Katya Grokhovsky: Double Exposure (House Portrait Number 1.)
Opening reception Saturday November 13th, 5pm – 9pm
Exhibition continues through 12/11/10 by appointment

What It Is
1155 Lyman Ave., Oak Park, IL, 60304
www.wot-it-is.com

“Double Exposure: (House Portrait Number 1.)” is a site-specific installation, consisting entirely of photographic images of the interior and exterior of a House and its’ inhabitants, situated inside the House itself. The double layered dynamics of a lived -in environment of a house-gallery are investigated and played with, via the medium of photography. Revealing histories and daily mechanics, treasures, traces and mysteries of artistic life inside the art itself.

Katya Grokhovsky’s practice is a hybrid of diverse disciplines and mediums, the themes of which stem from my experience of life in the East and West, under different political regimes. The Soviet and Post-Soviet mentality, dislocation, longing and embodied memories of “home” intertwine into pressed layers, forming an emotionally charged platform.

Buried recollections of a constant fear of fateful change, the human separation gap and the “otherness” present in my body and mind, are utilized as material. Through proposing a number of models by way of performances, videos, mixed-media installations, sculptures, text and photography, I allow the spectators to examine the various experiences lived through the aftermath of the political and social collapse of a former world superpower and translated in the Western context of a contemporary practice.

Born in the city of Odessa, in Ukraine (former USSR), Katya Grokhovsky came to Melbourne, Australia with her family in 1992. In Ukraine, Katya studies at Odessa Children’s Art School and completes a Diploma of Fine Arts. In Melbourne, 1999 she completed her BA (Honours) in Fashion at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and moves to Europe to travel and work in the fashion industry. In 2007, Grokhovsky completes her second degree, B.F.A (Painting) at Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, from which she graduates with numerous awards, including the prestigious Freedman Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Artists from National Association of Visual Arts, Sydney, Australia. In 2009, Grokhovsky moves to USA, where she is a current MFA (2011) Candidate in Sculpture at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

http://www.katyagrokhovsky33.blogspot.com/

The Chromatic number of objects in a room

The Chromatic number of objects in a room
Susan Gargiulo and Troy Hagenbart
Opening reception Sunday August 29th, 3pm – 8pm
Exhibition continues through 09/24/10 by appointment

The chromatic number of graph G is the smallest number of colors y (G) needed to color the vertices of G so that no two adjacent vertices share the same color (Skiena 1990, p. 210).

This is similar to the method that is used to color a map, where each face of a country is colored differently to those adjacent to it.

I suppose I would start with an anxiety about belief or at least with an anxiety about the assumption that something has to be believable, not everything can be a falsehood.

The setup is easy enough.
In thinking about making work in a home setting I simply went with the obvious and wanted to create a living room. I immediately looked back to a memory of what a living room usually or once consisted of. The objects appeared to me very quickly.

I begin with a couch, being the bulkiest of any object in a room; from it all the other objects seem to revolve. The couch shares many traits to a chair, maybe a chair extended. A chair holds many qualities of a table. In the simple step of erasing the back of a chair you can be left with a table or the representation of a table. It occurred to me that many objects in a room could be placed in line with one another, erasing parts and accentuating others. Objects can associate themselves with other objects. On the table is a bowl of diamonds made from aluminum foil. A simple construction but the association is two-fold, a candy in a wrapper and a diamond by design

Above the couch is a railing, constructed from 3 main parts. First, a typical but complex wooden railing covered in aluminum and paint. Its form, molded to the shape of a hand, becomes ornate outside of its function. Attached are two cylindrical forms, one of wood the other of chromed steel. The wooden rod is also covered in aluminum and paint.  Together the 3 pose a relationship of similarities.  The most obvious being the form and materials used.  The ornate wooden form with the reflective tape is meant to mimic the activity of the chromed steel. The chromed railing pulls the reflection to the furthest edges of odd lines of definition; the molded edges are an extreme example of this act.

Above the railing are 2 identical images of loons, both paint-by-number.   One executed in the prescribed fashion and the other in the form of a gray scale. This is my attempt to equate an image to the conditions imposed by chromed steel. There is always a loss of information in a reflective surface and I believe we should be thankful to this; otherwise we might lose the barrier of exterior from interior of a shop window. In the end both paintings do represent the image given but the question of what constitutes the object named is addressed. The distortion can be clearly described but the steps from one to the other can fall in line with associating a table with a chair. It is a simple twist of parts of the object made.

This goes inline with the steps of identifying a chair from a table. In an attempt to further complicate this idea I have constructed a mirror, or at least my notion of the function of a mirror: Wall molding, laminated to a frame and covered it with aluminum; a surface that reflects but ultimately distorts. Attached is a plank of wood, painted with the profile of the molded form.  The effect, in parts, created by the flat painted form of the profile reflected in its three dimensional form is a reflection of a straight line

The mirror extends itself to an association of other forms of display, namely a newspaper and a television. These are the final objects in this room. The newspaper is a collection of writings about chrome, mostly collected from people I know and some appropriated from other sources. In posing the simple and open task of writing about chrome a variety of themes and styles have been offered.

