CURTIS MANN IN WHITNEY BIENNIAL

Columbia College Chicago is enormously proud to announce that Curtis Mann, a 2008 MFA graduate and faculty of Columbia’s photography department, has been accepted into the Whitney Biennial exhibition – a 77 year-old exhibition of American Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The Whitney exhibition is one of the foremost shows in the art world and has traditionally marked the leading trends in contemporary art. Out of the millions of artists living and working in America, only 55 were chosen. With the invitation to the Whitney Biennial, the experts of the art world have chosen Curtis’ work to be one of the shining examples of the most current and important art being made today. He is now in league with some of the America’s most revered artists.

"Curtis Mann discovered his own distinctive artistic voice very early in our graduate program," says Bob Thall, Chairperson of the photography department. "He then developed his work with great intelligence, energy, and ambition. We are very proud of Curtis Mann and delighted that his work will be finding an enormous new audience."

Curtis Mann creates new photography by physically erasing and manipulating found amateur snapshots. This tension between creation and destruction in his process expands the boundaries of photography, and forms unique works that are full of experimentation and beauty. In the attached video made by Alan Del Rio, Curtis walks us through some of his techniques and shares the insights he has formed while developing his art.

Curtis Mann // Photography from Alan Del Rio Ortiz on Vimeo.

CONGRATULATIONS CURTIS!!!

LAYER CAKE: Tales of a Quinceañera - See the Video

I sat down with Camille Morgan, curator of Layer Cake, and Judithe Hernandez, artist. Check out our conversation and enjoy the pics. Remember, the opening is Tuesday, September 15, 4-8pm at C33 Gallery, 33 East Congress. Come and enjoy some real Quince cake and Mexican food.

Steve Carrelli - Interview and Blooper Reel

Steve Carrelli and I sat down last week and talked about his work and his process, but really we discussed art bloopers. Steve is on the faculty in the Art + Design Department here at Columbia College Chicago who will exhibiting in the {blank}Space exhibition in the Leviton A+D Gallery. Other exhibiting artists include Steven Carrelli, Anna Kunz, Betsy Odom and Michael K. Paxton. Organized by Jennifer Murray. I'm hoping to get interviews up of the other artists in the show, so be on the lookout. Thanks for watching.

Also...don't forget to go to the closing reception on September 10 (the information is below).

WHEN: August 13 – September 19, 2009

Closing Reception and Artwalk: September 10, 2009, 5-8pm

WHERE: Columbia College Chicago’s Leviton A+D Gallery

619 S. Wabash Avenue

COST: Free and Open to the Public.

MORE

INFO: Jennifer Murray, 312.369.8686

Website: www.colum.edu/adgallery

ArtseenChicago blog: http://www.artseenchicago.blogspot.com

to see videos of participating artists and additional images.

Upcoming Faculty Show at Leviton A+D Gallery

_place: Columbia College Art and Design Faculty Exhibition opens on August 13 at Leviton A+D Gallery

___place is about times and spaces of revolution, and their effect on visual images. We use convention and tradition to recognize images, pictures and works of art, and because art images interpret our world, they impact how we understand changes in the experience of place, space and time. We only understand visual things in contexts that are historical, geographic and cultural. Artists respond to those factors, and ___place is an experimental exhibition of such responses. The exhibition uses a notion of revolution to emphasize how changes in what, when, and where we see not only changes the character of visual images, but also tells us something about the tools we use to see the world. Exhibiting artists include Steven Carrelli, Anna Kunz, Betsy Odom, and Michael K. Paxton.

Over the next few week, I will be producing short video postcards about each of these artists. Today, I 'll be interivewing Betsy Odom whose current artwork address the issues of gender, sports and craft. Videos and information from the remaining artists will appear over the next few weeks.

Betsy Odom, Tom Bigbee, leather, elastic

Betsy Odom, Softball Bat, 2008, wood, leather, tape

WHEN: August 13 - September 19, 2009, opening reception Thursday, September 10, 5-8pm

WHERE: Leviton A+D Gallery, 619 S. Wabash Avenue

COST: Free and Open to the Public.

INFO: 312.369.8668 or www.colum.edu/adgallery

TimeOutChicago reviews Carl Hammer show Primal

Until July 22, Columbia College's gallery, Leviton A+D Gallery, is exhibiting works from Midwestern contributors of BLAB! Magazine. One of those artists is C.J. Pyle. I am happy to present here a review by Lauren Weinberg, art critic at TimeOut, of the Carl Hammer show Primal that features C.J. Pyle. I will be putting up a video tour of the gallery and the show Midwestern BLAB! next week. Keep a look out for that.

