A group exhibition of six artists who explore appropriations of popular self-help and healing techniques. Neither entirely mocking new age and self-help trends nor blindly subscribing to their alluring promises, each artist approaches their subject in an exploratory manner. Gregg Louis's Home Made Self Help series offers simple solutions to complex problems. Louis was inspired to create this series after stumbling upon letters by different psychic mediums offering solutions to debt and unhappiness. By reconstructing age-old wisdoms in digitally fabricated book jackets, Louis investigates how self-help formulas—the language they use, the promises they make, and the type of audience they ...

Re-arranging pre-arranged non-arrangements. Formal, temporary and permanent situations. New work by Carson Fisk-Vittori and Michael Hunter.

Alejandro Borsani uses video, computation, sound and physical phenomena to create spaces for rational reflection, bodily experimentation and emotional contemplation. In her interdisciplinary exploration of violence, sexuality and female criminality Maria Jönsson approaches serious subject matter with deadpan humor and poetic matter-of-factness. Orson Panetti works with new and found footage to craft video pieces that approach the cinematic environment as a meditative space, utilizing imagery that suggests an alternate collective unconscious of re-contextualized pop culture experiences. Raychael Stine’s paintings often depict dogs and a kind of implied violence in a highly literate painterly language. However, the works are not necessarily about ...

"Love," like "art" doesn’t have a single simple meaning. Every song ever written, every play, movie has tried to figure out what it is and how to deal with it. All of this collective brooding has reduced the language and images about love down to a few we recognize right off, hearts and broken hearts. Artists Mican Morgan and Porous Walker use this lexicon and suggest a slightly new one for an idea refresh and a necessary laugh. Love is not stale; it’s free. Mican Morgan manipulates relationship clichés like her sculptural materials. She pulls them apart and sticks different ...

Strictly defined, alla prima is a painting technique in which the work is completed in one session without time for the paint to dry, but the term is also more loosely applied to any painting done in a direct, expressive style, with minimal preparation. For our inaugural exhibition Paul Cowan will be applying this technique to canvas, cotton and confections.

Work by Alex Hubbard and Jon Pestoni.

Work by Alex Herrera, Danny Gallegos, Natalie Brilmyer, Brook Sinkinson Withrow, Luis Miguel Bendaña, Vincent Uribe, Brandon Seckler, Marcel Alcala, Hiba Ali and Michelle Daniela Villarreal. Performance by Natacha Stolz.

Work by Ali Bailey.

The exhibition (non)Sense: Physicality, Perspective and the Consciousness of Relating will feature artwork by Joe Grimm and Erica Moore. These artists focus on the body and how and what it senses in space and time through installation artworks. Both Grimm and Moore use installation as a method of investigating the sense-able, the visible/invisible and the audible/inaudible. They question where we are, how we are, what exists and how we know it. In Joe Grimm's installation work he uses modified 16mm projectors, sans film and domestic standing fans to play with light, space, time, what one perceives and what actually ...

Work by David Leggett.

Richard Hull's new works explore spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of empty and full spaces. The prevalent imagery, a biomorphic shape that resembles a horse's tail, or when doubled and combined, a Möbius strip, or a Klein bottle*, gives viewers the visual sensation of being simultaneously located both inside and out. Reverberating concentric lines inside the primary shapes allude to movement and connectivity, and can be thought of as pathways, highways or circulatory systems. Inside these pulsating pathways are several series of dots, ellipses, concentric squares, and other diagrammatic marks that the artist thinks of ...

There appears to be a growing return to the book amongst younger artists, writers and thinkers. This move towards the material and physical may be in reaction to the vastness and immateriality of forms of cultural production in the Second Life era. This discussion centers around definitions of the publication as art object, as curated exhibition, as micro-archive, as well as phenomenological aspects of the publication—its tactility, personable and intimate dimensions, and the unique one-to-one relationship between reader/viewer and object. Bookmakers, editors, curators and scholars have been invited to this discussion to share their experiences as we ponder the significance ...

This March Pentagon presents Sara Condo and Kate Ruggeri in their very own two artists exhibition. These solo artists have decided to become a duo and pair work to create a solid visual experience. Their artwork romanticizes ideas of the mundane but brings in humor and physical emotion. Sara and Kate are not afraid to create a dialogue with sincerity, personal experience and aspects of femininity with in their artwork. Showcasing photographs, sculpture and painting this show explores different mediums in hope to create continuity with their ideas.

From lapis lazuli to Lactarius indigo, Painter Smurf to the throat chakra, Lee Mynung-Bak's house to one-half of the Grecian Flag, and Palestinian Nav'i Protesters to Eifel 65, your friends at BEN RUSSELL invite you to wave hello (and goodbye) to all things BLUE on this, the first day of Spring. For a city steeped in so much historical BLUENESS (see: the Chicago Blues, the CTA, the Blue Man Group) and a discipline awash in so much azurite, ultramarine, and cerulean blue (see: Madonna with Child, Picasso's Blue Period, Der Blau Reiter), it only makes sense that these histories would ...

False Anatomies presents the diverse work of three artists dealing with the fabrication of the physical and the sometimes uncomfortable or humorous way that objecthood and illusion relate to each other. Their work commonly shifts attention to the importance of relationships between colors and textures. Paint is used as a structural element, hinting at the fiction of objects and the elusiveness of the figure, while color may be extracted entirely to highlight its indexical properties. Figures may only loosely or rarely be seen but in the case of all three artist's work, an interest in the mystery of a kind ...

