For the past 10 years, Jin Lee has been working on photographic projects that form a deeper relationship to a place through close examination of its landscapes, both man-made and natural.  Her work also seeks to reference and expand upon various traditions of landscape art, from Asian screen paintings to documentary photographs. She has received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and an Illinois Arts Council grant, and has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago Cultural Center, and Sioux City Art Center. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Madison Art Center and Museum of Contemporary Photography. She is Professor of Art at Illinois State University School of Art.

The Near and the Far is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council.

Richard Roth returned to painting in 2006 after a 10 year hiatus; previously, his practice was rooted primarily in collecting, archiving and presenting contemporary material culture. Rooting around in an expansive 3-D polychrome universe—product and package design, nature, architecture, masks, custom cars, and fashion—informs the recent work with a conceptual and post-modern attitude. His paintings are diminutive in stature—almost anti-heroic—use an efficient and direct vocabulary and offer an immediate retinal charge. The paintings’ unusual depth elevates them to the realm of formidable, tangible object, enabling him to explore the formal concerns of abstract painting in three dimensions while riffing on real and illusionistic space. This is Richard Roth’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Dorothee Joachim has exhibited her paintings widely since the late seventies. Recent solo projects include the installation IM ROHBAU in Cologne; exhibitions at devening projects + editions in Chicago, the Brühler Kunstverein in Brühl, Germany, pp projects in Hamburg, and Kunst in NRW in Aachen-Kornelimünster. She recently participated in Kunstmeile Wangen #4 in Wangen/Allgäu and was part of group shows the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (GKG) in Bonn; Judith Racht Gallery in Harbert, MI, Angle art contemporain in Saint-Paul-Trois-Châteaux (F), Halle Zehn in Cologne, Galerie oqbo in Berlin, Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, and Hunter College / Times Square Gallery in New York. Her work is featured in numerous private and public collections including Kolumba and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Dorothee Joachim lives and works in Cologne.

Richard Roth’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Tomlinson Kong Contemporary, NY; Galerie Rob de Vries, The Netherlands; David Richard Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM; HICA, Highland Institute of Contemporary Art, Loch Ruthven, Scotland; The Suburban, Oak Park, IL; Rocket Gallery, London; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Reynolds Gallery, Richmond; UCR/California Museum of Photography; the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan; and Feigen, Inc., Chicago. He is currently a faculty member in the Painting and Printmaking Department at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In February 2007, we opened to the public with Preview, a selection of works by Zak Prekop, Rodney Carswell, Jin Lee, Christopher Wool, Joe Hardesty, Susanne Doremus, Adam Pendleton and several other artists scheduled to appear in future exhibitions. It presumed the direction of the gallery and established the complex blend of form and concept that continues to define the gallery’s position today. We’ve presented over a hundred international artists as varied and noteworthy as Wade Guyton, Cheryl Donegan, Franz West, Anders Ruhwald, Roman Signer, Michael Pfisterer, Andreas Karl Schulze, Felix Malnig, Dianna Frid, Richard Rezac, Gary Stephan, Dorothee Joachim, Monika Bartholome, Volker Saul, Cary Smith, Peter Otto and many others in roughly 40 exhibitions. We look forward to the next few years and working with artists who bring tough and spirited work the program.

Like Preview, I Surrender suggests something of the future for the gallery. New work by Albrecht Fuchs, DAS INSTITUT, b. wurtz, Lucas Blalock, Nathaniel Robinson, Julia Hechtman, Rosalyn Schwartz, Heiner Blumenthal, Gerd Borkelmann, Melissa Pokorny, Scott Wolniak, Tom Meacham, Peter Otto, Cora Cohen, Gary Stephan and others point to the many ways in which the communication of information, form and conceptual structures are active today. DAS INSTITUT’s self-referentiality and focus on collaborative, site-specific actions negotiates how social and cultural politics exist today. In Alphabet Soup, Nathaniel Robinson’s enigmatic reflection on language plays on our ability–or inability–to access and understand information distribution systems. b. wurtz’s very modest sculptures have the poetic means to convey the emotional weight of something much more physically substantive; his work moves with the slightest of gestures. Lucas Blalock is a young artist whose photographic work reflects a temporal lag more familiar in snap shots from the 1940s or 1950s. Julia Hechtman’s hand-blown, glass worry stones elicit a direct physical and comforting sensation; they’re meant to be held, touched and used. Gary Stephan’s recent works on paper show a well established artist working in his prime with images and spatial constructions as tough and immediate as the work he did in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Scott Wolniak is showing Flag, a piece that could easily function as the index for the entire exhibition. Flag is an object of struggle; the dejected subject of the imposition of the artist’s will. Torqued, beaten, forced into submission, this sculpture has neither won the battle nor conceded to its creator. It functions as a sign for the creative act and offers insight into many of the works presented in I Surrender.

