Avondale, Humboldt Park, Logan Square, Wicker Park \\ Blue Line
Saturday, February 6, 2016
*All event descriptions written by the organizing artists with editorial support from 2FR staff
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Surge
Fidencio Martinez
Photo: Lynn Millspaugh
Installation \\ Whistler Storefront Gallery \\ Ongoing
“In my work, I choose cutting paper and other surfaces as a crucial technique because it evokes the crafts and customs taught to me as a toddler in Oaxaca, where they continue to be used as techniques to celebrate festivals and mourn the dead. By cutting into maps, paintings, and prints, I take what the mainstream media portrays and rearrange it so that I can finally say my side of this story. I am taking what has been endured by ‘los invisibles’ and putting real faces and narratives to a group that has too often been forgotten.”
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Mineral Rights
Richard Medina
Photo: Greg Reigh
Roving Gallery Installation \\ Times & Locations Vary
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Industry of Affect: Day at Work
Hank & Tannaz
Photo: Lynn Millspaugh
Participatory Performance Event \\ Private Residence \\ 9:00 AM-5:00 PM
What does it mean to be in the world with other people? What does it mean to be a community? Is it possible to accurately and productively represent human connection in art? In attempting to answer these questions, something strange and perverse often happens…our lives get mangled up and torn apart in the process of trying to track, collect, formalize, and quantify our daily lives together. People are not data and our lives are precious, crazy, silly things.
Industry of Affect: Day at Work was a participatory performance event at Tannaz’s home from 9AM-5PM in which audiences engaged in a series of one-on-one performances/services, joined group impromptu exercises, filled out artist-made forms and surveys, and chatted with Affect Industries staff.
hank4u.com / tannazm.com / to-from.info
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we are WITCH: a ritual performance for housing rights
WITCH Collective
Photo: Lynn Millspaugh
Site-Specific Performance \\ Logan Square CTA Stop \\ 12:00 PM-12:30 PM
WITCH is a performance collective that focuses on inequality and injustice in the Chicago area. WITCH explores the connection between art, performance, ritual and place-specific social justice issues. For 2nd Floor Rear 2016, WITCH performed a Hex and a Protective Spell action in the triangle of Logan Square, close to the Logan Square CTA stop.
WITCH’s actions are planned according to the specific location in which they take place. For 2FR 2016, WITCH’s this action focused on affordable housing, the proposed tax hike, and gentrification in Logan Square. Logan Square is the fastest gentrifying neighborhood in Chicago, and the one with the fastest growing income disparity in the city. WITCH desired to bring attention to this dynamic, hex those who profit from it, and protect those who suffer from it.
witchchicago.tumblr.com / facebook.com/groups/witchchicago / jessicacaponigro.com / chiaragalimberti.com /
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Transference of Touch: From Garment to Body
Katie Vota
Photo: Lynn Millspaugh
Exhibition with Programming \\ Corner \\ 12:00 PM-6:00 PM
Transference of Touch: From Garment to Body, an exhibition by artist Katie Vota, utilized recycled garments to engage viewers through experiential art. Transference of Touch focused upon the intimacy of garments, their intersection of form with function and also their disposability, to question issues of consumption, need and desire. Through this work, Vota sought to foster awareness around the politics of perception through community-based clothing exchanges and workshops on Radical Self-Reliance and Self-Expression, where she and guest artists taught mending as a form of consumerist protest and sewing as a method of self-expression. Vota was Corner’s artist-in-residence for the duration of February 2016, where she actively made work in the space and hosted regular public events. Participants were invited to engage at their own level of comfort, whether that meant active learning, observance, or bringing/taking clothes from the exchange.
