October 5, 2019 - November 1, 2019
Elena Ailes: Your Mouth as a Gaping Square
Curated by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
opens Sat., Oct 5 from 6-9pm : The Ski Club, Milwaukee 3172 North Bremen Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53212
The Green Lantern Press and Ski Club are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Elena Ailes, Your Mouth as a Gaping Square. In this exhibition, Ailes considers the body as the site that mediates language, its utterance, and its interpretation. The show consists of sculptures that apply traditional stone carving and mold-making methods to forms found in linguistic schematics, animal biology, and dark holes in the earth—whether natural or built. The result is a collection of muted bodies whose expression is held still, paused in the moments before sound and gesture offer explicit meaning. In creating space for what is articulable only in the absence of language, Ailes questions the primacy of clarity through works that contain language’s absence and also its potential. A mouth closed has a tongue inside it, resting in the dark.
Elena Ailes (b. Albuquerque, NM) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator concerned with the encounters, intimacies, and discordances found between worlds and ways of being—actions, bodies, histories, plant, animal, mineral. She is interested in that which makes her a better person and a worse person, especially in theory. In reality, she is an artist and writer living and working in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA in Sculpture and MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has presented her texts, videos, and installations widely, including at the SculptureCenter (NYC), Randy Alexander Gallery (Chicago), Sector 2337 (Chicago), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (Cambridge), and 4th Ward Project Space (Chicago.) She is the cofounder of jeux d’été, an artist-run curatorial project, and currently teaches at SAIC.
August 9, 2019 - September 1, 2019
Heidi Norton
Prisms
Ace Hotel New York: 20 W 29th St, New York, NY 10001
Aug 9-Sep 1, 2019
Opening Fri Aug 9 from 7-9pm
The Green Lantern Press and Ace Hotel New York are pleased to present a solo exhibition by Heidi Norton, Prisms. Over the last ten years, Norton has developed a botanical vocabulary using photography, sculpture, and installation to trouble traditional conceptions of nature. For this site-specific installation, Norton explores plants’ relationships to interior design and transient hospitality. By intersecting frames of existing architecture with photographic panels and sculpture, Norton plays with magnification and distance to destabilize place and perspective, raising questions about what is “real” or “fake.” How do such categories affect the way we think about the natural world? As a meditation on the vantage of a stranger in transit, Prisms exposes the comfort of pastoral tropes in designed, public space.
Heidi Norton (American, born 1977, lives NYC) is an artist and writer whose 1970’s upbringing as a child of New Age homesteaders in West Virginia resulted in a strong connection to the land, plant life, and nature. She received her BFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a recipient of a residency at Elmhurst Art Museum where her exhibition, Prismatic Nature, a major site responsive exhibition was on view. Other solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Monique Meloche Gallery Chicago, among others. Selective group exhibitions include Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, DePaul Art Museum, the Knitting Factory, Chicago Cultural Center, Ohio State University, Gallery 400 University of Illinois Chicago, La Box Gallery National School of Art France. Her writings and work are included in Art21, BOMB Magazine, Journal for Artistic Research, Grafts by Michael Marder, and the newly released, Why Look at Plants ed. by Giovanni Aloi. She is an adjunct professor at FIT and International Center of Photography. Her most recent illustrated essay, The Faceless Plant: A Sketch for Timothy Morton, is in a recent issue of BOMB Magazine.
October 13, 2018 - November 18, 2018
a group exhibition of artists from Chicago and Mexico City curated by Esteban King + Mia Lopez as part of the Lit& Luz Festival
featuring Alejandra R. Bolaños, Verónica Gerber Bicecci, Ricardo Cuevas, Lucía Hinojosa, Alejandro Jiménez-Flores, Caroline Kent, Iván Krassoievitch, Emilio Rojas, and Tamara Becerra Valdez.
curated by Esteban King + Mia Lopez
organized in conjunction with the Lit & Luz Festival
opening Sat Oct 13, 6-9pm
So close, far away presents work by a group of emerging and mid-career artists from Mexico and Chicago who explore the parallels and intersections between art, communication and writing. Organized within the framework of the Lit and Luz Festival, the exhibition brings together the multitude of ways in which poetry, art, and literature manifest in artistic practices.
The exhibition title refers to Chicago and Mexico’s shared history of migration and cultural exchange, and also poses a question about the relationships between writing and art. How close or how far are these two distinct mediums?
Apart from developing videos, performances, paintings or photographs, many of the artists of this show also write. These writings can be legible or illegible, conventional or encrypted, traditional or invented. So close, far away examines the meeting of artist and writer, and the polemic of text vs. image, intentionally obscuring boundaries between disciplines.
Some of the works in this show create an interplay between both the visual and literary realms. In others, images functions as texts and texts functions as images; and, even further, some of them question the fundamental idea that image and texts are separated worlds…
Rather than perpetuate tropes or trends, or attempt to arrive at a definitive resolution, we seek to provide a platform for both the consideration and the formation of new strategies and approaches. How can these visual and literary ways of communication operate? Are they always separated one from another? Where is the limit or the point of encounter between them? The artists in this exhibition address these inquiries, as well as point to further areas for interrogation.
With this dialogue, So close, far away seeks to account for the similarities and differences between the concerns and methods of working by artists in Mexico and Chicago. In an era marked by the rise of nationalism and cultural intolerance, establishing links between the work of emerging artists who have focused on contemporary artistic creation feels crucial. Echoing the student demonstrations that occurred in different parts of the world exactly 50 years ago, we are convinced that poetry and imagination are the first step to break with the established order and begin to conceive of a different kind of world.
