The Green Lantern Gallery

In Lieu of Gifts – Jenny Walters

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:31:53 +0000

05.09.09 – 06.06.09

The Green Lantern Gallery presents In Lieu of Gifts, featuring new works by Los Angeles-based, artist Jenny Walters. For this solo presentation, Walters debuts photographs and video exploring the narrative impact of transformative life events, specifically the durability and mutability of personal identity and their aftermath.

A pervasive sense of feminine desire, vulnerability and desperation links a number of these pieces, but they are also marked by an attraction to universally theatrical gestures and scenarios that signal the complexities of relationships with oneself, others and the future. The installation explores the issues of aging, mortality and performance while presenting visual information that allows the viewer to recognize and share the inherent intimacy in failure. Constructing a sort of psychological anthropology via performance and the photo/video document, Walters recognizes that it is in our failures that we begin to see each other and ourselves and draw closer together. This point of power exchange, in all its manifestations and nuances, drives primal human connections. It is in the crumbling of personal mythologies that a deeper intimacy with her subjects and their possessions occurs.

Evoking a consciousness of nostalgia and absence, Walters’ work probes the idea that identity often exists in a fluid state. It is in this investigation into stages of uncertainty–the doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self—that she so adeptly creates a visual experience of the uncanny or a sense of helplessness evoked by the anxiety of unknown emotions.

Walters’ portraits are characterized by an intimacy and quiet involvement with the subjects and places she selects. While there is an innate awareness of the historical, aesthetic paradigms of portraiture native to her work, she subverts many of the expectations of the form by inserting intentional transgressions in her process. In her new work, she has chosen to construct and show images that capture the truth of unique moments as opposed to presenting a homogenous study over time.

Walters earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2004 with a focus in video and photography. She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions, including Galeria Andre Kermer, Leipzig, Germany and has also been featured in group exhibitions at such venues as Vox Populi, Philadelphia; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; EAST International (a juried exhibition curated by Neo Rauch and Gerde Lybke) at Norwich Gallery, Norwich, England and Jen Bekman Gallery, New York. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.

In conjunction with this exhibition Walters is also releasing a limited edition portfolio of photographs.

Cyclone by Amanda Bowder

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 20:04:31 +0000

05.30.08-06.28.08

A solo-exhibition by Amanda Browder, Opens on Friday May 30th with a reception from 7-10 pm at The Green Lantern Gallery.It’s the last show of the season and what better way to celebrate the dowdy onset of summer than with a soft sculpture installation by Our Heroin Amanda Browder? “CYCLONE” devles into subconscious spaces,exposing interior landscapes that motivate on the one hand, while on the other remain dreamy and untenable. In this installation, that fluid under-the-iceberg space is brought forth, into the light,functioning as a funnel into alternate states of consciousness.Constructed with plush fabrics, bright colors and stuffing–this piece explodes and spins into the world, externalizing those interior pastures with a violent and playful confidence. With careful attention to materials and found objects, Browder presents one possible map,that, in her vocabulary of form, “points towards collective aspects of the human subconscious.”–

The Goddess of Scale Outside Her Temple: Brian McNearny

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:43:15 +0000

A solo show by Brian McNearny

10.18.08-11.15.08

Safest Place in the World

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:39:58 +0000

02.29.08-03.29.08

Paintings by Andy and Benjamin Kehoe

Though the days are shorter, it is still a bitter cold outside. It is impossible to recall the heat of summer and sweaty green things. The body seems to have lost its memory. The mind conjures only phantoms of light and comfort. Yet there is also the anguish of spring and in spring there is rebirth. Life takes on new shapes, adapting to the apprehension of growth. There is anticipation in life.

We are born in violence. The passage is both catastrophic and forgettable. In this show, violence is depicted through ornate designs of medieval horror, friendship, monsters and the sometimes contemporary wink. There is a new splash of color that takes up the page as we enter the worlds of Andy and Benjamin Kehoe- a compelling place with rich metaphors and soft jokes. It is better in this world. In this world the fantasy offers some respite from the otherwise urban gray of winter decrepitude. They prepare for us the summer, refurbishing the idea of color.