katievota.com / cornerchicago.com
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BUILD
Alejandro T. Acierto
Photo: Greg Reigh
Installation + Participatory Performance \\ Hume \\ 1:00 PM-5:00 PM
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Don’t Tell Me I’m Pretty
Na Chainkua Reindorf &Grace Kubilius
Curated by Lauren Leving & Elizabeth Lalley
Photo: Greg Reigh
Exhibition + Fashion Show \\ Hairpin Arts Center \\ 1:00 PM-8:00 PM
By exploring textiles and human form, Don’t Tell Me I’m Pretty engages ideas of “being somewhere” through the body’s experience with the material world. By bringing global, external questions into the context of garments, this work suggests that when we find ourselves “somewhere,” our presence also influences and reflects the places we are in. Being reminded of the body’s physical presence in the world through art is both a simple and profound gesture. This exhibition encouraged viewers to search for new understanding in their own bodies and the bodies of others, and in the shared relationships within the spaces we inhabit.
Don’t Tell Me I’m Pretty featured works by artist Na Chainkua Reindorf, an MFA student at Cornel University who uses printed textiles to explore societal development, and Grace Kubilius, a fiber artist and current MFA student at Virginia Commonwealth University who utilizes salvaged materials in her practice.
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Stovetop H/earth
Multiple Artists
Photo: Greg Reigh
Group Exhibition \\ Hairpin Arts Center \\ 1:00 PM-8:00 PM
Banished from the homeland, looking in from the ‘badlands’, we getting’ our papers together, trawling homelandsecurity.gov, cookin’ the books, the revolution begins at home.
Stovetop H/earth brought together artists from different countries to investigate the insurgent nature of the domestic sphere that localizes the global. Featuring work by Soheila Azadi, Sherwin Ovid, Grace Cross, Soo Hyun Kim, Chiara Galimberti, and Elizabeth Cambron. Curated by Jesus Gonzales Flores in collaboration with the artists.
soheilaazadi.com / nimadehghani.com / ssovidblog.com / chiaragalimberti.com / soohyunkim.com
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Neighborhood Dances
Victoria Bradford
Photo courtesy Victoria Bradford
Site-specific Performance \\ Corner of Diversey & Milwaukee \\ 4:30 PM-5:00 PM
Victoria Bradford has spent the past year researching and cultivating a body movement vocabulary in an attempt to articulate the continuing crossover between her current dance practice and deep roots in a variety of disciplines, from sculpture and video to comparative literature. In the process, she has established a thoroughly considered protocol for generating still and moving images out of work that intervenes daily on the sanctity of public spaces with her own unique movement dialogue and done so, at times, while facing the risk of arrest and incarceration. Bradford has also honed contemporary art notions of documentation as art object and developed intriguing new methods for cataloging that data to construct an attendant “anti-archive.” That is, an archive that, rather than functioning purely to store and preserve data, serves the fundamentally critical function of recovering lost information, history. At little over a year with 500 sequential daily performances and counting, Neighborhood Dances is just hitting its stride, today providing Bradford with the raw material of movement documents necessary to push further and ply much, much deeper into these philosophical explorations of the heart of place, movement, and experience of them in the embodied, never-quite isolated mind.
Playlist for February 6th and 7th by Todd Mattei (toddmatteiart.com)
victoriaeleanorbradford.com / neighborhooddances.com
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Place Interminable
Falak Vasa
Curated by Potluck Salon (Lara Schoorl & Zeenat Nagree)
Photo: Emily Esperanza
Screening \\ The Storefront \\ 5:00 PM-7:00 PM
A collaboration between the curatorial collective Potluck Salon and artist Falak Vasa, Place Interminable explored the continuity between the home, the studio, the gallery and the city. The project featured two parts—a one-week online residency and a concurrent storefront display—intended to be both a complete exhibition and a work-in- progress. This approach expresses Potluck Salon’s commitment to staging processes that go unnoticed or are deliberately left by the wayside. Throughout the duration of Place Interminable, Vasa broadcasted live video feed documenting his life as the lived practice of an artist, conflating routine acts and acts of artistic labor to one of the storefront windows in Logan Square. In the second window, Vasa projected live video of the pedestrians, making them confront their own banal routines in the context of art- viewing.