– Mia Lopez and Esteban King, curators
About the artists:
Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Mexico City, 1981) is a visual artist who writes. She published the books: Mudanza [Moving Out] and Empty Set, which won the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature prize and the Otra Mirada Cálamo prize. Some of her last projects in other media are: Migrant Words in Art Association, Jackson Hole, Wyoming; The Speakers No. 2 in Museo Amparo, Puebla; and The amplified void in Casa–Taller José Clemente Orozco, Guadalajara. She is editor at the cooperative Tumbona Ediciones and tutor of the Photography Production Seminar at Centro de la Imagen. To learn more visit: veronicagerberbicecci.net
Alejandra R. Bolaños (Veracruz, 1991). She makes narrations with texts, audios and drawings. Her work is the tool to talk about the Mexican Southeast, through ideas such as invisibility, social protest and the eternal representation of the tropical Nineteenth Century landscape. She studied at Soma México (2018) and currently coordinates the Documentation Center of the Museo Tamayo. Lives and works between Veracruz and Mexico City.
Ricardo Cuevas (Mexico City, 1978). Working from a conceptual framework based in text, books and photography, with its various discourses around selection, document, and archive, Cuevas’s work is constantly exploring the potential for misunderstanding, translation and fragmentation. He has exhibited in venues like The Stanley Brouwn Pavilion (Utrecht, Netherlands, 2008); Guangdong Museum of Art (Guangdong, China, 2009); David Roberts Art Foundation (London, UK, 2010); Maison de l’Amérique Latine (Paris, France, 2009); Centro Lam (La Habana, Cuba, 2011); Denver Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver, USA, 2012); The Power Plant (Toronto, Canada, 2014); Artpace (San Antonio, USA, 2014). A collection of past and recent works was shown individually at Darling Foundry (Montreal, Canada, 2011). He’s been awarded with several international artist residencies at: Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta); International Studio and Curatorial Program (NYC); Darling Foundry (Montreal), Kultur Kontakt Austria.
Lucia Hinojosa (Mexico City, 1987) is a visual artist/writer. Her multidisciplinary work explores the intersections between language, the politics of rhythm, and expanded poetry. She holds a degree in Visual & Critical Studies from The School of Visual Arts, and she completed a 2-year program at SOMA in Mexico City. Her work has been exhibited at spaces like Grice Bench Gallery (Los Angeles); Museo Nacional de Arte (Mexico City); Anthology Film Archives (New York); Art & Idea, Goethe Institut (Barcelona); Chalton Gallery (London). In 2013 she co-founded diSONARE, a bilingual editorial project. Her writing has appeared in journals and publications like Dolce Stil Criollo, Antifaz, Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail.
Alejandro Jiménez-Flores (1989) is a Conceptual Artist & Poet. They attained a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago In 2012 & a very minor in Poetry from School of Poetics in Marseille France in 2013 ;). Through a process based conceptual practice, they think, write, & craft about, multiplicities, becomings, de-subjectifications, funny things, & likes using language to assess the limits of semiotics.
Caroline Kent received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2008, and a BS in Art at Illinois State University, Normal, IL, in 1998. Current and recent exhibitions include How Objects Move through Walls, the inaugural exhibition at co. (Company project space), Minneapolis; Out of Easy Reach, Depaul Art Museum, Chicago, The Union for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE (2018); Triumph, Chicago (2017); Goldfinch, Chicago (2017); The Suburban, Oak Park, IL (2013); and California African American Museum, Los Angeles (2012). Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at The College of New Jersey, Ewing Township, NJ and St. Kate’s University, Saint Paul, MN. Group exhibitions include the Flag Foundation of Art, NY, Napoleon in Philadelphia and Jenkins Johnson Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Kent is a recipient of the 2016 McKnight Fellowship for Visual Arts; 2015 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; and a 2009 Jerome Fellowship in Fine Art. She is a current Fellow at Shandaken Projects Paint School, New York, the co-founder of Bindery Projects, Minneapolis, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN.
Iván Krassoievitch (Mexico City, 1980). His work takes off from the personal anecdote and the autobiographical story where the appropriation of images and objects turns into gestures that lead the spectator –sometimes through humor– to reflect on the lack of autonomy in regard to certain actions, chance, and the absurdity of daily life. He graduated in Industrial Design in 2000, after which he attended the education program of Soma between 2011 and 2013 (Mexico, D.F.). He has held solo exhibitions since 2005 Tired, Hungry, Horny, Hungover, Happy, Sad & Pissed Off, (2011) at Garash Galería, Mexico, D.F.; Protección contra el Destino y otros interesantes títulos de la colección (Protection against Destiny and other interesting titles of the collection)(2013) at Galería Machete; ¡Señor! ¿Qué es la Vida? (Lord! What is life?) at Cuarto de proyectos Soma, Mexico, D.F.; Mar de fondo (Groundswell) (2015) at Galería Machete and, more recently, the public sculpture Las bananas son un ejemplo (Bananas are an example) (2016) at the gardens of Casa del Lago, which will remain on exhibition until 2019.
Emilio Rojas is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with the body in performance, using video, photography, installation, public interventions, writing, and sculpture. He holds an MFA in Performance from SAIC and a BFA in Film from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada. Rojas identifies as a NAFTA baby, (born in Mexico City, spent his formative artistic years in Canada, and currently based in Chicago). As a queer latinx immigrant with indigenous heritage it is essential to his practice to engage in the postcolonial ethical imperative to uncover, investigate, and make visible and audible undervalued or disparaged sites of knowledge, narratives, and individuals. He utilizes his body in a political and critical way, as an instrument to unearth removed traumas, embodied forms of decolonization, migration and poetics of space. His research based practice is heavily influenced by queer and feminist archives, border politics, botanical colonialism, and defaced monuments. His works have been exhibited in the US, Mexico, Canada, Japan, Austria, England, Greece, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Australia. Besides his artistic practice, Emilio is also a translator, community activist, yoga teacher, and anti-oppression facilitator with queer, migrant and refugee youth. Galeria Jose de la Fuente in Santander, Spain and Gallleriapiú in Bologna, Italy currently represent Rojas’s work.
