1224 W Loyola Ave will feature new art installations and video projections while the space remains closed. These works are offered to our immediate neighbors, on view from the street. If you are not able to comfortably walk by our storefront from your residence, please enjoy these works from afar, through our website and on social media. Below is a list of current and past streetview-only programming shared during this time. The space was open with social distancing practices in place for exhibitions in Summer-Fall 2020, and will restart in-person programming again in Summer 2021. For a full project list from this time period, please visit romansusan.org/past.
As always, we are doing our best to get resources into the hands of artists. Given the circumstances, Roman Susan wants to encourage and appeal to all of our fellow art organizers – commercial, corporate, collections-based, DIY, domestic, educational, inchoate, non-centered, unstructured, et al – please continue your support of artists while the doors have to close for a time. Though we cannot be open as in the past, we're still working together. Thank you all for your support, please stay safe, and let's take care of one another.
Anette
Storefront and Studio Residencies
Anette situates working artists in commercial storefronts and domestic spaces to explore studio practice, curatorial projects, and community engagement. Individual residencies will vary in duration and public accessibility. After a hiatus, this project has been re-activated in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the Illinois stay-at-home executive order is in effect, Roman Susan will host solo dance and performance residencies for individual artists who live within walking distance of 1224 W Loyola Ave. If an artist is in our storefront working, you are welcome to view their rehearsal or work-in-progress from the street; please do so with social distancing guidelines in mind.
We are grateful to share our space with Izah Ransohoff (March 2020); Rachel Damon (April 2020); Aram Atamian (May 2020); Anna Martine Whitehead (May 2020); Rebecca Beachy (June 2020); A.P. Vague (June 2020); Christopher Smith (August 2020); Anthony Sims (March 2021); April Butcher (March 2021); Hannah Santistevan (April 2021); Kevin Norris (April 2021); and JI Yang (June 2021). If you live nearby and would be interested in a future residency, visit romansusan.org/movement-residencies.
Playing in the Dark: 2005 or 2006
March 22, 2020 to March 31, 2020
Projected each evening after dark, visible directly from the street. 2005 or 2006 is a satellite installation of the March 2020 exhibition Playing in the Dark: Selected Work by Bill Talsma (1971-2019) at PO Box Collective.
Please visit the creative commons archive of work by Bill Talsma online, via billtalsma.com.
Pastiché
April 1, 2020 to April 10, 2020
On January 4 of this year, our friend and neighbor Ramona Marquitta Rouse passed away suddenly at her home in Lincoln Square. Ramona was a point of light on our block in Rogers Park, with a magnetic smile for us every time we overlapped in our next-door storefronts. Ramona operated Salon Pastiché as an independent salon in Rogers Park for 23 years at 1226 W Loyola Ave. She is missed in our neighborhood, and across Chicagoland by her family and legions of friends.
In memory of Ramona, during the evenings of April 1 through April 10, Roman Susan Art Foundation will project solid fields of color at 1224 W Loyola Ave which approximate the tones of the neon light at Salon Pastiché. To view a tribute movie and other materials remembering Ramona's life, please click here.
Contributions made to Roman Susan Art Foundation NFP during the month of April will go toward a creative initiative in honor of Ramona Marquitta Rouse planned by her family. To make a direct contribution to this project, please visit gofundme.com/f/family-of-ramona-rouse.
In honoring our mother, we are seeking to raise funds to try to open a space in Rogers Park for community members who are battling depression where they can drop in and engage in art therapy, and find respite from their pain. Ramona fiercely loved and supported those around her. It is our hope to honor her legacy by creating space for people to come and heal. All funds raised will either be used to secure space and equipment for a new therapy clinic, or will be used to donate to a mental health organization that integrates art and music in an effort to heal people who are in pain as our mother would have wanted.
–Aina-soe Rouse Cambridge & Michael Rouse Simmons-Gessesse
This Place
April 11, 2020 to April 17, 2020
During the evenings of April 11 to April 17, 2020 Roman Susan Art Foundation displayed the video below at 1224 W Loyola Ave, compiled from materials and archival images generously shared by the American Indian Center and Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society. The video was projected after dark, visible directly from the street, and was subsequently on view as a part of the exhibition Birchbark, Wiigwaas at Rogers Park/West Ridge Historical Society, featuring new work by Nora Moore Lloyd.
During Winter 2021, narration of the video was recorded with Grayson Alexander, Isabella Chamberland, and Edelawite Sasahulih of the 49th Ward Youth Council.
Jordan Rosenow
Hand Washing Movement NYC
April 18, 2020 - April 23, 2020
I am spending quarantine with my girlfriend in our apartment in the Financial District, New York. New York City is being labeled the epicenter for this pandemic in the United States. Cases in the US are now the highest globally. Currently 100,500 cases have been reported in the US with 1,546 deaths. However, due to a lack of testing, we know the infection rate to be significantly higher. My partner and I both became sick with the coronavirus mid-March and our symptoms left a week later. We are grateful to return to full health and our hearts are with everyone who is being affected by this crisis. Today, Friday, March 27th, was the first time we have left the apartment since. The footage was taken midday on a Friday when the streets would normally be packed with hustling people. I filmed in five locations within four blocks of our apartment: Broadway St, Battery Park City, Oculus World Trade Center, the Federal Reserve, and our building rooftop. This movement is thinking about handwashing as both repetitive choreography and, along with isolation, our main defense against this deadly virus. This work was inspired by Yvonne Rainer, Hand Movie (1966).
–Jordan Rosenow
Hand Washing Movement NYC will be projected each evening after dark, visible directly from the street.
If you're interested in doing more, the New York Blood Center is asking those recovered from COVID-19 to come forward and donate plasma so they can treat as many patients as possible. New York and Chicago are also in critical need of blood, platelets, and plasma donations from the general population. A donation can save up to three lives. For more information and booking appointments visit: nybc.org (New York) or vitalant.org (Illinois, and elsewhere).
Jordan Rosenow is a visual and performance artist who focuses on the relationships of materials and movement through a queer, feminist lens using simple gestures such as touching, bending, leaning and standing. Her choreography is exploring the overlap between dance and sculpture by performing stillness and repetitive movements. Rosenow is from Minneapolis, MN and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Rosenow has exhibited at The White Page, Rochester Art Center, ACRE Projects, The Soap Factory, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Her performance work was recently presented at Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Walker Art Center. She is the editor of INREVIEW, a free, printed quarterly publication dedicated art criticism in the Twin Cities. For more information, please visit jordanrosenow.com.
Mark Alcazar Diaz
panorama2(problem)
April 24, 2020 - May 6, 2020
panorama2(problem) will be on view to directly from street, while 1224 W Loyola Ave is closed to the public.