Useless Weapon

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:36:07 +0000

01.18.08-02.16.08

Hiro Sakaguchi, Nancy Sophy, Jaime Treadwell, Christian Kuras, & Duncan MacKenzie, Heather Mekkelson, Tadashi Moriyama

O Pathetic Fallacy

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:30:55 +0000

03.16.07-04.14.07

Organized by Daniel Anhorn

Some questions to Ruskin’s concept of the pathetic fallacy surly follow the answers through the 19th and 20th centuries into the present 21st. Do we seek to conjure and “other”, as in the concept of prosopopoeia, or apostrophe in order to have someone present to listen to us? Does this anthropomorphism/ personification/ subjectification allow a certain colonization of the world with our subjective emotions? What happens when this runs amok or becomes commodified and proliferated through mass media? Do Disney characters allow subjectification of objects, landscapes, architecture? In today’s postmodern world, what if this mass subjectification of the “spirit” or animus, landscape, or objects is really an aspect of commodification that is reinterpreted as we receive and project the images of our emotion into hyperreality and media images.

The artists here exhibit a tendency to direct communication; hybridization of “hand” techniques and materials: drawing if one may observe. these media can be intimately tied to singular objects and subjective points of view, but are not necessarily tied to an idea of the “authentic” or real. Ruskin preferred his writers and painters to let and image be an image and an object be an object, so as not to “color” the world with and overwhelming emotion saying that “the greatest poets surmount the flux of consciousness; they do not present all reality, all human life, as it appears to them during the brief instant they experience an intense emotion [based upon The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (1971). The works exhibited are presented as singular subjective responses, more in the realm of art than “mass” media, even as they reference images from different sources filled from within that media. The strategies of each artist are not beyond appropriation, as they try to recolonize images taken from traditional stories and are endlessly reflected back to us and reinterpreted.

Sandra Dillon’s drawings in pencil and gouache “reflect”; the Modernist buildings with their class surfaces mirror our inner selves, presented impenetrable facades and faltering architecture, as well as endless reflections between opposing surfaces in which we are lost in a forest of signs. Her multiplicitous slumping dishes of receivers point to our fascination with images from around the globe. Are they overloaded as well?

Jason Dunda’s intimately scaled gouaches depict hummocks and hills, or are they animals? Their lumpy green “fur” or grass suggest a relationship with landscape in the process of either growth or decay or burial mounds.

Scott water’s oil and acrylic warplanes on found floral scraps of wallpaper suggest a violence tied with domesticity, at the same time that the wall paper intimately connects to the idea of a proliferation of images that functions in the background, like wallpaper.

Joe Trupia’s painting/drawing hybrids are informed by a wide array of sources, including meteorological phenomena, viral pathology, topography, apocalypse cults, crypto zoology, evolutionary adaptation in birds, epidemiology, and ghosts. The projection of these dream like concepts of science up into cloudlike formation or down upon a landscape with no visible horizon line contrast each other with opposing points of view, suggesting flight or placement upon the earth.

-DA

Nothing is Possible to Explain with Language. It’s Without It It’s Impossible.

admin — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 19:20:55 +0000

Mathias Krissterson & Todd Mattei

06.02.07-07-01.07

Visual artist and musician Mathias Kristersson believes nothing is possible to describe with language. He will present and exhibition at the Green Lantern titled “From here to there”, a multimedia show that asks its audience to think about the space in between language. When we speak and mean what we say, do we also mean what we don’t say? Studying semiotics through sound, video and performance, Kistersson investicages the content, transmission and perception of written and spoken words. The artist reexamines words (and noises) by slowing them down, breaking them up and housing them in new environments. Language, with its multifarious possibilities, acts as an object to be manipulated, recontextualized, and grasped differently as we travel from place to place.

Organized by Steve Greco, “From here to there” comprises a series of sound installations which reconsider and communicate with the architecture of the gallery space. The accessible and autonomous works engage the audience beyond notions of “English” or “Swedish”, aiding in our collective understanding of reality as we hear significant tones, see letters in a new way and heed to the silence. Featuring a project room by Todd Mattei, this exhibition helps guide us through the post-modern condition examined by the Green Lantern’s 06/07 season.

