Exhibitions

Current Exhibition

Thursday August 5th – Saturday September 11th, 2010

For No One but Us, curated by Justin Schmitz

Artists include Terry Evans, Jeremy Bolen, Martha Williams, Justin Schmitz, Stephen Eichhorn, Julia Stotz, Makaya Larson, Jason Lazarus, Matt Austin, Mary Scherer, Aiden Fitzpatrick, Brian Sorg, April Wilkins, Kyle Obriot, Zach Goheen, Paul Rizzuto, Daniel Shea, Terttu Uibopuu, Joseph Rynkiewicz, Mollie Edgar and Trevor McNaughton.

Light at Cafe Du Monde, Aiden Fitzpatrick

For No One but Us, is a collection of work by artists using photography as a way to engage in their creative process. Images that would only exist on a hard-drive, in a bedroom, or on a studio wall are on display at LivingRoom. The photographs in this presentation are images that inspire these artists to make more art work. This is a collection of self generated inspiration curated by Justin Schmitz.

Friday May 7th – Saturday June 19th, 2010

Synesthesia for the Times, Ian McLaughlin

Ian McLaughlin is a Chicago-based hybrid artist whose painting and sound work explore how color, line and shape entice and stimulate the imagination.

The show, “Synesthesia for the Times”, is an affair of color and sound coming together, a call and response between the two. It plays with the idea that color and sound can enrich and bring vibrancy and wakefulness to our world. Using rhythms, layers and patterns, in both sounds and visuals, the show aims to provoke and weave the senses; to conjure a geographic landscape in the imagination of places and the spaces that can lullaby or wake us, seduce or jar us into the moment.

The show includes a sound collaboration by Tobias Kaemmerer and Ian McLaughlin.

Ian returned to Chicago three years ago after living and working at a meditation center in the rural Rocky Mountains of northern Colorado for four and half years. In 2002, he received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute where he studied painting and film. Prior to that he studied visual art at the Chicago Academy for the Arts.

The exhibit was reviewed in Chicago Art Magazine by Claire Haasl.

Points of Entry, New Work by Alysia Kaplan

“We take almost all the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight inner adjustments of which we are barely conscious.”
— W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz)

For her installation at LivingRoom Gallery, Alysia Kaplan draws upon cultural signifiers of domestic space to investigate the personal experiences embedded in, and the historical antecedents imposed upon, a dwelling.

Alysia Kaplan is a Chicago-based artist whose print and photographic work explores the varied themes of home and place. Her work draws from the methodologies and histories of design to create a cultural critique of the home as commodity and signifier.

Alysia recently completed a residency at the Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium where she has an upcoming exhibition. She has also exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center; the International Print Center in New York, NY; Columbia College, Chicago, IL, The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA and at Art Basel Miami, Bridge Art Fair with Orleans St Gallery, Miami, FL. In 2009, she produced limited edition prints for Bailliwick. Kaplan is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The Alysia Kaplan show at LivingRoom was reviewed in Newcity by Michael Weinstein.

In her first solo exhibition with LivingRoom Gallery, Edelweiss Cardenas shows new paintings and drawings that feature her “wanderers”. These free wheeling amoeboid forms putter, whiz, float, fall and plod past the viewers eyes in crisp, dark, intuitive line drawings and candy colored, patterned paintings. As they endlessly explore their surroundings, some displaced and others right at home, Cardenas’ figurative articulations emit a quixotic emotive power spanning everything from forlorn to fanciful.

Edelweiss Cardenas was born in Mexico and lives and works in Chicago. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009. She has previously exhibited at Marwen in 2008 and Murphy Hill Gallery in 2009.

Curated by Thea Liberty Nichols in conjunction with Home Room.

The Edelweiss Cardenas show at LivingRoom was reviewed in The Chicago Tribune by Lauren Viera.

Wandering In Quest

Artist: Unemployed, New Installation Work by Shawnee Barton

Making art is expensive, but it can be cheaper than therapy. InCurrent Exhibition

Artist: Unemployed conceptual artist Shawnee Barton uses humor, humility, and her art practice to cope with being unemployed during the worst economic downturn our country has seen in sixty years.

In this installation at LivingRoom Gallery, the artist uses a variety of media to address subjects related to her inability to get a job including daytime television, arts policy, and her ongoing existential crisis.

Artist: Unemployed was reviewed in Newcity and Chicago Art Review by Steve Ruiz and on Chicago Art Magazine by Candice Weber!

Embroidery

Ever Epic, New Installation by Tanya Hastings Gill

Ever Epic is an investigation of continuum and impermanence.

Due to its implied delicacy, paper is the medium. The many illusions of artistic space are contained within paper. In Tanya Gill’s work the surface is emphasized by incisions that simultaneously support, transform and destroy these illusions while revealing another dimension beyond. Light passing through the incisions fills an elusive and impermanent space with glowing reflective color. Silhouettes and shadows mingle in the space, reacting to the changing atmosphere and air currents.

