April, 2006

Press Release

IN TRANSIT
Argentina - Canada - Czech Republic - Germany - Greece - Poland - Spain - USA

An exhibition of American and International art in various media.

Dates: 04.07.2006 – 05.12.2006

Opening reception/ vernissage: Friday, April 7th, 2006 6 – 10pm

Special Event: Saturday, April 15, 2006 1:00pm
Melinda Fries, Walking The Perimeter 2005 – ongoing Video and Guided ToursThe video is an ongoing examination of walking the 22 industrial corridors of Chicago, IL. A guided tour of the sites takes place on Saturday, April 15th with departure from the gallery at 1: 00 pm.

Finissage/closing party: Friday, May 12th, 2006 6:00 pm – 10 pm

Participating artists: Karina Perez Aragon (Argentina/New York), Annette Barbier (Chicago), Drew Browning (Chicago), Miroslaw Chudy (Chicago), Janina Ciezadlo (Chicago), Kinga Czerska (Seattle), Melinda Fries (Chicago), Bonnie Fortune (Chicago), Dennis Kowalski (Chicago), Claire Wolf Krantz (Chicago), Adela Matasova (Czech Republic), Jose Luis Molina (Spain), Tomasz Misztal (Poland), Mechthild Op Gen Oorth (Germany), Aleksandra Rdest (Canada), Susan Sensemann (Chicago), Zafos Xagoraris (Greece), Frances Whitehead (Chicago), Fern Valfer (Chicago), Kathleen Vojta (Chicago) å

The concept of the In Transit show is related to the gallery’s proximity to a highway. In Transit features art that evokes a broad concept of travel and commuting through culture, space, and consciousness. In Transit is an investigation of artistic response to a developed and conscious social reality in the contemporary world with a strong presence of issues that change our understanding of transcultural society and human existence.

Karina Perez Aragon is an artist from Argentina exhibiting a series of serigraphs on paper of abstract images, which are related to the experiences of a walker. Dancing Spheres, Suns Glow, and Raining Drops are titles of her works drawn from short notes taken during the everyday experiences of the artist’s walks and reinterpreted in an abstract language. Karina Perez Aragon was born in Argentina. She completed her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in 1989. In 1990 she began studies at the Facultad de Bellas Artes of S. M. de Tucuman National University, graduating in 1995 with a Masters of Fine Arts. In 1995 Pérez Aragón moved to Austria where she received a Kunst Magister diploma in Studio Painting and Graphic Art from the Bildende Kunst University in 1997. She stayed in Salzburg for seven years where she participated in numerous solo shows and group projects. She studied at Pratt Institute and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in February 2005

Annette Barbier and Drew Browning are Chicago artists working in electronic media artists. Their installation, the Path of the Dragon, presents a river journey in which a participant is a traveler in a mythic voyage through the ages of a nation, Vietnam. Beginning at dawn, the participant navigates through three levels: a past lived close to nature, a time of horrific upheaval and violence, and a time of adapting and rebuilding.
Interaction is accomplished by clicking and dragging on a computer to move through the space, which triggers sounds and animations. An additional participant may interact simultaneously on another computer from the other side of the table, complicating navigation and encouraging cooperation or conflict. Verbal communication between co-participants is possible via the microphone/headset.
Path of the Dragon was created in VRML, a web-based 3D format, and exhibited at the University Film and Video Association Conference, Chicago, IL, in August, 2005.
Annette Barbier and Drew Browning both earned MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Browning is the director of the Design Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Barbier chairs the Interactive Arts and Media department at Columbia College Chicago. Both use new technologies to explore issues of identity on a local and global scale. Their work may be seen on line at: http://www.unreal-estates.com

Miroslaw Chudy Crowd is a series of b&w acrylic paintings and b&w video images of bypasses along Michigan Ave in Chicago. Sketches are created in different media, painting and as well as video. Miroslaw Chudy is a Chicago-based artist born in Poland. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. Chudy earned a MFA in 1987, at the Prof. Konrad Jarodzki Studio. In 1988-89 he studied at the State College of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece with Prof. Jannis Kounellis. His paintings and drawings are connected strongly with the tradition of Polish New Expression, and international movement called Neue Wilde/Nouveaux Fauves or New Image in 80’s