Art review

“Primal”

By Lauren Weinberg

Carl Hammer Gallery, through Jul 3.

C.J. Pyle, Sugar, 2008.

Thanks to Carl Hammer Gallery’s emphasis on self-taught and visionary artists, several of the works in the sprawling “Primal: Drawing as the Mirror of Self” explore their makers’ psyches with panache—particularly Joseph Yoakum’s fantastic paintings of places he supposedly visited and devout Christian Stephen Palmer’s lovely, intricately patterned portraits of Mary and Jesus. Other pieces don’t fit the show’s introspective theme so neatly, such as Marc Dennis’s confrontational nudes and George Widener’s depiction of Megalopolis 2012, a bustling city dominated by birdlike airplanes. Still, Widener’s work, which the autistic artist has carefully organized and crammed with details, is fascinating.

The many superlative examples of drawing represent the show’s greatest strength: Three blue-penciled boards by Chris Ware offer insight into the comics artist’s process and poignant stories. In four drawings on album covers, C.J. Pyle calls forth miracles with a ballpoint pen, achieving exquisite shading and gradations of tone in weird, dreadlocked figures (pictured) whose faces appear inside-out, as though their musculature sits on the surface of their skin. Marilyn Murphy’s The Time Jumper and The Lost Glove, two pencil portraits of women shown only from the waist down, combine a luscious, photorealistic aesthetic with surreal hints of feminine anomie.

Yet one of our favorite pieces isn’t a drawing: Cow Girl, an unknown artist’s wood carving, depicts a redhead clad only in a hat, boots and suggestively placed holster. The artist knows exactly what he likes—and there’s something charming about his eagerness to immortalize it.

Layer Cake: Tales from a Quinceañera

image: Life on the Block, Adriana Lopez Sanfeliu, 2009

For young Latino girls, the Quinceañera is one of the most important moments in their youth. Like the Debutante Ball, the Cotillion and the "coming out" rituals that many young girls around the world participate in, the Quinceañera is uniquely Latino. Opening at Columbia College Chicago's C33 Gallery on September 8, Layer Cake: Tales from a Quinceañera is an exploration of the tension, delight, embarrassment, desire, joy, pride, confusion and beauty inherent in the Quinceañera. The exhibition features five to seven compelling stories – real or imagined – that speak to some facet of the greater Quinceañera narrative.

Image: Mexican Quinceanera, Javier Ramirez, Limon

Dating back to the Aztec and Mayan Empires and Spanish colonialism in the Americas (mainly Central and South America), the event ceremonially marked the time when a young girl would leave her family home to marry and begin her own family – around the age of 15.

Image: Mexican Quinceanera, Javier Ramirez, Limon

If asked what the Quinceañera means, a celebrant will likely answer: “I’m going from being a girl to being a woman,” but in today’s America of mixed moral, spiritual and cultural messages, coming-of-age is as complicated as ever. And so it comes down to the birthday girl, left to reconcile her own expectations and promises of womanhood with those of her family and community at large - rejoicing and lamenting in her newfound status.

Curated by Camille Morgan, Layer Cake: Tales from a Quinceañera has gathered artists who can capture this fantastic confusion through personal engagement - artists who can make transparent the layers of the poufy dress, the many-tiered cake, and the pomp and circumstance to reveal the truths beneath. Viewers will be drawn in and realize that this is not only an Hispanic tradition but a human one.

Image: Mexican Quinceanera, Javier Ramirez, Limon

Media is open to artist interpretation and can include painting, sculpture, photography, site-specific installation, performance and new media.

image: Juana Alicia, Don't Be So Tough, 2008

The exhibition will coincide with Columbia College’s National Latino Heritage Month (FOCO) and Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations.

COMMUNITY PARTICIPATION

Interactive Exhibit Wall – Photo Collage
Throughout the course of the exhibit, students, the rest of the Columbia College community and the public will be invited to submit personal photos from quinceañeras they have attended, participated in, had, crashed, etc. This supports the exhibit’s focus – artist’s exploring the theme of the quince through personal engagement.

image: Road Kill Series, Adriana Carvalho, 2009

"I am hoping people will enjoy displaying their crazy, funny, poignant, ridiculous and beautiful photos, " says Camille Morgan, the show's curator. "I am sure everyone will love to view them too. The purpose is to make the exhibit feel like a party everyone is invited to...a place where their experience counts and is important to the celebration of Latina womanhood."

