for online publication
Embedding metadata into digital images
Researching images when necessary

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, proficiency with Photoshop and experience with Excel and Adobe Bridge.

This is a non-paid internship.

Transitions

2010-10-07T11:16:00.013-05:00

Transitions

Video/Music Performance Event by Joe Grimm
Wednesday October 20, 7pm

Transitions is a new piece of music arranged for multiple TV monitors. In this work, Grimm extends some of the ideas from past work with 16mm audiovisual performance to the realm of digital video. It is a senseless but ecstatic exploration of the prefab geometry that is always already present in video-editing software in the form of cheesy cuts, wipes, and fades. In this controlled explosion of the standard "bars and tone," Grimm constructs a sonic and visual experience that is paradoxically image-free, consisting solely of a kind of weaving of the tools that we use to transition from one image to another.

Joe Grimm is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with light and sound. In his performances, sculptures, videos, and constructed situations, he appropriates material from enlightenment-era metaphysics, contemporary pop music, and the troubled legacy of minimalism -- insisting always on the centrality of sheer sensory pleasure. Grimm studied philosophy at Yale University before receiving a graduate degree in experimental music composition at Brown University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been shown at institutions such as CAPC Bordeaux, BMOCA, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Bezalel Gallery in Tel Aviv, and MCA Chicago.

EXHIBITION TOUR AND DISCUSSION

2010-09-23T14:21:00.008-05:00

Exhibition Tour and Discussion
Saturday Sept 25, 2pm

Join Gallery 400 director Lorelei Stewart for a tour and discussion of our two current exhibitions: Particulate Matter (Things, Thingys, Thingies) by Stephanie Syjuco and The Plastic Arts by Dexter Sinister.

THE TRANSFORMATION SHOW

2010-09-23T10:42:00.006-05:00

"The Transformation Show"
(curated by Ben Russell)
7:00pm on Tuesday the 5th of October
at Gallery 400, 400 S Peoria, Chicago, IL
FREE

Like so many smaller robots united to form a larger and somewhat more impressive whole, this program of films and videos culled from the last four decades of mediamaking is a proposition for transformation on both the micro and macro level. Screened in tandem with the Stephanie Syjuco and Dexter Sinister shows at Gallery400, in which throwaway e-art is made material and font choice becomes a locus for meaning, tonight's selection of moving images is about alteration and transmutation in the broadest sense of the words. Watch in slack-jawed awe as giant lizards metamorphose (SMITH), as men become portals (CAMPUS) and the city becomes a screen (KRANING), as language is emptied out of signification entirely (ROSE), and as an animated red star mutates into our psychedelic everyday (BECKETT). Be it through awkwardly forced connections (RUBY), unlikely Western datamoshing (BARON/GOODWIN), structuralist re-re-rephotography (LEGRICE), or That Force Called Time Which Changes Everything In Its Wake (GOTTHEIM), your sense of your-self-in-the-world will be inextricably altered, to be sure. Not too bad for an evening at the art space - so come one, come all and Do the Transform!

FEATURING: Gargantuan by John Smith (1:00, 16mm, 1992), Three Transitions by Peter Campus (5:00 video, 1973), Forced Inanimate Connection: Climax Modelling by Sterling Ruby (7:00, video, 2002), Secondary Currents by Peter Rose (18:00, 16mm, 1982), Evolution of the Red Star by Adam Beckett (7:00, 16mm, 1973), Berlin Horse by Malcolm LeGrice (7:00, 16mm, 1970), Lossless #3 by Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin (10:00, video, 2008), Vineland by Laura Kraning (10:00, video, 2009), Fog Line by Larry Gottheim (11:00, 16mm, 1970) TRT 76:00

VOICES LECTURE SERIES

2010-09-18T17:29:00.019-05:00

Dexter Sinister – double lecture
“It is the Outsidedness Flavor of It” by Stuart Bailey
“Everything is in Everything” by David Reinfurt
Thursday, September 30, 5 pm

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey. David currently teaches at Princeton University (NJ) and Columbia University in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (NYC). Stuart is currently involved in diverse projects at Parsons School of Design (NYC) and Pasadena Art Center (LA).

