Artist Residency
Dance Films Kino
March 4 - 25, 2012
Dance Films Kino, a three-week festival of film and live performance at Hyde Park Art Center, featured 30 free admission events in 20 days, showcasing the work of 45 filmmakers from emerging to established, and over 25 artists, writers, musicians, theater and dance makers.
Kinos, underground, private avant-garde art and film clubs popular in Soviet Russia during the 1920s and 30s, often presented art work and discussion deemed too political, experimental, or artistically challenging for general distribution. Chicago-based artist and film curator Sarah Best opens the studio doors as an artist in residence at the Art Center to create a salon-style environment evoking these kinos or art clubs, showcasing a series of events, film screenings, live performances, and literary readings, with open studio time for extended conversation. A carefully curated, rare selection of dance films will be on view, in 3 groups titled Revolutions and Revelations, Women and Men, and Utopias and Dystopias. The films were complemented by over 15 dynamic, free-to-the-public programs and performances. Best aimed to activate the studio space, cultivating an experience of movie-watching, discussion, and art-viewing that emphasizes community and celebration.
Sarah Best received a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and has continued her education in Chicago with Goat Island Performance Group, Morganville, Sprung Physical Theatre, Redmoon Theater, Lillstreet Art Center, and at the University of Chicago. She has curated numerous programs of dance on film at the Chicago Cultural Center, Links Hall, and Hyde Park Art Center and in 2012 will co-curate the Chicago Dancing Festival's second annual MOVIES program. Best has drawn and photographed dance and has written about dance for Time Out Chicago. A multidisciplinary artist, Best’s photography has been featured or reviewed by Chicago Public Radio, Chicago Reader, Chicago Art Magazine, and Bad at Sports, among others and has been exhibited by Antena Gallery and Cobalt Studio in Chicago. She has additionally presented projects at the Poetry Foundation's Printers Ball and Version Festival.
Emmanuel Pratt
March 15 - October 31, 2011
Emmanuel Pratt has spent several years working and traveling around the country with Will Allen, a recent MacArthur Genius award recipient and founder of Growing Power. Pratt now serves as Executive Director for the Sweet Water Foundation, a Milwaukee-based organization dedicated to building inter-generational and interdisciplinary educational programming for sustainability with a focus on the potential of urban agriculture and aquaculture in post-industrial cities. Pratt's professional and academic work has involved investigations of a range of topics, including urbanization and gentrification, race/identity, and most recently the transformative possibilities of community development through intersections of food security and sustainable design innovation.
Pratt earned an Architecture degree from Cornell University, a Masters in Science of Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University, where he is currently a PhD candidate in Urban Planning. While most of his early work has been situated within the field of architecture, Emmanuel has also worked extensively within the realms of art, graphic design, and interactive media. In 2004, his work was exhibited at the Studio Museum of Harlem in Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor. From 2004 to 2006, Pratt lived in South Africa, working as a visiting lecturer in the Architecture Department of the University of Witwatersrand, providing an in-depth survey of computer applications, techniques and methodologies for architectural design. At that time, Pratt's artwork was included in the exhibition Liquid Durban (Mare Nostrum) at the International Architectural Biennale Rotterdam (2005).
Residency Project
During his time at the Art Center, Pratt embraced a wholly interdisciplinary approach to his practice, intertwining urban agriculture, digital collage, text, video and photography in order to translate his ongoing green venture, the Mycelia Project.
The Mycelia Project is an innovative and educational collaboration with Chicago Public Schools, Urban Gateways, and the Woodlawn Community Development Corporation, among others, that seeks to unite the various Chicago communities via hands-on, experimental projects that promote learning focused on food, soil, water and energy sustainability. The Art Center’s studio walls were transformed into giant chalkboards as a way for the artist to visually construct and present his entire creative process, which included garden chemistry, constructive uses for found materials, and a proposition for revitalizing post-industrial cities through community activism.
Check out this video on Emmanuel's residency at the Art Center and The Mycelia Project.