Alex Valentine received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. He is an instructor in the Print Media Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a founding member of No Coast, formerly a retail, exhibition and studio space dedicated to producing, displaying, and distributing artist projects. His recent projects include the Tokyo Art Book Fair and What It Is Gallery in Oak Park, IL.

Joshua Abelow has been exhibiting in the United States, Europe, and Canada since the early 2000s. He has had solo shows in New York at James Fuentes LLC and Tomorrow Gallery in Toronto.  Abelow has an upcoming solo exhibition at Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Belgium.

During the summer of 2011 Abelow oversaw a series of curatorial projects at “ART BLOG ART BLOG” a gallery space he conceived in the Chelsea studio of his friend and former employer Ross Bleckner. Abelow is working on a memoir titled “Painter’s Journal” about his adventures as a burgeoning young artist in New York City in the late 1990s. Abelow will be featured in a solo presentation with James Fuentes at the inaugural Frieze, New York, in May of 2012.  ”Painter’s Journal” will be released in New York at this time.

Abelow earned his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998, and his MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2008. He has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, Vermont), the Banff Center (Alberta, Canada), and at Takt Kunstprojectraum (Berlin, Germany). Abelow is represented by James Fuentes Gallery in New York City.  You can find Abelow’s blog online at ART BLOG ART BLOG.

Joshua’s exhibition ART BLOG ART BLOG is the subject of a recent article by  Sofia Leiby called Post-Internet Painting and the Death of Affect.

Website landing page photograph by Jason Frank Rothenberg.

In God is Represented by the Sea, Booth devises and presents an alternative set of signifiers, a simple list-based system in which objects, perceptions, and concepts are represented by other objects, perceptions, and concepts.  This “code” invites those who encounter it to consider the shifting nature of experience, recognition, association, and comprehension. God is Represented by the Sea was written as a response to the code-based works of the remarkable French artist Guy de Cointet.

The title THE SEA IS REPRESENTED BY AN IRREGULAR SHAPE is the second line of the audio work God is Represented by the Sea. All subsequent exhibitions and iterations of the work will be titled with successive lines in the text.  Additional lines are added to the list with each exhibition, so that the text is perpetually evolving and increasing in length.  As a result, the system of representation also expands with each exhibition, with the theoretically possible eventual result that every object, perception, and concept in the frame of human experience could be represented by some other object, perception, or concept.

The exhibition at devening projects + dditions consists of a three channel audio installation of God is Represented by the Sea with instrumentals by the Chicago musical bellows and electronics duo Coppice, a durational live audio performance of the work, paintings on paper and polyester film visualizing lines from the audio text, and a site-specific installation in adhesive vinyl.

Mark Booth and Coppice will perform God is Represented by the Sea, with guest vocalists and animation by Orla McHardy, on January 14, 2012 in the gallery.

Mark Booth is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist.  His exhibitions and projects include God is Represented by the Sea, Adds Donna, Chicago, Nothing to Do with Wizards, O’Connor Gallery, Domincan University, River Forest, IL., pierecednightstarvoice at Schalter Gallery, Berlin, Germany, The Stinging Tentacles Of Anxiety That Constrict The Heart Are Healed By The Light Of An Inner Sun, Gahlberg Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL., Spanish Still Life (or a large list of merged animals), Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, IL, Endless (Perverted by Language/Delay 1968), UBS 12×12, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL., and a collaborative performance work Quiet (A disruptive fog (or a hogshead full of vapor called memory) in Chicago, Illinois. Booth has performed and exhibited in the United States, Scandinavia, and Germany. Booth is an assistant professor in the Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches creative writing and sound.

As a veteran of the Chicago Police Department, Fortino always had privileged access to sectors of society that most of us do not. He recognized first-hand how a space might be used to impart an immediate and sometimes visceral psychological imprint on anyone unfortunate enough to find themself inside. His work might locate familiar interstitial zones–foyers, hallways, corners, scarred walls, stained floors, small patches of ground, random trees–the spaces that lead us in or out of the main theaters of experience. At the same time he will expose sites that are simply evocative and poetic: framed interiors celebrating the possibilities of architecture to open our minds and hearts. On occasion, Fortino has taken his camera to locations far removed from the familiar territories of urban structures. Photographs of the lakefront, micro-views of flowers and even stark landscapes of Iceland contradict the psychology so prevalent in his institutional work. But the obvious beauty can be as oppressive as a small airless room in one of his interiors. These photographs seem almost too perfect; appearing strategically constructed with a hint of artifice, even though they’re purely documentary.