Dexter Sinister established a workshop in the basement at 38 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side in New York City. The workshop is intended to model a ‘Just-In-Time’ economy of print production, running counter to the contemporary assembly-line realities of large-scale publishing. This involves avoiding waste by working on-demand, utilizing local cheap machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production and distribution into one efficient activity.

Voices Lecture Series

2010-09-16T16:38:00.001-05:00

Matt Mullican, individual works from 1971 Р 2009, mixed media. From Huberman’s For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

Anthony Huberman
“I Know that I Know Nothing”
Wednesday September 22, 5 pm

Huberman is an independent curator and writer based in New York. He is currently a distinguished lecturer at Hunter College and is the director of The Artist’s Institute.

Huberman was born and raised in Switzerland, and received his BA in sociology from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He has served as curator of the SculptureCenter (NY), education director at MoMA/P.S.1 (NY), a curator at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and chief curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, among others. He has curated several group exhibitions, including the recent For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there. He has organized exhibitions, performance, and radio events with Ei Arakawa, John Armleder and Oliver Mosset, and Lutz Bacher among others. His writings have appeared in Afterall, Artforum, Bomb, Dot Dot Dot, and The Wire.

Voices Lecture Series

2010-09-07T15:52:00.014-05:00

Triple Candie " For Teaching Porpoises Only: A Lecture Demonstration"

September 13, 5-7:30 pm

Gallery 400 Lecture Room

Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett co-founded and have served as co-directors of Triple Candie, a not-for-profit contemporary art venue in Harlem, since 2001. Triple Candie is a place-based, research-oriented gallery that produces exhibitions about art but largely devoid of it. A typical exhibition consists of reproductions, surrogates, models, stage-sets, or common objects that are displayed using a combination of rhetorical devices. Given their ephemeral nature, frequent use of historical subjects, and lack of any obvious artist-agent, Triple Candie’s exhibitions have often been referred to as “curatorial performances.” Bancroft and Nesbett live in New York City. Triple Candie was highlighted as one of twenty-five worldwide trendsetters in the September 2007 issue of ARTnews. They were co-publishers of the award-winning Art on Paper magazine until 2004. Bancroft holds a master’s degree in contemporary art history from the University of Washington, Seattle and a bachelor’s degree in painting from Michigan State University. Nesbett holds a post-master’s certificate from the Institute for Not-for- Profit Management at Columbia University, a master’s degree in art history from University of Washington, Seattle, and a bachelor’s degree in visual studies from Cornell University.

Irving Petlin

2010-08-28T09:27:00.006-05:00

Ever since Gallery 400, with the support of the IMLS Foundation, began our ongoing effort to reorganize and digitize our archive, I have been sorting, reading, scanning, organizing, and inventorying my way through box upon box of press releases, postcards, slides and CDs, piecing together a composite portrait of the gallery as it has grown over nearly 30 years. I have perused more checklists, correspondence and exhibition documentation than I can hold in memory, and through them I have discovered a slice of the recent art history of Chicago that I might never have otherwise engaged. In my experience, archiving can sometimes resemble a kind of detective work, an incidental research through which, almost by accident, a recreation of a past exhibition is formed. While the experience of seeing the exhibition itself can never reappear, a ghost of the show lingers the cumulative material of its remnants. The Gallery 400 archive is full of surprising and exceptional phantoms, and I am excited that it provides (and once it is digitized, it will do so with greater ease) those who can never now see the shows themselves with an opportunity to reinvent them in their imaginations. But since by now I am reasonably familiar with the history of these exhibitions, I am glad to have the blog as a method of calling attention to them, especially as their stories grow and shift, contextualized and re-contextualized by the changing history and circumstances of the artists and artworks involved.