Tamara Becerra Valdez (Corpus Christi, Texas, 1984) uses photography, video, and drawing alongside an adoption of methods in archaeology and ethnography to consider how historical topographies can be discovered in traces and fragments in the urban social landscape. Through intervening methodologies and chance encounters, she observes the uses, meanings, and functions of discarded materials. The ephemeral nature of human behavior leaves an impression in her work. Valdez earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art with formal studies in Anthropology and Folklore at the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. She has held positions in programming and special collections at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, and The Harry Ransom Center. She has worked in field-based, ethnographic projects in Texas, Mississippi, Illinois, and states in México. She is currently completing a Masters in Fine Arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago. As a Graduate Research Fellow at UIC, she is supervising the artistic and creative direction in the collaborative, multi-disciplinary project, “Political Ecology: Platform Chicago”, supported by the Institute for the Humanities (UIC) Humanities Without Walls consortium, and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
About the Festival:
The Lit & Luz Festival Began in 2012 (unofficially) with the release of the fully translated—Spanish/English—MAKE Magazine issue 13, “Intercambio/Exchange.” In 2014 the Lit & Luz Festival was launched from those pages and ever since has produced yearly events in Mexico City and Chicago, with writers and artists from Chicago, Mexico, and beyond. MAKE Literary Production’s 5th annual Lit & Luz Festival of Language, Literature, and Art is an ambitious exchange between Mexico City and Chicago. The week-long festival takes place at over a dozen arts venues and universities throughout Chicago, October 13th-20th. The following February, a similar series of events are held in Mexico City. Programs include readings, conversations, and our signature event, the “Live Magazine Show”—which makes its Museum of Contemporary Art debut this year. We are honored to welcome inspiring authors, artists, and arts professionals from Mexico to Chicago. Art and language are key to understanding culture and community, and the cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico. With events such as Lit & Luz, we hope to strengthen the relationship between the two countries, and in particular, to increase the distribution of literature and art from Mexico for Chicago audiences and beyond.
September 7, 2018 - September 30, 2018
Solo Exhibition by Eduardo Kac
Opening September 7, 6-9pm
curated by Fulla Abdul-Jabbar and Caroline Picard
The Green Lantern Press is pleased to present Inner Telescope, a solo exhibition at Sector 2337 by Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) of an artwork created for the conditions of Outer Space. Central to this show is an abstract form of the same name—an Inner Telescope conceived for zero gravity, having neither top nor bottom, neither front nor back, and which was realized aboard the International Space Station by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet in 2017. The form entwines linguistic and figurative representations of the self, separate from the ground they have always relied on. Additional objects in the show further explore the vulnerability and ambition of the human subject without its usual downward tendency. Inner Telescope releases the human from gravity’s constraint to show the inextricable ties between humans and their world.
Artist Bio:
Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web 80s, Eduardo Kac emerged in the early 90s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology, and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience to the cultural impact of biotechnology; from the changing condition of memory in the digital age to distributed collective agency; from the problematic notion of the “exotic” to the creation of life and evolution. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”—first with a groundbreaking piece entitled Genesis (1999), which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with “GFP Bunny,” his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000). Since the 1980s, Eduardo Kac has been theorizing and producing art and poetry that challenge the limits of gravity. His Space Poetry manifesto was published in 2007. In 2017—with support from the European Space Agency and L’Observatoire de l’Espace, the cultural lab of the French Space Agency—Kac finally realized the dream he has pursued for more than 30 years: the creation, production, and experience of a work directly in Outer Space.
May 12, 2018 - July 29, 2018
The Green Lantern Press is pleased to present If the hours were already counted, a single-channel, site-specific video installation by Angelika Markul.
This 2016 film was shot in Naica, Mexico—a crystal cave in the Chihuahua desert. The crystal cave is now closed and no longer accessible to humans. Projected in a site-specific installation, Markul translates and transposes the environment of the cave into Sector 2337’s gallery space to raise questions about scientific technology and aesthetic exploitation. Here, scientists try to move among giant crystals suspected to have formed more than 200,000 years ago. The figures struggle with high temperatures and the 99% humidity while looking for primitive life forms. In this ancient labyrinth, we don’t know if there is way to get in or get out.
Angelika Markul (b. 1977) in Poland. Lives and works in France and Poland. In 2016, she received the COAL Prize awarded to an artist whose practice navigates between art and environment.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Centre international d’art et de paysage de l’île de Vassivière, Vassivière, France, 2019; Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris, France, 2018; Naturaleza reimaginada, Muntref – Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2018; Tierra del Fuego, Leto Gallery, Warsaw, Poland, 2018; Excavations of the Future, Laurence Bernard gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 2016; What is lost is at the beginning, CSW Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, Poland, 2016; Terre de depart, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2014; The Unleashed Forces. Angelika Markul and Contemporary Demonism, Muzeum Sztuki Łódź, Łódź, Poland, 2013; Installation monumentale, Domaine de Chamarande, Chamarande, France, 2013; Galerie Foksal, Warsaw, Poland, 2012 ; Salon Noir, MAC/VAL, Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry sur Seine, France, 2010; Now New Moon, CSW Zakii, Torun, Poland, 2009.