Mark Alcazar Diaz, born in Manila, lives and works in Chicago, Illinois as an artist, educator, and arts administrator. He works in a variety of media, including video, drawing, and object making, to explore issues around migration, memory of place, and natureculture. As an extension of his arts practice, Diaz has facilitated youth art collaborations with several community arts organizations throughout the City. Currently, Mark oversees in-school arts integration programs with Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education where he explores the intersection of aesthetics and pedagogy with teachers and artists. He received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois Chicago.
Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew
Measured in Distances
Forthcoming 2020
May 12 through May 17, a preview of the exhibition Measured in Distances will be projected after dark, visible directly from the street, while the storefront space at 1224 W Loyola Ave remains closed to the public.
Anna Martine Whitehead
May 18, 2020 to May 31, 2020
For the last two weeks of May 2020, Roman Susan will share selected moving image works by Anna Martine Whitehead while the artist has a solo storefront residency at 1224 W Loyola Ave. Works will be on view each evening, directly from the street, while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance.
Her work considering a Black queer relationship to time and space has been presented by venues including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Links Hall; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, 3Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Daring Dances, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Djerassi. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and endurance for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and has contributed chapters to a range of publications including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016).
She is currently in residence at the University of Chicago Arts + Public Life.
Paige Taul
It makes me wanna
June 1, 2020 to June 10, 2020 at Roman Susan
December 4, 2020 to December 13, 2020 at MirrorLab
An exploration of the expression one makes when the music is just that good. Meant to expand on the assumption of universality and generality in Black expression and whether or not such a feeling is a common experience. It makes me wanna will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Paige Taul is an Oakland, CA native who received her B.A. in Studio Art with a concentration in cinematography from the University of Virginia and an M.F.A from the University of Illinois at Chicago in Moving Image. Her work engages with and challenges assumptions of black cultural expression and notions of belonging. Her interests lie in observing environmental and familial connections to concepts tied to racebased expectations and expose those boundaries of identity in veins such as religion, language, and other black community based experiences. To view more work by the artist, please visit vimeo.com.
Paige Taul | 60wrd/min - November 17, 2020 + Newcity - November 27, 2020
Artist talk recorded on December 8, 2020 coinciding with the installation of It makes me wanna by Paige Taul at MirrorLab in Minneapolis, MN. To view the works mentioned in the talk, please visit Transit, It makes me wanna, and I am on paigetaul.com.
Ben Creech: time
June 11, 2020 - June 20, 2020
every instance of the word "time"
from gilles deleuze's cinema 2: the time image
I am an experimental human who makes and unmakes films, texts, sounds, and time. Originally from Kentucky, transplanted to Chicago, my work is based in a sense of radical pedagogy and raw experimentation with material culture, primarily the history of cinema. I've just completed my debut feature film, SELF & other Early Works: the mixtape cut, available on Vimeo. I'm after alternative strategies.
– Ben Creech
time will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public. The audio on time is Episode XVI from Madlib's Medicine Show #5 – The History of the Loop Digga, 1990-2000. To view more work by the artist, please visit vimeo.com/creechlikesthisone.
A.P. Vague
Ext
Forthcoming 2021
This project is inspired by the uncanny experience of unfamiliar locations. I’m interested in the process of capturing information about a given place, and I want to explore the potential slippage between the feel of direct experience and mediated representation. For this work, I will deconstruct images taken in Rogers Park into component elements such as individual colors and values. This is a way to render an area as raw information.
– A.P. Vague
June 21 through June 30, 2020 a preview of the exhibition Ext will be projected during the afternoon and after dark, visible directly from the street, while the storefront space at 1224 W Loyola Ave remains closed to the public.
Christopher Smith
Casual Hexagonal Relations
Forthcoming 2021
In lieu of his scheduled exhibition, Christopher Smith will be taking up residence at Roman Susan presenting a shifting selection of sculptures and flat works orbiting the work Honey Never Spoils, a high definition video of an archival yet edible sculpture in storage waiting to be consumed. Honey Never Spoils will be visible directly from the street August 11 through August 20, 2020 while the storefront space at 1224 W Loyola Ave remains closed to the public. The exhibition Casual Hexagonal Relations will be rescheduled and presented in 2021.
From 2008–15 Christopher Smith organized exhibitions in a vacant lot, a fire pit, and a medicine cabinet. His work has been presented at The Franklin, Roots and Culture, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He received his MFA from Northwestern University. For more information, please visit visualdesolation.tumblr.
Burrow, Tousle
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
August 22, 2020 - September 2, 2020
Burrow, Tousle is comprised of two improvised solos existing, meeting, and colliding in the same space; unearthing what it looks and feels like to be at home with another person. This work is an ongoing collaboration between Kara Brody and Amanda Maraist (movement, direction), Chien An Yuan (film) and Chrissy Martin (sound). The work is currently in its second year of performance and process.
Burrow, Tousle will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Kara Brody is a native of Detroit, Michigan and received her BFA in dance from Wayne State University. She dances with Chicago companies Khecari, Lucky Plush Productions and The Cambrians, and has performed works by Kevin Iega Jeff, Shannon Alvis, and Alice Klock. Brody teaches in Chicago and throughout the Midwest. She has been on faculty at Visceral Dance, Dovetail Studios, The Cambrians’ Winter and Summer intensives, Brighton Dance Festival, and The Actors Gymnasium. She guest teaches at University of Chicago and regularly teaches company and master classes for Lucky Plush Productions.
Amanda Maraist is a movement deviser, improviser and performer from the Texas Gulf Coast. She performs in Chicago with Khecari, and acts as an operations assistant for the company. She participates in several other collaborative processes with local musicians and artists, with her personal work imagining the body as a sloppy archive, and aiming to incite coinicidence. Through authentic movement practices and meticulously rendered improvisational scores she welcomes unwieldy processes and a DIY demeanor.
Chrissy Martin is an interdisciplinary performing artist with a background in dance, vocal performance, and experimental theater. She graduated with a BFA in music and performance studies from New College of Florida in 2006 and is currently pursuing an MFA in Dance at Smith College. She has been lucky to be a part of numerous companies around the US, including Sarasota Contemporary Dance, Muscle Memory Dance Theatre, Danielle Georgiou Dance Group, Dead White Zombies, and BodyCompass Dance Projects in Chicago. Somatic practices such as Pilates, Gyrotonic ® Expansion System, Body Mind Centering, and Laban Movement Analysis deeply inform Chrissy’s integrated movement style. Chrissy is part of the global contact improvisation community, which has inspired her to develop her own improvisational structures.
Chien An Yuan is an interdisciplinary artist – photography, music composition / performance, sound design, graphic design, film direction, and quite recently, stage design. He runs a record label, 1473, focused on experimentation, electronics, and improvisation.