Although I have been away from Chicago for the month of August, I have found that the scope of the archive stretches well across the country. While in residency at the Vermont Studio Center I’ve had occasion to meet Irving Petlin, a former Gallery 400 artist working primarily in pastel whose From the Periodic Table series was exhibited at Gallery 400 in 1990. Based on prize-winning Italian author Primo Levi’s work The Periodic Table, Petlin created a series of twenty-one pastel drawings, each named after a different element; the same elements the inspired various chapters in Levi’s book. The minerality of pastels, the layering of metaphors and Petlin’s experiences growing up in a Jewish community in Chicago during World War II made him uniquely suited to re-interpret Levi’s work. Levi, an Jewish-Italian chemist and holocaust survivor whose memoirs, poems, and short stories brought him international acclaim, died in 1987 in what many believe to have been a suicide. Petlin had been slated to meet him soon after, and was on his way to Turin when the author died. A book also called From the Periodic Table, underwritten by Kent Fine Art of New York, was published to accompany the exhibition at Gallery 400.

Born in 1934, Petlin grew up in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He earned his undergraduate degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago before continuing on to Yale to study under Josef Albers, and later moving to New York City. As an artist he emphasizes the importance of drawing, which he describes as “a scout sent out to look at new territories.” He was partially drawn to working in pastel by the dryness of the medium, and his desire to “use the surface as a kind of communicator of the fragility of what you’re doing.” Some of his pastels eventually become paintings, but most are complete in their drawing forms.

At the Studio Center, Petlin presented a slide lecture which surveyed ten years of work completed between 1999 and 2009, which were also overwhelmingly “posthumous collaborations”, as he called them, with numerous writers, musicians, and poets. These literary and historical engagements, which have mostly defined his practice over the past twenty years, have inspired Petlin to create drawings and paintings based on the poems of Emily Dickenson, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer, and Edmond Jabés, as well as the writings of Bruno Schulz, W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and visualizing Bach’s The Art of the Fugue. Much of his work has funereal qualities, often dealing with the Jewish experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Even when not directly reflecting the work of a particular writer or composer, images of the old Jewish cemetery in Prague, or a destroyed synagogue in Kiev haunt his drawings. Referential and reinterpretive without sacrificing any originality or rigor, Petlin’s work for me in some ways resembles the way art can be understood through an archive. A work was created, an experience took place, and in Petlin’s work, as in the mind of one who searches through an archive, that story and its meaning are re-invented, pulled apart, re-emphasized, layered and twisted into something unique, which is simultaneously a fragment of a preexisting artwork and story, while remaining entirely other and new.

Caroline Carlsmith

Archivist

Gallery 400

In Adams-Sangamon Park

2010-08-18T16:01:00.005-05:00

Sonic Playground with David Moré
August 31, 6-8 pm
Location: Adams-Sangamon Park (two blocks north of Gallery 400)

Co-produced with the Chicago Park District.

Sonic Playground is a series of events sponsored throughout Chicago parks over the summer
to bring experimental sound production and families together. Gallery 400 exhibiting sound artist
David Moré brings his distinct, irreverent and handmade approach to the series at the new park
opening around the corner from Gallery 400 at Adams and Sangamon Streets.

Sonic Playground is where you can create sounds and music with play in motion. Experiment with
the environment and translate your play into sound. Activate your space. Play the playground.
Share the love of making music. You are the musician.

For more information on Sonic Playground series call Inferno Mobile Recording Studio: 312 296 5843

“…practice always obliges the sentence to end.”

2010-08-16T11:33:00.013-05:00

Trained as a painter, I accidentally became a writer, then editor, then curator. This may go a small way to describe why I am always taken by the mess of production and presentation—not just the big gestures, the intended gestures—the small, illegible and invisible gestures that make a final work or exhibition hold a viewpoint and offer an opinion. In a word: Process. Thinking process as a felt if not exactly recognized path has been on my mind quite a bit recently. By process, I’m not talking about watching the artwork get created or seeing all the notes leading up to the exhibition, and I’m not thinking studio detritus, the used paintbrush sitting in the turpentine can. I’m thinking the incongruent marks, the remaindered thoughts, the questions that make you stand in one exhibition longer than in another.