Among her recent group exhibitions: CAC La traverse, Alfortville, France, 2018; Muzeum Wspolczesny Wroclaw, Warsaw, Poland, 2018; Power Station of Art Shanghai, Shanghai, China, 2018; Départ, Solo Galerie, Madrid, Spain, 2018; Après, Kewenig gallery, Palma de Mallorca, Mallorca, 2018; Laurence Bernard gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 2018; Bienalsur, Centro Cultural Néstor Kirchner, Buenos Aires, Argentine; Fundación Migliorisi Museum, Asunción, Paraguay, 2017; Take me I’m yours, Buenos Aires, Argentine, 2017; 3 Years anniversary group show, Laurence Bernard gallery, Geneva, Switzerland, 2017; Summer After images, Angelika Markul, Konrad Smolenski, Leto gallery, Varsovie, Pologne; Sans réserve, Mac-Val, Vitry-sur-Seine, France, 2017; Zone Yonaguni, Les Abattoirs, Frac, Toulouse, France; Take me I’m yours, The Jewish Museum, New York, United States, 2016; The State of Life, National Art Museum of China, Beijing, China, 2015; Immigrantes, Muntref – Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. Sede: Hotel de Inmigrantes, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2015; Take me I’m yours, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France, 2015; Inhabiting the world, Busan Biennale, South Korea, 2014; Tristan da Cunha, Pavillion 0, Signum Fondation, Venice, Italy, 2013; Art Souterrain, Montreal, Canada, 2012; Monte Negro, Installation, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, France, 2012; Collectioneuse, Focus Biennale de Lodz, Lodz, Poland, 2010; PLASH, Wolnosc od-zysku, Galerie National ZACHETA, Warsaw, Poland, 2009; La chaine-artists of France and Japan, BankART Studio NYK, Yokohama, Japan, 2007; Via Space, Galerie Babel, Trondheim, Norway, 2007; The Pantagruel Syndrome, Triennal Castello di RIVOLI, Musée d’art contemporain, Torino, Italy, 2005; J’en rêve, Fondation Cartier, Paris, France, 2005; I still believe in miracles, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, France, 2005.
May 11, 2018 - July 29, 2018
What is whole without a part? What is a part without a whole? In Handles Expenditure, Liz McCarthy explores pulled clay handle forms, cast through a traditional wet pulling process performed with her body. Her hand was the tool for making the form, and the traditional handle form was intended to be held by a hand. The protrusions in this installation are represented as forms autonomous from a vessel, rendering them useless, purposeless, excess, expenditure. We expect the handle to be mounted, connected, useful in its position to the cup. There are many forms we expect to have use; tireless and familiar, like a body and a vessel, specified rather than ambiguous. A vessel is expected to be a container, and the body seeks to consume its contents. The handle mediates this connection and in merging two vessels – body and cup – both forms intended to empty and fill.
Liz McCarthy’s work explores humans’ physical and psychological relationship to material and how it develops meaning. She considers her own body to be a prominent material in her sculptural and photographic work. In projects over the past few years, she has used clay as a thematic material. It is a material that has developed in the earth over the course of millions of years, used by humans for over 35,000 years, and still used today. Clay is familiar because it is deeply embedded in a humanist tradition, and in some ways synonymous with our own malleable and fragile human bodies. By physically shaping clay and documenting those processes, the artist explores how clay and her own bodily material develop meaning through use and origin, using performative elements to reinscribe meaning.
Curated by Sharmyn Cruz Rivera
About the Artist:
Liz McCarthy is interested in the complex history of humans’ relationship to the material world. She mixes elements of sculpture and performance to explore and reinscribe material meaning. Lizrecently finished her MFA at UIC, and received a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She regularly exhibits in Chicago and throughout the Midwest, and was nominated a “Chicago Break Out Artist” by NewCity Magazine in 2017. She was recently was in her first exhibition abroad at ExGirlfriend Gallery in Berlin. Her artistic projects have been supported by Joan Mitchell Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, and Chicago’s Department of Tourism. She has participated as Artist-in-Residence as Atlantic Center for the Arts, ACRE, High Concept Laboratories, and Banff Centre. Liz has also worked as a curator with ACRE Residency; she was the Co-Founder and Directing Curator of Roxaboxen Exhibitions from 2009-2012.
About the Shoebox Gallery:
The Shoebox Gallery is an experimental micro gallery nestled in The Green Lantern Press storefront at Sector 2337 (2337 N Milwaukee Avenue). Highly visible to pedestrians and initially built as a restaurant’s menu box, the exhibition space lends itself to small-scale, experimental projects meant to engage diverse audiences.
February 16, 2018 - April 15, 2018
Solo Exhibition by Lou Mallozzi
The Green Lantern Press is pleased to present 1:1, a site-specific installation by Lou Mallozzi based on two 2005 excavations from Krems-Wachtberg, an archeological site near Vienna where the artist was in residence in 2015. The first excavation, dated to 25,000 BCE, features the oldest known burial of two infants in a single prepared grave. The second, from the same period, includes one of the oldest painted objects ever recovered, a piece of ivory with eleven stripes of red ochre. Though the find has unprecedented historical merit, Mallozzi’s initial response was emotional, triggered by the care taken for the twins’ burial. Out of this, Mallozzi began an investigation that framed the dig within a contemporary art context: How do archeologists exploit the slight horizontal differences between topological layers, and how does this horizontal difference become vertical as a dig deepens? What presence does red ochre add to the marking of history in dirt and fragments? How does forensic cataloging double museum cataloging?
For 1:1, Mallozzi explores this archeological and emotional material by continuing his work in site specific architectural and sonic installation. One half of the installation, Planks, floats eleven clear acrylic replicas of floorboards from Sector 2337’s main gallery over their doubles. Twins occupies the entire southeast wall of the gallery and consists of a pencil-line grid divided into eleven sets of twenty squares containing the fingerprints of eleven sets of twins from the Chicagoland area.