Culture Mutt

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:48:04 +0000

4.27.07 – 5.27.07

Carl Baratta and Tsherin Sherpa

Show opens on Friday April 27th, from 7 – 10pm

Live Jazz performed by Celia Whiren and Ryan Meisel

Is there a responsibility to preserve and protect international history? Is one similarly responsible for the various modes of appropriation that, while furthering one dialogue, might destroy its origins? If we are encouraged to promote and preserve the past, how does one preserve tradition for its own sake, retaining and propagating its’ original potency as a contemporary object, rather than fetishizing its’ historical stature? In a global community, various national aesthetics are constantly being re-appropriated and re-contextualized. In Culture Mutt, two geographically disparate artists are presented side by side in order to explore a portrait of global influence. American painter Carl Baratta and Tibetan Thangka painter Tsherin Sherpa, display distince but related voices, articulating a visual bridge as a metaphor for our cultural climate, where the migration of culture is an endless force of international awareness, celebration and destruction.

Baratta grew up in Philadelphia and completed his formal education with an MFA at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. Applying a pastiche of Asian motifs borrowed from video games and flat decorative landscapes, Baratta personalizes these formal elements, making them relevan to his own context. Baratta has the freedom to employ foreign tropes and incorporate them in his voice. He is not bout by the traditions he adopts. His tradition is entrenched in destruction and reconstruction; he is bound to break rules and rebuild new surfaces with scraps discovered in the rubble. Baratta’s approach is far from the ancient tradition of Tibetan Thangkas. The ornate and laborious sophistication of Thangka painting comes from hours of quiet workl paints are ground by hand and mixed with yak glue, and the picture-field is comprised of an infinite many minute dots, like hand-drawn pixels. Tsherin Sherpa will hand his work beside Baratta’s; although born in Tibet, Sherpa grew up in exile in Nepal apprenticing with his father as a painter. The direct descent of knowledge is an effort to preserve a tradition that is threatened by the development of the world. It is important to consider the non-historic implications of this tradition, a style of working that seems incongruous with the contemporary media-driven world. It is steady, ornate and non-disposable.

These two artists have distinct motivations: on the one hand, Sherpa wants to preserve his Eastern tradition, while on the other hand Baratta wants to stand out in the Western one. While Baratta’s work might be more accessible to the contemporary audience, his hand belies an unsophisticated mark. There is a pleasure to be gleaned in the tension of these two hands, indicative as it is, of the greater condition of the shrinking world.

14.27.07 – 15.27.07Carl Baratta and Tsherin Sherpa
Show opens on Friday April 27th, from 7 – 10pmLive Jazz performed by Celia Whiren and Ryan Meisel
Is there a responsibility to preserve and protect international history? Is one similarly responsible for the various modes of appropriation that, while furthering one dialogue, might destroy its origins? If we are encouraged to promote and preserve the past, how does one preserve tradition for its own sake, retaining and propagating its’ original potency as a contemporary object, rather than fetishizing its’ historical stature? In a global community, various national aesthetics are constantly being re-appropriated and re-contextualized. In Culture Mutt, two geographically disparate artists are presented side by side in order to explore a portrait of global influence. American painter Carl Baratta and Tibetan Thangka painter Tsherin Sherpa, display distince but related voices, articulating a visual bridge as a metaphor for our cultural climate, where the migration of culture is an endless force of international awareness, celebration and destruction.
Baratta grew up in Philadelphia and completed his formal education with an MFA at Chicago’s School of the Art Institute. Applying a pastiche of Asian motifs borrowed from video games and flat decorative landscapes, Baratta personalizes these formal elements, making them relevan to his own context. Baratta has the freedom to employ foreign tropes and incorporate them in his voice. He is not bout by the traditions he adopts. His tradition is entrenched in destruction and reconstruction; he is bound to break rules and rebuild new surfaces with scraps discovered in the rubble. Baratta’s approach is far from the ancient tradition of Tibetan Thangkas. The ornate and laborious sophistication of Thangka painting comes from hours of quiet workl paints are ground by hand and mixed with yak glue, and the picture-field is comprised of an infinite many minute dots, like hand-drawn pixels. Tsherin Sherpa will hand his work beside Baratta’s; although born in Tibet, Sherpa grew up in exile in Nepal apprenticing with his father as a painter. The direct descent of knowledge is an effort to preserve a tradition that is threatened by the development of the world. It is important to consider the non-historic implications of this tradition, a style of working that seems incongruous with the contemporary media-driven world. It is steady, ornate and non-disposable.
These two artists have distinct motivations: on the one hand, Sherpa wants to preserve his Eastern tradition, while on the other hand Baratta wants to stand out in the Western one. While Baratta’s work might be more accessible to the contemporary audience, his hand belies an unsophisticated mark. There is a pleasure to be gleaned in the tension of these two hands, indicative as it is, of the greater condition of the shrinking world.