Joelle Mercedes and Amina Ross
Delight
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
September 3, 2020 - September 6, 2020
To mark the occasion of Artists Run Chicago 2.0 at the Hyde Park Art Center, Roman Susan is grateful to revisit Delight by Joelle Mercedes and Amina Ross. This work was first shared at Roman Susan as a part of the exhibition twinskin in November 2016. Delight is a single channel video of 5 minutes and 59 seconds duration, with camerawork by Ladan Osman. Delight will be on view from the street in a 24/7 loop at 5020 S Cornell Ave in Hyde Park from September 1 to November 1, 2020. Delight will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
twinskin – a collaborative project by Joelle Mercedes and Amina Ross – has performed across Chicago and the internet, making magic in DIY punk spaces, dance studios, and gay nightclubs. Work from twinskin will be a part of Foundation, a new community-hosted art collection featuring artists from each year of Roman Susan programming from 2012 to present.
Joelle Mercedes is an artist and educator who amalgamates text, time-based media and objects to speculate on partial, unstable, and contested histories. Joelle has presented work nationally and internationally at venues including: TrueQué Residencia Artística (Ayampe, Ecuador), Links Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Threewalls, Sullivan Galleries (Chicago), Lynden Sculpture Garden (Milwaukee) and California Institute of the Arts (Valencia, CA). Joelle participated in Strange Attractors, a book project curated by Nomaduma Rosa Masilela for the 10th Berlin Biennale: We Don't Need Another Hero.
Amina Ross creates boundary-crossing works that embrace embodiment, imaging technologies, intimacy and collectivity in physical and digital spaces. Amina has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and taught workshops at venues throughout the United States and abroad. Amina founded and co-organized ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival celebrating darkness, the participatory performance series Beauty Breaks, and the venue F4F. Amina was a 2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence at Arts & Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. Ross is currently an MFA candidate at Yale School of Art within the sculpture department.
On the occasion of . . . Rebecca Beachy: growing down
Artist talk recorded on October 22, 2020 coinciding with the exhibition growing down by Rebecca Beachy.
Rebecca Beachy is an artist, writer, and educator in Chicago whose practice involves deepening attention to the materialities inherent in urban and natural orbits. Her work engages the many subtleties and the complex relationships we have with the natural world. She holds an MFA in Studio Arts and an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Born in 1982, Beachy grew up in Denver, Colorado. Past exhibitions include Ralph Arnold Gallery with Roman Susan, Loyola University, Chicago; Sector 2337, Chicago; New Capital Projects, Chicago; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; FRISE, Hamburg, Germany. Beachy’s work has been featured in publications such as Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, UK; Æther Sofia/Haga, Bulgaria, Netherlands; City Creatures, University of Chicago Press, New New Corpse, Green Lantern Press. Beachy’s work has been written about in White Hot Magazine; ArtSlant; Hyperallergic; Armseye; Art Papers; NewCity Chicago; Chicago Reader; Chicago Tribune. Beachy is a recent recipient of 3Arts Make a Wave Grant. For more information about the artist, please visit rebecca-beachy.com.
Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew
Measures of Distance
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
November 7, 2020 - December 20, 2020
Intimacy and alienation do not constitute a binary, but rather operate as simultaneous phenomenon; expanding and contracting distances requiring fluid performances of vulnerability, support, propriety, and separation. For Measures of Distance, Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew navigate this matrix, exploring alternative intimacies, physical proximities, and ambiguous distances through video, performance ephemera, and sculptural objects.
Measures of Distance is a street-view exhibition on view 24 hours a day, with projections after dark.
Lia Kohl is a cellist and multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She creates and performs embodied music and multimedia performance that incorporates sound, video, movement, theatre, and sculptural objects. She is a curator and ensemble member with the acclaimed performance ensemble Mocrep, with whom she has toured nationally and internationally. She has presented work and performed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and held residencies at Mana Contemporary Chicago, High Concept Labs and dfbrl8r Performance Art Gallery. As an improviser she performs around the world and with her clarinet/percussion/cello trio, ZRL. She plays with Chicago bands Whitney, OHMME, and Circuit des Yeux. She tours with Chicago based puppet theatre company Manual Cinema.
Nick Meryhew is an experimental musician, curator, improvisor, and armchair geologist. Their work explores ideas of assemblage, hybridity, and nonhierarchy through a sculptural approach to found sound. They frequently improvise as a medium through which to investigate social dynamics both personal and political. Nick is a founding/former member of performance ensemble Mocrep, and has presented work at No Nation Gallery, The Hideout, Art Institute of Chicago, High Concept Labs, and MCA Chicago. They currently perform in Chicago with The Lucky Trikes, Runaway Labs Theater, and alongside noise artists Hedra Rowan and Jen Hill. They have curated at Logan Square's Comfort Station since 2017, primarily working on the experimental sound and performance series Gather. They are currently co-artistic director of AG47 Collective, a youth arts collective that facilitates interdisciplinary arts workshops and exhibitions for teens in Logan Square.
Loving the Cannibal: Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew’s Measures of Distance | Sixty Inches From Center - December 1, 2020
Artist talk recorded on December 15, 2020 coinciding with the exhibition Measures of Distance by Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew. To view excerpts of the videos mentioned in the talk, visit romansusan.org/measures-of-distance.
Emilio Rojas
Resistance Exercises
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
December 21, 2020 - January 3, 2021
Resistance Exercises will be projected each afternoon and evening at 1224 W Loyola Ave, visible directly from the street.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage, it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. Besides his artistic practice, he is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth.
His work has been exhibited in exhibitions and festivals in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Holland, Colombia, and Australia, as well as institutions like The Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Ex-Teresa Arte Actual Museum and Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, The Vancouver Art Gallery, The Surrey Art Gallery, The DePaul Art Museum, and The Botin Foundation. He is represented by Jose de la Fuente in Spain, and Gallleriapiu in Italy. Rojas is currently a Visiting Artist/Scholar in Residency in the Theater and Performance Department at Bard College in New York, for the 2019-2020 academic year and the inaugural resident of the Judy Pfaff Foundation. Where he is developing a new commission for Live Arts Bard at the Fisher Center, which premiered in November 2019, focusing on the theme of Borders.
Resistance Exercises | Bad at Sports - December 18, 2020
Michael Chambers and Millicent Kennedy
Life Inside – Still
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
January 8, 2021 - January 29, 2021
Life Inside – Still is a site responsive installation initially made by Michael Chambers and Millicent Kennedy during the 2020 COVID-19 related shutdown. Over the course of continued quarantine the artists have continued to trace one another’s shadows, paused in gestures of daily life, and install the overlapping silhouettes backlit by video in a window. The resulting images compress time, and keep a record of human movement in social space. The original installation with Purple Window Gallery occupied an apartment window viewable from the street, creating the mystery of looking into a stranger’s home and seeing part of their lives. At Roman Susan, this video installation has been adapted to include a gallery setting, one of the shared spaces lost in the pandemic. Our lives and social relationships are heavily mediated through screens/video and technology, now more than ever. Mirroring the viewer's isolation outside of this scene, kept at arm's length.