David Schutter
after AIC W, YCBA C, GSMB R
2010
Silverpoint on tafelet

Beginning this summer, working on an essay for the catalog accompanying a two-person exhibition of Chicago-based painter David Schutter and Berlin-based artist Arturo Herrera, I kept searching for how to address the relationship each artist has to formal traditions and historical forms. Neither aims for a direct statement on a particular tradition, but then traditional ways of dealing with material, painted studies and silverpoint for Schutter, and the classic push and pull of collage material in Herrera, kept me looking for a clear historical footing in the works, something that is denied by their disruptive uses of these time-honored techniques. This impasse, for me, could be located in the way both so actively reveal their cards. Their works, on one hand could not be more straightforward in how the final work functions, and this reveal slows down the viewer, looking for what and why is different.

Arturo Herrera
Wolfgang
2010
Collage, mixed media on paper

I was stumped, with no idea where to begin. When stumped starting an essay I always turn to J.G. Ballard’s "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" produced for the Zone publication Incorporations, edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. Maybe he pithily defined a term I need? Maybe I forgot some important angle? Maybe I just need a deep dark laugh. There was nothing there of use to Schutter and Herrera, but suddenly I had ideas for at least two new essays, an idea of what was missing for an upcoming group exhibition I am organizing with Philip von Zweck, and the desire to dive headfirst into Schutter’s and Herrera’s relationships with tradition and modernism. That’s when I remembered a quote from Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz: “It is a mistake to view Modernism as a block without fissures, or cracks.”

Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore

Soon after finishing the essay, I found myself in a meeting at Dexter Sinister’s Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore on New York’s lower east side one sweltering July morning. I was there to get a handle on the details of, ideas behind, and function of their upcoming exhibition The Plastic Arts at Gallery 400. Dexter Sinister is a duo quite adept at diffusing the lines between form and content in graphic design, creating presentations and publications that collapse the distinctions between editing, design, production and distribution. Process is always a focus of their work, you just might not be able to recognize it as process because it looks so much like content, or design, or voice, or packaging, or structural support. Beyond the fruitful conversation that day, two images have stayed with me since the morning visit.

First image: I walk down into the basement space to see David Reinfurt (half of Dexter Sinister), planted directly in front of a three-step stepstool, on top of which was a desk-sized oscillating fan. Perched just below the fan was a red bucket with a 1lb. bag of ice. Taking air conditioning back to its basics when necessity requires and big budget solutions are out of the question. The desire, the need and the inventiveness were clear to see in this set-up, what was less visible was how this combination came to be the right solution. The paths of production and process were visible, and it felt the proper response for the place. Was there a more reasoned solution? Probably. Then again, the ingenuity and the humor of the assemblage was as much a relief in the heat as any cool air actually circulating the space as a result of the contraption. You’ll need to picture it; I tend not to take cameras anywhere.

Second image: We are discussing, gathered together in front of this air conditioning unit, what will actually be in the exhibition: what texts they are using, formats, styles, and how the materials should function when brought together. David tells me there is a video that will show exactly how they want the exhibition to function. David tells me the video clearly exhibits how communication changes when form changes. The video isn’t a work of theirs. It isn’t a work by another artist. It is a YouTube find. A short clip taken out of context from a larger lecture video posted elsewhere. Watching the video, twice at least, I have an irrepressible smile; as does David. We are both amazed—me for the first time, he for the umpteenth. Not for the first time feel Dexter Sinister are my people, and this exhibition is the right one to do. Suddenly, somehow, I had a clearer idea of what the typography, font and quotation choices mean for The Plastic Arts project. Why the decisions they were making seemed right even when I couldn’t locate a path.

