June 27-August 9, 2008
Sugarcraft
Curated by Wynter Whiteside
Opening Reception June 27, 6-9 pm

Cherry Bodies, (Detail) by Nikki Renee Anderson

Since childhood, sugar has tantalized our senses of sight, smell and taste, offering a delicious form of comfort. Usually just empty calories, in Sugarcraft the sweet treat flavors a light yet substantive exploration of creation and consumption, whipped up by curator Wynter Whiteside and a large, diverse selection of artists from around the globe.

As Whiteside explains, “This exhibit is designed to playfully break boundaries, and to foster a dramatic interaction between artist, audience and the works themselves.”

Many of the participating artists represent the contemporary adoption of DIY
practices as a response to mass production and consumption, as well as the fading
line between contemporary fine art and fine craft. Using traditional or uncommon
materials, including refined sugar, all encourage indulgence in eye candy and a
playful conversation about the various aspects of taste. Casual viewers and art
connoisseurs alike are invited to engage with both established and emerging artists.
Among the painters, Matt Neff collects wedding cakes into a pile of rosettes and
bleeding colors and Isadora Stowe invokes a cake’s frosted layers as a personal
symbol of subtle inter-familial divisions. The prolific Tilly Strauss adds ice cream with a visceral piece from “A Month of Sundaes,” a series that came to life in public view.

Sweetness in texture and sculptural form is laid out smorgasbord style, including a
fur delicacy from Christine Marie Davis, James Jaxxa’s cupcake fake-outs in
Styrofoam and glass and a plush crying cake from My Paper Crane. Another
anthropomorphized pastry is made noisily cannibalistic in a video by Kathy
Santiago’s Everlasting Cakes. Contributing works that are partly or wholly edible
desserts, Whiteside and cake stylist Mark Seaman bring the sensual experience of
Sugarcraft full circle.

With The Candy Shoppe!, a miniature marketplace of items from exhibiting artists
and DIY crafters featured by Columbus-based show sponsor Wholly Craft!, and a
wide range of price points starting at seven dollars, the curator hopes to create an
irresistible temptation in gallery visitors to take a taste of the exhibition to go.

Mint Chocolate Cake Charm, by Itzel Garza

On Curator...
Wynter Whiteside is a graduate of the Columbus College of Art and Design Fine Arts Program, with independent studies in Contemporary Art, and study abroad at Burren College of Art, Ballyvaughn, Ireland. During her emergence from the Columbus gallery scene, Wynter undertook the curation of several uniquely themed, multimedia gallery exhibits, featuring both established and emerging artists, performers and musicians. The resulting critical acclaim, as well as Wynter's genuine passion for discovering new talent, has furthered her professional career as an independent curator.

Her current project, Sugarcraft, is an international exhibition that symphonizes the
worlds of Fine Art, Contemporary Fine Craft, and the Culinary Arts. Sugarcraft has evolved, from an invitation to guest curate into a travelling exhibit featuring over fifty artists. Sugarcraft will be hosted by Kasia Kay Art Projects, Chicago, IL in spring 2008, with other dates and venues pending.

Wynter is a featured artist in Sugarcraft. Her mixed media paint-based works have
been featured in galleries throughout the Midwest including (most recently) at Urban Institute of Contemporary Art (MI), the Carnegie (KY), Roy G. Biv Gallery (OH), Mahan Gallery (OH), and Ohio Art League. Her work has appeared in several juried exhibitions, most notably by Claudine Ise (Wexner Center for the Arts), Joe Houston (Columbus Museum of Art), and Manifest Gallery (for Whimsical Muse, 2007). Wynter's works have also appeared in various experimental, nonprofit venues.

