I recently wrote an essay, Structure as Subject, for Rafael E. Vera, a contemporary artist living and working in Chicago. Active in both drawing and printmaking, as well as installation, Vera investigates architecture through the depiction of structure and space.
Vera has recently shown at Cara & Cabezas (Kansas City), Dubhe Carreno Gallery (Chicago) and Back Room Projects (Chicago).
“S” Train (Steven Miglio)
Opening reception Sun. Sept 18th 3pm – 8pm
Exhibition continues through Sat Oct. 22nd by appointment
http://wot-it-is.com
According to critic Joanna Drucker, “The relationship between linguistic statement and physical object influences every encounter we have with our environment.” The exhibition Nomadic Texts addresses the adaptability of text across book, sculpture and site. Located within, on or as artworks in this exhibition, words, fragments and sentences seem placeless and mutable as they inhabit expanded fields. Floating or migrating, texts are tacitly connected to their surface or context, unbound by image or narrative: easily unhinged and on the make.
In some works, dynamic composition or experimental typeface captures the spirit of movement and in others, mixed signifiers and poetic gestures suggest unlimited readings and shifts in meaning. Finally, some works capture the nomadism of text in a global sense, as words on signage, garments and the body are ephemeral in time and space.
The exhibition is designed as a site-specific intervention across the domestic space of What It Is. Sculptures, books and installation will be placed throughout the front gallery, living room and dining room.
Artists include Joseph Grigely, Mark Holmes, Alex Valentine, Karen Reimer, Jason Pickleman, Stephanie Brooks, Steven Miglio, Rachel Foster and Rebecca Foster.
(Quote from “Language in the Landscape” p. 90, in Figuring the Word)
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This is Paul Halupka
Presented by the Contemporary Arts Council
Curated by Jessica Cochran
C33 Gallery at Columbia College Chicago, August 5 - September 5, 2011
DeCaprio Gallery at Moraine Valley Community College, August 15 - September 15, 2011
Artists: Alberto Aguilar, Pamela Bannos, Viv Corringham, Adam Farcus, Regan Golden, Bill Guy, Kirsten Leenars, Daniel Mellis, Ryan Richey, Michael X. Ryan, Fred Sasaki, Allison Yasukawa, Mary Lou Zelazny
View the press release.
View the catalog.
Read a preview in the Chicago Reader.
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Learn more about the design and conceptualization of our summer reading room at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, THE WORLD AS TEXT, by visiting our design blog!
http://theworldastext.tumblr.com/
Designed under the direction of John Preus, the reading room, which will house over 75 artists’ books, will be open to the public June 16 - August 12, 2011.
For lectures, performances and readings visit: http://www.colum.edu/Academics/Interarts/events/lectures-and-public-programs1/index.php#Music+Poetry
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I co-curated the 2011 Thesis Exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I worked with over thirty students, curating their work into several group exhibitions, including “On the Run,” “Renditions,” “Or Just After,” and “Present Perfect.” Scroll down to view images and my curatorial statement for the project. I worked with curatorial assistants Jenny Gerow, Alex Gartelmann and Leah Oren, as part of a graduate seminar in curatorial practice.
Curatorial Statement
In an essay for their 2003 exhibition Inside the Echo, Søren Andreasen and Lars Bang Larsen consider the echo as both methodology and metaphor, signifying a “time and space where many discourses unfold and mumble.” In their model, works are presented as “continued discussions rather than as isolated statements or masterpieces.” It is in this spirit that our curated sections have been organized, with a gestural curatorial hand.
If affectation trumps plot and attitude meets aesthetic, then the subtext for everything here is a different kind of knowledge—one where value judgments are reflexive and flickering, driven by the rhythm of intuitive ebbs and intellectual flows. To that end, each graduating artist is united by a commitment to art as a constant reinvention of knowledge through the creation of images, objects and sound. Students of everything and nothing, they use the tools they have been given to move beyond their zone of comfort, into uncertain yet invigorating territory.
