SEPTEMBER 8
JARED BROWN AND TONY FOLEY - 12 OPENINGS/PART 12
Opening Reception: September 8, 2-6p
Join us for the FINAL opening event of 12 Openings with
performances by Jared Brown and Tony Foley 4-6pm
+ end of summer potluck BBQ, 6-8pm! Bring something to grill, drink, eat and let's celebrate the end of summer and the beginning an amazing fall!
Jared Brown 12 Covers
12 Covers is a response to the Compound Yellow prompt: 12 Openings. Jared Brown has enlisted artist friends to contribute brief examples of a 'cover' - musical covers, news coverage, casual text pieces for Jared to recite that aim to function as lids, containers or provide protection from outside contamination.
Jared Brown is an interdisciplinary artist born in Chicago. In recent work, Jared has been broadcasting audio and text based work through the radio (CENTRAL AIR RADIO, 88.5 FM), in live DJ sets, and on social media. They consider themselves a data thief, understanding this role from John Akomfrah's description of the data thief as a figure that does not belong to the past or present. As a data thief, Jared Brown makes archeological digs for fragments of black American subculture, history and technology. Jared repurposes these fragments in audio, text, and video to investigate the relationship between history and digital, immaterial space. Jared Brown holds a BFA in video from the Maryland Institute College of Art and moved back to Chicago in 2016 in order to make and share work that directly relates to their personal history.
Tony Foley this moves thru me easy = "Calm song", compassion doesn't mean forgiveness = "On pain", color fields: untitled
Tony Foley is an audiovisual poet, performer, and community organizer from Makakilo, Hawai'i. Tony's work employs emotive color theory and direct language in attempt to sanctify a vibrant healing space. The work often rests between mantra, confession, and poem.
August 4 -September 8
JUSTIN NALLEY
The Blood Is On Your Hands - Miguel Ramos
August 4
Sara Rouse AND Miguel Ramos - 12 OPENINGS/PART 11
Opening Reception: August 4, 2-6p
We are excited to invite you to the 11th installment of an exhibition titled 12 Openings, a yearlong experiment in collaborative curation with unpredictable results. We are thrilled to announce our 11th participating artists and their titles:
Sara Rouse "Like a Gardener, Like a Garden"
Johari's window, a table used in cognitive psychology, breaks self-awareness into four quadrants including "Open Arena," "Blind Spots," "Facade," and the "Unknown." Thinking about knowledge and self-awareness through this lens, I ask myself how to picture what is hidden or that which is both unknown to the self and unknown to others. In response to the unfolding quality of 12 Openings, I've indulged in this question, in looking, and in feelings of anticipation. My project, "Like a Gardner, Like a Garden," is an interchangeable arrangement of drawings hung on a clothesline. The images respond to the unique site of Compound Yellow and ask what lies between words and pictures that are held temporarily together.
Sara Rouse is an installation artist working to disassemble what it means to witness and to know. She uses elements of drawing, sculpture, and writing to replicate experiences with unknowable images and feelings that are beyond words. She is intrigued by the hubris, vulnerability, and violence embedded in the expansion of knowledge, its history, and ultimately, its limitations. She struggles with abstraction and representation to replicate the grasp of looking, the anticipation of revelation, and the exponentially expanding question of what is hidden and what is unknown. Rouse earned a B.F.A. in Painting & Drawing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and an M.F.A. from the University of Chicago. She has exhibited at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, EXPO Chicago and in Hyde Park Art Center’s Ground Floor exhibition.
Miguel Ramos The Blood Is On Your Hands
I come from a restricted background, oftentimes as a child I was taught to fear the dark and stay far away from the sight of the unknown, but as I grew those are the same qualities that I was drawn to. My work spans the ideas of life and death, capturing the essence of the macabre, tragic, horrific and giving it a platform to be beautiful.
I oftentimes also see people view these offbeat ideas in the same manner as I was raised, staying far away from the strange and unusual qualities in life.
My installation challenges that, it's an interaction between the viewer and the art, it's a performance, it's a freak show, it's a game of dare. Its a chance to claim a piece of art, while still giving into the unknown.