Presented alongside this show is an artist-made catalog, including original source materials from Mallozzi’s research, related images and artworks, and scholarly essays by Seth Kim-Cohen, Susy Bielak and Fred Schmalz, Bryan Markovitz, and Joseph Clayton Mills.
Lou Mallozzi (b. 1957) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work often focuses on sound, language, and acousmatics. During his more than three decades of interdisciplinary arts practice, he has performed, exhibited, and broadcast in a number of venues in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Arts Club Chicago, The Renaissance Society, Randolph Street Gallery Chicago, Podewil Berlin, TUBE Audio Art Series Munich, Bayersicher Rundfunk Munich, New American Radio, Experimental Intermedia New York, Ausland Berlin, Radiorevolten Festival Halle, Constellation Chicago, and many others.
February 16, 2018 - April 15, 2018
The Green Lantern Press is pleased to present Immanentizing the Eschaton a site-specific installation by Manal Kara at the Shoebox Gallery.
Manal Kara’s assemblage combines inlaid and laser cut acrylic and wood to create a multilayered, heterogeneous composition. Using semiotic techniques, Immanentizing the Eschaton presents myths and theories about the universe’s creation and its foreshadowed demise. From a feminist angle, Kara looks to Slavic mythologies like Baba Yaga, mystical philosophies about repositories of information such as the Akashic record, and the study of plant organisms to deanthropocentrize common understandings of what constitutes a world. Kara brings together this constellation of research to point at how mythologies can be intrinsically misogynistic and how certain philosophies repeatedly position human provenance at the center of existence, hindered by their built-in perceptual apparatus.
About the Artist:
Manal Kara (b. 1986) is a Moroccan-American self-taught artist. They have exhibited work both nationally and internationally and are based in Gary, IN. http://www.manalkara.com/
About Shoebox Gallery:
The Shoebox Gallery is an experimental micro gallery nestled in The Green Lantern Press storefront at Sector 2337 (2337 N Milwaukee Avenue). Highly visible to pedestrians and initially built as a restaurant’s menu box, the exhibition space lends itself to small-scale, experimental projects meant to engage diverse audiences.
September 9, 2017 - November 19, 2017
Rebecca Beachy, Rhonda Holberton, Essi Kausalainen, Takahiro Iwasaki, Aki Inomata, Ebony G. Patterson, and Tsherin Sherpa. Curated by Caroline Picard
The libidinal flux of the teenager has left a permanent mark on culture, normalizing radical consumption in service of an endless will to change. With the end of earth’s resources in sight, this paradigm needs revision. Presented by The Green Lantern Press, Coming of Age presents the work of seven artists from different parts of the world that subvert our material and cultural landscape with meditative gestures.
“Many of the works in the exhibition are pictorially and sculpturally built environments, familiar, but physically uninhabitable by human life. Coming of Age is an unexpectedly utopian exhibition, in which humanity is primarily represented through celebrations, mimesis, and built environments.” — Max Guy, Chicago Artist Writers
April 20, 2017 - June 10, 2017
Project Space installation by Lisa Vinebaum
New Demands? features new neon works and a site-specific, cut-vinyl window installation exploring historical and contemporary modes of collectivity and collective organizing for better working and living conditions. Emphasizing text, typography and the adaptation of historical protest slogans, the exhibit connects past and present demands for economic, social, and racial justice.
April 20, 2017 - June 10, 2017
Solo exhibition by Lindsey Dorr-Niro
With the backside of a billboard as her starting point, Dorr-Niro interrogates the global epidemic of distracted materialism through a set of architectural interventions. These include: a floor sculpture/stage in the gallery’s center that shifts its configuration according to the needs of public programs, a site-specific screen that amplifies and undermines Sector’s storefront window, and the gallery’s adjacent hallway is additionally activated as a site of transition. The resulting environment seeks to prompt inquiry and agency among viewers and participants to ask: What does it mean to take ownership of experience within America’s 21st-century landscape of late-capitalism? What and where is “freedom”? If freedom is possible, how does it locate human dignity and citizenship on this land? Dorr-Niro’s installation is an adaptable backdrop for programs and interventions in Sector 2337’s main space that explore truth and authenticity within today’s sociopolitical environment.
February 10, 2017 - April 2, 2017
Project Space installation by Danny Giles
During his January 2017 artist residency at Sector 2337, Danny Giles will incubate new works that explore everyday things whose implications for identity and political resistance are activated through spectacles of memory and provide allegories for transgression and self-determination. Thereafter, Giles will present new works in Sector 2337’s project in a solo exhibition titled “Remembrancer.”
February 10, 2017 - April 2, 2017
Solo exhibition by Edra Soto
GRAFT is an interactive exhibition for which the artist Edra Soto installs life-size Puerto Rican style bus stop benches inside of the Sector 2337 gallery, with the island’s traditional rejas on the exterior storefront.
The first iteration of this exhibition took place at Cuchifritos Gallery in New York (Spring, 2016). It is accompanied by a two-part tabloid-style with bilingual contributions from Dorothy Bell Ferrer, Cristina Correa, Christopher Cozier, Rafael Franco, Alison Fraunhar, Jefferson Godard, Daniel Hojnacki, J. Anna Looney, Anansi kNOwBody, Jesus Mejia, Daniel R. Quiles, Xuxa Rodriguez, Teresa Silva, Albert Stabler, Andy Sullivan, and Carolyn Supinka.
GRAFT is produced with support from the Efroymson Family Fund and The Green Lantern Press.