On the television is an animation, a new challenge. Through distress, struggle and thoughts about chrome and graph theory came an animation about static. Static can be said to be a lost article of television but ultimately it is a loss of signal. In a stop motion animation of small 1 ¼ “ blocks painted white with gray dots, the illusion of static worked well enough but seemed a bit redundant. To pull the original question of objects being similar to one another to light, I have made crude dot drawings of the objects in the room with black dots on the gray static. Accompanying the animation is an original score by Daniel Blake, a fantastic improve saxophone player who added to the dimension of time and shape of the piece.

All in all it comes down to the quote below the header of the Chrome newspaper: Some see personally, some see infinity, some see in chrome. If you place your finger on a chrome railing you can see finger reflected, a bit distorted but it is there. If you look outside your finger you can see a collection of what surrounds you. But if you look somewhat out of focus you can see the surface of just chrome.

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Photo credit: Charles Heppner

Network, Domestic Intervention

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.

Michelle Welzen Collazo Anderson and Bernard Williams.

Michelle Welzen Collazo Anderson is fascinated with the underlying structure or often called, “natural order” of the universe and how that relates to patterns in our human experience. Her series entitled the “Blum Jerro Series” is a spin-off on a pair of 1950’s bedroom slippers that were manufactured in New York by the Jerro Brothers and sold in Department Stores across the country. Though Michelle’s work is not primarily concerned with the true history of the object, it certainly references its origin and infuses it with new meaning. The stripes and appendages of these shoes are a dominant textile design element. Her aesthetic incorporates geometric design that embodies some of the natural patterns in nature, i.e., the Fibonacci sequence in a manner expressed by the Arte Povera and Op artists. Pattern communicates harmony, discord, error, perfection, cyclic change, small or large aberrations, destruction, renewal, love, wave undulations, etc.

…”The work I am is generating is a response to dynamic elements of design and serves as a discourse between the pervasive aesthetic of our habitual environment and its influence that resounds and changes when combined with the experience of our culture”…

For Bernard Williams his small sculptures function like sketches for him. Often they are produced from fragments of interest which fall to the floor while cutting parts for larger sculptures. They remind him somewhat of the small robots which peel off of the monster robot in the opening scenes of the 2007 Transformers movie. In more intimate spaces, the smaller machine-like jumbles of wood may carry on the business of the mother sculpture, or may take on an unexpected mission.

Bernard writes…”A geometry forms from seemingly random pieces, a house of cards stands firm because of screws, and maybe the next large build is suggesting itself. The large sculptures are everywhere in Chicago… in the buildings, next to buildings, the skeletons of buildings. The frantic construction and evolution of the urban space I drive through every day is inescapable. The urge to stack, screw, glue, and lean parts together seems like the natural way.”

“Michelle Welzen Collazo Anderson and Bernard Williams” continues through Sunday Dec. 20th. 2009. WHAT IT IS is open by appointment only. Please email info@wot-it-is.com for further information. A reception for the artists will be held on Sat Dec 5th from 3pm – 8pm. What It Is is located at 1155 Lyman Ave., Oak Park, IL, 60304. http://www.wot-it-is.com

Irene Perez
(involuntary) Memories
Artists reception Saturday September 26th, 5 – 9pm
Exhibition continues through 10/17/09 by appointment

Exhibtion catalogue is available.

In psychology the subconscious memories activated by a sensory experience are labeled as involuntary. A touch, a smell, an image suddenly evoke a recollection of a past event without any effort on our part.

(involuntary) Memories is a work that explores the family stories stored in the artist’s memory, which are often triggered by the smell and taste of certain specific dishes that she used to eat in her native Spain.
Irene Pérez is an emerging visual artist making work that explores place, perception, cultural identity, and language. Irene works on projects in a variety of media, including works on paper, fiber pieces, and installations.

Born in 1975 in Terrassa, Spain, near Barcelona, she currently lives in North Aurora, near Chicago, Illinois. Her studies include work in art history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and photography and fine arts at the College of Dupage in Illinois. Irene graduated with a BFA in studio arts with a focus in sculpture and painting at the University of Illinois at Chicago in May of 2009.

In addition to her practice as an artist, Irene has worked on a number of curatorial projects, serving as the Assistant Director at the Orleans Street Gallery in St. Charles, Illinois from March 2007 to May 2009. She also worked as the curator of the Library Art Exhibition Series at the College of DuPage Library from 2004 to 2006, and as the assistant organizer on artXposium 2007 and co-curator of artXposium 2008. In June 2008 Irene co-founded the Second Bedroom Project Space in Chicago together with Christopher Smith, aiming to offer creative and exhibition opportunities to emerging artists working in installation media. CONSTRUCTIONS, her most recent solo curatorial work opened in January 2009.

