As Matt Rich describes his paintings, “ … they aren’t quite many things: flat, dimensional, representational or perfectly singular. In being not quite many things, they commit to a formal and experiential dissonance.” The dissonance seems to come out of his joy in making work that wobbles through different neighborhoods. Painting, sculpture, emblematic signage, performative action – Matt Rich finds possibilities in each of these. To keep things in flux in the studio, he maneuvers among these territories and enlivens the work through improvisation and modification. Hanging directly on the wall, the work emphatically holds space, acting at times like heraldic insignia and at others, like portals into some visually skewed netherworld. Each work is assembled from cut paper activated with acrylic pigments applied in a variety of gestures—evenly sprayed, messily smeared, scraped, brushed and rolled. The process of composing is “pre-indeterminate;” it starts someplace — almost any place — and evolves through a liberated sense of composition and construction toward tenuous stability. The final shape may feel familiar — usually the title leads someplace — but the work quickly slips and becomes something entirely other. That the paintings frequently hover almost there or not-quite-there is a testament to Rich’s awareness of how things congeal, how the paintings form and become whole – or potentially dissolve into some unexpected result. They may feel tentatively held together, but it is the declarative nature of what we ultimately experience that intimates a work as an essential being: something flawed but resolute. The work’s heartfelt exuberance is expressed through shape, color and construction, but we feel its willingness to be imperfect as absolutely human.

Matt Rich has had solo exhibitions at Project Row Houses in Houston, devening projects + editions in Chicago, the Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois, Samsøn Projects in Boston, VOLTA NY art fair and Halsey McKay in East Hampton, New York. In the past three years, Rich has had group shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Cottage Home and LACE in Los Angeles, Baer Ridgway Exhibitions in San Francisco, Galerie oqbo in Berlin, and DODGEgallery and BravinLee Programs in New York. Rich’s works are held in the collections of the List Visual Arts Center at MIT and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Terra Foundation for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His work has been reviewed by Modern Painters, Artforum, Art Papers and The Boston Globe.

Vincent Hawkins studied at the Maidstone College of Art in Kent in England. His recent exhibitions include Inshore Fishing, at the Rokeby Gallery in London; Layer Cake, Fabio Tiboni, Bologna; The Chameleon’s Eye at Centrum, Berlin; ATN Bushwick Open Studios, Brooklyn; Moveable Feast, Paris; Five Galerie 1/5, Toulon; A Sort Of Night Of The Mind, Herbert Reed Gallery; and Artary Gallery, Stuttgart. He was a finalist for the Jerwood Painting Prize in 2006. He lives and works in London.

In large wall pieces carefully constructed from fabric and thread, along with plaster and cardboard sculptures, Nancy Ford examines how one perceives and interprets unfamiliar landscapes, and looks for the triggers and cues that direct perceptual movement.  Her project reflects on how forms are recognized and what happens in the moments prior to that identification. The work is physical, optical, and rich in its reminiscence of the settings from which they’re inspired. Long walks through Death Valley and Zion National Park offered an opportunity for Ford to problematize form, light, scale, and color in her recent work. Traveling to those remote sites directly from a dense urban setting necessitated certain sensory adjustments. Shifting her perspective and forced to make regular optical adjustments to accommodate the expanded horizon, the walks through these landscapes form the basis for this current project. The movement of the sun, surface reflection, and the constant state of spatial flux meant regular reorientations to her place in the landscape. Territory became hard to measure; somber, monochromatic mountain ranges, upon close examination, revealed themselves to be sloppy upheavals of color.

In the studio, Ford processes the sensory phenomenon experienced during her travels; the resulting work looks at what it means to learn to see differently. Rather than depicting the landscape literally, the work translates that material into abstracted fragments mapping a terrain to engage the eye’s activity. It acknowledges that memory is the imperfect version of a picture; it can distort subtle color into high contrast, correct for blind spots, or warp one’s sense of scale. The fabric pieces employ flat, demarcated “brush strokes” whose colors resonate at each shared edge. Optical illusion and depth of field come into play as the compositions develop. Certain colors advance, then sink back when punched up against a competing value. These marks act in the same way when sunlight hits an object: every point and contour shift creates a new mark; the forms become a culmination of many smaller, separate smudges of light.

The sculptures take a slightly different tact. Reinterpreting the more grounded parts of the landscape, they become objects upon which the eye lands to slow down perceptual absorption. Offering a momentary resting place, they break up the optical movement within the field of vision created by the wall works. The sculptures interrupt and focus the view in a way not unlike the source from which they’re inspired.

Nancy Ford’s abstractions are not simple mutations of land-based forms, but hover in the middle ground between observation, perception, and understanding.