Watch the clip:

I returned to Chicago. Back to work. I reread "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century" just a couple weeks ago, having finished the Schutter/Herrera essay, having flushed out some of the Dexter Sinister exhibition, having arranged for some price quotes for materials, having visions of camouflaging octopi dancing through my head. Now even more loose change started spilling out of my head. What catches me this time? J.G. Ballard: “Fashion: A recognition that nature has endowed us with one skin too few, and that a fully sentient being should wear its nervous system externally.” Trusting the instinct behind research that isn’t on topic keeps you looking for the solution that is right, even if it does not make a straight line. After all, research is how any armchair reader or academic pronounces procrastination. I’m great at research. Which is not a good thing. So I need to make sure a good portion of my research is ‘off-topic”—the octopus propelling itself away in a cloud of ink, changing shape, color and texture when it realizes it is in the line of focus. It makes me move.

What is surrounding me as I work out the Dexter Sinister exhibition, the other upcoming shows and essays soon to be due? Books: William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch; Dexter Sinister, The Curse of Bigness; Tan Lin, Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking; Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural; Dexter Sinister, unofficial bootleg of Anthony Huberman’s For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there; Stuart Bailey, Extended Caption (DDDG); David Reinfurt, Six Prototypes for a Screensaver; Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance; J.G. Ballard, The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard, and The Atrocity Exhibition; Diane Williams, The Stupefaction: Stories and a novella; not to mention daily newspapers, issues of Texte zur Kunst and the such. Records: Gate, A Republic of Sadness; Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle; anything involving Arto Lindsay; Pan Sonic; the Minutemen; Funkadelic, Standing on the Verge of Getting It On; Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space; Luc Ferrari, Cellule 75; The Fall, “Totally Wired”; Pocahaunted; Sic Alps; Kurt Vile and on and on. Films: The Face of Another, Woman in the Dunes, A Grin Without a Cat. And then for some reason the British artist Cerith Wyn Evans.

Why does any of this matter? That cannot be answered. What does any of the above have to do with Dexter Sinister, graphic design, utopia, painting, surface, modernism, fantasy, collage, psychopathology, voice or haunting, not to mention marketing, granting, website structures and anything else I am supposed to be thinking about? Quite possibly the answer is: not a thing. What will any of this contribute to the final outcomes? If I could answer this, neither my work desk nor my home desk would be as messy as they are. It is a practice. A hunch. In a word: process. With similar attitude, curator Bob Nickas has advised those organizing shows: “Do put works next to each other that wouldn’t in a million years seem to belong together. You probably won’t have seen it before, and if a suggestive space does open up between them, no one has to know it was a shot in the dark.”

Of course, mistakes will happen this way, as will the anxiety of fast-approaching deadlines and work yet to be completed. What makes an exhibition or an artwork something special though is the “shot in the dark” of which no one needs to be informed. English as a language is a mess, structurally speaking, with few hard and fast grammar rules. One, for example: all sentences have to end. This said, you can choose to rewrite any sentence as a proposition, replace the period with an ellipsis, add as many independent clauses as the word count will accept. There is a lot of bend. On the rare occasion when I get an essay, exhibition, publication or drawing right, I know it is because the proposition, the ellipsis, the independent clause can be felt, even if few—including myself—can actually find them.

A Brief History on, and Invitation to Hot Media

2010-08-09T13:23:00.018-05:00

Two years ago we started a new program at Gallery 400 which was, at first, titled The People’s Matinee Series. It was “The People’s” in that it was meant to be curated by an autonomous group of students with membership open to all graduates of all different disciplines. We had it as a “Matinee” because it seemed like folks were more likely to come if it was during their day on-campus rather than the evening. The first idea turned out a success: a small but dedicated group of students (mostly art history and studio grads) formed to share ideas on what we could present, which primarily took the form of short film and video works. The second idea, the “matinee” part, turned out to be not so convenient for most schedules, so the next year we had to think of something different. We made some changes, but the core idea still stands: an open invitation for UIC grads to collectively curate.

During a meeting last year, my colleague, Tiffany Funk had the simple idea: “Hey, why don’t we screen works on the projector and give graduate students and artists an informal platform to present their work?” This notion took off. No longer in the afternoon, and no longer merely a film/video screening the program was renamed the Hot Media series, because there’s something excellent yet perverted about turning Marshall McLuhan into a marketing scheme.

