Work by Carrie Gundersdorf.

A solo exhibition of Jessica Taylor Caponigro’s work; a site-specific installation titled Looks Like A Place I Came In. Caponigro’s response to the space respectfully takes into account the existing architecture as a means of interacting with her brought in constructions. Drawing influence from her family’s history by means of the decadent lacy fabrics juxtaposed with gaudy laminate flooring that surrounded her elders homes, Caponigro employs these dichotomies in her installations. Contorting sheets of fake cherry wood with a jungle of living houseplants to form contemporary sculptural forms, screenprinting temporary wallpaper of lace patterns, and covering the walls with ...

Causality is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is a consequence of the first. Traditionally, we have experienced this relationship with assumed expectations and relations. Aristotle’s example of essential causality is a builder building a house. This single event can be analyzed into the builder building (cause) and the house being built (effect). Continuing their reflection and analysis of modernity in art, Paul Cowan and Matt Stolle question, analyze, confirm and modify tropes and conventional tactics of the art object and artistic practice. Through their explicit references to ...

Work by Gil Rocha. ...Sorry I Didn't Have Time to Google You features work by David Jourdan, Lisa Holzer, Kitty Kraus, Chiara Minchio and Stefan Schuster.

The first group show of ACRE's founding members. This exhibition includes new photographs, drawings, sculpture, moving image and sound with finger food concocted by ACRE residency chefs. In addition, a collectively built sculpture inspired by the Tower of Babel will be on view; this twelve foot tower is equal parts monumental sculpture and optimistic trash heap. Assembled from found detritus, personal items, texts, houseplants, and artistic flourish, the installation speaks to the practice of creating and operating an organization or collective by making use of what's at hand, incorporating diverse visions, tirelessly reaching toward constructing utopias, and willfully ignoring ...

Work by Diego Leclery.

A new project by Berlin-based artist Renate Wolff. Skies in Between is a complex painted-wall installation that directs attention to deliberately formed elements and intersections, but offers multiple possibilities for where and how one moves through the space. Finding its locus near the back of the gallery with a large painted square, Skies in Between offers a network of interchanges that quietly move the viewer through the gallery and toward points at which a pause or a break occurs. Using color, rhythm and scale to speed up and slow down the pace, Skies in Between suggests that in an ...

The work of Chicago photographer Joseph Mohan in his exhibition titled You Can Do It Your Own Way (If It's Done Just How I Say). For this show, Mohan will be displaying photographs, sculpture and video works that address the progression of creative production/control from the 1980’s up to today. Mohan utilizes the language and structures of his professional career as a freelance photographer and photography editor to recontextualize and question creative influence, authorship, and originality. The first part of the exhibition, titled Scenes from Kill ‘Em All: Since the Dawn of Thrash Metal, documents the aftermath and influence of Thrash Metal icons Metallica ...

Work by Dana DeGiulio.

The show Braided Bread is a site-specific installation created by Chicago artists Scott Cowan and Katy Keefe. For this exhibition, Cowan and Keefe focus their energy towards the formation, reproduction, and experimentation with what they like to call "secondary objects." Cowan and Keefe's work, with its particular brand of humor, enjoys offsetting the viewer into a thinkspace that questions the traditional gallery experience. This displacement occurs as the artists change the physical paths of observation, question the stability of the materials used, and strive jokingly to reproduce their subject matter. While the main space of the gallery is ...

De facto literally means “from the fact,” or “actual.” The sculptures in this most recent exhibition with the gallery Nathaniel Robinson strike a balance between pointing to their own physical reality and interfacing with an environment of ideas and associations. Some aspects of the objects are conspicuously self-formed, their particular structure derived from processes beyond intentional control. Erik Neff in the Off Space.

Work by Hans Peter Sundquist.

Work by Colby Shaft.

Peter Otto's work reports on the constituent factors of a human condition continually shifting between beguiling and highly disturbing. He reveals the state to which humanity—ever tested by social, cultural and political forces—bends, breaks and at times collapses. His paintings and sculptures show a reality emerging from the darkest moments. The themes are somber; the work though is delicately formed and teeming with graceful facture.

