Lisa Conrad, Ken Fadell, Joe Jachna, Eliot Joflin, Meriellen Johnson, Eun Young Kim, Dennis Kowalski, Carrie Lassman, Rebecca Morris, Kay Rosen, Allison Ruttan, Chris Hanson, Hedrika Sonnenberg, and Marie Walz.
Featured Artists
Tag (about play) was a curatorial project organized by Doug Ischar and Judy Ledgerwood. Ischar, a photographer teaches at the University of Illinois, Circle Campus, Chicago. Ledgerwood, a painter who makes large abstract landscapes teaches at Northwestern University. The exhibition investigated the role of play in making and reading art. From the subject oriented to the purely visual, Ischar and Ledgerwood presented a wide range of work from diverse aesthetics, including performance, video, painting and sculpture.
Kay Rosen’s text paintings toyed with the printed word. Palindromes, puns and linguistic jokes all reveal and hide themselves in Rosen’s work. Rebecca Morris flirted with formalist traditions; her humorous and abstract methods play with the very definition of painting. Video satirist Eliot Joslin literally combated the AIDS virus in his piece. Chris Hanson and Hendrika Sonnenberg constructed a miniature model of Jackson Pollock Looking for a Bathroom at Peggy Guggenheim’s House, and Lisa Conrad’s April 14th performance centered on ideas of nostalgia and fearlessness. Allison Ruttan’s series More Better, altered pages from pornographic magazines. Ruttan obsessively cut holes in every sexual image, to lessen the direct usage of sexual suggestive imagery and to bring a more typical female preference of sexuality to the imagery. Other artists in the exhibition included Joe Jachna, Meriellen Johnson, Dennia Kowalski, Marie Walz, Carie Lassman, Eun Young Kim, and Ken Fadell.