Christa Donner and Andy Yang

I’ve always intended the “media” in Hot Media to be forward and backward compatible. That is to say, not the historically specific “media” which refers to communication technologies from the middle of the 20th Century onwards, but instead precisely what the term means at face value: the plural of medium. This way, as long as we were presenting at least two different media of any kind within one program (an easy goal) we were holding true to the title. We could include absolutely any kind of work, if given the opportunity: from painting to video games to experimental ambient writing. But furthermore the broad meaning of media carried the intentionally interdisciplinary mission of the series. With the broad title we could do anything we wanted, and what we wanted was to be as inclusive of as many kinds of art-making, criticism and scholarship on-campus (and beyond) as possible.

Erik Peterson

For such a possibly overambitious goal we have made it pretty far. But the series is held back by a problem on the UIC campus which, in Catch 22 fashion, the Hot Media Series was supposed to help remedy. There is this sentiment floating in the campus ether that we are a “commuter school” and therefore we have no community. With no community also comes no wide-spread inter-departmental communication and therefore a difficult scenario for developing interdisciplinary dialogue. First of all, I don’t think the commuter off-campus attitude is nearly as prevalent as many say it is. Second, I’ve held this theory that interdisciplinary dialogue doesn’t require a great deal of bureaucratic or institutional effort, but instead something as simple as one on-campus entity giving students some free space and time.

Rebecca Beachy

Hence Hot Media. The curatorial group is open to all grads of all disciplines, and all students, as well as general public, are invited to attend. Although I feel its a success and privilege to have made more connections between art history and studio arts, there seems to be many other disciplines that are not included merely because we haven’t met each other yet. So designers, architects, musicians, theatre practitioners, literature scholars, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, engineers, and all other graduates in disciplines that I’m not listing... I’m looking at you. Help me prove this theory and discard the “commuter” baggage. It would be my privilege, and the privilege of the Hot Media group to meet you, and if you’re so inclined to contribute to the process all the better.

And also, if undergrads are interested in forming a group and having a space where they can share work and dialogue, let me know. Gallery 400 would be very interested in facilitating that kind of thing too.

The upcoming gallery exhibitions are very exciting, as is the potential for what we can plan this year for Hot Media. The primary goal of the series is to simply create an informal atmosphere of discursive space, and I’m looking forward to finding new methods and collaborators to make that happen.

Chaz Evans
Gallery Assistant
Gallery 400

Contact Hot Media at hotmediaseries@gmail.com

The Summer of '10

2010-08-04T12:23:00.010-05:00

So, what has Gallery 400 been up to since June when we closed our last shows? You may have read snippets here and on Facebook and Twitter. But I thought I'd give you a wider view. We've been doing a lot of thinking and prepping, preparing for new shows in the fall (of course) and working on new initiatives--including a new website to debut in the fall and new types of programs.

But more than new programming initiatives, we've been discussing and debating a new focus for the Gallery. How can we do what we've done well in the past in a more meaningful way, connecting with people and connecting them to each other. We've been greatly aided in thinking this through by Tom Shapiro of Cultural Strategy Partners. Tom has helped us think about the benefits and purpose of how Gallery 400 can best interact with the UIC and Chicago art and non-art communities. I'll be back on this blog in the next month to give you details on the open, welcoming, inclusive and participatory Gallery 400 we envision.

In the meantime I thought I'd share with you some influences on this process. One of the things we've been doing is traveling and meeting other professionals in the field. In some ways this has been our most productive input for thinking about how and what Gallery 400 does. In June I traveled to Silver Falls State Park in Oregon for five days at the NAMAC Leadership Institute for Visual Arts Organizations. Our cohort of 17 directors and senior managers learned about useful tools in leadership, teamwork and more--did you see Anthony's June Facebook post about a pyramid chart? This is it.