Conrad Freiburg
October 11 - September 30, 2011
Originally from Quincy in downstate Illinois, Conrad Freiburg asserts that Nothing is in his bones. As a result, he is able to focus his artwork on the moment of constant discovery open to many different disciplines such as music, martial arts, philosophy, astronomy, and engineering. His sculptures, drawings and installations often include the viewer to be physically interactive to complete the artistic experiment inherent to the work. Demolition and reconstruction are at the forefront of Freiburg’s investigations. His work has mostly been exhibited throughout Chicago since 1998. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute. He currently lives and works in Chicago, busks with his ukulele all over the country, and is represented by Linda Warren Gallery.
Residency Project
It Is What It Isn’t explores what Nothing looks like. Through this exhibition and his residency, Freiburg considers the possibilities of the Void through an interactive sculptural installation in the Art Center’s main gallery that will include a large-scale drawing machine, a hand-crafted telescope, musical instruments, and a “destruction station.” The installation will invite the public to experience the so-called Void by literally creating and destroying things, as well as seeing and hearing them. The exhibition will utilize the Hyde Park Art Center’s architectural feature that allows the main gallery to remain open to the sidewalk and street, creating a truly accessible and expansive
exhibition space. Freiburg will also invite the public to engage with him and his ideas over the course of his ten-month residency.
During his time in residency, Conrad Freiburg fabricates work for It Is What It Isn’t and creates an audio archive he calls the Pod of Absence. To create the archive, Freiburg invites musical interpretations of the Void by artists such as Jason Ajemian, Mississippi Gabe Carter, the Thin Man, Harold Mann, Andy Hall, and others. This process will culminate in a public album release.
Monica Herrera
June 6 - July 31, 2011
Herrera concentrates on public art with a focus on the construction of meaning through context and re-contextualization. In her residency at the Hyde Park Art Center during the summer of 2011, Herrera aimed to explore the extent of our consciousness towards our daily surroundings through several projects. One project included creating and placing sculptures of leaves from endangered local trees made out of glycerin soap on to the trees that exist in Hyde Park. Like the lifespan of these trees, slowly the sculptures disintegrated and were cleansed by the natural processes of the landscape.
Herrera explains: Soap is an everyday, ordinary object; washing is a private, almost intimate act. The place in which the soap is located, the mannerisms of our personal care, the temperature of the water, it is all part of our daily routine. But what happens if we de-contextualize one of these objects and what we do with it? This is what I want to investigate with this piece, turning everyday objects into soap sculptures, so as to bring them out of their anonymous background and into the main stage, so to speak. Later on, I would place it in public places: parks, stadiums, plazas, malls, etc. and follow their disintegration/manipulation process. There is also something ephemeral about this project. As people manipulate the soap, it will show signs of change, the pieces will steadily take a different shape, and eventually lose their silhouette, until eventually [they disappear] as everyday objects do in the background of our everyday life.
Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra, Jr.
March 19-26, 2011
Co-founded by Karla Diaz and Mario Ybarra, Jr. in 2002, Slanguage is an artist group headquartered in Wilmington, California, a harbor area of Los Angeles. Slanguage has built a diverse network of Los Angeles-based artists at various points in their careers, including teenagers, street artists, and established mid – to late career artists, to make artwork, curate exhibitions, coordinate events, and lead art-education workshops. Community-building, education, and interactive exhibitions drive the group’s art practice. Focusing on art education, the collective has organized numerous artist residencies in museums across the United States and abroad. Fostering dialogue about the meaning and value of contemporary art, Slanguage has used their studio space and resources to cultivate relationships between artists, students, communities, and organizations.
Slanguage’s recent projects include Engagement Party, a three-month residency with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2009); Sweeney Tate (2007) for the Tate Modern, London; and The Peacock Doesn’t See Its Own Ass/Let’s Twitch Again: Operation Bird Watching in London (2006) for the Serpentine Gallery, London. In 2009, the collective hosted workshops at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, as part of the Slanguage Teen Art Council.