As the reach of the pandemic continues to stretch and the dynamics of life shift, the layers of silhouettes and video mimic this increased complexity, ambiguity, and compression of time. The artists want to draw upon both the recent memories of gathering together, while creating this illusion with just ourselves, and using something temporary, and without substance. These silhouettes combined together create a layered document of our time in isolated space. the process of tracing another person, and trying to make an accurate record, while you exist in the human impossibility of standing still, seems ripe with metaphor of shared anxieties and unrest in this unusual, evolving situation.
Life Inside – Still is a street-view exhibition on view 24 hours a day at 1224 W Loyola Ave, with projections after dark.
Michael Chambers is a Chicago based artist working primarily in video/sculpture installation,photography and printmaking. He received a BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. There he exhibited the solo show Mighty Means in the Great Hall Gallery. He has shown with Red Lotus Gallery and The Muskegon Museum of Art in Muskegon Michigan. In Chicago, Chambers has exhibited with Parlour and Ramp Gallery and Purple Window Gallery.
Millicent Kennedy is a Chicago based artist, curator, and educator working in installation, fiber, print, and performance. She received her Bachelor's Degree from Northeastern Illinois University and her MFA from Northern Illinois University where she was awarded the Helen Merritt Fellowship. She's received solo exhibitions from SXU Art Gallery, Roman Susan and Parlour and Ramp, as well as site specific installations with Terrain Exhibitions Biennial, and Purple Window Gallery. She has received artist residencies in Chicago, and Mississippi, and Michigan. Kennedy co-currates at Parlour and Ramp Gallery in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, and has served as the Gallery Director at Rockford University, She currently teaches at Evanston Art Center and Lillstreet Art Center.
On the occasion of . . . Alejandro T. Acierto: Breathing Room
Artist talk recorded on January 20, 2021 for Breathing Room by Alejandro T. Acierto, exhibited at Roman Susan from April 8 to April 27, 2017.
Acierto is an artist, musician, and curator whose work is largely informed by human relationships to technology. He has exhibited projects at the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, the Film Society of Lincoln Center (NYC), Issue Project Room (NYC), MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Boundary Gallery (Chicago), and Roman Susan (Chicago). His performance works have also been presented as part of the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival, the KANEKO (Omaha), Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival (Chicago), Center for Performance Research (NYC), and Center for New Music and Technology at UCBerkeley. Recent curatorial projects have been presented in East Tennessee State University’s Tipton Gallery (Johnson City), Coop Gallery (Nashville), and online for the Wrong Biennial through his online gallery twosixteen.net. He is also co-author of CQDE: A Feminist Manifestx of Code-ing published by Sybil Press with KT Duffy, and has contributed writing for the Journal for Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas and Imperial Islands: Vision and Experience in the American Empire after 1898 edited by Joseph Hartman for University of Washington Press.
Noted for his “insatiable” performance by the New York Times, Acierto has performed written and improvised music extensively throughout the US and abroad as a soloist and chamber musician. He is a clarinetist and founding member of the Chicago-based new music collective Ensemble Dal Niente and can be heard on several recorded projects on Carrier, Albany, New Focus, Parlour Tapes+, and Avant Media Records. His last issued solo record was also released on Prom Night Records.
Acierto has held residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Banff Centre, High Concept Laboratories, LATITUDE, Chicago Artists' Coalition and was an Field Guide Consortium Fellow and a Center Program Artist at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago. A 3Arts Awardee, he received his undergraduate degree from DePaul University, an MM from Manhattan School of Music, an MFA in New Media Arts from University Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and was an inaugural Artist in Residence for Critical Race Studies at Michigan State University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Digital Art and New Media and a Mellon Faculty Fellow in Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University. For more information, please visit alejandroacierto.com.
On the occasion of . . . Christine Wallers: Death of a Moth
Artist talk recorded on January 27, 2021 for Death of a Moth by Christine Wallers, exhibited at Roman Susan from September 12 to September 27, 2015.
I am a nonrepresentational artist making temporal works that take the form of large-scale installations and intricate works on paper that are more than drawings, but not quite sculptures. It is this space of “more than, but not quite” that thrills me. Light and its shifts play a significant role in the perception of my work. In both installations and works on paper, my pieces change as viewers move around them and as light illuminates areas at different angles. In this way, my work is constantly shifting, suggesting a sense of movement that elicits a physical awareness and empathy in the body. My creative practice also values the imperfect, ritualistic, and contemplative process of hand rendering.
– Christine Wallers
| For more information, please visit christinewallers.com. |
On the occasion of . . . Sadie Woods: A Study in Rhyme & Song
Artist talk recorded February 3, 2021 for A Study in Rhyme & Song – From Minstrel Show Tune to Children’s Nursery Rhyme by Sadie Woods, exhibited at Roman Susan from October 6 to October 28, 2017.
Award-winning artist Sadie Woods has had an exciting career, showcasing her talents everywhere from academia to nightclubs, boutiques to museums. As a multidisciplinary artist, curator and deejay, Woods' work focuses primarily on social movements and resistance, and producing collaborations within communities of difference. She also deejays under the moniker Afrodjia, focusing on diasporic Afro-Latin and -Caribbean music and culture. She has exhibited her work and deejayed nationally and internationally. Publications include Harald Szeemann Méthodologie Individuelle published by JRP Ringier with Le Magasin—Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, in collaboration with the Department of Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London.Woods received her BA from Columbia College and MFA from The School of the Art Institute. She is a 2020 recipient of the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Esteemed Artist Award and currently Faculty at the School of the Art Institute, Residents Orchestrate Project Manager at the Chicago Sinfonietta, and resident deejay on Vocalo 91.1FM and Lumpen Radio 105.5FM. For more info, please visit sadiewoods.com.
Colleen Plumb
Surveilling Snow Lily
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
February 1, 2021 - February 28, 2021
Surveilling Snow Lily is a video installation project created from daily webcam screen recordings of a zoo-captive polar bear. The project reveals four years of Snow Lily’s incessant pacing. As the seasons change, each day she paces, alone. This work confronts a system of cruelty, passed as normal for generations, and asks viewers to share in bearing witness. I wish to draw attention to the reality of the lives of captive animals, in order to tip the balance where people will not allow animals to be held captive for display under any premise. There is so much to be learned from observing Snow Lily pacing, cutting a path through the stage upon which she lives striking the exact same tracks with her paws each day for years. I want to use my video recordings of Snow Lily to create work that cuts through the stages we humans have built around ourselves to sooth ourselves and sterilize the realities of mortality and our own animal-ness. I wish for this work to serve as a catalyst for greater empathy and connection and deepen questions regarding systems of power imbalance and colonialism. This work looks at the passage of time, endurance, absence, and the deep impact we humans have made on the planet. This project was partially supported by a 2020 Culture and Animal Foundation Grant.
– Colleen Plumb
This project is a progressively growing exhibition, on view directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave throughout the month of February 2021.