Ever Epic is the result of Tanya Gill’s experiences in northern India where the relationships between ancient structures and the current patterns of daily life exist in a thriving continuum of history and custom. The piece Ever Epic, at the center of the exhibition, shows a young boy amidst swirls of abstracted forms. The overwhelming forms encompass the boy; he simultaneously exists as an individual and as a moment in the continuum.

Rise and Fall, an ongoing installation, was inspired by the shifting and evolving uses of the ancient structures of New Delhi, India. The layering cycles of building the new over the old is common to all cities and Rise and Fall is a celebration of the changing nature of the dwelling through these cycles. The small domestic paper structures fit closely alongside one another, as if they are an overgrown garden.

Among these places, different moments of time exist alongside the present. This coexistence emphasizes the impermanence and continuum of life and civilizations. Sensory contradictions, elusive experiences, and our ever present adaptability are revealed by the delicate paper constructions in Ever Epic.

Ever Epic was reviewed on Chicago Art Magazine by Madeleine Bailey!

Rise and Fall

Thursday July 16th – Saturday August 22nd, 2009

It happens that the stage sets break down, new work by Rosemary Lee

It happens that the stage sets break down is an installation of drawings and soft sculptures, focused on the malleability of memory. Conjuring imagery of familiar spaces and objects, it seeks to link the present-ness and continually shifting nature of the past.

It happens that the stage sets break down was reviewed in Newcity by Justin Natale.

It happens that the stage sets break down

Friday May 22nd – Saturday July 11th, 2009

I love you, I love you, new work by Karolina Gnatowski, Dan Gunn & Gunnatowski

I love you, I love you presents the artwork of Karolina Gnatowski, Dan Gunn and their collaborative installation group, Gunnatowski as separate art practices. In part a portrayal of the reciprocity of influence between collaborators, I love you, I love you also portrays different formal and conceptual approaches to art-making. The commonalities between these approaches, actively negotiated in the collaborative practice, are in the repurposing of pop-cultural or social forms of display and an awareness of the malleability of those archetypal or cliche forms via addition, subtraction or combination.

I love you, I love you, detail

Thursday April 16th – Saturday May 16th, 2009

About Face, new paintings and drawings by six artists of the Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner Foundation at Thresholds South

About Face is a group exhibition that celebrates the human face and explores portraiture. The six artists included in the show, Robert Bell, Paul Blaye, Yakini Braswell-Bey, Louise Jarecki, Gregory King, and Katara Mallory, each take distinctive approaches to representing and addressing this important historical and continually relevant subject matter. Gregory King paints musical icons as diverse as Sir George Solti and Diana Ross. Louise Jarecki explores a range of emotion in marker drawings of stylized faces. Robert Bell and Paul Blaye look to art history for inspiration, reinterpreting images made by others. Beautiful women are the subject of Katara Mallory’s and Yakini Brswell- Bey’s paintings. Mallory paints a monumental portrait of Princess Leia, and Braswell creates a painterly image of an elegant woman in a green turban.

“Untitled”, Paul Blaye, Marker on paper, 11″ x 15″

Friday February 20th – Friday March 27th, 2009

Between Fiction and Make-Believe, new work by Christy Matson

LOOMscape: Ocean (detail)

Between Fiction and Make-Believe is a new interactive audio installation inspired by both the tradition of tapestry weaving and contemporary video game culture.

October 24th, 2008 - January 9th, 2009

Nothing Just Happens/Along The Boulevards, selected works by Philip Dembinski

In his first solo exhibition, Nothing Just Happens/Along the Boulevards, Dembinski brings a cinematographic sensibility and an inclination towards vacancy to bridge two bodies of work. He shadows lonely life forms caught in ambiguous moments, and backtracks miles of resolute boulevard landscapes searching for a century’s populace.

Nothing Just Happens/Along the Boulevards was reviewed in ArtSlant by Thea Liberty Nichols.

Back Alley Disturbance

August 8th – October 10th, 2008

Megan McCready’s solo show, “Easy Does It”

Processed foods and building materials are routinely juxtaposed within Megan’s artworks and ephemeral installations. A sensuous perception of the food industry is created through process, accessibility and interaction. Currently her research is focused on the political, historical, sociological and scientific aspects of food. Advertising and design aesthetics and nostalgia also influence her decisions.

“Easy Does It” features a new project using birch plywood with embedded drawings made of Kraft Easy Cheese.

Chair B + Ottoman F, detail

June 20th – August 2nd, 2008

An Abiding Locale, site specific installation by Chicago artist Amy Honchell

“My work focuses on conflating the spaces we inhabit and exploring the sense of touch in a visual way. Formally and conceptually, my installations are complemented by architectural sites. In my work, microscopic scenes can be explored/experienced on a gigantic scale, underscoring the parallels between the structures and functions of the spaces we inhabit: the human body, architecture, and the landscape.”

Here and Now, detail

April 19th – June 14th, 2008

LivingRoom Gallery is proud to present its first group show with work from Janet Ecklebarger, Stephen Eichhorn, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, and Sarah Wagner.

Janet Ecklebarger, Comestible Botanicals: dandelion, detail

Sarah Wagner, Invisible Healing World: White Poppy, detail

Stephen Eichhorn, Foliage IX (I Was A Lover) (detail)

Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Punk Painting