Miguel A. Ramos Jr. was born in Waukegan, IL and raised in Round Lake Beach where he attended Round Lake Senior High School. He has been using is creative outlet to exhibit in a number of ways around his school, he has been apart of countless art shows, has made murals for the school property, and has even gotten to be awarded the Overall Departmental Award In Excellence of Art. Aside from traditional art, he also has a background in performance, spoken word, prose writing, and makeup artistry.
Curio - Jasper Nord
JUNE 16
Carris Adams AND Jasper Nord - 12 OPENINGS/PART 10
Opening Reception: June 16, 2-5p
We are thrilled to present the next participating artists for 12 Openings/Part 10:
Carris Adams Untitled
Jasper Nord Curio
Carris Adams is a visual artist whose practice visually investigates markers of domesticated space. The conceptually multi-layered works seek to inform and position viewers to recognize their assumptions, recall an experience and perhaps note how societal markers materialize in the landscape.. Adams received her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (2013) and her MFA from the University of Chicago (2015). Adams's work has been exhibited at The Studio Museum in Harlem ( New York, NY) , The Logan Center Exhibitions at The University of Chicago (Chicago, IL), Produce Model Gallery (Chicago, IL) Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery (Chicago,IL) and The Courtyard Gallery at The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX).
June 2 - July 6
HOLLY HOLMES - ALL THOU LOST, BRING IT TOO DAY
Opening Reception: June 2, 2-4p
This is an exhibition of new work by Holly Holmes thinking about craft, process and care. Holmes uses hand altered porcelain casts to make stitching needles that vary by size, color and shape. At once fragile and strong, bold and delicate, she uses the needles to create a series of sculptures and a hand woven wall work. This new work marks a significant progression for Holmes as she begins to stake out new territories of representation and fabrication in her practice.
MAY 4
Katherine Desjardins AND Ji Yang - 12 Openings/Part 9
Opening Reception: May 4, 3-6p
Katherine Desjardins Indecent Proposal: A Meditation on Yard Waste and Wonder
Indecent Proposal for Compound Yellow is intended as a completely earnest invitation to meditate on the role of "attention" in our lives. Attention will manifest itself in various forms as the project unfolds in stages throughout the remainder of the 12 Openings Project.
Ji Yang To Make an East of Ridgeland Production
"To Make an ..." is a day of bench making with a bench building workshop led by Tony Foley and Karl Bergholz. The bench will be made near the side walk, on a private owned, public welcomed land. The idea arose from an early spring afternoon conversation between the person who lived 2 hours away (by L), and the person who lived 2 seconds away (by foot) from the art space here. The conversation also shifted between the person as a mother, as a care giver, as an ex-Hyde Park resident, as a social activist, as an art lover, as a curator, as an artist and much more. To navigate the "much more" requires steady legs, walking smart steps. These legs, sometimes, like many of us, need a place to rest, to feel welcomed, to be supported.
12 Openings is a yearlong experiment in collaborative curation with unpredictable results. Over the course of the year there will be 12 shows, each having its own two titles, culminating in a group show of 24 artists. Each month two artists are invited to install an artwork in or around the home of Laura Shaeffer, Andrew Nord, and their sons Sebastian and Jasper, making the private public and extending our understanding of home, family, and community. Both artists are then asked to extend the invitation to one more artist to do the same, thus adding two more works, and two more show titles each month. Each new artwork multiplies the connections between the existing artworks and, overall, constructs a cumulative exhibition that subverts the traditional top-down nature of curating exhibitions, replacing it with a model of artist-driven co-curation. The narrative arc of the show is not predetermined, but rather built upon the robust and crisscrossing networks of artists in this collaborative city. 12 Openings showcases the artists that other artists are curious about and allows these connections to shine as the exhibition grows. At the end of the run, the 12th opening, viewers will be able to see 24 original works by 24 artists, selected and inspired by their peers.
April 6 - May 11
PRISON + NEIGHBORHOOD ARTS PROJECT - THE LONG TERM
Opening Reception: April 6, 5-8p / Closing Reception: May 11, 2-6p / Film Screening and Discussion of “The Sentence” May 11, 4-6p
Between 2016-2018, artists, writers and members of the Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project created a series of thematic works around long-term sentencing policies and the other long terms they produce: long-term struggles for freedom, long-term loss in communities, and long-term relationships behind the prison wall. These projects emerged out of classes and collaborative work at Stateville prison, where people are serving extraordinarily long prison terms (60, 70 and 80 years), often for crimes for which they would have already been released, had they been sentenced 30 years earlier, or in a different country.