September 1, 2016 - December 31, 2016
Alberto Aguilar, Brit Barton, Mara Baker, Kevin Blake, Zippora Elders, Rami George, David Hall, Kuras and MacKenzie, Josh Rios and Anthony Romero, Michal Samana, Naqeeb Stevens, Tina Tahir, Anna Martine Whitehead; writers: Lise Haller Baggesen, Daniel Borzutzky, Isaiah Dufort, Patrick Durgin, Tricia Van Eck, Jane Lewty, Jill Magi, Nam Chi Nguyễn, Rowland Saifi, Suzanne Scanlon, Mia You and Maarten van der Graaf with Fiep van Bodegom and Obe Alkema; & curators: David Ayala-Alfonso, Britton Bertran, Rashayla Marie Brown, Every house has a door, Lucia Fabio, João Florêncio, Stevie Greco, Jeanine Hofland, Renan Laru-an, La Keisha Leek, Sofia Lemos and Vincent van Velsen. Online Exhibition Design: Pouya Ahmadi. Curated by Caroline Picard and Lara Schoorl
Institutional Garbage is an online exhibition that presents the administrative residue of imaginary public institutions produced by artists, writers, and curators. This residue includes but is not limited to contracts, email correspondences, documented unproductivity, syllabi, scanned objects, and obstacle courses; collecting such fragments in one place, Institutional Garbage illustrates the backend activities of imaginary bureaucracies in an effort to trace the private life of institutional endeavors. What comes to the fore is not a cohesive, singular agenda, but instead a cross-section of often misfired objects that, once assembled, try to tease out new strategies for community arts production, education, sustainability, and value assessment.
Presented by The Green Lantern Press + The Hyde Park Art Center.
December 7, 2016 - December 10, 2016
In tandem with the Second Annual Festival of Poets Theater, Sector 2337 Project Space offers books, programs, audio and visual recordings connected to Poets Theater–featuring Signals Through the Flames: The Story of the Living Theatre (1984) by Sheldon Rochlin and Maxine Harris. The Second Annual Festival of Poets Theater presents performances, screenings and readings over four nights, plus an afternoon of talks on the genre at Sector 2337 and Links Hall. Curated by Patrick Durgin
Thanks to Canarium Books, kenning editions, Flood Editions, The Living Theater.
November 2, 2016 - December 2, 2016
The Green Lartern Press 2016 Fundraiser
Claire Ashley, Rebecca Beachy, Rami George, Sofia Leiby, Heather Mekkelson,Michael Milano, Aay Preston-Myint, Mitsu Salmon, Edra Soto, Hui-min Tsen, Andrew Yang, and Philip von Zweck.
Toying with the intersection of 18th c. Spiritualism and 60s psychedelia, NEW AGE NOW: Art Auction features the works of twelve artists and artworks that use beeswax, photography, spray paint, silkscreen, a salad bowl, mud, terrycloth towel, plastic, indigo dye, duct tape, and birdsnest. Within this alchemical field of materials, we look for the future ad hoc: How can artistic experimentation articulate strategies for collective and long term sustainability?
This auction/exhibition is further contextualized by a Transcendental Menu with finger foods specifically prepared for the occasion by artists Brandon Alvendia, Jessica Campbell, Rebecca Mir Grady, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Alyssa Martinez, Eric May, Midnight Kitchen Projects, Kathleen Rooney, and Edra Soto.
September 9, 2016 - November 20, 2016
Naama Arad, Samuel Levi Jones, Hai Knafo, Andrew Norman Wilson, Stephen Kwok, Kelly Lloyd, Christopher Meerdo, and Globe Al Chemical Company. Curated by Third Object, Fall 2016 Curatorial Residents at the Sector Project Space.
A Rule By Nobody is an exploration of the boredoms, frustrations and pleasures of bureaucratic routines. Drawing its title from Hannah Arendt’s definition of bureaucracy, the exhibition takes the bored energy of office labor and channels it into a multipart dive into the sublimely overflowing inbox, the inky warm Xerox room, the balled up wads of red tape, and the moments of escape that punctuate the droning beige sameness of nine to five.
The show is composed of a two-part group exhibition in Sector 2337’s rear project space, a video screening, a live performance, and a printed publication.
September 9, 2016 - November 20, 2016
Solo exhibition by Stephen Lapthisophon
Styles of Radical Will (Italian Sculpture) mixes sculpture, wall drawing, found objects, text, photography, works on paper, and fabric to address issues of time and duration. Works prepared in both the artist’s studio and created onsite in the gallery space make reference to artistic precedents in Italian art from the mid 20th c. such as Piero Manzoni, Jannis Kounellis, Giovanni Anselmo and Giuseppe Penone. This show extends Toccare (Non) Toccare, a body of work Lapthisophon presented for a 2016 project at the Nasher Sculpture Center. Texts will be drawn from an artist book produced in conjunction with the Nasher project, Notebook 1967-68, incorporating the work of Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.
March 25, 2016 - March 25, 2016
Solo exhibition by Magalie Guérin
With 100+ drawn reproductions of the artist’s prior works, Copy Drawings, examines the process by which one reconsiders and recreates the past, posing questions about what is and is not original.
Copy Drawings is organized in conjunction with the publication of Guérin’s first book, NOTES ON (The Green Lantern Press, 2016).
