CSI BIENNALE
FLATFILEgalleries presents CSI Biennale 2008, which will open on June 20th and run through August 22nd, with an opening reception on June 20th from 5-9pm. The exhibition, for which there will be a full color catalogue, marks the second CSI Biennale hosted by FLATFILE. Jurors sculptor John Henry, Elmhurst Art Museum Director Neil Bremmer, and freelance writer/critic and Columbia professor Corey Postiglione reviewed sixty-eight unidentified entries, choosing 35 sculptors for the exhibition from among them in a blind jury process. The exhibition will be housed on both upper and lower floors of the gallery. 26 Voices Surrounded, a sound piece created specifically for CSI Biennale 2008 by French artist Alexandra Loewe, will be heard throughout the gallery.
Click here to see a full list of the artists participating in the CSI Biennale 2008.
On the walls of lower level Gallery B, FLATFILE will also feature 2D works that address the 3D subject of architecture. In Wall Work, guest artist Janet Satz, who lives in Kansas was born and raised in Chicago, shows pieces from her large scale Urban Landscapes series. Satz, who has shown extensively throughout the US, has work in over two dozen important corporate collections including the Corporate Headquarters of Mercedes Benz, Sprint, and General Electric. She earned a BFA at Pratt, and both an MA in Art Education and a Doctorate in Arts Fellowship from NYU. Satz has been the recipient of many grants and awards including an NEA grant and two grants from the Kansas Arts Commission.
Sharing the space with Satz will be the winners of the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s 2008 Newhouse Award, comprised of photographs of selected Park District facilities by students from Chicago Public Schools. The awards, which are in their 26th year, have literally helped thousands of students gain exposure to careers in architecture, engineering and the building trades. Founded by the late Illinois State Senator Richard Newhouse with the goal of getting minority students interested in architecture, his legacy lives on in the thousands of students who go on to work in careers in the field. The Newhouse Program & Architecture Competition is part of a yearlong program that includes the Saturday in the Studio skill-building workshop series, school visits by professional architects and paid summer internships in Chicago-area architecture and construction firms. The competition is open to all Chicago public high school students. This year more than 200 students have entered the photography competition from which as many as 19 winners will be chosen and be displayed at FLATFILEgalleries. The architectural photography aspect of the competition is celebrating its 5th anniversary, and was formed in partnership with the prestigious architectural photography firm, Hedrich Blessing.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH
VIRTUAL JIHADI, the night of Bush Capturing, the latest confrontational art installation from gallery artist Wafaa Bilal will open for an unimpeded run at FLATFILEgalleries from June 20th to August 22nd, with a reception on June 20th from 5-9pm. The installation was closed down in two locations in Troy, NY.* It is the belief of FLATFILEgalleries that censorship of any artistic expression is wrong, and proudly supports the right of its artists to show their work regardless of political content and previous censorship. Thus, we are both pleased and proud to present Wafaa Bilal’s Virtual Jihadi, as well as gallery artist Benjamin June’s IRAQ Suicide Attack Pillow Project: A MEMORIAL, the other component in our FREEDOM OF SPEECH summer exhibition.
Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi American artist and professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, first came to the US in 1992 after fleeing Saddam’s persecution and surviving two years in refugee camps in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In 2007, Bilal made history with DOMESTIC TENSION, the interactive paintball project in which he resided in the gallery’s project room for 31 days, a human target for paintballs fired remotely via internet.
Benjamin June began the work in his IRAQ Suicide Attack Pillow Project: A memorial in 2007, after thinking long and hard about the more than 7,000 victims of over 900 Suicide Bomb attacks since the US entered Iraq on the 20 March 2003. As an artist who has long used embroidery as his medium, June thought that the perfect place to embroider the work was on pillows, ubiquitous objects that imply an inherent intimacy due to their size and nature. June established a coded system that allows him to imbue each pillow with many points of information. For example, pillows edged with narrow lace mean that more than ten victims died, with medium lace, more than 25 fatalities, wide lace, more than 50 victims, and more than 100 is designated with all three sizes of lace. Black lace denotes that the suicide bomber killed only himself. The front of each pillow informs the viewer whether it was an SUV, a car, a boat, or on the person, a belt, a backpack, or explosive vest, along with hash marks denoting the number of deaths that occurred in the incident. June believes that the installation of these pillows in a closed space will raise awareness of the astonishing numbers of deaths, including those of suicide bombers that have occurred since we entered Iraq.