The Long Term exhibition is travelling around Chicago to create discussion about life and long term sentencing, with the voices of incarcerated artists and writers at the center. The exhibition includes: an 13 minute hand-drawn animation and a series of works on paper made by artists at Stateville prison; a series of video interviews with people impacted by long term sentencing; an audio installation with formerly incarcerated people about carceral policy; and a portfolio of risographic prints made by 15 Chicago artists that accompanies a book titled The Long Term: Resisting Life Sentences, Working Toward Freedom. The works in this exhibition examines the impacts of life and long sentences and demands an end to death by incarceration.
Curated by Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project
MARCH 30
Li-Ming Hu And Adrienne Elyse Meyers - 12 Openings/Part 8
Opening Reception: March 30, 3-6p
We are thrilled to announce our eighth participating 12 Openings artists and their titles:
Li-Ming Hu Pool Party
Adrienne Elyse Meyers Immediate Possession
Li-Ming (b. Palmerston North, Aotearoa/Zealand) is an interdisciplinary artist working in video, performance, installation and sculpture. Drawing on her past experience as a stage & screen actor, (including a season as Gemma the Silver RPM Power Ranger) she is interested in the intersections between art, popular culture and entertainment. Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of our high performance culture, her art world anxiety and the construction of subjectivities via diaspora. Negotiating boundaries is a constant endeavor – between appropriate and inappropriate types of performance and appropriation, performance and documentation, tragedy and comedy, success and failure, art and life. Installation provides an opportunity to play with where a performance begins and ends, and the objects and moving images are intended to operate as both artefacts of performance and performing in their own right.
Li-Ming has exhibited widely throughout New Zealand including at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, The Physics Room and Tauranga Art Gallery, and performed at Links Hall and The Art Institute of Chicago.
http://www.li-minghu.com/
Adrienne Elyse Meyers works with images domestic scenes, often sourced from found photos, as the point on which to build a fantasy or desire. She is drawn to the afterlife of the image that persists and requests its own recreation, that lingers, yet dissolves upon closer investigation. This melancholic pursuit pulls at the image’s secrets—what’s around the corner, behind a curtain, in a reflection—addressing them as suggestions of characters that occupy the space. Immediate Possession presents a image of a room repeated on each side of a sign panel that is hung from a real estate sign post. It suggests a space to potentially inhabit, while the image’s source is unrevealed and remains only as a painted image, unenterable.
Adrienne Elyse Meyers was born and raised in Texas, and currently lives and works in Chicago, where she earned an MFA at the University of Chicago. She has exhibited at Lawndale Art Center, BLUEorange Contemporary, Alabama Song, and Mission Hill Gallery, among others, and has participated in multidisciplinary projects with Harvard Medical School, the Lost Ward Gallery, and the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago.
https://www.adrienneelyse.com
February 9 - February 23
MICHAEL LOPEZ and RONI PACKER - TWO SPREADS
Opening Reception: February 9, 3-6p / Closing Reception: February 23, 3-6p
Resisting boundaries that dictate convention within the arts, Lopez and Packer use the un-archival material of food with the hopes of forming memories; for this exhibition, the end game is anything but a sale. Typically known as object makers, they choose to explore new mediums as a supplement to those they are most comfortable using in the studio, opting instead to explore the mutual connections in which their friendship is grounded: a love of eating and a love of creating.
Inspired by the relationships between food and art, two of the artists’ great loves, Two Spreads highlights their passion for color and form. Creators in every way, Lopez and Packer pile mounds of homemade edible color onto a plate of canvas. Though these foodstuffs are the focus of the opening and closing events, they are unable to overpower the audience’s presence.
Lunch table as artwork, these spreads are made for sharing.
Michael Lopez is an interdisciplinary “bi-racial” UIC MFA native of Chicago. His mother is a public school teacher and last year he claimed only $3,400 on his taxes. For a detailed breakdown of his genetics and artwork please visit www.michaelplopez.com
Roni Packer is a painter who prioritizes the paint over the image. Her spacious paintings and installations are a terrain for material and formal explorations that invariably put color at their core. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Packer moved to the United States in 2014. She received her MFA from The University of Illinois-Chicago in 2017, and was a BOLT resident at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2017-2018. www.ronipacker.com
An essay by Lauren Leving will accompany the exhibition.