Colleen Plumb (American, born Chicago IL) makes photographs, videos, and installations investigating contradictory relationships people have with nonhuman animals. Her work explores the way animals in captivity function as symbols of persistent colonial thinking, that a striving for human domination over nature has been normalized, and that consumption masks as curiosity. Plumb's work sheds light on abnormal behaviors of captive animals in order to bring attention to implicit values of society as a whole, particularly those that perpetuate power imbalance and tyranny of artifice. One of her current projects, Invisible Visible, reflects upon the industrial food system and meatpacking industry through the bones and bodies of chickens.
Plumb's work is held in several permanent collections and has been widely exhibited. She has written for the Center for Humans and Nature, an organization dedicated to exploring and promoting human responsibilities in relation to nature, and has collaborated with the Nonhuman Rights Project and Phoenix Zones Initiative. Her first photography monograph, Animals Are Outside Today (Radius Books, 2011) critically documents our ambivalent dispositions towards animals. Plumb's recent photography book, Thirty Times a Minute (Radius 2020), examines the plight of captive elephants with contributing essays by nine experts working in legal, ethics, and scientific fields. Plumb's work has appeared in LitHub, Psychology Today, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Village Voice, Blow Photo Magazine, Feature Shoot, New York Times LENS, Time Lightbox, Oxford American, Photo District News, and Artillery Magazine. Plumb lives in Chicago and has taught photography and video at Columbia College Chicago since 1999. For more information, please visit colleenplumb.com.
Chicago Must See | ARTFORUM - February 10, 2021
Artist talk recorded February 10, 2021 coinciding with Surveilling Snow Lily by Colleen Plumb, exhibited at Roman Susan from February 1 to February 28, 2021.
On the occasion of . . . John Marks: Suncatcher
Artist talk recorded February 18, 2021 for Suncatcher by John Marks, exhibited at Roman Susan from December 7 to December 31, 2013.
John Marks is a Minneapolis-based artist and curator working at the intersections of media, music, and visual art. In 2005, John co-founded Art of This, an artist-run nonprofit, and has served as co-curator of the Tuesday Improvised Music Series, a monthly series presenting new experimental music in the Twin Cities. In 2013, John co-founded MirrorLab, a studio, film lab, and project space for explorations in integrated art forms. For more information, please visit john-william-marks.com.
On the occasion of . . . Maddie Reyna: Song of the Summer
Artist talk recorded on February 24, 2021 for Song of the Summer by Maddie Reyna, exhibited at Roman Susan from May 8 to May 30, 2015.
Maddie Reyna (b. 1987, American) is an artist in Chicago, IL. She received her Masters in Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013 and is currently Assistant Director of Academic Programs for Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist's Residency. In 2020, she opened a space in Chicago called Slung Leg, with her husband, Jacob Goudreault. In addition to an active studio practice and exhibition schedule, projects have included co-director of Julius Caesar Gallery, Chicago, host of art review radio show, Wang, and editorial associate for Contemporary Art Daily. For more info, visit maddiereyna.com.
BOUNDARYMIND
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
March 3, 2021 - March 6, 2021
Work in progress – sculptural installation by Molly Roth Scranton, video by Kera Mackenzie, with audio by Linda Jankowska and Katherine Young. This iteration of BOUNDARYMIND is experienced directly from the street, while the space remains closed to the public. Sculpture on view 24/7, with video and audio activated after dark.
BOUNDARYMIND is a collaborative work which will culminate in an evening-length electroacoustic sound piece and aggregating installation that explores and transgresses the geographical, cultural, psychological, and musical boundaries that impact how we share our past, present, and future selves with others. Developed over the course of seven years by Linda Jankowska and Katherine Young, the project will also present video art by Kera Mackenzie and a performative sculpture by Molly Roth Scranton. Additional production partners include Experimental Sound Studio, 6018North, and PO Box Collective. For full project information, please visit boundarymind.com.
The complete work will premiere at 6018North. Two public performances will include original, collaboratively composed music presented within a multimedia environment. Throughout the performance space we will install objects and materials – ceramic pots, plastic toys, wooden spoons, pine straw, sugar packets, and other things – chosen for their personal significance and power to evoke memories of places from our childhoods. For Linda, the space is a cottage in rural Poland where she spent formative years. For Katie, it is her early childhood home in Mississippi. On a series of visits in 2015, we gathered objects and sound recordings from these places.
Working on this project, we have become acutely aware of how sharing the history and the personal significance of the objects we are performing with deepens our connection, allowing us to build the trust we need to make music together. Our collaborative process and BOUNDARYMIND’s unique soundworld became charged with emotional significance and shared meaning. Thus, in this project the unexpectedly musical sounds of household objects allow us to investigate the formation of bonds forged by individuals from different backgrounds. Taking our collaborative musical relationship as a starting point, we will invite listeners and other makers to contribute to the work, sharing memories and sounds from their pasts, as well as their aspirations for our collective future.
CALL FOR RECORDINGS from Katie Young and Linda Jankowska:
We invite anyone tuning in to create a sound recording of a household object with personal significance. Any object! Childhood toys, tattered T-shirts or sentimental souvenirs. Anything! Without damaging the object, scrape, tap, bow, boing, ping, and otherwise resonate it. Play around. Explore the quiet details it offers. Then, with your permission, we will remix these recordings for broadcast on Lumpen Radio and future boundarymind productions. Submit your recordings to boundarymind2021@gmail.com. Stereo wave formats are preferred, but we are happy with any formats you might record in. Please either submit your files via email or provide a link to a downloadable file stored in the cloud. More info at boundarymind.com/samples.
Streetlight
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
March 8, 2021 - March 28, 2021
Featuring works by Lisa Armstrong, Audrey Barcio, Ruth Biene and Timo Herbst, Thomas Georg Blank, Methas Chantawongs, Jiayi Chen, Hugues Clément, Javier González Pesce, Anthony Hamilton, Shir Handelsman, Lisa Hoffmann, Jonathan Johnson, Amay Kataria, Toby Kaufmann-Buhler, Daniel Kukla, Jasmine Lin, Jeff Mendenhall, Ruxandra Mitache, Rick Niebe, Ej Nussbaum, Labkhand Olfatmanesh, Cheryl Pagurek, Matthew Pell, Miloš Peškir, Susanne Layla Petersen, Erika Råberg, Clemens Reinecke, Diego Rodriguez, Hiroya Sakurai, Maxine Schoefer-Wulf, Leviticus Shand, Paulius Sliaupa, Nicko Straniero & SYZY GAL O00O, Allison Tanenhaus, Hi Yo To, Sally Waterman, and ARTOLDO (Sara Ferro & Chris Weil).
Projections on view directly from the street, afternoons and evenings. Image: still from future conjure: faith consuming hope by Jasmine Lin.
On the occasion of . . . Suburban Piano Quartet: about a block
Artist talk recorded on March 24, 2021 for about a block by Suburban Piano Quartet, performed around Roman Susan June 30 to July 8, 2018.