Karla Diaz is a writer, artist and educator. Her work encompasses a multi-disciplinary, pedagogical approach to art-making through collaborative practices and the interaction of social-public spaces. Her work has been exhibited primarily in Los Angeles at MOCA, LACMA, the Getty Museum, and REDCAT Gallery in addition to the Serpentine Gallery (UK), Instituto Cervantes (Spain), and the Zocalo (Mexico City). She writes for several art magazines including Beautiful Decay, FlashArt and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. She is a former co-director of exhibitions at the New Chinatown Barbershop gallery in Los Angeles and received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts.
Mario Ybarra, Jr. is known for creating mixed media artwork that reveals and studies the social norms underlining public environments, common histories and personal narratives. Ybarra’s visual dialogues expose an autobiographical context that is unique to southern California but universal in concept. He received an MFA from University of California Irvine and a BFA from Otis. His work has been featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, the Tate Museum in London, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum, and at LACMA among others.
Residency Project
Diaz and Ybarra, curators of the exhibition Police and Thieves, which ran from February to March of 2011 spent one week in residence at Hyde Park Art Center working with the Youth Art Board on an upcoming show, leading a
discussion on Police and Thieves, and visiting local artists’ studios.
Police and Thieves featured a variety of work by contemporary artists including Gusmano Cesaretti, Meg Cranston, Los Angeles Poverty Department Collective, Amitis Motevalli, Ray Noland a.k.a. CRO, Ben Stone, and Arnoldo Vargas. Police and Thieves brings together current artistic production in Los Angeles and Chicago that deal with the historical and inherently conflicting relationship of power between those who enforce laws and those who break them. What it means to be a cop or a thief is associated with images of heroism or criminality that are simultaneously specific and generalizing. The exhibition hopes to redefine and explore stereotypical good-guy/bad-guy images through a series of drawings, paintings, sculptures and photographs. This thought-provoking and sometimes humorous selection of artwork by Diaz and Ybarra surveys the complex relationship between police and criminals, providing an intimate perspective that questions notions of power, freedom, community, cultural narratives and civic engagement.
Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery
February 18, 2010 - March 20, 2011
Judd Morrissey and Mark Jeffery are Chicago-based artists merging digital literary practices and performance. The art work they create together is visual, textual and choreographic and evolves through context-specific research and practice. Morrissey and Jeffery always consider the constraints of a given venue or occasion when making a work. Site- responsive considerations include the performance/exhibition/production space as well as the local community and (online) textual activity happening within the locale, such as in Twitter. For Morrissey and Jeffery, a given piece is a body of material that may have no singular fixed form but is alternately or simultaneously presented as internet art, durational live installation or a performance of fixed length. Their work attempts to engage the flux of contemporary, networked culture and to contain a complex diversity of material within rigorously defined forms and structures.
With a background rooted within writing, Judd Morrissey uses computer code to remix, visualize, and animate his texts on the web while also collecting data from online sources. Mark Jeffery generates movement and constructs images activating the body and installed objects in response to source material such as a memory, a site, or a sampled text or image. In the collision of these individual practices, physical and virtual sites and audiences are of equal importance.
Residency Project
Throughout 2010, Morrissey and Jeffery used their studio space as a laboratory to research and experiment with performance, developing a new project called The Precession that culminated in an exhibition and series of public performances taking place at the Art Center from December 21, 2010 – March 20, 2011. Inspired by history, astronomy and new media sources, The Precession combined digital images, text and performance art into a monumental exploration of labor and the night sky and was developed specifically for the Art Center’s digital facade. The concept for the artwork was developed after the artists visited the Hoover Dam and saw the Oskar J.W. Hansen sculpture, The Winged Figures of the Republic and a celestial floor map that is a part of the 1930s public art installation.
The Precession incorporated a rich program of events, including performances, workshops, and open-studio events at various points during the artists’ residence at the Art Center. Morrissey and Jeffery regularly opened their studio to the public, inviting audiences into their artistic process and testing out choreography and new material. The residency also provided an opportunity to collaborate with other artists to create live performances that took place within the context of a textual and digital environment.
