WHAT IT IS: is pleased to announce our participation in this years artXposium 5.0. We have curated 14 artists who produce work in a range of media.

artXposium 5.0 takes place on the weekend of 09/11 – 09/12 at 203 West Turner Court, West Chicago, IL, 60185.

West Chicago is about an hours drive due west of Chicago, see this google map or hop on the Metra and ride in style!

Dates / times:
09/11/10: Noon – 9pm [opening reception 6pm - 9pm]
09/12/10: 1pm – 6pm

RSVP on our Facebook event page: http://tinyurl.com/2ewj8du

Man Bartlett, Bradley Bullock, Lauren Carter, Colleen L. Coleman, Troy Hagenbart, Selena Jones, Nathan Keay, Erica Moore, Sabina Ott, Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Westbrook and Oskar Westbridge as TWo Projects, Jeremy Tubbs, Michelle Wasson

Man Bartlett

Colleen L Coleman

Troy Hagenbart

Nathan Keay

Erica Moore

Sabina Ott

Selena Jones

Jeremy Tubbs

Michelle Wasson

Bradley Bullock

TWo Projects (Adam Trowbridge, Jessica Westbrook, Oskar Westbridge)

Please join us the closing reception for Sara Schnadt and her site specific installation at What It Is, Network, Domestic Intervention. For further images of her piece take a look at this flickr set Sara created

UPDATE: Sara’s installation is featured on Minus Space blog.

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Sara Schnadt
Network, Domestic Intervention
July 31st – August 21st, 2010

Opening reception Sat July 31st, 3pm – 8pm
Exhibition continues thru Sat Aug 21st by appointment

Sara Schnadt is a Chicago-based performance/installation artist. Raised on an international commune in Scotland, an ‘alternative’ context which considered itself as a social experiment outside of conventional culture, she spent formative years understanding herself as an outsider, an observer. Since moving to the United States in 1986, Sara has become fascinated with the unifying rituals and values that are common threads in contemporary western culture, and has made work that frames and resonates with those common threads.

Formally, Sara makes performance and installations that use task, found objects, interactivity, projection, and movement derived from common gestures. Her work creates environments that shift the audience regularly from spectator to participant as the performer constantly moves between pedestrian and more stylized or evocative activity and the viewer negotiates spacial immersion in the work.

Works often take shape as installations and live activities that translate data visualizations of large quantities of socially-resonant information into material, gestural and poetic form.

Network, Domestic Intervention

Since November 2009, site-specific versions of Network have been created in Chicago for an unused store front downtown and a gallery space at Hyde Park Art Center. For What it is, a version of Network will be created to inhabit the entire house that is the project space and artists’ live-work space and extend out into the garden.

Visualizing the idea that we simultaneously live in a real and virtual world, and that the virtual is infinitely expansive, Network uses large quantities of electric yellow twine (tied in patterns based on both social network structures and Internet network infrastructure) to suggest a virtual network landscape cutting through an otherwise ordinary space.

Artists/curators/residents Tom Burtonwood and Holly Holmes will also live with the work in their home for a month, negotiating their routines around it. A series of photographs will document their activity for the project catalog.

Sara Schnadt is a Chicago-based artist working in new media, installation and performance art. She has shown her in work in Chicago at Hyde Park Art Center, Pop-Up Art Loop temporary gallery series, 12×12: New Artists New Work at the MCA Chicago, Looptopia, the Site Unseen Performance Festival, Balloon Contemporary, and at Antena Gallery. National and international shows include Exchange Rate public projection series in LA and New York, Upgrade! – Chain Reaction in Skopje, Macedonia, CINEA Paris, FreeManifesta in Frankfurt, and the Busan Biennale in Busan, South Korea.

http://saraschnadt.com/home.html

Michelle Wasson, I’ll Cavern You, 2010

Sabina Ott, Frequently the Woods are Pink, 2010

Michelle Wasson, I’ll Cavern You, 2010

Sabina Ott, Frequently the Woods are Pink, 2010

Michelle Wasson, I’ll Cavern You, 2010

More images for Sabina and Michelle can be found here and here.

Our booth at the NFO / XPO will feature Christopher Holmes and Andrew Rigsby. The booth will be adorned with a special wall paper and cups of tea will be served.

Additionally Tom has curated and organized Approaching the Nanofax Singularity a symposium and exhibition with artists utilizing new digital manufacturing technologies in their work such as laser cutters, 3-d printers, CNC machines and so forth. Exhibiting / presenting artists are Margarita Benitez, DIYLILCNC (Chris Reilly and Taylor Hokanson), Claudia Hart, Patrick Lichty, Mik Kastner, Brian Matthew, Dan Price, Ben Stagl and (f)utility projects. For more information please click this link:  http://nanofax.wordpress.com/

April 24th – 25th we’ll have a booth at the Version Fest NFO XPO at Benton House in Bridgeport, featuring work by Christopher Holmes and Ye Olde English Tea Shoppe. Please come by and check out our installation.

Then a week later What It Is will be taking part in the Next Art Fair at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, April 30 – May 3. We will be showing work by Tom Burtonwood, Troy Hagenbart, Anni Holm, Holly Holmes, Mike Lash, Sabina Ott and Andrew Rigsby. Anni will be performing several times during the fair, we will update her schedule as things firm up. We will also post preview images of some of the work we will be showing. Hope to see you at the fair!

Sabina will also be showing some new work in conjunction with Michelle Wasson at our next exhibition here in Oak Park that opens the sunday of the fair, ideally the weather will be nice and we’ll fire up the grill, so if you’re coming in from out of town for the fair and want to check out the space this is a good opportunity to do that!

Happy days!

Love Tom + Holly

Chicago, IL (February 2010) — From March 27 to April 23, 2010, 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.

Joe Grimm

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 exists. In two featured site-specific installations, Erica Moore, activates the preexisting architectural details using reflective materials. By using non-traditional hanging and installation methods, Moore plays with what happens when the viewer has to physically move their body to look at an artwork. Both artists play with physical presence, perspective, consciousness, and the relation we have to our surroundings.

Erica Moore

The exhibition (non)Sense: Physicality, Perspective and the Consciousness of Relating features contemporary artworks by Joe Grimm (MFA, Sound, 2010 candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, SAIC) and Erica Moore (MFA, Studio Art, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2009), and is curated by Cecilia Vargas (Dual MA Degree in Art History, Theory and Criticism & Arts Administration and Policy, 2010 candidate at SAIC).

What It Is provides a domestic setting for the viewing and consideration of art. Artists are invited to interact with our home and create temporary art works in conjunction with the domestic space we inhabit.

(non)Sense: Physicality, Perspective and the Consciousness of Relating will be on view from March 27 – April 23, 2010 at What It Is, 1155 Lyman Avenue, Oak Park, IL, 60304; 773.837.9809. The exhibition is free and accessible by appointment.

Untitled (A Brief History of the Body) by Maya Mackrandilal from tom burtonwood on Vimeo.