The Suburban Piano is a performance ensemble, Nadine Dyskant-Miller, Clay Gonzalez, Perry Maddox, and Corey Smith, creating collaborative multimedia performance situations. For more information, please visit suburbanpianoquartet.com.
Christopher Corey Allen
una cosa che sente
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago ILMarch 29, 2021 - April 4, 2021
Christopher Corey Allen is a transdisciplinary artist whose work is concerned with disruptive narratives, radical perspectives, and the speculative performance of self. CCA utilizes video, print media, and performance to explore ways of escaping normative conceptualizations of the subject as bound, contained, and intended for progress. Socially engaged and theoretically informed, their practice draws on a range of influences, including experiences growing up in the 90’s rave movement and DIY punk culture. CCA is influenced by years of athletic training, clowning and other theater-based work.
una cosa che sente will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Currently, CCA’s work employs the use of colorful camouflage-like patterns, refered to as ‘speculative camouflages.’ They are tessellations, repeating shapes that fit into each other, made up of images of different bodies. These camouflages represent errors of representation, both functionally and conceptually. They reference bodily anxiety, taboo, and the labor of daily gender performance to investigate shapeshifting strategies one uses to survive the politics of daily performance.
CCA received their MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2018, where they subsequently received a distinguished Tobey Devin Lewis Fellowship. They have been the recipient of numerous awards including the New Beginnings Award from Mercedes-Benz Financial Services in 2018, the Lenore G. Tawney Foundation award in 2017, and an MN Artist Iniative Grant in 2015. Exhibitions and performances include Montage Halle in Berlin, Germany, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis MN, Roman Susan in Chicago IL, and Detroit Artists Market in Detroit MI. Residencies include Künstlerhaus Fehrbelliner in Berlin, Germay, Mass MoCA in North Adams MA, Frans Masereel Center in Kasterlee, Belgium; The White Page in Minneapolis MN and Pino in Florence, Italy. Additionally CCA was a co-facilitator of SpaceSpaceSpace in Detroit, a conference centering around alternative pedagogy, self-organizing, and exploring ways of disrupting productions of knowledge within academic structures.
HIJACK
JEALOUSY
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 5, 2021 - April 11, 2021
This video is an artifact of the hour-long performance of the same name that premiered at HAIR+NAILS (Minneapolis) in Summer 2019. Audiences strolled the gallery installed with a strapping-tape-and-light-walled room-within-a-room designed by Ryan Fontaine and Heidi Eckwall within which HIJACK (Kristin Van Loon & Arwen Wilder) danced. This dance was visible via multiple live-feed video views in basement and backroom installations or to the naked eye via peepholes or barely-there blurriness through the walls. The blacked-out backroom view was on a tiny tv that shared the feed of three CCTV cameras on a switcher. The tv shared space with shelves of candle-lit donuts with frosting the same shocking pink as the mainroom installation and the costumes. The room smelled of soil and sugar. The switching CCTV camera live-feed was recorded on vhs.
JEALOUSY will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
HIJACK is the Minneapolis-based choreographic collaboration of Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder. Over the last 26 years they have created over 100 dances and performed in venues ranging from proscenium to barely-legal. HIJACK manipulates context by employing a site-specific approach to every performance and toying with audiences' expectations. HIJACK has performed in New York (at DTW, PS122, HERE ArtCenter, Catch/Movement Research Festival, La Mama, Dixon Place, Chocolate Factory), Japan, Russia, Central America, Ottawa, Chicago, Colorado, New Orleans, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, at Fuse Box Festival in Austin Texas, and Bates Dance Festival in Maine and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. In 2013, Walker Art Center commissioned “redundant, ready, reading, radish, Red Eye” to celebrate twenty years of HIJACK and Contact Quarterly published the chapbook “Passing for Dance: A HIJACK Reader”. For more information, please visit mcknightdancechoreo.org/hijack2.
Heidi Eckwall designs lighting for dance, theater and performance. Sometimes she tours in the US and abroad, sometimes she works and teaches at Colorado College, sometimes she works biking distance from the house she shares with Arwen Wilder and their two children. Recent projects include #PUNK100%POP*N!GGA with Nora Chipaumire, Birds of the Future with Charles Campbell and Momentum: New Dance Works (J. H. Shui Xiān, Herbert Johnson III, Leslie Parker, Jonathan van Arneman).
Ryan Fontaine is a visual artist, musician, and co-director of HAIRandNAILS Contemporary Art with Kristin Van Loon. Ryan makes paintings, sculptures and multi-media installations using a wide range of materials, synthetic/industrial as well as natural, including living plants. The work is primarily concerned with the relationship between object and information. For more information, please visit ryanfontaine.com.
Jordan Rosenow
A Place to Fall Into
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 12, 2021 - April 18, 2021
A Place to Fall Into will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public. This video is documentation of a movement work by Jordan Rosenow presented on June 28, 2018 at the Walker Art Center as part of Terrace Thursdays curated by Jacqueline Stahlmann. A Place to Fall Into was a series of unfixed performances concentrated on proximity, slowness, and the tension between bodies and sculpture. For three hours performers moved at a glacial pace through the building’s terrace, adjacent galleries, and amongst the crowd. Occasionally two performers would cross paths and join for an extended duet before continuing on a solo route.
Performers include Judith Holo Lue Choy, Lauren Coleman, Caitlin Dippo, Malakai Greiner, Katrina Matejcik, Amal Rogers, Jordan Rosenow, and Joél Valdez. Costumes were created by Katrina Matejcik and the work was filmed by Justin Sengly.
Jordan Rosenow is a sculptor and performance artist who focuses on queering building materials through choreographic gestures. They investigate relationships of materials and movement by using simple motions such as touching, bending, leaning and standing. Rosenow's choreography is exploring the overlap between dance and sculpture by performing stillness and repetitive movements. Jordan Rosenow is currently based in New York, NY and is from Minneapolis, MN. Rosenow has had exhibitions and installed public art at The White Page, Rochester Art Center, ACRE Projects, The Soap Factory, and Franconia Sculpture Park. Their performance work was recently presented at Lynden Sculpture Garden and the Walker Art Center. For more information, visit jordanrosenow.com.
First image: Katrina Matejcik and Joél Valdez at Walker Art Center; second image: Judith Holo Lue Choy at Walker Art Center – photos by Justin Sengly (2018). Home page image: Jordan Rosenow – photo by Bobby Rogers, courtesy of Walker Art Center.