Arthur Schopenhauer has described the aesthetic experience of art as a rare moment of the triumph of the intellect over ‘world will’, the force that drives all life to survive. Through the live images, Place Interminable asks: are we being presented with an experience of transcendence or of struggle? The format of the project acknowledges the struggles of viewing itself. Immersing the potential audience in a terrain of ceaseless ambiguous banality, Place Interminable underscores our propensity towards varying modes of engagement, from the quick glance of a pedestrian to the inexplicable attachment of a returning visitor. As the video feed rolls on, the intentionality of the spectator and the artist blurs into each other, offering endless possibility for creation.
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King of that Also
Etc. Gallery (Galen Beebe & John West)
with Fontaine Capel & Lauren Clark
Multimedia Performance + Reading \\ Pinky Swear \\ 5:00 PM-8:00 PM
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Lavender Menace Occupation
Angela Davis Fegan & Brett Swinney
Photo: Joey Delisi
Interactive Installation \\ Cole’s Bar \\ 6:00 PM-2:45 AM
The Lavender Menace Occupation is a public intervention that aims to transform the bathroom into a safe place. Through the placement of “Who do you make room for?” in vinyl wall text, the audience is called upon to respond directly and publicly on the wall with seafoam-green paint markers. This action turns the public into participants who create an affirmative, generative public dialogue. *21+
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THE WRETCHED NOBLES Film & Video Showcase
WRETCHED NOBLES
Photo: Emily Esperanza
Screening \\ OuterSpace Studios \\ 6:30 PM-8:00 PM
For this 45-minute showcase screening, WRETCHED NOBLES presented a diverse selection of short films and videos from Chicago-based artists and filmmakers who have previously screened in the monthly film& video series.
WRETCHED NOBLES Featured artists: Molly Hewitt, Ellen Nielsen, Emily Esperanza & Abby Young, Greg Reigh, and FND Films
About WRETCHED NOBLES: “Everything has been done before” is the biggest LIE of 21st century. Providing a venue for NEW local film & video art, the WRETCHED NOBLES celebrates themes of EXILE, FLUX, INCONSISTENCY, ANGST, PASSION, & MORAL PARADOX.
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they didn’t bring enough water
Lindsey French & Willy Smart
Photo: Joey Delisi
Release \\ TUSK \\ 6:30 PM-8:30 PM
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over, under, in, around: a poetry jam
Dao Nguyen
Photos: Emily Esperanza
Participatory Event \\ Private Residence \\ 7:00 PM-9:00 PM
Feeling stuck in your head? Got writer’s block or the blue screen blues? Stop scrolling an endless FB feed and get those juices flowing with a little jam. over, under, in, around is a poetry jam [ workshop ] enacted through touching, feeling, and mapping, where jam is both an unrehearsed jazz performance and a fruit preserve, a substance whose viscous quality allows parts to cohere.
For 2nd Floor Rear 2016, participating audiences embarked on a psychogeographic field trip sited in, on, and through the body, in which they considered collectively what constitutes a body and how they formed a body with their bodies.
Participants drew upon storytelling, improvisation, and wordplay to foment and mash their sticky fruits into a delectable compote. Players formed groups, and through intimate exchanges, responded to prompts to generate and construct a wayfinding assemblage of signs, gestures, and movement. They mapped points of confluence and connectivity onto skin with invisible ink. They aligned points across bodies and formed a single body, to construct image-word compositions and perform gestures. They enacted a poem over, under, in, and around the body, made visible under blacklight. All signs pointed to HERE, where they were, in the fleeting moments of their encounter. Their day-glo maps became a friendly reminder like morning after tramp stamps.
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Spanx© For Coming
Multiple Artists
Photo: Joey Delisi
Apartment Exhibition & Party \\ Private Residence \\ 8:00 PM-11:00 PM
Spanx© For Coming was an immersive apartment exhibition celebrating the similarities between the temporary adornment of homes and feminine-presenting bodies. With the decorated apartment as the exhibition platform, the artists explored the nature of these impermanent palettes, delicately tethering comfortable pasts to uncertain futures.