Sunae Large Stickers, by Naoshi

Exhibiting Artists: Brandy Agnew, Nikki
Renee Anderson, Thomas Brouillette, Kris
Chau, Sally Curcio, Christine Marie Davis,
Stephanie Divencenzo, Bee Harris , James
Jaxxa, Jay Krevens , My Paper Crane,
Naoshi , Matt Neff, Kristin Pavelka,
Connie Richards, Kathy Santiago of
Everlasting Cakes, Mark Seaman of
Marked for Dessert, Lindsey Sedlar,
DeAnna Skedal, Amy Stevens, Isadora
Stowe, Tilly Strauss, Jen Thomas, Colleen
Toledano, Twinkie Chan!, Mirek Vlas,
Wynter Whiteside

Miniature and small artworks by:
Lindsey Ashpole *Edababe, Kandi Boda ,
Chrissy Brown, Polly Conway,
*Pollyannacowgirl, Megumi Cummings of
Sweet Honey Complex, Itzel Garza
*Mcdoofus, Christine Green *Minimaker,
April Hiraki-Morris *Pukashell, Mio Ishida
*Miomio, Briana Moore *Nest, Diane
Paone, Chiara Puppo *Aoisart, Elizabeth
Raine of Eat Me Not, Sonicim, Jennifer
Sternhagen *KungFuCowgirl, Alison
Tennant, Joan Burge Wallick
*CrashcanStudio, Emily-Kitturah
Westenhouser, Tracy Yip *Meowgu
Ong Xiao Yun

May 16—June 21, 2008
Maleonn: Days on the Cotton Candy (in the Main Gallery)
Brian Yates: you ruin everything (in the Project Room)
Atmospherics - A site-specific installation of 3D animated projections by the School of the Art Institute graduate and undergraduate students (Lower Level)
Opening reception May 16, 2008, 6-9 pm

Maleonn, Days on the Cotton Candy # 4, ink-jet print, 53 x 35 inches, 2006

Maleonn is both a photographer and a director, and these identities influence one another in his work. His photographs manifest his interests in manipulation and dramatic reappearance. Maleonn manipulates the objects he photographs, setting them in a created atmosphere, so they become an instrument to narrate the real beauty of life. His work is dramatic and cinematic; although the images are still, they reveal and expressive content and strong feeling by holding a mirror up to his viewers. He calls his work a “labyrinth, a huge one, lots of entrances, lots of exits as well. The viewers can walk around and realize the existence of themselves by getting through it.”

For Brian Yates, the present is awkwardness and uncertainty. This may be the one fixed feature of the present; the past meanwhile might hold charm while the future asserts unnamed potential. The imagery Yates uses has its origins in the nostalgic charm of his past, but there is none of the attachment and fondness that might be expected. Subjects are distant, half-remembered, full of false romanticism—but they are purposefully isolated, depopulated and stripped of their sentimental power to the point of impotence. This is the spot at which Yates finds these objects and locations at their most beautiful, with their most potential in their independence

Maleonn was born in Shanghai in 1972. He graduated from the Fine Art College of Shanghai University with a degree in graphic design. Until 2003 he worked as an art director and director of commercial films, and in 2004 he began his creative art practice. Since then he has exhibited widely, including in group shows in Australia, Canada, China, Holland, Germany, the US, and the UK, and in solo shows in Canada, China, and the US.

Brian Yates lives and works in Chicago. He graduated with an MFA from Ohio University in 1996, and since then has had numerous solo, two-person and group exhibitions in the US, including a 2007 solo show The New Anomie at kasia kay art projects gallery and a 2006 solo show, Future Perfect, at the Charles Allis Museum in Milwaukee.

April 4—May 10, 2008
Kim Curtis: Disruption (Main Gallery)
Andrea Loefke: Folding an orange fish out of newspaper (Project Room)

Opening reception April 4, 2008, 6-9 pm

Kim Curtis, Long Fall, oil on panel, 6’ x 5.5”, 2007 (detail)

Rarely do we have a pure visual experience.  We are continually being disrupted in our viewing of even the most mundane things.  Glare off reflective surfaces, people or things passing between us and the view - not to mention fleeting thoughts and noise - all act as interruptions to observation. Kim Curtis’ process of painting capitalizes on this same kind of interference. Because we viewers are so adept at quickly reconstructing these relationships into something recognizable, her use of disruption paired with the courtship of abstract shape and color pattern over realistic reference helps to avoid literalism in her “landscapes.”