EDUCATIONAL RELEVANCE OF QUINCEANERA

WHEN: September 8 – October 28, 2009

Artwalk Reception: September 10, 2009, 5-8pm

Official Reception: September 15, 2009, 4-8pm (to feature a real quince cake and Mexican food)

WHERE: C33 Gallery

33 East Congress Pkway @ Wabash

• Curator Talks (by appt) at 312.369.7663 or cmorgan@colum.edu

• Shifting meaning of the quinceañera

• The shifting definition of “tradition”

• Religion and faith in terms of cultural ritual

• Issues surrounding immigration and societal status

• How colonialism affects “history”

• Feminist issues in a patriarchal society

Image: Judithe Hernandez, 2009

WHEN: September 8 – October 28, 2009

Artwalk Reception: September 10, 2009, 5-8pm

Official Reception: September 15, 2009, 4-8pm (to feature a real quince cake and Mexican food)

PANEL DISCUSSION: Thursday, October 22, 3pm at Hokin Annex, 623 S. Wabash
Steve Caballero (Community Christian Church in Pilsen), Priscilla Mills (author of Quinceanera Connections) and Yolanda Nieves (Artistic Director of Vida Bella Ensemble).

WHERE: C33 Gallery, 33 East Congress Pkway @ Wabash

COST: Free and Open to the Public.

CONTACT: Camille Morgan at cmorgan@colum.edu or 312.369.7663

PRESS INQUIRIES: Elizabeth Burke-Dain at eburkedain@colum.edu or 312.369.8695

More Images from Midwestern BLAB! at A+D Gallery

CJ Pyle, Been A Long Time, (c)2009, 13 1/4" x 12 1/4", ink, colored pencil, and graphite on cardboard; to appear in BLAB! 19

Image: Don Colley, miscellaneous sketchbook drawing, (c)1996, 11 3/4" w x 10" deep, ink and watercolor on paper

Image: Teresa James, (c)2000, No Chance Meetings from "The Old Haunts" by Jeffrey Steele; 1 15/16" x 8", color etching, originally appeared in BLAB! 11

Image: (c)2004, Tom Huck; Race of the Wheelbarrow Brides; 24 3/8" x 12 9/16"; hand-colored linoleum cut on paper; originally appeared in BLAB! 15

WHEN: June 18 – July 22, 2009

WHERE: Columbia College Chicago’s Leviton A+D Gallery

619 S. Wabash Avenue

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm, Thursday 11 am – 8 pm

COST: Free and Open to the Public

MORE

INFO: Gallery Coordinator, , 312.369.8686

Press Inquiries, 312.369.8695

Re-Figure: A Contemporary Look at Figurative Representation in Art

Media Contact: Elizabeth Burke-Dain, 312.369.8695

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

June 5, 2009

Images are Available.

Image: Amber Hawk Swanson, To Hold, Pinball, 2008, c-print

New technologies and innovative use of traditional media have changed the ways in which we view the body – from the Sims to Facebook to YouTube, our lives are inundated with new interpretations of, and uses for, figurative representation. The art exhibition RE:figure explores the common ground between new and old media representations of the human form, as well as the different uses of figurative representation. RE:figure features artists working in a diverse range of media, such as video game screen captures, photography, sculpture, collage and drawing. The works will show a range of body types, as well as explore different relationships between the artist and his or her subject. Betsy Schneider’s “Quotidian’ series of photographs, for example, document in large grids of drugstore photos the physical development of her small children while simultaneously giving the viewer insight into the power structure between parent and child. Don Doe’s mixed-media drawings, modern-day interpretations of the Madonna, give a much darker view of motherhood. Amber Hawk Swanson’s photographic series ‘To Have, To Hold and To Violate’ of her doppelganger Realdoll ™, a lifelike sex doll she had created in her own image, provides a disturbing look into the ways in which likenesses can be abused. Stacia Yeapanis’ ‘Glitches Are Signs’ gives a more lighthearted view of the same subject, through screen captures of her own Sims ™-likeness apparent physical disintegration.

Re-Figure was curated by Cole Robertson.

