Panel discussion for Simple Pleasures exhibition.

Looking at the way we communicate through personal narrative, artistic practice and identity and magic.

Panel members:
Iris Bernblum, Rebecca Walz, Liz McCarthy, Raul de Lara, and Selina Trepp.

Simple Pleasures
Liz McCarthy, Caleb Yono, Selina Trepp, Raul de Lara, Ryan Pfeiffer & Rebecca Walz
Curated by Iris Bernblum
 

This show is a love letter. From one artist to another. To those who give me hope in the wake of a new post-election reality. Absorbing the pain I was feeling myself and from those around me, I realized it’s more important than ever to speak to the issues presented here. I came to this show with the body and pleasure in mind.

To put it simply: These artists work with the body, sexuality and gender in ways that push, seduce, and play with us. They bring forward the complexities of our bodies and minds with what it means to be seen, touched, hurt, and loved. What it means to be human.

For me they are magicians in the studio, taking us to places that feel true and full of life. They all invite us to engage on an intimate level; one cannot look and look away. The afterimage stays. It sinks in.

“And now, after living beside you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness - as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argu- ment, however loose) - I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.”

-Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Pierce the Veil
Sage Dawson, Chiara Galimberti, Victoria Martinez, Katharine Schutta, and Selina Trepp

Standing stones and monoliths, intentionally constructed so that at significant moments of the year – like transitions between seasons – the sun strikes on predetermined and symbolic elements, are often attributed to astronomical observance; suspected ritual sites but actual functions unknown. Lines of geomagnetic forces run through earth’s crust, and when concentrated in a specific place, intensify and amplify the magnetic field. 

Pierce the Veil, a group exhibition featuring the work of Sage Dawson, Chiara Galimberti, Victoria Martinez, Katharine Schutta, and Selina Trepp, takes its title from the historical television drama Outlander, based on series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. During the first season, an older local woman attempts to interpret the inexplicable disappearance of a visiting woman to her bereft and disbelieving husband. The visitor has touched a magical stone and been transported back in time two hundred years.

Though not all of the included artists create work that explicitly addresses the time-space continuum, they all make work that allows the viewer to transcend reality – to physically or psychologically walk through a portal, connecting distant locations, alternate dimensions, parallel worlds, or breaks with the future and past.

Originally from Italy, Chiara Galimberti is currently residing in Chicago. She earned an MA in Italian Studies from NYU in 2015 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where she was a Soros New American Fellow. Her work tends to be context and place specific rather than self-referential, and can take the form of drawing, installation or collaborative performance. She is particularly interested in looking at both public and private space as sites of continual power and boundary negotiation and contestation. Her work was recently shown at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and New York University in Florence, Italy. She is a member of the feminist art collectives W.I.T.C.H and Tracers.

Selina Trepp is an artist whose work explores economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is the goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often the result.
She combines installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture to create intricate setups for photos and videos. Selina Trepps work has been exhibited widely internationally and has received several awards and honors including the Swiss Art Award and the Illinois Arts council Fellowship. In addition to the studio-based work, Selina is active in the experimental music scene. In this context she sings and plays the videolah, her midi controlled video synthesizer, to create projected animations in real-time as visual music. She performs with a varying cast of collaborators and as one half of Spectralina, her audiovisual collaboration with Dan Bitney.

Sage Dawson is a Saint Louis-based artist, educator, and curator. Her work examines dwelling rights, land use, and the identity of spaces. Recent exhibitions were held at Pyramid Atlantic, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston University, the City University of New York, and the International Print Center New York. Sage’s work has been featured in Elephant Magazine and in From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press. Her work has been reviewed at Art in Print, Hyperallergic, and by Lori Waxman for 60 wrd/min art critic. Sage teaches printmaking at Washington University, and runs STNDRD–a gallery project based in Saint Louis.

Victoria Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago who explores installation, site-specific intervention, screenprinting, and painting. She believes in chance and intuition, creating projects for galleries and ephemeral experiences in the urban environment. Martinez works with vibrant colors; pattern based textiles, and overlooked items, sewing them together to create fresh perspectives. She has exhibited at Northwestern University, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and Chicago Artists Coalition. Upcoming projects include group exhibitions at the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Franklin, and a solo exhibition at Washington State University.

Katharine Schutta is a Chicago-based artist. She creates paper collages, visual poems, that are explorations of the human condition - of art, intimacy, and transgression. Culling, cropping, repositioning and realigning images from a vast collection of auction catalogues, magazines and books, Schutta collides contemporary art and art history, science, technology and the natural world.

Nothing Twice Opens October 21

Heaven Gallery is pleased to present Nothing Twice, a two-person show featuring two Chicago based artists, Magda Dudziak and Annette Hur.

Dudziak’s practice explore topics of displacement, memory, intimacy and relationships. Through abstraction and process of deconstruction/reconstruction she is interested to interpret familiar places that over time get altered and reimagined and to question how physical and psychological experiences of displacement effect and reshape a sense of one’s identity.

Hur’s practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative.

Magda Dudziak is an artist born in Poland. Dudziak holds BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied in Painting and Drawing Department. She is a recipient of Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship and is currently a MFA Candidate at the University of  Illinois in Studio Arts. Dudziak work has been exhibited at Hokin Gallery, Woman Made, Beverly Arts Center, Artis’t Run The Satellite Show in Miami, and Woskob Family among others. Dudziak currently lives and works in Chicago.

Annette Hur is originally from Korea, and has been living and working in Chicago since 2013. Her practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative.

Hur is currently a resident at Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency, and she has exhibited at Gallery X, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago and Mist gallery among others. Hur holds BA(education) from Ewha Womans University in South Korea, and BFA(painting and drawing) from School of the Art Institute of Chicago.