October 6, 2016 - March 13, 2016
An opera by Mark Booth
Mark Booth’s evolving project The Sea is Represented by an Irregular Shape was an on-going month long production with focused occurrences of the work happening every Saturday in February 2016 at 2:30. The basis of Booth’s opera is an unfolding chain of metaphors that slowly describe a world of surprising, yet effortlessly entangled images. The intuitive resonance of each juxtaposition—how the sea could be represented by space, and space represented by carbonated water—manifests throughout the month-long performance as sound, written text, and paintings. These multivalent metaphors strike the audience as a tangent strikes a parabola; as the constantly changing performers read their way through the metaphors the supreme stillness of Booth’s formal decisions highlight the work’s strangely conscious inward movement. Cosmic in scope and stoic in its ethics, The Sea is Represented by an Irregular Shapeis an opera for our ecological age.
February 12, 2016 - March 11, 2016
Gast Bouschet & Nadine Hilbert (Brussels, Belgium), Faith Coloccia (Seattle, US), Niels Geybels (Antwerpen, Belgium), Alessandro Keegan (New York City), Max Kuiper(Arnhem, Netherlands), and Michaël Sellam (Paris, France). Curated by Amelia Ishmael in the Sector Project Space.
Bleeding Black Noise is a revision of Steven Parrino’s statement “My relation between Rock and visual art: I will bleed for you.” Here the curator replaces Rock with Noise, and celebrates the Bleeding as a release of the Black Noise, raw energy and formless potential. The collected works on paper of seven artists provide encounters with dust, electromagnetism, sympathetic magic, ecology, politics, and a passion for storms. Each of the artists are involved in experimental music—as active musicians or collaborators.
October 9, 2015 - November 21, 2015
Sebastian Alvarez, Srijon Chowdhury, Katy Cowan, Zoe Crosher, Lindsey French, Essi Kausalainen, Deanna Ledezma, Wilfredo Prieto, Steve Ruiz, John Steck Jr., Linda Tegg, and Andrew Yang; a night of performances by Katherine Behar and Joshua Kent (curated by Every house has a door); and The Lichen Museum, an Institution in Residence, by A. Laurie Palmer. Curated by Caroline Picard
Responding to a new field of critical thought, Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening uses the group exhibition format to explore the strangeness of plants and algae, and how they trouble human structures. Vegetal life forms are banal in their ubiquity. Undeniably alive, yet silent, they creep upwards, their roots submerged and out of human sight. Like anarchists protesting order, weeds break through concrete. Plants challenge theoretical logic as well; they can be both one and many: Aspen trees growing on a hillside share a single root system. Plants have occupations and desires: engaged in constant growth, they spread out with a will to consume and occupy space.
October 9, 2015 - November 21, 2015
Installation by A. Laurie Palmer
During Sector 2337’s group exhibition, Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening (organized by The Green Lantern Press), A. Laurie Palmer will install her Lichen Museum in Sector 2337’s project space. The activities of the Lichen Museum include, among other things, a screening of lichen and lichenologists, guided lichen walks on October 10th, and a window installation.
August 22, 2015 - September 30, 2015
A window installation by Esau McGhee.
Visible from the street, Blackitolism teases late night pedestrians with a-typical advertisement. Part concrete poem, part neon sculpture, part print edition, McGhee’s work toys with the power of suggestion and the idiosyncrasy of desire.
Produced in tandem with the Terrain Bienniale.
September 4, 2015 - September 19, 2015
Aay Preston-Myint, Adam Liam Rose + Alex Zak, Amina Ross, Betsy Odom, Elijah Burgher, Gordon Hall, Katie Vota, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Margaret Bobo Dancy, Matt Morris, Oli Rodriguez, and Rami George. Curated by Alexandria Eregbu
This exhibition unveils the artists’ sensitivity to space and how such material practices propose an alternative, non-binary platforms for the queer and/or collective body. This platform becomes a meaningful tool against oppressive structures which limit pleasure, desire, visibility, and mobility. Here, we might further examine how these artists consider the queer body in space amongst the domestic, the architectural, the landscape, public or private sectors— and how the collision between such domains might summon, conjure, or propose a third space.
The exhibition organized as part of Platforms: 10 Years of Chances Dances — a multi-site series of exhibitions and events in celebration of 10 years of Chicago-based queer collective, Chances Dances.
May 9, 2015 - July 3, 2015
Solo exhibition by Ellen Rothenberg
elsetime examines the difficulty of artistic lineage exploring history’s dislocated presence. Central to Rothenberg’s artistic retcon is the image of her walking in the study of Bertolt Brecht. How can plans for a future protest affect the furniture of the past? Rothenberg expands from there, refracting through additionally (and personally) significant figures like Stefan Brecht and Simone Forti, along with temporally specific locales like post-war Berlin, Woodstock, and downtown New York; layering these sites and personae, Rothenberg traces a range of influences through objects and sometimes ambiguous politics. elsetime is the material culmination of the artist negotiating, inserting, and revising past and future selves in the present now.
“Anyone prepared to spend time with the work will be rewarded, not with answers, but with a deepened appreciation of how unnecessary such summaries are.”
—Artslant: May 27, 2015, “The Personal Is Political: Ellen Rothenberg at Sector 2337″ by James Pepper Kelley
“Elsetime” is an operation in ways to proceed forward, a challenging exhibition that provides rewards if you want them.”
—Newcity Art: June 13, 2015, RECOMMENDED: Ellen Rothenberg at Sector 2337 by Chris Reeves
February 12, 2015 - April 12, 2015
Exhibition by Kuras & MacKenzie
Everything Is Still Really Interesting, the latest exhibition by collaborative duo Kuras & MacKenzie. The title of the exhibition hints at a moment in time — “still” suggests something that has passed, but hasn’t yet entirely disappeared. What is it that persists? A remnant, a feeling, an after taste. A naive interest in the world, perhaps, it persists as some vague but committed idealism — whether authentic or the product of Romantic thinking, the artists do not differentiate. Either way, any residual “naiveté” is complicated. Everything Is Still Really Interesting muddles through the oppositional poles of lofty hope and hard-won cynicism, leaving the art object to mark moments in an ongoing conversation.