Welcome To Our Home

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:43:46 +0000

07.07.06 – 08.11.06

Abby Coe & John Bissonette

TN artists Abby Coe and John Bissonette collaborate to bring a home to Chicago. Through the guise of kittens and pabst, this couple creates an exhibition to complement the faux interiors of Bed, Bath and Beyond. While mall bedrooms and window homes are stripped of all personal affects, Coe and Bissonette create an environment where home furnishings are supplanted by tokens of sentimentality and American culture. Cats are drawn and painted in glam-pinks on found materials. Markers and paper and crayons and glue deliberately stray from other mediums that bear the authority of traditional fine art. Coe’s cats, drawn with solemn earnestness, create comfort, individuality and strength. These make their home beside Bisonette’s pantsycapes and painted pabst cases. Paintings of women on shiny cars resurrect images of American prosperity and integrate them with paintings of feet with painted palm-tree toes. The result is a home away from home: where clusters of work personify different rooms with different functions: a bedroom, a kitchen, a TV room and a back yard, and the detritus lying about is made up by different pieces of art. These other works, un-hung, but carefully displayed include lists composed and abandoned, by the artists themselves.

Baby You’re An Animal

admin — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:41:11 +0000

09.08.06 – 09.30.06

Matthew Tetzloff

As per Around the Coyote, Wicker Park’s Annual Fall Arts Festival

M Tetzloff 1SWM, 31 6″ 1902, non-smoker, recovering Catholic, finds pleasure in making forms above all things. 3 Enjoys reading, going to the theater, and live performances of such things as music, but also enjoys a quiet night at home watching movies or playing winning 11 on the play station 2.4. Has terrible pun-based sense of humor that grows on you after a while, but only because he is otherwise fairly pleasant in disposition. Very much enjoys hanging out at bars and restaurants, and enjoys reading fiction novels and revolutionary war era history books. Tends to be a contrarian in conversations that veer towards the polemic, but not out of antagonism as much as a lack of interest in having a conversation where the whole things is two people agreeing with one another. 5 He has a BFA in drawing from the University of Iowa, which has really come in handy.

———-

[1] I am working to construct a visual vocabulary of the signifiers that I directly associate with beauty, love, and attraction.

[2] My work explores the use of people and objects as symbols in the images that I’m surrounded by in glossy magazines, television, billboards, and film, and the layered implication that having the object will, in turn, make people desire them as well is fascinating.

[3] The questions raised in this visual dialogue are a starting point for exploration of questions that go beyond a simple reaction to consumerism. How much of my definition of beauty is environmental? What signifiers trigger that moment when I notice someone from across the room? To what extent can I impose an idea of beauty back outward onto the world through the creation of forms? These drawings are extensions of this internal dialogue.

[4] The imagery is culled from observational drawings, from appropriated popular imagery, and from a lexicon of familiar and created symbols and references. My intention is to attempt to strip as much cynicism and external politics from questions that can only be weighed down by these considerations.

[5] Instead I work to follow the process of contemplation and discovery.

SEPTEMBER 30th 2006

As part of the closing reception, there will also be a solo performance by Craig Klein from The Race and The Singleman Affair will perform. Doors open at 9 pm, with a suggested $5 donation. BYOB.