Confirmed Artists (more are anticipated)
Edna Dapo http://bit.ly/cu2Ny
Don Doe http://bit.ly/Izs3g
Robert Flynt http://bit.ly/FgmPA
Jason Salavon http://bit.ly/4OWYa
Betsy Schneider http://bit.ly/nm9fu
Amber Hawk Swanson http://bit.ly/nm9fu
Stacia Yeapanis http://bit.ly/6CKin

WHEN: September 8 – October 30, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 5 – 8pm

WHERE: Columbia College Chicago’s Glass Curtain Gallery
1104 S. Wabash Avenue, 1st floor
Gallery Hours: Mon-Wed, Fri: 9:00am – 5:00pm, Thurs: 9:00am – 7:00pm,
Sat. by appointment

COST: Free and Open to the Public.

MORE INFO: Gallery Coordinator: Mark Porter, 312.369.6643 or mporter@colum.edu
Press Inquiries: Elizabeth Burke-Dain, 312.369.8695

Some images:

Sabrina Raaf, Blood, Rags and Da Bomb, photograph

Don Doe, New Mother, No. 142 (cover story), 2008, gouache, ink and pastel on prepared paper

Ashley Hope, Can Opener, 2005, oil on panel

Edna Dapo, Impermissible, acrylic on canvas

Robert Flynt, New Year Baby, 2008, collage

Su-en Wong, Mighty Hymn, 2007, graphite on paper

Colleen Plumb on Jen Bekman News

I was really happy to see Colleen Plumb's work being featured on Flavorwire. Colleen is a Columbia College alum and has gone on to have a enviable career as an art photographer. She recently had a show at City Gallery, a photo gallery that Columbia curates. Thanks Jen and thanks Colleen.

Jen Bekman Photographer of the Month: Colleen Plumb
12:51 pm Monday May 11, 2009
by Caroline Stanley

Image credit: Circus by Colleen Plumb

Twice a month, Sara Distin from Jen Bekman Projects, Inc. contributes a post to Flavorwire about an artist or photographer. Jen Bekman Projects, Inc. includes Jen Bekman Gallery, 20×200 and Hey, Hot Shot!.

I haven’t been able to touch bacon since Michael Pollan revealed what happens to pigs and their corkscrew tails on CAFOs. I should have known better and become a vegetarian before I became a foodie, but I didn’t. Now I suffer irrepressible guilt for even craving salty, fatty slivers of swine. Colleen Plumb’s photograph, Pigs, makes me feel even worse.

Her series Animals Are Outside Today brings you this close to animals stuffed, strung, fenced, flying, rotting, leaping, and barely breathing, affirming our perverse relationship to other living things; when animals and humans meet, it’s usually to the detriment of the former. We are mostly oblivious and uncaring to that fact.

It might be because, as Plumb points out, we are disconnected from the natural world in general — isolated in urban environments, stifling instinct with intellectualism. Plumb’s photographs are alternately soft and dreamy, crisp and cold, engaging both the heart and the brain, and mimicking the natural cycle of attachment and detachment we have with our two- and four-legged friends. Funny and tragic, they acknowledge that these encounters are increasingly rare and diluted in spite of best intentions.

Over the last few months, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at Colleen’s work at JBP HQ. She was a Hot Shot last year; and we’ve featured several of her works on 20×200 — her editions have been eagerly collected. Plumb’s works will be on view at Denver’s van Straaten Gallery starting Thursday, May 14. If you’re not in Denver, I have a perfect pairing of Plumb and Whitman for you instead, courtesy of Ms. Jen B.

- Sara Distin

FRIEZE MAGAZINE REVIEWS LOADED

Loaded: Hunting Culture in America is currently on view at Columbia College Chicago's Glass Curtain Gallery.

Frieze.com published this article on April 8,2009. It was written by Jason Foumberg, a most excellent writer and reviewer for New City in Chicago.


Erika Larsen, Wedding Ring (2005)

In the April 2009 issue of hunting magazine Outdoor Life, a hunter tells an anecdote about coming across a rare ‘transgendered deer’ (with male polished antlers and female genitalia); of course, he shot and killed it. On the magazine’s facing page is an ad for an erectile dysfunction pill. In a quest to understand modern hunting culture, it was satisfying to smirk at these and other mentions of complicated sexuality in the context of killing animals, since hunting is often defended as tradition. More telling, though, was the insertion of such urban concepts as ‘transgendered’ and Viagra within an age-old activity, revealing how bloodsports have been modernized and commercialized. This, too, is the intention of ‘Loaded: Hunting Culture in America’, a thematic exhibition that combines documentary photography, contemporary art, hunting-chic décor and hunting paraphernalia.

