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Entry Gallery
Stacy Hand - mixed media,
Susan Sensemann - photography
Gallery A/1
Sally Havlis - painting
Gallery A/2
Jean-Marie Casbarian - video installation
Main Gallery
Angela Altenhofen - mixed media
Karen Brow - drawing
Judy Koon - painting
Ellie Wallace - encaustic
Angela Altenhofen
The idea of the surrogate, an object representing replacement
and potential fulfillment, has underscored my work for several
years and has led to experimentation in tangibility and ephemerality,
the touched and the untouchable. My consistent use of fibers
is due to their natural metaphorical reference to living things
and I habitually recall this quality in my sculpture, especially
in terms of suggestive displacement. I ask, “Does touching
something make it existent or comprehensible? Is it proof?
How do objects facilitate transformation of the self?”
My current work is based on the idea of surrogate landscape:
large, soft, and transportable objects that reference natural
environments, not unlike the way a teddy bear caricatures
and abstracts an actual grizzly.
Angela Altenhofen received a Master’s degree from SAIC
and has since been exhibiting sculpture in solo and group
shows in the US, Europe and the Near East.
Karen Brown
To suddenly experience the solidly real world as contingent
and entirely dependent on my sense perceptions of it, and
ultimately, open and non-objectifiable, is completely unnerving.
Nevertheless, I find myself squarely between two obviously
true views of what is right there in front of me. The gap
can be bridged by the idea and experience of the Genius Loci,
the resident spirit of a place and the inspirations that may
be derived from it. Always present, constantly changing; the
perceived world endlessly unfolds. How utterly amazing.
Karen Brown was born and educated in Southern California.
Brown came to the Midwest in 1999, and is currently an Associate
Professor of Art at Northern Illinois University, in DeKalb
IL. Her work addresses the processes of perception, and the
construct of the self. Most recently Brown’s work has
been shown at The Pickled Art Center in Beijing, China; the
Toronto Alternative Art Fair International, and the Maryland
Federation of Art.
Jean Marie Casbarian
Double Blind: Fact or fiction is always an underlying current
in my work. Such is the nature of perception—one individual’s
truth is another’s fabrication. Double Blind is based
on the premise that it is not until the end of a pursuit that
we discover its result. In this latest video installation,
the audience visually tracks a ball of light to an unspecified
end. As the light leads us through an ambiguous space, we
are asked to draw our own conclusion as we try to identify
its source.
Jean Marie Casbarian is an interdisciplinary installation
artist who incorporates film and video projections, photography,
sound, sculpture, and performance into her artworks. Along
with a nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation,
Jean Marie has received a number of awards and artist residencies.
Currently, she teaches at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally.
Stacy Hand
Cultured Materials: Stacy Hand constructs a series of landscapes
that subtly shift between micro and macro space. In one line
of works, objects and fluids in combination struggle to “realize”
the strange material presence that visualization techniques
like electron microscopy lend their subjects. These works
represent a non-objective translation of this imagery’s
material effects into a space accessible to human experience.
Other works use landscape compositions to investigate the
subtle synaesthetic language of consumable materials like
skin cream, milk of magnesia, and shampoo. These works playfully
engage the material history and kinesthetic mythology that
tells us, for example, that yellow pearlescence feels like
restorative conditioning.
Stacy Hand is both an artist and a career an art historian.
She is currently finishing a Ph.D. in Art History at the University
of Chicago. For 2003-2004 Stacy was awarded a Fulbright to
Germany. In addition, she teaches as part-time faculty at
both Columbia College and at Northwestern University’s
School of Continuing Studies.
Sally Havlis
Sally Havlis’ works are painted on pairs of wood panels.
These diptychs paintings combine geometry with the immediate
irrational painted surface. The work explores the relationship
between intention and immediate, object and surface, conscious
and unconscious, rational and imaginative.
The purpose of the art, rather than informing the viewer,
is to initiate a visual process of intimate scrutiny that
blends the viewer's mindfulness with the observed object.
Sally Havlis is a Chicago artist who received her MFA in painting
in 1993 and a MA in drawing in 1989 from Northern Illinois
University. She has been represented in Chicago by Gallery
Stephanie and Erie Street Gallery and has exhibited widely
in the area. Ms. Havlis has had one person shows at Holsom
Roc Gallery and at Harper College.
Judy Koon
My paintings derive from a fascination with being between.
This territory of between-ness necessarily exists within an
abstracted configuration of the things we see. I say “necessarily”
because it is through the pause of abstraction that our eagerness
to name things can be momentarily diverted, and thus allow
for an interval of uncertainty.
For me, the landscape, as subject, embodies these subtle contradictory
possibilities of betweeness: it is potentially abstract, yet
particular, and infinitely varied; being at once impersonal
and intimate. Add to this, changing weather and light, these
are the immediacies of indeterminate moments; conditions which
are vague, yet familiar: inhabiting, the in beteween.
Judy Koon is a painter and an educator. A faculty member of
The School of The Art Institute of Chicago since 1986, and
The Evanston Art Center since 2003, she has taught and lectured
in the midwest, Scotland, and Italy. Her work has been exhibited
primarily in Chicago and in Italy where she frequently teaches
and works. Most recently she was an artist-in-residence at
Catwalk, in Catskill, NY.
Susan Sensemann
My photographic montages are a depiction of autobiographical
intent that is located in self-portraiture. For example, in
the 'Impersonation Series' the subject of 'self' is overlaid
with a variety of images of marble portrait busts which I
have photographed in museums here and abroad. As the author
of my own disguise, I become the man, the maiden, and the
monster, an embodiment of vertiginous excess. Borrowing from
the Gothic narrative structure with its hyperbolic story line
and hyper-saturated color, this work elucidates a childhood
preoccupation with the play and power of dress-up. The hybrid
'self' is evidence of an adult and unapologetic form of narcissism.
This work is from a vanitas series: beauty, sadness, and the
humor that accompanies despair.
Susan Sensemann is an artist, educator, and arts administrator
who has lived and worked in Chicago since 1979. She is a professor
at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has lectured
at institutions in Italy, Germany, and China among others
in this country. Awards include a MUCIA grant to South Korea,
a British Arts Council grant for Belfast, and Chicago Artists
International Program grants to Prague and Turku, Finland.
Ellie Wallace
Several years ago, I began painting ordinary household objects
floating on sky-like fields of color. At first I was interested
in how mundane objects take on their own idiosyncratic associations
and meanings outside of their regular usage, roughly analogous
to the development of written language with pictographs as
a starting point.
I have become more concerned with how the images operate as
formal elements, seeming to hover right over the line between
abstraction and representation with the physical simplicity
of the objects somehow balanced against the illusion of the
painted image.
Ellie Wallace was born and raised in Downers Grove right in
the middle of her family. She received her BFA from University
of Illinois at Chicago in 1994 and joined Artemisia Gallery
in 1996, serving as co-president in 1997-98 and remaining
a member until the gallery’s closing in 2003. Currently
she lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago and
supports herself and her cat, Eartha, by working for DePaul
University’s Department of Art and Art History as their
studio manager.
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