Live Activations of The Precession: An 80 Foot Long Internet Art Performance Poem
On March 4-6, 2011, a large-scale durational event extended and activated the 10-screen projected artwork, The Precession, via a systematic orchestration of live elements within the main gallery, catwalk space, and outdoor areas of the Art Center.
Máximo González
July 16 - August 31, 2010
Best known for creating intricate murals and collaged sculptures playfully created using non-circulating paper currency. His work explores the life cycle of domestic goods: what happens when these items have been discarded and possibilities for recycling and re-purposing. González says, “I use all this energy and these ideas and make another art structure; in other words, I recycle all these materials and ideas and build a new concept, a new language, to express new ideas and, finally, new reflections.” More recently, he has worked across media to produce sculptures, paintings, installations, and digital works, still using and manipulating found or borrowed materials, expanding an interest in currency to larger questions surrounding value, markets, and alternative economies.
Originally from Argentina, where he studied at the Institute of Art Josefina Conte in Corrientes, González moved to Mexico City in 2003. His work has been featured in over 25 solo exhibitions and he has participated in 58 group exhibitions in Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Guatemala, United States, Canada, Spain, England, France, Germany, Poland and Czech Republic. These include the well-received exhibitions Poetics of the Handmade at MOCA Los Angeles; The Tree: From the Sublime to the Social at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; and Fine Line at the Museo de Las Americas, Denver, among many other international institutions. In 2010, he received the Premio Tequila Centenario at the Zona Maco art fair in Mexico City for Warning Monument, a large-scale installation incorporating dozens of shiny new red plastic household items. In Chicago, his work has been shown at Monique Meloche Gallery and Skestos Gabriele Gallery.
Residency Project
Most noted for his work with devalued currency, González’s project at the Hyde Park Art Center demonstrated a new process for the artist. He used his private poetry and verses to generate the ideas for the sculptures and installations prior to arriving in Chicago to produce the work. The artworks created during the residency address topics rooted in the artist’s personal childhood memories and experiences of his family during the 1970s, while also incorporating political and economic issues of the day, particularly from Argentina’s Dirty War era.
Philippe Durand
June 22 - July 12, 2010
Durand's primary artistic interest is in the ways in which public space is occupied, organized and altered by man and nature. His photographs trace the quizzical expressions that result in cities, particularly reflecting on how motor vehicles structure the urban landscape and how this mode of transport might be transformed. For fifteen years, Durand has photographed cars in the built and natural environment, and his images ask us to consider (and reconsider) the transportation industry’s ability to shape and define public space. Durand seeks an understanding of how people must adapt to navigate and survive within the modern city. The artist currently teaches at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, France and is represented by Galerie Laurent Godin (Paris).
Residency Project
While in residence at the Hyde Park Art Center Philippe Durand explored Chicago’s terrain, studying the city’s main transportation arteries to capture how people move within the overall system. The project, which ran concurrently with the exhibition Spatial City: an Architecture of Idealism, provided Durand the opportunity to continue his exploration of transportation systems. He developed a new body of work titled “Rust and Flowers” originating from his interest in Chicago’s commuter culture and complex network of highways, railroads and other paths of travel. At the same time, Durand actively immersed himself in the Art Center’s community of students, artists, visitors, and neighborhood residents and engaged in a dialogue about his work. Through this project Durand focused his lens on the Chicagoland area, which was an exciting continuation of a previous body of work that examined other major cities such as Los Angeles, Havana, and Beirut.
Chicago’s transportation system is the second largest in the United States, serving the city’s population of over 10 million people. According to a 2008 study, 2 million trips are taken daily by people using public transit (bus and train), 3.4 million by biking or walking and millions more commute via their cars in the Chicagoland area. Chicagoans have the second longest commute in the United States, according to the US Census Bureau (2005). Philippe Durand’s Chicago project surveys the conditions of urban/suburban mobility, while questioning the global repercussions and personal/global sacrifices required for maintaining that mobility.