October 16, 2014 - December 11, 2014
Benjamin L. Aman & Marion Auburtin, Joseph Grigely, Young Joon Kwak, Jason Lazarus, Carlos Martiel, Heather Mekkelson, Aay Preston-Myint, Rachel Niffenegger, Xaviera Simmons, Shane Ward, and Shoshanna Weinberger; with Jane Jerardi as our November 2014 Studio Resident.
An affiliated exhibition catalogue includes written contributions from Antibody Corporation, Rebecca Beachy, Érik Bullot, Judith Goldman, Julia Drescher, Every house has a door (Matthew Goulish & Lin Hixson), Christy LeMaster, Valeria Luiselli, Jesse Malmed, CJ Martin, Nathanaël, Caroline Picard, Martine Syms, John Tipton, Zoe Todd, and Fo Wilson.
The New [New] Corpse is a group show with thirteen artists whose work in photography, sculpture, performance, film, and drawing wrestles with representation to show how the figure appears fragmented, distorted, or emphatically absent. These artists exhume the human body to study the material networks by which it is comprised. The New [New] Corpse is The Green Lantern Press inaugural exhibition at Sector 2337.
November 7, 2014 - December 6, 2014
Jane Jerardi is a time-based artist working in the media of choreography, performance, and video. She has created work for a variety of contexts — from theaters and galleries to record store listening booths, public subway escalators, audio walks, and projected videos — constructing pieces that often move fluidly between media.
August 24, 2014 - November 23, 2014
At Hyde Park Art Center
Amanda Browder, Nick Butcher, Maria Dumlao, Jason Dunda, Rebecca Mir Grady, Nadine Nakanishi, Carmen Price, Steve Ruiz, and Hui-min Tsen. Curated by Caroline Picard
In June 2014, The Green Lantern was invited by a group of Rhode Island School of Design students to reproduce one of The Green Lantern’s past exhibition in response to the Hyde Park Art Center’s Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle. The resulting choice, Isolated Fictions, explores a curious incident in history when a fleet of English sailors found themselves icebound in the Arctic for nine months. In order to survive, they put on weekly plays and published a newspaper of theater reviews, inside jokes, poems and classified ads. The resulting periodical, The North Georgia Gazette, presents the sailors as an older, idiosyncratic DIY art collective whose activities arguably sustained the crew through a physically, and psychologically inhospitable environment.
“Exemplary of [The Chicago Effect: Redefining the Middle’s] strengths is a brief interlude in the middle of the main gallery marked by a stripe of grey paint that hangs on the walls and floor between two halves of the white cube… Isolated Fictions: A Reenactment, as the sub-show is titled, presents a provocative case study in the generative possibilities between art schools, small galleries, art centers, and other ‘middle men’ of the art economy.” — Elliot Reichert, Chicago Artist Writers.
January 9, 2014 - April 19, 2014
At La Box ENSA (Bourges, FR) and Gallery 400 (Chicago, US)
Sebastian Alvarez, Art Orienté objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin), Jeremy Bolen, Irina Botea, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Robert Burnier, Marcus Coates, Assaf Evron, Carrie Gundersdorf, Institute of Critical Zoologists, Jenny Kendler, Devin King, Stephen Lapthisophon, Milan Metthey, Rebecca Mir, Heidi Norton, Akosua Adoma Owusu, Tessa Siddle, and Xaviera Simmons.
The Northwest Passage—an historic golden fleece of shipping routes—has opened up in the Arctic, and scientists continue to predict dramatic rising seas. Bee populations have fallen rapidly, raising questions about food production. Mice grow human ears on their backs in laboratories and rabbits glow in the dark. In this new age of ecological awareness, “Nature” as a Romantic ideal—a pristine mountainside beyond the scope of human influence—is but a dithering spirit. Rather than succumbing to the pang of this loss, Ghost Nature exposes the limits of human perspective in the emergent landscape that remains: a slippery network of sometimes monstrous creatures, plants, and technological advances.
An affiliated catalogue of the same name with written contributions by Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, Laurie Palmer, Caroline Picard, João Florêncio, Nettrice Gaskins, and Jamila Woods was co-published by La Box & The Green Lantern Press.
June 2, 2012 - June 13, 2012
At the Co-Prosperity Sphere
Ellen Rothenberg, Mark Booth, Stephen Lapthisophon, Heather Mekkelson, Christian Kuras and Duncan MacKenzie, Carrie Gundersdorf, Justin Cabrillos, and Rebecca Mir.
Field Static examines the possibilities of objects as they engage with each other and thereby embody a network, or constellation of points. What begins to emerge is an ecology that blurs the lines between life forms and inanimate material bodies. In Field Static curators Caroline Picard and Devin King created an opportunity in which relations between objects might be highlighted such that the field created via the installation of artwork would accent one’s material engagement. Each object within the Co-Prosperity Sphere becomes focal point and periphery alike, suggesting both solitary histories and the peculiar synthesis of matter common to all things. Field Static rejects or, at least, torques art’s historically anthropocentric position — the poem is written by a human, the portrait is painted of a human — in favor of a more egalitarian engagement with objects. How are objects, human and non-human digested and reborn by the realization and decay of magnetisms? Part celebration, part lament for the passing of a moment, these artists have been invited to examine pan-psychic networks of affect and influence.
Essays in accompanying catalogue by João Florêncio, Lin Hixson, Robert Jackson, Lily Robert-Foley, Peter O’Leary, Devin King & Caroline Picard.