Hunting magazines comprise two main types of imagery: a photo-op of the proudly smiling hunter holding his (dead) catch, and wildlife (alive) in its natural habitat, looking pretty for the shoot. The exhibition, too, picks up on these standard poses. Erika Larsen’s series of colour photographs, ‘Young Blood’ (2007), documents the lives of various families that hunt together. Especially difficult to view are portraits of children and young adults posing with rifles, bloodied squirrels and turkeys in hand. Similarly, Brian Lesterberg’s photograph Hoof Track with Blood (2003) shows a depression on a plane of white snow, dappled with blood drippings from a fresh kill recently carted off. Each photograph could act as a condemnation of the bloodsport, though these are insiders’ views: Larsen contributes photographs to Field & Stream, a popular hunting magazine in the US, while Lesterberg is a hunter himself.



Mathieu Lévesque, John-Paul (2006). Enamel, oil and carving on brass

But what do the art establishment, and even urban or suburban dwellers, know about the seemingly backwoods hunting community? Lots, apparently. Like punk rock or S&M, the gear and gadgets from hunting subculture have trickled through to the mainstream. Sure, the brew gets watered-down and the bite is softened as contemporary artists and designers pick it up, but curators Audrey Michelle Mast and Ann Wiens don’t seem interested in expressing exactly what it feels like to track and kill an animal; rather, it’s the look, the fashion and the stuff - the culture - of the hunt that is on display here.

There are a handful of ‘real’ objects and scenes from hunting culture - not only Lesterberg’s and Larsen’s documentary footage but also duck decoys from the collection of an award-winning decoy sculptor. The life-like painted wooden ducks are both functioning tools and sculptural objects (though not necessarily ‘sculpture’ as we’re comfortable with the term).



Diana Guerrero-Macia, Kill Shots (2007). Wool, leather, vinyl and cotton

The step from the duck decoys, popular in some faux-rustic dens, to ironic kitsch is easy to make, and the curators follow through by exhibiting a cardboard trophy buck head, made to adorn, presumably, college dorm rooms. The difference between the wooden decoys and the cardboard head is the seriousness with which the decoy maker works and the smugness of the cardboard joke. The contrast is similarly played-out with a taxidermied and mounted jackalope (the folkloric antlered bunny), and designer salt and pepper shakers in the shape of stag heads. Whereas the jackalope was a junk-shop prize find and is a token lowbrow curio, the spice shakers are made of stainless steel and sell for US$43. Elsewhere in the exhibition, you can play Nintendo’s popular Duck Hunt (1985). A trajectory takes shape, detailing the progression of the hunting subculture’s step-by-step manoeuvre into middle-class life.

As for the contemporary art on view, there are similar reversals and transpositions of high and low taste. Jenn Wilson’s lush oil painting of a bear recalls a hunter’s morbid love affair with nature and the sport’s curious self-justification of environmental conservationism. Bear (2008) could hang just as easily in a lodge as it does in the Glass Curtain Gallery. Kimberly Hart’s Hunting Stand with Unicorn Bait (2007) is an installation that updates the Metropolitan Museum’s famous ‘The Hunt of the Unicorn’ (1495–1505) tapestries, using hobby-shop materials such as plastic beads and pastel pom-poms. On the side of sentimentality are Josh Winegar’s altered photographs of hunters parading their trophy kills, in which the artist has whitewashed the proud hunters with paint until they’re almost completely faded out, though leaving the animals intact. In Mtn. Lion (2007), a large, limp feline is given a painted bandage in a sweetly futile gesture of redemption.

Hunting culture is so ripe with artistic metaphors - decoys and doubles, the quietude of a collection and the violence of ownership - yet the curators don’t deviate from the historical slice they aim to present (except, perhaps, the inclusion of Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s stitched ransom note, which reads, ‘Designed to deliver kill shots’, and may be aimed at viewers). By balancing pictures of carcasses and guns alongside cultural relics, hunting is shown to be a disturbingly assimilated pastime.

Jason Foumberg

Loaded: The Hunting Show

A wonderful article written by Alicia Eler appeared in New City. I include it here.