The negotiations we encounter while decorating our homes are similar to our beautification rituals. We contemplate an ever-evolving vision of self, which we attempt to reflect in the appearance of residence and body. In both cases, the medium turns out to be inconsistent in our perceptions of the ideal so reinforced in advertising, consumer culture, and social media.
Spanx© For Coming was a tribute to the power of crafting variable feminine facades, while acknowledging the inherent vulnerability of seeking unattainable states of permanence and perfection. Audiences joined the artists to explore and celebrate the complexities of inhabiting in-between places.
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VAM Presents: Stacking Paper to the Ceiling and Riding on 24 Inch Chrome
VAM STUDIOS
Photo: Emily Esperanza
Screening and Talkback \\ OuterSpace Studios \\ 8:30 PM-10:00 PM
VAM screened both the #UNFILTERED and DIY series in full for the first time. VAM also hosted talk-back with filmmakers Jeremy Freedberg, Greg Stephen Reigh and VAM TEAM.
#DIY Series featuring: Dojo, Eco, Young Camelot, Dollhouse
#UNFILTERED Series featuring: Po’ Chop, Owen Bones, Audra Jacot, Emily Esperanza, Michael Thompson, Lefty, Elizabeth Margulis, Jake Vogds, Mateo
About VAM: VAM IS AN EXPERIMENTAL IN-HOUSE CREATIVE STUDIO FOCUSING ON THE BEST OF UNDERGROUND ART THROUGH ALL MEDIUMS. OUR MISSION FOR VAM IS TO CHRONICLE THE BEST OF THE OFF-THE-RADAR STREET ARTISTS, CULTURE ENTHUSIASTS AND NIGHTLIFE VISIONARIES AROUND THE CITY WHO INSPIRE US TO EMBRACE OUR CREATIVITY AND DEFY SOCIAL NORMS.
About the #DIY series: #DIY works to amplify the underrepresented and underground sub-cultures which create the thread within the fabric of our city. This series aims to shine light on the best underground venues, galleries, personalities and taste makers who throw kick-ass events and parties that challenge the status-quo.
About VAM UNFILTERED: Unfiltered is an intimate video profile on some of the most inspiring, up-and-coming, unexpected and accomplished artists. We journey into their intimate work spaces and places of inspiration to get an ‘unfiltered’ look into their lives as artists.
vamstudio.net/vamdiy / vamstudio.net/vamunfiltered
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The Pageant of Ieya
Christopher Allman
Photo: Joey Delisi
Installation + Performance \\ Private Residence \\ 8:30 PM-12:00 AM
Day 1 Event Curators:
Katie Waddell | 2nd Floor Rear Creative Director
Katie Waddell is an independent curator, writer, and event producer based in Chicago, IL. Katie collaborates with artists across disciplines, organizing their projects, artworks, or ideas into total environments or sequential events. Her research and projects focus on the encounter, by way of public events and programming, as the nexus from which intimacy, curiosity, and the experiential unfold. Katie holds a dual-M.A. in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Learn more about her work at katiewaddelldoesthings.com
Jesus Gonzalez Flores | 2016 Associate Curator
Jesus Gonzalez Flores is an interdisciplinary artist, and a freelance curator. He studied at Eastern Michigan University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Gonzalez Flores has shown internationally and nationally including So Weit, die Zunkunft [SWDZ] (Vienna, Austria), Julius Cæsar (Chicago), The Institute of Contemporary Arts (Singapore, China), CUE Art Foundation (New York), and PERIGRINEPROGRAM (Chicago). Other recent projects include Mis Aventuras, Por Un Amor, and ADDS DONNA. This coming spring he is attending an Artist-in-Residence program at Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. He is a Gemini, married and plans to adopt.
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2nd Floor Rear 