FEBRUARY 9
Elnaz Javani & Maryam Faridani And Shanna Zentner - 12 Openings/Part 7
Opening Reception: February 9, 3-6p
We are excited to invite you to the seventh installment of an exhibition titled 12 Openings, a yearlong experiment in collaborative curation with unpredictable results. Over the course of the year there will be 12 shows, each having its own two titles, culminating in a group show of 24 artists. Each month two artists are invited to install an artwork in or around the home of Laura Shaeffer, Andrew Nord, and their sons Sebastian and Jasper, making the private public and extending our understanding of home, family, and community. Both artists are then asked to extend the invitation to one more artist to do the same, thus adding two more works, and two more show titles each month. Each new artwork multiplies the connections between the existing artworks and, overall, constructs a cumulative exhibition that subverts the traditional top-down nature of curating exhibitions, replacing it with a model of artist-driven co-curation. The narrative arc of the show is not predetermined, but rather built upon the robust and crisscrossing networks of artists in this collaborative city. 12 Openings showcases the artists that other artists are curious about and allows these connections to shine as the exhibition grows. At the end of the run, the 12th opening, viewers will be able to see 24 original works by 24 artists, selected and inspired by their peers.
We are thrilled to announce our seventh participating artists and their titles:
Elnaz Javani & Maryam Faridani “When a broken bone has been healed…”
“When a broken bone has been healed…” is an experimental video installation explores body movements and space.
You love but never get too close, you look, glimpse and maybe even spy but never touch. There are no mathematical rules to find the right distance between the need of engagement and the need to be and stay reserved. You would heal once you find the right distance.
Elnaz Javani is an Iranian artist and researcher who creates sculpture, drawing, installation, and time-based mediums that explore themes of gender and violence, body and cultural identity. Her practice embraces conceptual strategies and handwork using everyday materials mostly fabric and cloth. She received her BFA from the Tehran Art University of Iran in 2009, and her MFA from the School of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. Her work has been exhibited internationally in the USA, Spain, Iran, France, Colombia, Turkey, UAE, Germany and Switzerland, such as at the CAC Ses Voltes International Residency Program (Spain), the Luminas’ Cultural Foundation of Visual Arts (Chicago), the Mottahedan Projects (Dubai), the Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal USA Presidential Award Exhibitions (Chicago), The Munich cultural center at Pasinger Fabrik (Germany) , “Le Commun", Bâtiment d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), San Telmo Museum (Spain) Arts Santa Mónica Barcelona (Spain), and at Espacio El Dorado Bogotá (Colombia).
Maryam Faridani is an Iranian media artist. She examines identity construction in the age of social media and its contemporary problematization. Her work focuses on issues of identity, online culture, and social media as an extension of the self. By using her own life narratives and experiences through experimental moving image and video installations. She is a MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she holds a BFA in Film & Theater from the Art University of Tehran. Her work has been presented in various events and screenings such as, Chicago Filmmakers Open Screening, Cabaret Cabaret Performance event in Chicago, Nobody Comes, Nobody goes Late night performances event in Chicago, PAOP at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chords International University Festival of Theater in Tehran, and Looyeh International University Festival of Theater in Tehran.
Shanna Zentner "The Flood Shines Its Light Underneath Your Hair"
Acrylic on Canvas, 2019, approximately 48” diameter T
hrough a process of staining, bleaching, cutting, and collage, Shanna Zentner has created a painting for the lawn at Compound Yellow. The painting, portraying two figures enduring a flood between them, will weather the snow, rain, sun, and footprints of half a year laying on the ground. Bio Shanna Zentner is a Chicago based artist who earned an M.F.A. from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She works primarily with painting and drawing, combining material experimentation with narrative fiction to address questions about fear, trust, and the unknown. Zentner is currently a lecturer at Purdue University Northwest and a writer for the New Art Examiner. She has a background in scientific llustration and has work in the collection of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. She is currently writing and illustrating her first graphic novel about journalism, conspiracy, and inter-dimensional travel, titled Chrono-logical. Zentner is a 2019 participant in The Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center