But frankly, the Institute was the first time in my ten years at Gallery 400 in which I was able to take a break and think about what I value in what I do and what Gallery 400's values are. (Did I mention we were in the woods with no cell phone coverage or internet access?) In the day-today of running an art space its easy to get caught up in the pragmatics of making things happen and in keeping up with the latest in art practice and discourse, losing sight of the biggest picture: why one does this in the first place. For many of us at the Institute that's expecting and finding joy, excitement, and human connection in art institutions. Why wouldn't we we want that?! I can't thank the NAMAC Leadership Institute and its expert facilitators (Dewey Schott, Sonya Shah, and Paula Manley), as well as the 17 other attendees--wonderful people, all--enough for the chance to rediscover the heart of what Gallery 400 can do.

Similarly, the Contemporary Curators Conference that Anthony and I attended in Houston in July was a great opportunity to connect with colleagues from around the country, compare notes on practices, challenges, and priorities.

Moreover, it put Gallery 400's identity in high relief. We are different from a museum. Our context within an educational institution gives us a community built into our very being. On top of that we have the potential to be a significant bridge between the university community and the city. Outside the conference agenda--which included a SNL Weekend Update-like presentation by Dominic Molon, new chief curator at Contemporary Art Museum , St. Louis, and Jenelle Porter of the ICA Philadelphia and good conversations on the role of the curator and for whom shows are curated--visiting the many institutions in Houston such as Contemporary Art Museum, Houston and Project Row Houses provided concrete inspiration on connecting to communities.

Here's hoping that next week's Open Dialogue 2010 organized by The Association of American Culture and taking place here at home in Chicago will add more.

Taking off and taking stock have been especially fruitful for me personally. Hopefully, once we set things in motion, they will be for the larger Gallery 400 community. More soon.

Fall Internship Opportunities

2010-07-26T13:07:00.006-05:00

In school or recently out of school and looking for good on-the-job experience? Well, you're in luck because Gallery 400 is looking for amazing interns!

Gallery 400 welcomes internship applications from current students and recent graduates. Internships at Gallery 400 offer education through professional experience at a dynamic public art venue and university resource.

Internships are available in the areas of Gallery Marketing, Exhibition Preparation and Archival Work. Appointments are a semester in length and require a commitment of 10-20 hours per week, depending on appointment.

Applications are reviewed three times per year. To apply, please send a cover letter and resume to uicgallery400@gmail.com with “internship” in the subject line.

Gallery 400 accepts applications for all internships three times yearly. Please see below for application deadlines.

Application Deadlines
Fall Semester (September-December)	July 28, 2010
Spring Semester (January - May)	December 1, 2010
Summer (May - August)	May 1, 2010

MARKETING:

Gallery 400 seeks undergraduate and graduate students interested in assisting with Gallery Marketing of the exhibitions, lectures, film and video screenings and other programs.

Job Duties include:

Assisting the marketing staff to maintain the marketing calendar
Archiving press clippings
Assist in updating social networking tools within established gallery conventions
Maintain mailing list
Assist with documenting exhibitions
Assist with distribution of marketing materials

This is a non-paid internship.

PREPARATOR:

Gallery 400 seeks undergraduate and graduate students interested in gaining art handling and installation experience in a professional gallery setting. This position is an excellent opportunity for students to develop valuable preparatory experience and polish their professional installation skills.

Job Duties include:

Assisting in gallery installation and preparation (includes working withlighting, wall patching, painting and artwork installing)
Assisting with documentation and archiving of exhibitions
Assisting in the maintenance of Gallery 400 facilities

This position requires very good verbal communication skills and great interest in working with your hands. Candidates should possess familiarity with basic tools; excellent organizational and interpersonal skills; enthusiasm; and a proven track record of prioritizing and completing multiple assignments. Applicants must be able to lift 50 pounds. Basic knowledge and familiarity with a variety of tools, materials and AV equipment is preferred.

Archive:

Gallery 400 seeks undergraduate and graduate students interested in assisting with Gallery 400’s current effort to reorganize and digitize its archive in preparation for a new website and online archival database.

Job Duties include:

Assisting the gallery archivist in inventorying and organizing documentation and historical material.
Editing scanned images in Photoshop
Embedding metadata into digital images
Uploading digitized material onto the gallery’s website
Editing the archive for digital accessibility

Desirable skills in a candidate include a high degree of organization and attention to detail, writing skills, and knowledge of Photoshop, Excel, and Adobe Bridge. This is a non-paid internship.