Nancy Ford received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has shown her work nationally at rowland contemporary, Joymore, Gallery 312 in Chicago and Artists Space in New York. Her work has also been featured in exhibitions in Los Angeles, Boston, London and Japan.

Rainer Spangl has been developing a rich and inspired relationship with history developed most often through observational studies done in museum collections. In UUUUU, he synthesizes more than one conceptual position constructed from this historical context. One aspect of the project presents work depicting a specific location in a room; the paintings are installed at a height suggesting a frieze-like ornamental architectural feature. Alongside the group are five other works related by contextual reference. As with all of Spangl’s work, observational studies and drawings act as the basis for the project. Working in the galleries and directly from the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, Rainer finds important conceptual triggers from the objects and the spaces that frame them. In one set of works, Spangl renders a vitrine featuring pre-currency objects used in barter and trade transactions. Depicting the images smaller than actual size, Spangl re-stages the economic means of exchange as a constructed double entendre. Being inspired by and simultaneously participating in an arcane and existing market, Spangl brings to bear the rudimentary tools of a financial system. In other works taken from spaces in the museum, there are views of windows and architectural details from the interior.

Spangl’s system of pictorial depiction has within its production, a way of solidifying the painting with its meaning. Using light to dark, shifting monochromatic grounds as well as recurring color fields, Spangl’s brush marks begin with slight gestures that are gradually built up to a fully realized image.

Rainer Spangl studied at University College of Leeds, Bretton Hall, UK and completed his studies in painting at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 2005. Recent solo exhibitions include Song Song, Vienna (2012, 2010) and devening projects + editions, Chicago (2008). His works have been presented in group exhibitions at Pigna Project Space, Rome; ADDS DONNA, devening projects + editions, Julius Caesar and Fifty-50 Gallery in Chicago; Trottoir, Hamburg; Kunstraum Innsbruck; and at Swingr in Vienna. Since 2010 he’s co-curated the “Artist Lecture Series Vienna.” He lives and works in Vienna.

Nick Ostoff was born in Los Gatos, California and spent much of his life in Toronto; he currently lives and works in Chicago. He received a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1999 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where he also won the George and Ann Segal Graduate Fellowship. He has received numerous grants and fellowships and his work has been reviewed in such Canadian periodicals as the Globe and Mail and Canadian Art Magazine. His work was recently included in group shows at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery (The Question of Their Content) and Adds Donna (duck/rabbit). Nick Ostoff is represented in Toronto by Diaz Contemporary; Tracing is his first solo exhibition in Chicago.

Allison Wade received her MFA from the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, earned her BA in English literature from Stanford University and completed the post-baccalaureate program at Maryland Institute College of Art. She has been granted residencies at Mustarinda (Finland), ACRE and the Vermont Studio Center, for which she was given a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. She is the recipient of an Edes Foundation Semi-Finalist Prize, Clare Rosen and Samuel Edes Foundation Prize for Emerging Artists awarded through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent projects include exhibitions at Adds Donna, LVL3 Gallery and the MDW Art Fair with The Salon Series in Chicago; and the HF Johnson Gallery of Art, Carthage College, Kenosha, WI. She is currently an adjunct professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, WI. She lives and works in Chicago.

Julia Hechtman is an interdisciplinary artist based in NYC and Boston. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her BFA from Syracuse University. She has shown her work nationally and internationally in exhibitions that include Second Nature at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Chain Letter at Samson and Vast Vistas: Landscape in New Media at CyberArts, in Massachusetts; Gravity Matters and Shadowy Folds at dok25a in Dusseldorf, Germany; and Irrationalism at devening projects + editions, among many others. Her videos are part of the Video Data Bank’s collection in Chicago and have been screened recently in London’s 52nd Film Festival, at City Art Rooms in Auckland, NZ and at The Artist Foundation in Boston. She teaches at Northeastern University; this past summer she taught an interdisciplinary, intensive studio course at The Burren College of Art in Ireland as part of Northeastern’s study abroad program.

Christopher Michlig received his MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California and works in a variety of media including collage, sculpture, film and video. Most recently, he’s been featured in solo projects at Marine Contemporary and Steven Turner Contemporary in LA, Volta 8 in Basel and 1000eventi in Milan. He work has been featured at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in Yellow, curated by Lia Trinka-Browne and in the 2006 LA Weekly Biennial. Michlig’s exhibitions have also included Desertshore, curated by Jan Tumlir at Luckman Gallery at California State University, Los Angeles and Resist Complacency, Consider Urgency, curated by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer at the Eagle Rock Center for the Arts in 2009.