Janina Ciezadlo House of Cards, a series of works on paper, represents images of the artist’s psychological states in relation to society and politics. It also represents the determination of an individual confronting historical and social processes. She has exhibited photographs and prints since 1976; her work explores variations in the relationships between text and image. Born in Chicago, Janina A. Ciezadlo is an artist, lecturer, and art critic in the city. Her reviews appear in the Chicago Reader, Afterimage, The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Bridge, Artscope, and the Chicago Art Critics Association publications.
Ciezadlo received a BFA and a MFA in printmaking from Indiana University and Washington University, Saint Louis. Ciezadlo taught on a Navajo Reservation in Arizona during the 80s and currently teaches at Columbia College Chicago.

Kinga Czerska is a Seattle-based artist, born in Kraków, Poland. She attended Carnegie Mellon University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. She is a painter who has explored many media including sculpture, ceramics, and metal. Czerska is an abstract artist making her statement with color and pattern. Her painting Haze, included in the exhibition, is densely layered and precisely crafted–it moves the eye in an optical-linear play, creating an amazing visual experience of depth and a multilayered abstract journey.

Melinda Fries is an artist and filmmaker currently living and working in Chicago. She spent several years in motion; hopping trains, hitchhiking, walking long distances, and moving from city to city. Since 1998, together with Bonnie Fortune, she has been the creator/curator of ausgang.com <http://ausgang.com/>, an online exploration and travel guide of ephemeral experiences, stories, and collections. The exhibition presents both Walking the Perimeter, a video and performance, which examines the industrial corridors of Chicago, and a website project In the Weather.

Dennis Kowalski the photo collages Contamination Greece and Con-tamination England represent Kowalski’s tourist photos from travels to England and Greece. The images of foreign landscapes–his private and intimate photos from abroad– mixed with abstract marks/signs painted over the photos create a comment on the nature of travel and on the perception of unfamiliar places.
Kowalski studied architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago and earned his BFA and MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been a professor at UIC for the past 30 years. A founding member of N.A.M.E. Gallery in 1973, Kowalski has been an important figure on the Chicago art scene, not only as an artist, but through his support of young conceptual artists before such art was accepted or appreciated by the public. Kowalski's work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others.

Claire Wolf Krantz is a mixed media painter and digital artist, a freelance art critic and curator. She lives and works in Chicago. Her digital prints Chicago Winter, Snow Scene, Ghost City, and Time contain interwoven themes about how we invent narratives to make sense of our world and understand others and ourselves in relationship to our culture and environment. In all her works, the tension between an image that looks like it could be real, yet having deliberate discrepancies from the real, creates an uncertainty about any absolute understanding of our world. The resulting image represents the memory of an experience, rather than capturing a particular photographic event.

Adela Matasova lives and works in Prague in the Czech Republic. Matasova creates sculptures and site-specific installations. She was awarded a UNESCO grant for a two-month stay in Paris in 1968.
Her paper reliefs were awarded a prize at the Biennial of Drawing in Rijeka, Croatia, in 1982. Her work was exhibited at Art Basel 17 in 1987; at the CIAE in Chicago and at the Czech Art Festival in New York in 1994. Her works are represented at the National Gallery in Prague and other museums in the Czech Republic and abroad, as well as in private collections in Germany, USA, Sweden, and Poland. In 2000 she was a visiting professor at the Department of Art at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was during her repeated visits to the USA that Matasova became captivated by the majestic presence of the Western landscape. She created a series, Fictitious Projects, of manipulated photographs of the Western landscape. One work from this series is included in the exhibition. The photographs are partial recordings of actual segments of this region’s topography. Nevertheless, they are “fictitious landscapes” and result from skillful use of computer manipulation and negative large-scale printing. In some images new shapes are introduced into existing scenery, which seem to integrate as if they had always been a part of this extraterrestrial environment. The landscape is kept intact and mirror-like rectangles placed at the high points of the earth’s formations are the only intervention.