In service of this incredible pulse, the artists in our sections have been grouped thematically in order to create a productive lens that amplifies rather than over-determines connections in process and approach to subject, form and material. It is our hope that each theme serves as a proposition, or place to begin: a tool for just one kind of legibility. And as one moves through the exhibition, the theme should exist like an echo, bouncing across time and space before ultimately fading away.
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THE WORLD AS TEXT
June 16 - August 12, 2011
Center for Book and Paper Arts
Select Press
Waxman, Lori. “An alternative summer reading list,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 2011
Weber, Candace. “The World as Text at the Center for Book and Paper Arts, TimeOut, July 13, 2011
THE WORLD AS TEXT, a summer reading room designed under the direction of John Preus, is a hybrid space designed to amplify connections between the action of reading and the activity of performance. The reading room features over seventy five artists’ books, zines, exhibition catalogs and alternative publications selected by over fifteen guest curators, including Tate Shaw, Doro Boehme, Buzz Spector, Sara Bodman, Temporary Services and Steve Clay…
The World AS TEXT features a concurrent exhibition of works by artists culled from the reading room, curated to make visible the connections between book practices and interdisciplinary art making. Artists include Edie Fake, Joseph Grigely, Dianna Frid, Heidi Norton, Rebecca Mir and Marshall Weber.
I am serving as one of four guest curators for the School of the Art Institute MFA Exhibition, opening April 29. I am also managing the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA exhibition at my day job, at the Center for Book and Paper Arts. It also opens April 29. I am also managing the BA thesis exhibitions at my night job, at Dominican University’s O’Connor Art Gallery, with opening dates of April 11 & April 17. Its been a busy month.
Since that makes me something of a social lifeless expert worker bee in the world of student exhibitions, I was one of many people interviewed for this great article by Stephanie Cristello for Proximity.
Enjoy!
Critic Pedro Velez let me show him around the Center for Book and Paper Arts. The result? A lovely profile on Artnet of the Center and students from the MFA Program. Enjoy!
Click here to read From Nacionalismo to Now, an essay for the exhibition Mano/Mundo/Corazon: Artists Interpret La Lotería
The full length, published by the Center for Book and Paper Arts will be available on LuLu any day!
Click here to read a review of NOTHING TO DO WITH WIZARDS (New Work by Mark Booth) in Art Papers. 
(photo by Sisson Photography)
This interview from 2009 I discuss the launch of Converge Curators Forum, an initiative I helped conceive of and and organize at Art Chicago and NEXT as a way to bring engaged curatorial dialogue about contemporary art into a more public sphere.
Exhibition: Poesís: The Visual Language of Edwin Torres
February 16 – March 11, 2011
Center for Book and Paper Arts, 1104 S Wabash (Mon - Sat, 10-6)
The Center for Book & Paper Arts is pleased to present a display of visual text work by acclaimed New York based poet, Edwin Torres. Works on view will include design work from poetry books, including his new publication “Yes Thing No Thing.” The exhibition will also feature Torres’ visual lettering, which unites text and graphics singular style that utilizes aesthetic strategies of repetition and layering in a distinctly minimal way.
Reading + Reception: Performance Poetry in the Age of Language
February 24, 6-8PM: Stage Two, 618 S Michigan | Reception at CBPA, 1104 S Wabash
Torres will present “Performance Poetry In The Age of Language”, a reading beyond text. The reading will be followed by a reception and viewing of his work at the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
The reading is presented by the Poetry Foundation and the Columbia College Poetry Program in association with the Center for Book and Paper Arts.
About Edwin Torres
Multimedia pioneer Edwin Torres has been presenting his energetic blend of poetry, performance, music, dance and visual art since the late 1980s. Born at New York City’s infamous Nuyorican Poets Café, as mid-wifed by the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, he has published and performed extensively in the United States and abroad, and has given lectures and workshops at numerous universities, including Bard and Naropa University. Visit his website at: http://www.brainlingo.com/
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PANEL DISCUSSION
Instigating Accidents: Chance as Strategy and Aesthetic
Simon Anderson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Meredith Malone, Associate Curator, Kemper Art Museum
Robin Price, artist
Judith Goldman, Harper Schmidt Fellow, University of Chicago