Solo exhibitions include Atlantic O, Second Bedroom Project Space, Chicago, IL; (Do) Touch, Project Wall Space, Antena, Chicago, IL; Guest Artist, Stitch’n’Bitch, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL;
Listening Service, performance, Chicago Art Walks, Chicago, IL; Homeland of Many Nations, Art on Artmitage, Chicago, IL; Chicago Passages, Ullastrell Cultural Center, Ullastrell (Barcelona), Spain.

Hearts and Fireworks / Burning the Many, Installation view, 2009

Our first exhibition features three new pieces by Andrew Rigsby. Hearts and Fireworks a digital video is projected on one wall of the space, Burning the Many a painted dyptych frames the video and Purple Heart sits on the wall (not shown). The installation is a reflection on mortality and age. These pieces are part of a series Rigsby has produced about reflections and memories. Each video is a marker for a specific time or place in life. Burning the Many is as much a light box as painting. Installed in an interior window it uses the existing light from the adjacent room to illuminate the panels. This piece is a response to the video installation. The final element of the exhibition, Purple Heart, is a cut out mdf painting mounted on the wall in the space, it’s dark hues blend in with the subdued light of the exhibition space. This piece is a meditation on the pain that comes after a wound has been inflicted.

Exhibition continues through Aug 15th. Please email info@wot-it-is.com to schedule an appointment.

www.andrewrigsby.com

post_fireworks and hearts from andrew rigsby on Vimeo.

It’s all about the after. And the before. It’s about the future, as well as the past.
It’s almost never about the now.
It’s about standing still. And it’s about moving. About looking back. But pushing forward. It’s about not knowing what comes next, having no clue, but still acting, doing something, anything.
If you ask the artist, he’ll talk about highway driving, chasing the sun with a car. Long distance. He’ll talk about things on the horizon getting closer, growing to where you recognize them and then them passing and fading behind you.
It’s about the other thing that then comes into view.
There is a word for all this: Longing. I like the length implied with this word. The actual distance imparted by it. It’s appropriate.
In Oak Park, Illinois in the front room of a house turned gallery Andrew Rigsby’s latest video plays on a wall. It’s large, projected, and has no sound. There is a barbeque in the backyard, the inaugural show for a new gallery, and the gathering of people in attendance go through the room with the video to get to the food and beer. This is a model of showing that has worked well for Chicago, the apartment gallery. It’s an intimate, work-horse ready atmosphere. No pretension. Practical. Honest and genuine. An ideal setting for Rigsby’s work. This is not a wine and cheese event. It is the beginning of summer and there is still a chill to the air. No one really trusts it, but everyone is comfortable with it, accepts it as the way things are. Chicago weather. Chicago work. People linger with the video, beer in hand, usually alone, before they head out back for air and conversation.
One would think the art stops at the door. That it doesn’t travel outside. But that would be naive. This is sticky work.
On the surface, the video appears simple. A silhouetted image of a human heart frames a frenetic slideshow of colorful fireworks, both moving, forward and back in space, pulling and pushing at each other at different speeds. The firework slideshow is fast and frantic. The outlined heart is slow and plodding. The combination is brutal.
Have no doubt, this is sad work. It is melancholy. Bitter sweat. Even a little depressing. But along with the sadness, there is hope. There is the idea of potential, anticipation, a crowd of prospective happiness, talking, gathering together and meeting each other, having a drink or two or three or more, making your way through new and old faces, smelling backyard smoke for the first time after a hard winter. This is where the work lives. This is how the work lives.
I feel the summer in Rigsby’s work. Not the meaty middle firework time. But the end-nearing, can’t-hold-on-to-it, wish-there-was-more-of-it time. And there’s a secret. It’s a secret which the artist has figured out and is attempting to let us in on. There is more. This work is an Indian Summer. It’s a gift.
Stand still and watch explosions in the sky. Kinetic movement above you. Underneath, looking up, you are powerless compared. You are static, still, and quiet. But keep in mind that you will not burst. You will not spontaneously catch on fire. You will not sputter and spit and quickly burn off into the night. You will be small and subtle and dark next to the fire but you will remain. It will pass before you.

Text by Alain Douglas Park, July 2009
www.alainpark.com

Artists reception Sat. July 18th, 2009, 5 – 9pm
Exhibition continues thru August 22nd, please email info@wot-it-is.com to make an appointment.

For the first show at What It Is we are pleased to invite long time collaborator and colleague Andrew Rigsby who will be presenting a new video installation and paintings.

Andrew Rigsby is a Chicago based conceptual artist working in video, painting, sculpture and photography. Rigsby enjoys playing with the modern psychological conundrum through the lens of popular visual semantics and contemporary logotypes. Typically preferring to work in an installation format using light box photographs, shaped paintings and sculptures, found object and video to create multifarious tableaus.

Andrew Rigsby is the founder of GARDENfresh. He received his MFA from Southern Illinois University in 2000. Rigsby has shown both Nationally and Internationally, most recently with GARDENfresh at Bridge Miami and London. He has also shown in New York, Kansas City and Tokyo.