Jose Luis Molina lives and works in Spain. He received numerous prizes and scholarships from many cultural and educational institutions in Spain. Molina represents the new generation of Spanish painting. He graduated from the University of Sevilla where he is a professor. Molina employs expressive language to create a combination of rational and emotional work. He speaks about the territories and the invisible barriers that real space contains. In the three paintings in the exhibition–In the Subway, Metamorphosis, and Human Boxes–geometric forms and figures merge in uncanny sublimation. Molina’s paintings represent complex visual imaginary inspired by movies, current events, photography, the Internet, chats with friends, and books. Molina’s art relates to expressionist and surreal traditions, especially those of Spain.

Tomasz Misztal works and lives in Oregon. He earned a Masters of Fine Art and a Ph.D. from the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland. He has exhibited widely in Europe and America, and his works are included in private collections and museums internationally, most notably at the Vatican Museum. Misztal creates abstract, atmospheric paintings with a strong colorist sensibility drawing on the tradition of Polish Colorism.

Mechthild Op Gen Oorth is a German photographer. A granddaughter of the well-known north German impressionist, Arthur Illies, Op Gen Oorth works with photography and mixed media on paper. Her series of German Baroque images are a romantic and subtle meditation on Baroque German architecture. She exhibited at the Goethe Institute in Chicago, and at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. She has had numerous exhibitions in many countries, and her works are in museums and private collections worldwide.

Aleksandra Rdest works and lives in Toronto, Canada. Her painting is abstract and subtle. In her works she creates strong contrasts between the narrative title and the abstract image. Openness, clarity, and flatness distinguishes her paintings. At the exhibition she show two of her newest works, Forever is Just a Word and Heart Fog.
Rdest graduated from the Ontario College of Art & Design in 2002. She received the Davis L. Stevenson Scholarship and the Av Isaacs Scholarship. Her works were featured in several group and solo exhibitions, including the Pari Nadimi Gallery in Toronto, and the Studio Gallery in Yokohama, Japan, among others.

Susan Sensemann lives and works in Chicago since 1979. Sensemann’s cibachrome photography is a depiction of autobiographical intent that is located in self-portraiture. She is captivated by the most diverse subjects – sculpted Thai vegetables, marble busts of historic figures, Roman wall murals, garden gnomes, as well various statues of the Buddha. Her pictures summon references to disguise, dressing up; she wants to engage with those images, to explore them as signs of self. Sensemann states: “…I merge my face and head with a variety of images I’ve photographed to form something that extends me into an imaginary place. This strategy has allowed me to become a range of characters—from temptress to saint, princess to king, bunny to Bacchus, Buddha to a pathetic garden gnome. I can experiment with decay, disease, beauty, and even glamour without actually living it. ...I’ve been drawn to the idea of the monster, because the monster eludes capture—it's not a fixed entity…It’s a strategy for exploring self in a world that is not self…
Sensemann is an artist, educator, and arts administrator who lives and works in Chicago since 1979. She is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has lectured at institutions in Italy, Germany, Korea, and China as well as at others in this country. Awards include an Illinois Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship, a MUCIA grant to South Korea, a British Council grant for Belfast, and the Chicago Artists International Program grant to Prague and Turku, Finland. She has curated a number of exhibitions including Tangential Pleasures, Brain/Body, Libidinal, Heat, and Skew: the Unruly Grid. Her photographs and paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally and are held in numerous private, public, and university collections. At the exhibition she presents three photomontages: Haaa, Noir II, Snare, and a big scale drawing Tango Rose.