Using software processes of his own design, Jason Salavon's distinctive fusion of art and information technology has positioned his work at the forefront of digital art practices. Salavon’s projects often coopt and reconfigure data from popular culture, investigating the interrelationship between the part and the whole or the individual and the group. The final compositions are exhibited as art objects, such as photographic prints and video installations, while others exist in a real-time software context. Old Codes is comprised of ten works — an LCD panel displaying a hyperreal vanitas still life constantly (yet almost imperceptibly) in flux; four prints ...

With accessible materials like Velcro, manufactured woods, enamels and various other found objects, Cordy Ryman constructs simple and elegant forms that conflate the aesthetics of Minimalism and Post Painterly Abstraction. Rough and casual, Ryman's sculptures treat the reductive movements that form the apex of Modern Art as pliable components employed toward a yet unfinished project. Without being overwrought or playing to the lowest common denominator, they represent a strategy for how art can leave behind the limiting principles of our last century and engage formalism for today.

Work by Karl Haendel & Walead Beshty, Sheree Hovsepian and Barbara Kasten.

Work by Sayre Gomez, Roxane Hopper, George Liebert, Amanda Ross-Ho, Justin Schaefer and Vanesa Zendejas.

The League of Dark Departments have joined forces in the Gesture Guild, a bureau for the recovery and acquisition of lost gestures. The Gesture Guild aims to return and reinforce the primordial anxieties responsible for head-bending weight and other liquid spiraling disasters, topical and tropical. The public, inflicted with involuntary movement, nervous twitches, and ticks, due to the loss of solid surfaces and time-space incongruity, can join various Guild programs in search of gravitational re-calibration. Determined via a brief questionnaire, members of the public are initiated into the Guild, thus participating in prescribed Guild activities at individually appointed times. A schedule of activities ...

Visiting artist Nnenna Okore uses materials such as newspaper, wax, cloth, rope, clay, and sticks in sculptures created through obsessive repetition and labor-intensive practices. The inventive use of found materials to cope with poor economic conditions inspires Okore's choice of material and approach.

Curated by William Staples. Work by Dianna Frid, Deva Graf, Anne Simon, Brian Taylor and Scott Wolniak. Painting and Sculpture have a common, if not at times, competing trajectory. Through out their proceeding history these two practices continued to develop through all the major advancements in Western Art History, with painting often coming out on top, so to speak, and Sculpture following right behind. The impulse for this exhibit is to examine the one property of Sculpture that sets it apart from painting: sculpture in the round. The experience for the spectator of walking around a plastic form, contemplating ...

Each piece in THE NEW is born from Nesci's observations of the world around us and the banal designs that inform our lives, forms many of us never stop to consider– the edge of a curb, the base of a street light, etc. With these pieces, Nesci picks up the torch of 20th Century design and carries it into the 21st century, stating, "I am informed by the work that has preceded me and aim to add a building block in the continually changing landscape of product and process." Nesci's translated observations reflect his inspirational sources and modern design ideals through ...

Organized by Chad Kouri of the Post Family and Ed Marszewski of Co-Prosperity Sphere, the exhibition includes over 25 works on paper, mixed media, and installations including a grocery store with hand drawn products made out of paper. Works by Adrianne Goodrich, Alex Valentine, Anthony Zinonos, Ben Speckmann, Chris Roberson, Chris Schreck, Doug Shaeffer, Emily Clayton, Greg Lamarche, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, James Harry Ewert Jr, Joe Tallarico, Jordan Martins, Mario Wagner, Matt Nichols, Matthew Rich, Michael Pajon, Netherland, Peter Skvara, ...

WTF is a Kunz, Vis, González exhibition series introducing the viewer to contemporary ideas on the cult of "new and youth." WTF uses humor and the absurd in visual art to delight the viewer and create a reflexive lens in which to view radical shifts in cultural perspectives. The exhibition features painting, soft sculpture, and video performance works on emerging narratives and new perspectives inspired from contemporary culture in the age of fiber optics. The works oscillate from the "self" to the "other" and to the "public" and "private." Sparking inquiry into the creation of social space through installation and ...

A collaborative project by Chicago-based artists Paola Cabal, Michael Genge, Christopher Grieshaber and Amanda Tworek who comprise the (ƒ)utility Projects Collaborative. This is their formal debut as a collective. In Depth of Field, (ƒ)utility Projects creates the illusion of an actual window that extends beyond the wall of the project space and into the internal corridor of the Fine Arts Building. (ƒ)utility Projects seeks to generate a perspectival illusion that invites viewers to momentarily sustain their gaze and suspend their belief by optically stretching the volume of the space.

Erin Leland makes performative photographs and writings reflecting the struggle between wanting to be seen and wanting not to be seen. In his single channel videos Mike Morris explores how the various ways of interpreting mediated experiences relate to belief and doubt. Inspired by markers of transition—a cinematic matte, an exit sign—Michael Sirianni’s videos and objects investigate the lure of longing. Jeremy Tubbs’ work reveals the happy hopelessness of our media saturated world.

The Suburban presents solo exhibitions by Ann Pibal and Gerold Miller. Both artists work with geometric motifs, highly conceptualised color schemes and dutiful attention to surface. Gerold Miller produced six new works for his exhibition at The Suburban. These shaped paintings are made from copper-plated aluminum. Ann Pibal’s project is comprised a selection of her abstract drawings.