We’re very pleased to present Unfurl, Scott Fortino’s most recent project. A series of photographs reveals a new studio-based practice with a sentient inquiry into artifacts loosely associated with his previous work. The unfurling here is a refreshing opening-up that one senses as both emotional and expressive; newly defined concerns are registered through material means deliberately arranged in the space of his studio. We’re brought in much closer to the subject now. Bolts of camouflage fabric hang in front of the lens to create a scrim that suggests, but obscures, a landscape beyond. Like his previous work, we find resonant levels here; the camouflage functions as an optical deception intended to cover and deflect, while it invites the viewer into the comfort of its folds and the mystery of the imprinted foliage. Fortino says that this body of work evolved out of a need to find new ways to process big landscape themes. Camouflage, created for military advantage, becomes an appropriate carrier to bring forth new questions about contemporary culture and society.

Scott Fortino developed his approach to photography out of experiences directly related to his position as a Chicago police officer. This work led to the publication of his important 2006 book, Institutional. He received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA from Columbia College Chicago. He has had solo exhibitions in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, and numerous public and private collections. He lives and works in Chicago.

(b. 1955) Andreas Karl Schulze has been exhibiting widely since finishing his studies at the Art Academy in Münster, Germany. He has produced solo installations in Germany at Gallery Horst Schuler in Düsseldorf, the Kunsthistorisches Institute in Bonn, the Kunstverein Heilbronn, the Japanese Culture Institute, the Neues Kunstforum in Cologne and the Field Institute at Museumsinsel Hombroich. He has also shown at Concept Space and the Goethe Institute in Japan; Gallery Katharina Krohn in Basel; Sleeper in Edinburgh; CCNOA in Brussels; and Cairn Gallery, Pittenweem in the UK. He has also participated in group exhibitions in Berlin, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Reykjavik, Oslo and many more. In 1993, Schulze was invited by Donald Judd to work in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. The resulting installation remained there for two years. Andreas Karl Schulze lives and works in Cologne.

Spoiler alert: If you have not read Clarice Lispector’s ontological novel The Passion According to G.H., you might want to skip this paragraph. In the book, G.H. eats a cockroach. Before she does it, she spends hours teeming with both desire and aversion. As soon as she eats it, she wants to understand what happened to her, but she knows that to do so she has to put it into language—to give it a form. The novel becomes the search for that language. “Creation isn’t imagination,” she writes, “it’s running the huge risk of coming face to face with reality. Understanding is a creation, it’s my only way. I shall have to painstakingly translate telegraph signals—translate the unknown into a language that I don’t know.”

Evidence of the Material World features sculptures, mixed media works and artist’s books; each project reflects Frid’s inventive integration of diverse material processes. For this exhibition, the pieces differ from each other in format, scale, media, and execution, yet as a group they behave like distinct planets that orbit around a shared premise—each piece is triggered by a textual event that Frid has distilled, processed, and translated into a material manifestation.

The trigger-texts, as Frid calls them, are fragments from sources as commonplace as a dictionary definition or as intricate as an epic poem. In each work the trigger-text becomes an occasion to ponder how language both describes and obscures phenomena both intimate and impersonal: death, love and being; time, space and light. Whether a little or a lot of the trigger-text remains, in every instance the source language is no more than a splinter in the naming of the works. The works are at once gestures and descriptions of time (process) and of fact (the material evidence of that process and of the things it transforms).

The exhibition will also feature a recent edition suite by Dianna Frid. On the Modification of Clouds (for L.H.) is set of four lithographs printed by Bud Shark and published by Shark’s Ink. in Boulder, Colorado.

Raised in Mexico City and Vancouver, Dianna Frid currently lives in Chicago. Her work builds on a longstanding concern with architecture and with re-imagining literary and scientific representations of natural phenomena. For several years Frid has been making and exhibiting books, objects, and installations that join mixed media, sculpture, and works on paper. Her work has been shown in galleries in the USA and abroad and at numerous public venues including PS1-MOMA (NY), The Drawing Center (NY), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the Neues Kunstforum (Cologne). Frid is Assistant Professor in Studio Arts in the College of Architecture and the Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has received grants from The Canada Council for the Arts and a Chicago Artadia Award. Recently she was a resident at in John Hejduk’s Wall House 2 Foundation in Groningen, where she will be creating a site-specific project for 2013.

On Saturday October 22 at 1:00 pm join us in the gallery for a conversation between Dianna Frid and Julie Rodrigues-Widholm the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Be sure to join us on Saturday, September 17th at 1:00 for a conversation between Timothy Bergstrom and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung as they discuss Timothy’s work in Sound & Vision.

(born 1984) Timothy Bergstrom received his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and was the recipient of the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship. He received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. His recent projects include exhibitions at Monya Rowe Gallery in New York; The Suburban in Oak Park, IL; FFDG in San Francisco; and Hungryman Gallery in Chicago. He lives and works in Chicago.