Karen Sherman
Hildas and Trojans + The Part That’s Human
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 19, 2021 - April 25, 2021
Hildas and Trojans and The Part That’s Human will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Karen Sherman makes work that incorporates her background in dance, writing, theater, music, and the handyman arts. Hands-on in all aspects of her work, she choreographs and performs, builds sets and props, designs sound, and writes text. Her explorations in craft and visual art, including glassblowing, woodworking, and sculpture, illuminate how the body extends to and through other materials, culminating in an interdependent world where objects elucidate bodies, choreography is language, and words become tools. Her work as a freelance stage technician, technical director, and production manager for 25 years allows her to instinctively strategize the technical execution of her own work as she creates it, as well as directly serve other artists and the field as a whole. In conjunction with her show Soft Goods, which explored work, death, loss, and the occupational self-obliteration of stagehands, she partnered with Behind the Scenes, a national support organization, to create a mental health/chemical dependency counseling fund, the first in the nation specifically for technical production workers.
Her work has been presented nationally by Walker Art Center, P.S. 122, Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, PICA/TBA Festival, Fusebox Festival, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Hair+Nails Gallery, American Realness, The Southern Theater, Diverseworks, Movement Research, Highways Performance Space, ODC, and many others. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2020 Herb Alpert Award in Dance; a Bessie Award for her performance in Morgan Thorson's Faker; multiple McKnight Foundation Fellowships in Choreography and Dance; a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship; Sage Awards for her work as a choreographer, performer, and scenic designer; multiple MacDowell Colony Fellowships; and residencies through Vermont Performance Lab, Movement Research, ADI/Lumberyard, and the Bogliasco Foundation program in Liguria, Italy. She was a 2016-2017 Hodder Fellow in The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University where she is currently an inaugural Caroline Hearst Choreographer-in-Residence in its dance program. Her writing has been featured in such forums as e-flux journal, Movement Research Performance Journal, Hair+Nails Gallery Zine, Good Job, Criticism Exchange, mnartists.org, and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman. For more information, please visit karenshermanperformance.org.
First image, above: video still from Hildas and Trojans; second image, below: video still from The Part That’s Human.
Anna Marie Shogren
Professionals
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
April 26, 2021 - May 2, 2021
Professionals, a video work, projects dancers into the role health care workers, underlining overlapped skills, and questioning how those skills are approached in each field. Filmed on January 7, 2019 in the performance space at the A-Mill Artists Lofts in Minneapolis with the help of collaborators Alan Yu Wah Tse, Alys Ayumi Ogura, Emily Michaels King, Julia Gavin Bither, Linden Baierl, with music by Hildegard von Bingen, and filmed by Tamara Ober.
Professionals will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space itself remains closed to the public.
Anna Marie Shogren is a dance artist connected to caregiving, social dance, and touch, researching this work most recently as an Art and Health Resident at the Weisman Art Museum, working in collaboration with the University of MN School of Nursing. She's presented much dance and experiential installation in while living in Minneapolis and NY, and has performed internationally with numerous choreographers.
She has recently begun a Masters program in Interdisciplinary Art at Goddard College and holds a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota. In 2010 she received a fellowship for a residency in Skagastrond, Iceland at the Nes Artist Residency. She was part of the Brooklyn based art collective, Non Solo from 2010-2013. She is invested in care work and health justice; working in senior care (PCA, CNA, therapy-based movement), as a caregiver to individuals with dementia, autism, and developmental delays, and a mother. She has also enjoyed writing on performance and art for MNartists.org, Conversations across the field of Dance Studies, Critical Correspondence, NY Arts Magazine.
Ellie Durko Finch
And So Which / W*tching Body
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
May 3, 2021 - May 9, 2021
Video works improvised and posted to social media from 2018-2021, projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave while the space remains closed to the public. And So Which / W*tching Body is being shared as part of Movement Studies – a series featuring artists in Chicago and across the Great Lakes region.
Until I Vision: Reflections on Ellie Durko Finch’s “And So Which / W*tching Body” at Roman Susan by Stevie Ada Klaark (PDF)
Ellie Durko Finch (she/her they/them) is a Non Binary Transgender Femme artist and a 2005 alumnus of the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Department of Theatre Arts & Dance. From 2005 to 2013 she performed in, co-created, & executed design for numerous Twin Cities live performance & dance works. She contributed to hundreds of performances & other events as a hourly employee of Bryant Lake Bowl Theater from 2008 to 2012, and became a cog in the Minneapolis' 20 year running queer performance group, Dykes Do Drag. Together with Kristin Van Loon they co-curated secret fARt Fest video nights in the "New Smuda Theater" at BLB.
Ellie received a 2006 Jerome Foundation Naked Stages Performance Art fellowship and received a 2015 Sage Award for Dance with the design team for Megan Mayer's 2014 work "Soft Fences." In 2019 she contributed as a community member on the City of Minneapolis Trans Equity Council and wrote her pre-Covid-19 2020 essay Where Will You Dance as part of dance-analog-digital-real-time-ness series at MNartists.org by guest editor Kristin Van Loon. In 2021 she is focusing on roller skating, personal practices, ritual, and witching the trans dancing body.
Can be reached for questions via @ellie.bloodofstars.biz.biz on Instagram and earlamyfinch at Gmail. Thanks to Roman Susan, Kristin Van Loon, Stevie Ada Klaark, Leah Krizak, Allison Aye, and myriad Instagram followers for offering support of this work.
Anna Martine Whitehead
FORCE! (our labor has become more important than our silence)
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
May 11, 2021 - May 18, 2021
Performers: Julian Otis, Ron Ragin, Jenn Freeman, Jasmine Mendoza, and Zachary Nicol.
Video projections each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street.
Anna Martine Whitehead does performance.
Her work considering a Black queer relationship to time and space has been presented by venues including the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art; San José Museum of Art; Velocity Dance Center; Links Hall; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has developed her craft working closely with Onye Ozuzu, Jefferson Pinder, taisha paggett, Every house has a door, Keith Hennessy, BodyCartography Project, Julien Prévieux, and the Prison + Neighborhood Art Project, among others. She has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, 3Arts, Chicago Dancemakers Forum, Daring Dances, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Rauschenberg Foundation, and Djerassi. Martine has written about blackness, queerness, and endurance for Art21 Magazine, C Magazine, frieze, Art Practical; and has contributed chapters to a range of publications including Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings (Oxford, 2017). Martine is the author of TREASURE | My Black Rupture (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). She is currently in residence at the University of Chicago Arts + Public Life.
For more, please visit annamartine.com.
Amina Ross
Specular Cry
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
May 21, 2021 - May 26, 2021
Specular Cry will be projected each evening, on view directly from the street from 7-11 PM. This work debuted at CCDMX as a part of ZONAMACO in Mexico City, and at Excess of Reality as a part of SPRING/BREAK in Los Angeles, both organized by TRANSFER. This installation will be the Chicago debut of Specular Cry.
Coinciding with the project at Roman Susan, Amina is launching specularcry.site, an interactive audio and text transcription of the work, as well as a postcard print-run created in collaboration with Avery Youngblood. If you are not able to visit in person, send us your address – we will send you a postcard in the mail!