Zafos Xagoraris lives and works in Athens, Greece. He is a multimedia artist who successfully combines sound installation, painting and video. His paintings on paper are predominantly black and white, with deep layers of black and sometimes midnight blue acrylic scumbled with deft brushwork and graceful gestural drawings of people and things on corresponding white space. His paintings often contain the simple but culturally complex form of a bell buried in the earth. The bell is a compelling image, one of the most primary human artifacts connoting community. Xagoraris’s paintings and sound installations are based on recording and later broadcasting the silence of Cyprus’s abandoned villages after the partition of the island between Turks and Greeks. His works represent absence and displacement built up in a poetic accumulation of images and concepts spanning human history from the time of the ancient bell to the digital times. The tone of his work is reflective and melancholy. The figures in his paintings seem to be lacking in agency: waiting, grouping and regrouping, or confused by space, broadcasts, displacements, while the overall theme of absence–political aporia–finds a sense of possibility in the image of the bell and the sound installation. The Amp, a mechanism, which consists of two speakers, an amplifier, a battery, and a microphone, was installed in the center of each village, in a way that the almost silent sound of the place was enhanced and reproduced. In 2002, he presented two public installations at Metsovo, Greece and at Langenlois, Austria. In 2003, he started the construction of a permanent public artwork at Kallithea station in Athens. He also realized the first of a series of movable sound installations in abandoned villages and neighborhoods at Cyprus (2003-05), and in collaboration with the Athens Museum of Contemporary Art, Xagoraris created a public art project at 3 different venues in the city.
In 2004, he exhibited public artworks at the Art Lot in Brooklyn, NY; at the European Patent Office in Munich; and at Modena, Italy, during Going Public 04. He also participated in the project in progress, “L’Autre Ville”, which will be realized at Nicosia and Lyon. Xagoraris was the co-curator of the collaborative project in progress “Paradigmata” (Greek participation at the 9th Biennale of architecture in Venice, Benaki Museum, Athens).
In the current exhibition, Xagoraris shows Silencer, water-soluble materials on paper.

Frances Whitehead lives and works in Chicago. In this exhibition, she placed her data-driven digital print on Voutek vinyl in the gallery window. It represents scientific data, numbers that specify the exact location of the gallery measured in the GPS system. Whitehead is working at the nexus of nature and culture; her works are not intended to be merely an ecological or technological statement but rather are a musing on the complex relationship between our physical world and our interior lives.
Whitehead received a B.F.A. from East Carolina University and a M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University. Numerous awards include Illinois Arts Council grants, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, and an Indiana Arts Commission fellowship. Whitehead's work is in several European and American museums including The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, The Arizona Museum of Art, Scottsdale, and the State of Illinois collection.

Fern Valfer lives and works in Chicago. Her paintings are expressive and abstract. Valfer has the ability to use the language of abstraction and gestural mark-making to find the lost voices of her family. Three of her paintings are included in the exhibition: River Park, Turquoise Aftermath, and Back to Barcelona, all oil on canvases. In Back to Barcelona Valfer represents artist’s imaginary trip to the city of Barcelona where her ancestors came from. In this painting artists is marking the space with horizontal lines of strong brush strokes, contrasting composition with intense colors. Valfer searing abstractions are potent reminders that the panorama of history is in reality the sume of individuals’ s lives whose experiences leave palpable imprints on future generations. In the case of Valfer it is the actions of Valfer’s parents forced to leave Germany in the 30’s to escape the Holocaust, and the loss of her grandparents to its horrors, that entitled her search for ancestral identity which has been shaped by tragedy, dislocation, strength and, ultimately, survival. Valfer graduated from the School of the Art institute of Chicago, and currently she is a professor of the Columbia Collage.
Her works are in many collections in the USA and abroad, most notably in the Open Museum in Jerusalem, Israel, and Oacton Community College Art Collection in Chicagogra. She was awarded with many awards and honors like Ragdale Foundation Fellowship, National Endowments for Arts Archives Project, National museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, and many others.

Katheleen Vojta works and lives in Chicago. Her paintings - part abstraction, part collage - invoke dream like states, creating loose narratives through the layering of ambiguous images in webs of amorphous paint and resin. They bring to mind memories, vague, fleeting, almost inaccessible. In Vojta's words, "These paintings serve as metaphors, as reminders that we are as we perceive," implying doubts regarding the fidelity of memory and acuity of perception, not only in dreams, but in our waking lives as well. Vojta presents Prayer for Paz, Dream #97, Dream for an Orange Revolution, Dream # 82 and One for Marquez, all mixed media on canvas.

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