This project is partially supported by a Community Arts Assistance Program grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, and a Special Assistance grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.
IT'S ALL ABOUT LIGHT
When FLATFILEgalleries opened in 2000, it was dedicated to extending opportunities to artists who had never had the chance to show their work. The gallery is still serious about that mission, and even devotes one of its five gallery spaces, DEBUT, to previously un-shown artists, while the other four regularly show artists as established at John Himmelfarb, Barbara Crane, and Michiko Itatani.
Robert Judelson’s show, It’s All About Light, opening on June 20 and running through August 22, is one such exhibition. Judelson, who is a partner in Bojer, was one of the founding members in JMB Real Estate, and Balcor. As well as being a Director of the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Bulls, and a variety of other boards, he is a self-described amateur photographer. Susan Aurinko, Owner/Director of FLATFILEgalleries thinks he’s being humble. “Bob has a great eye”, Aurinko says, “he sees things that other people miss; small interesting details, intriguing angles, scenes that go unnoticed by most onlookers.”
Judelson started taking photos 55 years ago, with a Kodak Brownie Camera that he begged his father for two years to buy. He soon “graduated” to an Ansco twin lens reflex camera, and then over the years, to a variety of other cameras – Hasselblad, Canon, Leica; cameras that don’t exactly fit with the term “amateur”. Judelson says that if he had been able to draw, which he isn’t, he would perhaps not have taken up photography. He also says he began to photograph because he has “always found light and its effect on scenery, people, and objects very intriguing”. Some of his favorite things to shoot are light’s effect on water, and golf courses, which he says are “light lovers playgrounds.” Judelson goes on to elaborate, “shadows long and short, long stemmed branches, weeds and flowers bending in the wind, reflecting all kinds of light.” For years he made images of swimming pools at night with the lights on, just for the reflection and refraction it caused.
Carrying a camera with him wherever he goes, Judelson never misses an opportunity to make an image of something that catches his eye. Whether it’s a sunset over the lake or spectators’ derrieres through the bleacher seats at a ballgame, sublime or ridiculous, Judelson’s camera is trained on something most of the time.
For Judelson’s “premiere”, Aurinko has chosen a wide assortment of images, because she finds that though Judelson’s vision is far reaching, there is an observational similarity to the way he sees whatever he photographs. There will be a trifold catalogue available. IT’S ALL ABOUT LIGHT will open with a reception on June 20, from 5-9 pm. Judelson will be there – he’ll be the guy with the camera around his neck!
FLATFILEgalleries is open from 11-6, Tuesday – Saturday and by appointment, and is a member of the Art Dealers Association of Chicago.
* Backstory in brief: In the fall of 2007 Bilal was invited by Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI) art department to be part of a visiting artists program called Art and Islam. Bilal submitted a proposal for a series of projects and a show at RPI. The centerpiece, called “The Night of Bush Capturing: Virtual Jihadi,” was a video game based on a video game called “ Quest for Saddam” which Al Qaeda then spun off to become a hunt for President Bush. Bilal hacked the game and inserted himself as a character who, after the death of his brother in the war, becomes a suicide bomber. That suicide bomber can be sent on a mission by the first shooter (the game player) to assassinate President Bush. Bilal’s intent was to raise awareness of how Iraqis have become vulnerable to recruitment from terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda; and how the US’s failure to protect Iraqis from violence has pushed them to the extreme. The RPI art department approved the proposals and was very supportive throughout the process. Everything went fine until Bilal’s arrival in late Feb. 2008, when the arts department posted Bilal’s press release for the show. Unfortunately, the Young Republican club at RPI didn’t understand the message of the project, and based solely on the press release, created a post on their website labeling Bilal a “terrorist,” the art department a “safe haven for terrorists,” and requesting the university president shut down the show. In the second week of Bilal’s artist residency, he was in the middle of a discussion with RPI students when three administrators arrived, told Professor Branda Miller they needed to take Bilal with them at once, and escorted the artist to another classroom. After half an hour of interrogation about the source and nature of the game, they said they were sent by school president Shirley Ann Jackson to determine whether the show was suitable for viewing. They also informed Bilal that FBI, CIA and Homeland Security officials would be present at his show and artist talk that evening.
The show and reception went off as planned, but the next day Bilal was informed that university president Jackson had suspended the show pending further review. After RPI’s censorship of Bilal’s work, Virtual Jihadi reopened at Troy, NY’s Sanctuary for Independent Media - for one day. Then the city shut down the Sanctuary, citing "code violations." |
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