Eye Exam: A Loaded Question

image: Erika Larsen, Wedding Ring, 2005

By Alicia Eler

Taxidermy is big business—and high art. A March 6 New York Times article reported taxidermy sightings at this year’s Armory Art Fair, including Carolyn Salas and Adam Parker Smith’s buckhead whose abnormally huge antlers twist into the air like overgrown tree branches. This month’s Modern Painters devotes its cover to taxidermy: A blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman wearing an ironically conspicuous cross around her neck lies on an animal-print cloth next to a dead, sleeping taxidermied baby fox, suggesting that death is once again en vogue.

Curators Ann Wiens and Audrey Michelle Mast take this trend into deeper territory, exploring the literal meat of it all. Their show, “Loaded: Hunting Culture in America,” looks at the influence of hunting on the art world, pop culture, design, photography and video games. Juxtaposed against a hunting-culture backdrop, the trend begins feeling like less of an oddity and more like a culturally relevant pattern.Mast foregrounds the hunting-culture trend in her curatorial essay, mentioning designer Philippe Starck’s 2000 “hunting lodge gone mod” as a harbinger. Wiens and Mast avoid turning the show into a dichotomous, moralistic attack on what many rural communities view as a cherished, time-honored tradition. Uninterested in work that could walk the line with propaganda, they instead focus on open-ended pieces that are best unpacked by the viewer. “Loaded”’s subject matter could have easily meandered into a condemnation of the killing sport or fetishized its easy kitsch, but it instead succeeds in peeking beyond our urban, non-hunting experience.

image: Kimberley Hart, Hunting Stand with Unicorn Bait, 2007. Courtesy of Mixed Greens, NY

The show inadvertently discusses gender, particularly in the work of Brooklyn-based artist Kimberley Hart. Her alter ego of an ultra girlie-girl—”the quintessential sweet girl, all frills and petal pink…the doe-eyed, sentimental icon with dolly in tow and teacup in hand,” explains Hart in a NY Arts Magazine article—sprung from her own preteen tomboy tendencies. Through her persona, Hart explores an imaginary, magical world devoid of gender expectations where her alter ego hunts unicorns that, when killed, may incite disaster. To lure in and later kill the innocent unicorn, she crafts “Hunting Stand with Unicorn Bait” (2005). A light pink ladder leads up to a kitschy, seventies-looking pastel-colored box decorated in fabrics and yarn, with circular mesh windows, frills, sequins and hanging fuzzy balls. (Hunters use similar stands to help spot deer on paths in the woods.) A lick of golden salt—unicorn bait—hangs from a string on the stand. Picturing a pixie-looking girl mischievously killing a magical unicorn defies real-world expectations of her alter ego’s gender expectations and takes one into a magical fantasy world reminiscent of the movie “The Neverending Story.”

Straddling the hunting and fine art contexts, Erika Larsen’s photographs document rural families on the hunt. A regular photographer for “Field and Stream,” a hunting magazine with a readership of ten-million-plus, Larsen also shows her work, which takes an unbiased approach to hunting, in art galleries. In “Wedding Ring,” Larsen captures a moment after the kill. She shoots a close-up portion of a woman’s sweater and forest-green hunting gear, focusing her lens on the woman’s bloody fingers as they rest on her hip. A diamond wedding ring sits snugly on her index finger, becoming the focal point of the photo. These contextually flexible works are the show’s most compelling, presenting a candid, non-voyeuristic peek into real hunting cultures where men, women and children see hunting as far more than sport.

Seeing photographs of the hunt may be more satisfying than eating the meat of dead animals, or seeing taxidermy that comes neatly packaged after the fact. It’s the adrenaline rush, the connection to nature and, ultimately, man’s ability to conquer nature. To supplement such ideas, Wiens and Mast include the 1984 Nintendo game Duck Hunt, a video game that is exactly what it sounds like. Viewers are welcome to play. “Bucky,” an assemble-it-yourself cardboard buckhead available from cardboardsafari.com, takes the trophy significance out of the object, imbuing it with a sense of poppy, mass-produced playfulness.

Wiens and Mast also include artifacts from hunting culture, borrowing duck decoys from a man named Bob Lantz who lives in Palos Heights, Illinois. Lantz carves and collects the decoys, and has won numerous awards for his craftsmanship, including a 1981 world title in the intermediate World Wildlife Carving Championship held in Ocean City, Maryland. A 1981 duck stamp, which functions as both a permit for hunting waterfowl and a hunter’s collector item, suggests one of hunting culture’s many facets.