An undisciplined creator, Amina Ross creates boundary-crossing works that embrace embodiment, imaging technologies, intimacy and collectivity in physical and digital spaces. Amina has exhibited work, spoken on panels, and taught workshops at venues throughout the United States and abroad. Amina founded and co-organized ECLIPSING, a multi-media festival celebrating darkness, the participatory performance series Beauty Breaks, and the venue F4F. Amina was a 2018-2019 Artist-in-Residence at Arts & Public Life and the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. Ross is currently an MFA candidate at Yale School of Art within the sculpture department. For more information, please visit aminaross.com.
Cherrie Yu
Lydia and Matthew
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
May 27, 2021 - June 2, 2021
Lydia and Matthew is a screen dance featuring a duet between the two performers Lydia Feuerhelm and Matthew Lemus. Lydia is a partner dancing teacher, and Matthew is a janitor at a high-rise residential building in downtown Chicago. I spent a month and a half working with Lydia and Matthew separately, collecting their biographical information, performance histories, movement habits and life routines. In the end I put together a solo for each of them that corresponded with each other.
–– Cherrie Yu
Performers: Lydia Feuerhelm and Matthew Lemus
Camera: Wanbli Gamache, Armin Hayrapetian
Sound: Armin Hayrapetian
Video projection on view directly from the street, afternoons and evenings.
Cherrie Yu is a 25 year-old artist born in Xi’an, China. She currently lives and works from Chicago, IL. She has shown work at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Links Hall and Mana Contemporary Chicago. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE, Contemporary Calgary Museum, and a visiting artist at Emory University. Her films have been screened at Satellite Art Show, Helena Anrather Gallery, Trestle Gallery and Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the awardee of the 2020 Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship, and will be an artist in residence at Yaddo Foundation in 2021. For more information, please visit cherrieyu.cargo.site.
Michael Mac and Amanda Maraist
sounds from another room
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 5, 2021 - June 6, 2021
Performance Saturday and Sunday at 8 PM
sensational memory incorporates some wrong information.
this is our sensational mobility.
realizing you're just playing a game of telephone with the rest of the world
listening to weight
and listening, waiting.
sounds from another room is a collaboration between Amanda Maraist (movement performance, devising) and Michael Mac (composition and performance). This hour-long performance digs into instinctive somatic responses to sounds, semi-autobiographical soundscapes, and the nonsense of memory.
This live performance is safely viewable through the windows, from the street. Outdoor seating will be available during the performance. Admission is free – we will be gathering food and monetary donations for The Love Fridge Chicago and Rogers Park Food Not Bombs during the show if you find yourself willing and able to donate.
Amanda Maraist is a movement deviser, improviser and performer from the Texas Gulf Coast. She has most recently performed in Chicago with Khecari and Ayako Kato / Art Union Humanscape. She participates in several other collaborative processes with movers, musicians and artists; imagining the body as a sloppy archive and aiming to incite coincidence in performance. Through authentic movement practices and meticulously rendered improvisational scores, she welcomes unwieldy processes with a DIY demeanor. For more information, please visit amandamaraist.com
Michael Mac is a Chicago-based musician, engineer/producer, and founder of Pallet Sound recording studio. He got his start making music with the experimental pop band, Oshwa. His musicianship and engineering can be heard on works by artists such as Tasha, Tenci, Claude, The Curls, The Slaps, Burr Oak, Ester, and many more. His work has appeared on NPR Music, VICE, The FADER, Pitchfork, Stereogum and Consequence of Sound. For more information, please visit michaelmac.org.
sounds from another room Performance Guide (PDF); preview images courtesy of Ash Dye.
Elena Duque
Colección Privada
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 8, 2021 - June 11, 2021
Outdoor Screening Saturday, June 12 // 9 PM
A filmed inventory of a private collection. That can be understood as a dubious art collection, but also as a compilation in the spirit of philately or archeology, or a series of objects and documents that constitute a kind of sample book of memories. The emotional catalogue of a life transformed, again, in a collectible item.
Colección Privada will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave.
This presentation is a part of 2021 Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival.
Elena Duque is a Spanish-Venezuelan filmmaker, curator, writer and teacher. As a filmmaker, she has completed several animation and experimental short films, such as Cómo hacer un fanzine, exhibited in the art center CA2M in Madrid, De cara a la galeria, that premiered in Curta 8 (Curitiba, Brasil), La mar salada, programmed in the festivals Transient Visions (New York), Moving (Kioto) and Florida Experimental Film Festival, Pla y Cancela, selected in Verín and D'A in Barcelona, and in the exhibition Cibermujeres in the Neomudéjar Arts Center in Madrid and Valdediós (2019), part of the Official Section of Punto de Vista Festival in Pamplona, and selected in festivals such as London Animation Film Festival, Les Inattendus (Lyon), Milwaukee Undergrounfd Film Festival and Experiments in Cinema. For more information, please visit cargocollective.com/elenaduque.
Onion City is one of the premiere international festivals exclusively devoted to experimental film and video. Onion City was founded in the 1980s by the Experimental Film Coalition and run by them for many years. Chicago Filmmakers assumed responsibility for the festival in 2001, and expanded the size and opened it up to video work as well as film. It is generally 8-10 programs over four days and features roughly 60-70 works from around the world. Aside from the competition programs, there are occasional special presentations of new or old films of note or guest presentations. Screenings take place at Chicago Filmmakers and other venues around mid-June. For more information, please visit onioncityfilmfest.org.
Erika Råberg
Mirror State
1224 W Loyola Ave, Chicago IL
June 12, 2021 - June 15, 2021
Outdoor Screening Thursday, June 10 // 9 PM
Mirror State will be projected each afternoon and evening, visible directly from the street at 1224 W Loyola Ave.
This presentation is a part of 2021 Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival.
Erika Råberg is a Swedish-American visual artist and writer who uses both still and moving images to explore the subtle relationships built into her surrounding environments, whether on the farm in rural Sweden which has been in her family since the 1600s or in and around Boston, Massachusetts, where mythologies surrounding the founding of the United States provide rich material. Råberg has shared work widely in Chicago, including at the Elmhurst Art Museum, ACRE Projects, Roman Susan, Chicago Artists Coalition, Sector 2337, High Concept Labs at Mana Contemporary, Filter Photo Festival, Ballroom Projects, and the Swedish American Museum. She has also shared work in New York, Boston, and Baltimore, as well as internationally in Stockholm, London, Berlin, and Iceland. For more information, please visit erikaraberg.com.
Onion City is one of the premiere international festivals exclusively devoted to experimental film and video. Onion City was founded in the 1980s by the Experimental Film Coalition and run by them for many years. Chicago Filmmakers assumed responsibility for the festival in 2001, and expanded the size and opened it up to video work as well as film. It is generally 8-10 programs over four days and features roughly 60-70 works from around the world. Aside from the competition programs, there are occasional special presentations of new or old films of note or guest presentations. Screenings take place at Chicago Filmmakers and other venues around mid-June. For more information, please visit onioncityfilmfest.org.