Advance Fall Exhibition Schedule

2010-07-19T15:23:00.008-05:00

Stephanie Syjuco: Particulate Matter (Things, Thingys, Thingies)
September 7 – October 23
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 8, 5-8 pm

Syjuco’s handmade versions of objects designed by users of the free 3-D modeling program Google SketchUp exist somewhere between the bootleg, the copy, and the translation. Modeled from online designs that seem to lack value or utility, Syjuco’s refashioned versions explore the handmade in the digital-era of design, uniqueness found even within the copy, and collaboration’s relationship to outsourcing, as well as labor, authorship, and value.

Stephanie Syjuco lives and works in San Francisco. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; The New Museum; SFMOMA; The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. Throughout 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops at art venues in Istanbul, Turkey; Beijing, China; and Manila, Philippines. In October 2009 she presented a parasitic art counterfeiting event, COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone in Frieze Projects, London; and contributed proxy sculptures for P.S.1/MoMA's joint exhibition, 1969. She is a recipient of numerous awards, including a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award.

http://www.stephaniesyjuco.com/

Dexter Sinister: The Plastic Arts

September 7 – October 23

Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 8, 5-8 pm

Diffusing the lines between form and content in graphic design, Dexter Sinister creates presentations and publications that collapse the distinctions between editing, design, production and distribution. Designed as a walk-in-caption and typeset in their newly devised Meta-the-difference-between-the-two-font. font, this exhibition offers a series of frames with which to consider the usual channels of material, subject matter and set-up in exhibition displays.

Dexter Sinister is the compound name of Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt. As a group, Dexter Sinister works as a publishing imprint, a workshop/bookstore based in New York, and an exhibiting artist making art shows and events. David graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993, Yale University in 1999, and formed the design studio O-R-G in 2000. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the journal Dot Dot Dot the same year.

Further information:

http://www.dextersinister.org/

http://www.dot-dot-dot.us/

http://www.sinisterdexter.org/

Steve Reinke: The Tiny Ventriloquist

November 2 – December 18

Opening Reception: Wednesday, November 3, 5-8 pm

With endearing wit, Canadian-born Steve Reinke makes videos and two-dimensional works that use diaristic and collage elements to relate desire, philosophy and pop culture. Reinke’s videos, ranging in length from a couple minutes to feature-length often feature wryly-humorous uses of voiceover and rhetorical structures. The exhibition will feature new video and two-dimensional works by Reinke alongside videos made in collaboration with Dani Leventhal, John Marriott, Jessie Mott and James Richards. Also on display will be individual artworks by Reinke’s collaborators.

Steve Reinke is an artist and writer best known for his work in video. His work is in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the National Gallery (Ottawa), and has screened at many festivals including Sundance, Rotterdam, Oberhausen and the New York Video Festival. In 2006 he received the Bell Canada Video Award. Coach House Press published a book of Reinke’s scripts, Everybody Loves Nothing, in 2004. He is currently an associate professor of Art Theory & Practice at Northwestern University.

Further information:

http://www.myrectumisnotagrave.com/

http://blog.musicisplaying.com/

Both Stephanie Syjuco: Particulate Matter (Things, Thingys, Thingies) and Dexter Sinister: The Plastic Arts are presented in conjunction with Studio Chicago.

Studio Chicago is a yearlong collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio. Through exhibitions talks, publications, tours, and research, participating organizations celebrate the working artist and reveal their sites of creative production from historical and contemporary perspectives.

For more information, visit www.studiochicago.org.

Core Studio Chicago partners include: Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Columbia College Chicago, Gallery 400, Hyde Park Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and threewalls.

Summer Internship Positions Filled

2010-06-25T10:13:00.003-05:00

The Gallery 400 2010 summer internship opportunities have been filled. If you're still interested in internship opportunities at Gallery 400, keep in mind the deadline for fall internship applications is July 28, 2010