But a hunting show wouldn’t be complete without taxidermy. Various animals find their way into the show, like the jackalope, a make-believe rabbit with antlers. The curators, however, treat any taxidermy in this show as an artifact from the culture—not an art object. Skinning and stuffing dead animals may be a part of both art and hunting cultures, but it’s by no means the focus.

Through April 29 at The Glass Curtain Gallery, Columbia College, 1104 S. Wabash Ave.

Don't Burn Ray Bradbury's Books...Eat Them! April 1, 2009

Rosemary and Tom Zimmerman, Italian Pizelle Book, winner for Most Book-like

Non-fiction tends to be slightly more difficult to digest,
but poetry is an impossible degustatory quest.
So here is a word to the wise,
if you are hell-bent on eating prose,
your attendance at an April event is mandatory, I suppose.
Attend the Edible Books Show and Tea
where licorice whip binding is the key
and deli ham pages are turned with glee.
Whether books be eaten by the Ezra Pound
or with a sprinkling of Joyce Carol Oats,
you might just Wanda Gag.
So don't secretly nibble pages in the stacks,
eat your books in public. Get the facts!
Delectable words will jump off the page.
Eating books is all the rage.
EAT BOOKS!

Erica Snell, The Very Hungry Caterpiller

Join us at Edible Books Annual Show and Tea.
Make a book of your own and get in free.
If eating books is all you crave,
Pay at the door and try to behave.
If your fingers wander and probe
into the jellied aspic Book of Job
We might have to cook you at Farenheit 451
as Mr. Bradbury would have done.

Edible Books Show and Tea
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
6pm to 8pm
Viewing and Voting: 6-7pm
Devouring Books: 7-8pm
Winner will be announced by 7:15pm

Columbia College Library
624 S. Michigan Avenue, 3rd Floor
Chicago, Il
312.369.6630 for more information.

K.V. and Jan Chindlund, The Velveeta Rabbit, winner for Best in Show

PRIZE CATEGORIES
Most likely to be burned
Most likely to be devoured
Most out of this world
Most likely to be make into a Truffaut film
Most Magic

Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons - I Am Not a Photographer

A few weeks ago, in an earlier blogpost, I wrote about Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, the Cuban artist who is currently exhibiting at Columbia College's Glass Curtain Gallery.
Below is a video of a lecture and performance that she did here at Columbia College. Enjoy.

Reverence Renewed - DePaul's Museum Presents Early Religious Images from Peru

Unidentified artist, Our Lady of Cayma, Peru, c. 1771-1782, oil on canvas

Having grown up in a religious Catholic household, I was familiar with the religious icons of Western Europe. While the images were beautiful and often frightening, they were very European in style. The exhibition Reverence Renewed at the Depaul University Museum displays religious icons from the 1700s in Peru and South America. The beauty of these images is darker and depict a mysteriousness that is a profound look into the Peruvian temperment of the late Baroque and beginning of the Rococo period. They attempt to copy the style of the European painting of the time, but the emotional content of the work is very uniquely South American. Reverence Renewed is an amazing interpretation of religious painting in a land far away from Rome, at a time when the Roman Catholic church was the dominant political and religious force in the world. This is a fantastic show.

Unidentified workshop St. Michael Archangel Peru, Cuzco, late 17th-early 18th century Oil on canvas

The invasion of the Incan Empire by Spanish forces in the 1530s marked a defining moment in Andean history and art. Visual culture in the newly-established Viceroyalty of Peru (present-day Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and more) was modeled to some degree on the art and architecture of Italy, Spain, and Flanders. Yet South American artworks were products of their colonial environment, indeed often made by indigenous and mestizo (mixed-blooded) artists and informed by their own cultural circumstances and the demands of their local patrons.

Unidentified Workshop, Ship of Patience, Peru, Cozco 18th century, oil on canvas

This exhibition focuses on three distinctive characteristics of painting in the Andean region: the popularity of the Virgin Mary as icon and image; the artists and their stylistic inspirations, particularly in the artistic center of Cuzco; and the emergence of a distinctive representational repertoire drawn from European tradition but elaborated in fresh and unpredictable ways. Works from this fluid environment include historical narratives of Spanish power, secular portraits, extraordinary silverwork, and above all, Catholic imagery-renewed in its Andean environment.