The show Symbols/Souvenirs is a site-specific shop built and created and by Chicago artist Frank Van Duerm. Enlarged representations of objects, originally produced for the express purpose of remembering people and places of geographic, cultural, and ideological significance, are present in surplus. Items on sale draw from cultural icons and symbols, including guided mediation DVD's and Tanya Harding VHS sex tapes. These imprints of mass produced objects continue to inform Van Duerm’s practice, as the installation explores how memorabilia builds, abstracts and collides with cultural histories.

In conjunction with the College Art Association's annual conference four Chicago galleries will host exhibitions that feature the work of the 13 painters who will comprise CAA’s Studio Art Session: Painting Panel. Julius Cæsar will present work by Michelle Grabner, Thomas Lawson, Carrie Moyer and Scott Reeder.

Rodney Carswell continues a rigorous and newly energized pursuit of formalist poetics with a series of paintings and works on paper for this second exhibition with the gallery. Heiner Blumenthal in the offspace. Recent evocative black and white photographs and non-objective ink drawings—each informing the other—in the first devening projects + editions exhibition for this Cologne-based artist.

The work on display will be a collection selected by a group of close friends centered around a unique contemporary animism that Mike Kloss articulates with drawings, sculpture and assemblage, leaning toward the automatic.

In I Lay Claim to You (single channel video, 2009), Chelsea Knight invites choreographer Khalia Frazier to translate a text — appropriating themes from Margaret Mead's 1938 description of a Balinese cremation — into a dance. In an improvised rehearsal, Knight and Frazier perform attitudes of identification: claiming and reclaiming ownership of the dancers and of each other. The dancers operate as a Chorus, mediating and transcribing the process. Knight conflates tropes of cultural inscription with the situation of a rehearsal to engage difference and sameness as changeable, conditional and contested categories, whose instability is political.

The year ends and the holidays are upon us. Home Wreckage is the perfect exhibition to help us focus our attention on family, home and comfort. Subversive, dark and humorous, the collection of works in Home Wreckage remind us that being home is not always as relaxed and convivial as we wish it might be. Home Wreckage includes work by John Arndt, Claire Ashley, Alexander Braun, The Franks, Patrick Gavin, Marie Hermann, Roxane Hopper, Peter Power, Anders Ruhwald, Wolfgang Schlegel, Roman Signer and Franz West.

devening projects + editions is very pleased to present Redden, a new project by Dagmar Varady. Based in Leipzig-Halle, Dagmar Varady belongs to a generation of artists working intensely on the borderline between art and science. Questioning how artistic modes of perception or expression gain importance to scientific disciplines and vice versa, she minimizes the differences or boundaries between these fields of study by renegotiating the values applied to each. The result is a sense of redirected interpretation and experience. Redden, a new project made up of approximately 50 exquisitely drafted, red ink drawings on vellum, features images extracted ...

Work by Madeleine Bailey.

Works by Candida Alvarez, Karen Azarnia, Brooke Barnett, Justin Berry, Deborah Boardman, You Ni Chae, Nicholas Cueva, Dana DeGiulio, Susanne Doremus, Andrew Falkowski, Servando Garcia, Judith Geichman, Jacob Goudreault & Billy Kang, Michelle Grabner, Carrie Gundersdorf, Corinne Halbert, Anne Harris, Lindsey Hook, Michiko Itatani, James Kao, Chelsea Knight, Eric Lebofsky, Diego Leclery, George Liebert, Elizabeth Lopez, Caleb Lyons, Michael Milano, Aliza Nisenbaum, Michael Nudelman, Deirdre O’Dwyer, Leah Patgorski, Frank Piatek, Michael Pollard, Alison Rhoades, Ryan B. Richey, Noah Rorem, ...

For a complete lineup of the programming taking place on 26-27 September, see the official Fest Fest website.