Inside\Within

Marc Fischer’s Archived Ephemera 

Published June, 2017

Marc’s practice deals in archives, excavating the contents of those found both in public libraries and the basement collections of acquaintances’ homes. His interest in private collections comes from the meticulous obsession that informs an individual’s collecting, and the knowledge attached to patient research rather than classical training. For our interview we met Marc at the Harold Washington Library, where he invited us to explore how he examines the public resource’s vintage newspaper microfilm, obscure periodicals, and rotating displays in order to gather content for his ever-growing publication series.

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Udita Upadhyaya: Deconstructing Loss

Published June, 2017

Udita uses her body as a conduit to tell the many stories that travel through it, working with textile, drawing, and performance to express narratives encountered within. Trained in Vipassana meditation, her work has a quiet patience. For her current untitled project, Udita delicately harvests gold thread woven into a collection of frayed and discarded saris, repurposing the removed material as handmade rope. Like this project, many of her works address grief, Udita teaching her hands to lose each textile they actively deconstruct.

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Ellen Nielsen’s Decorative Power

Published June, 2017

Ellen works from a studio inside of her apartment, surrounded by thread, fake flowers, and costumes made both for herself and other artists. Through staged acts she embodies decorative symbols and innocent icons, taking the form of a flower, bunny, or baby in order to highlight topics such as sexism and sexual objectification through stand-up comedy and strip routines. Interested in ornamentation and its potential for aggression, Ellen also produces sculptural work that is highly decorative, forming embroidered banners with complicated motifs and pom poms that aim to destroy corporate architecture.

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Margot Bergman’s Internal Other

Published April, 2016

Previously collaborating with anonymous makers of discarded art, Margot has recently begun to work alone with her gestures, allowing traces of what she learned while painting with others to continue to influence her own vocabulary. These larger works, which focus on female images, emotionally link broad paint strokes with manic scribbles. The disparate gestures create a dichotomy within each subject’s face, conjuring an energetic aura that extends beyond the canvas’s edge.

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Alex Bradley Cohen’s Community-Culled Portraiture

Published February, 2016

Painting from the subjects that surround him, Alex creates portraits of his family and longtime friends— bright works that highlight his relationships in both the past and present. His paintings often take on an autobiographical quality, tracing personal stories from childhood memories to getting his GED. Alex often places himself within a work’s scene, painting multiple versions to represent different aspects of his psyche. Although deeply engaged with painting, he is also an active installation artist, desiring the balance of community-engaged art to his solitary studio time.

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Erin Washington’s Porous Palimpsests

Published February, 2016

Utilizing material as content, Erin produces works on handmade chalkboards with ephemeral materials such as coffee, chalk, and dust. Her works claim the labels of both painting and drawing as she continuously adds and erases marks on top of the abstract pieces. This layering express the history of each work’s construction, leaving evidence of prior marks and feelings within the porous materials. Inspired by the institution in which she works, Erin often pulls imagery from sculptures found in the Art Institute of Chicago, placing ancient Greek pieces like Head of Aphrodite onto her chalk-based works.

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Jason Lazarus: Image as Footnote

Published July, 2015

Jason uses image to build community around certain historical events and moments, often involving his subjects directly in the process of each of his ongoing projects. Understanding the social nature of photography, Jason has moved beyond pure documentation, layering his images with meaning that can either be digested or taken at face value. Looking outside the typical frame, Jason observes subjects from all angles, creating alternate ways of looking, even turning the picture to the wall to make the image something that can only be envisioned.

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Jennifer Reeder's Unremarkable Utopias

Published May, 2015

Hailing from Columbus, Jennifer writes and directs films about places that are overlooked, the day-to-day scenes otherwise dismissed as filler. Injecting these stories with feminism, telekinesis, and multiple sub-plots, she creates worlds in which teen girls are often the stars, underdogs reigning as leads.

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Lyndsey Marko's Tropical-Tinted Now

Published March, 2015

Inspired by cinematic moments, her personal history, and bright florescent accents, Lyndsey paints abstract images of tropical scenes that call forth her childhood in Florida. Previously painting straight from memory as a way to transcribe the last traces of her grandparents’ home, Lyndsey has moved to painting more abstractly, using a mix of oil and spray paint to produce works that play into a common nostalgia.

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Lise Haller Baggesen's Disco Feminism

Published February, 2015

Lise creates work that not only address motherhood and its feminist components, but act as a mother through its execution and content. Her practice focuses on staking out a territory for mothering in contemporary discourse, balancing her vibrant, tented environment with the printed text of her piece Mothernism—a disco beat serving as the lyrical and aesthetic inspiration.

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Soo Shin: Reflecting the Inner Void

Published February, 2015

Soo builds sculptures from found pieces of wood and metal, the natural wear of the discarded objects creating an approachability for the viewer. Pointing towards the inseparable nature of struggle and faith, Soo’s pieces often have a slight reflective quality, allowing one’s body to complete the sculpture as they stare at themselves through the dark, resin-coated abyss.

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Chelsea Culp's Memory-Tied Talismans

Published December, 2014

Arranged from overlooked memories, Chelsea’s paintings tap into the undocumented moments of her recent past, turning them into fantasy on canvas. Often distracted by images imprinted on her mind, Chelsea chooses to paint the images instead, removing them from her consciousness so her focus remains on her environmental paintings and cement-dipped sculptures.

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Ivan LOZANO's Polysemic Scars

Published October, 2014

Ivan’s studio houses eyes, faces, and limbs roughly cut without attention to exact detail. The parts, culled from vintage and contemporary gay pornography, serve as bookmarks to the pornography’s history while also imitating similar shapes of Mexican milagros. With a background in experimental film Ivan has moved towards physically editing his work, creating animations that appear computer-edited rather than produced entirely by hand.

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Eric Fleischauer: The Stability of Ephemeral Media

Published May, 2014

Eric places his work in two realms—moving and still images accessed both online and in-person. Intrigued by dying and dead media, he plays with the non-literal use of past media objects and meshes old forms of media production with the new.

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Assaf Evron's Overlooked Aesthetic

Published April, 2014

Assaf is an Israeli artist and former photojournalist who traded his motorcycle for an art practice. Assaf’s studio is located in the Hyde Park Art Center, a large second floor studio packed with sculptures layered from door to window, a byproduct of his recent move from 2D to 3D.

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