Andrea Loefke creates installations where fictional narratives, dream worlds with anchors in the real, occupy a space between familiarity and fantasy. The environments are systems – overlapping worlds, groups and subgroups that are juxtaposed and united through scale, color, sound, form, space, and material. With the continuous pushing and pulling among the elements of this vocabulary, Loefke creates hierarchies of events and narratives, which compete and communicate. Loefke develops pathways for the viewer to travel, linking micro with macro worlds, encouraging notions of irritation, and implying movement of the objects, all asking the viewer to relate oneself to the objects and the situations they present. The viewer is asked to weave his or her own story and sensations, to believe and to wonder.

Kim Curtis comes to painting from a rich background in theatrical costume design.  She holds a degree from UC Berkeley in History of Art as well as in Painting from the California College of Arts and Crafts.  Both her costume work and her study of art have brought her to work extensively abroad, mainly in Italy and Germany.  Curtis has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at kasia kay art projects, the Illinois Institute for Research in the Humanities, and Isabelle Percy West Galley, Oakland; and in numerous group shows, including at kasia kay art projects, Chicago; Bleu Acier Gallery, Tampa, FL; TOJO Art Gallery, Chicago; Springfield Art Association, Springfield; and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago. Curtis also has works in various private collections.  She now paints in her studio in Urbana, IL.

Andrea Loefke, Folding an Orange Fish Out of Newspaper, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2008 (detail)

Andrea Loefke is a German born sculptor/installation artist with a Masters degree in Art and Physical Education from Leipzig, Germany (2000) and an MFA in Sculpture from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio (2003). She has had numerous solo exhibitions including at the Sculpture Center, and SPACES, Cleveland, 2004; PH Gallery, New York, 2005: “Ene mene miny mo”; Kiehle Gallery, 2006; PH Gallery, New York, NY and at Galerie Schuster, Frankfurt, Germany: “Das muss gefeiert werden! Mit Krokant, Kandiszucker, Kremhuetchen,..!”, 2007; Islip Art Museum, East Islip, NY; and Michael Steinberg Gallery, New York, NY. Numerous group shows and reviews in Sculpture Magazine (Dec, 2006, Vol. 25, p. 77-78), Brooklyn Rail (Vol. June 2005, p. 19) and in one of the main German newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine (Vol. 190, Thursday, August 17th, p.48) have accompanied the solo exhibitions throughout the past few years. Forthcoming is a feature in Sculpture Magazine, published in their 2008 March issue, “Once Upon A Time: A Conversation between Paul Black and Andrea Loefke”. During the summer months of this year, Loefke will be a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, NE.

Rachel Beach: Rabbit Hole (main gallery)
Lisa Caccioppoli: New Work (in the project room)
January 11 – February 16, 2008
Opening reception January 11, 2008, 6-9 pm

kasia kay art projects gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming show of new work by artists Rachel Beach and Lisa Caccioppoli.

Rachel Beach's multifaceted wood veneer and oil paint constructions are derived from details of art, architecture and design history. By manipulating the grammar of these visually familiar forms, Beach questions the construction of meaning in the visual world around us. Sitting somewhere between painting and sculpture, the pieces ask us to reflect on our own perception and to see the new in the familiar. Beach’s lyrical forms alternate between two and three dimensions, interspersing structural and formal logic with more traditional pictorial illusion. Meticulously crafted and thoroughly materialized, these quirky objects provide a play of opposites, jostling us between the ambiguous and the specific, the minimal and the exuberant, the optimistic and ominous.

Lisa Caccioppoli’s paintings act as navigational markers through her artistic practice, both for the artist and the audience. Investigation of the work tells us where she has already been and where she may go, often through a tension between oppositions of tidiness and messiness, order and bedlam, ritual and unpredictability, stability and volatility, neurosis and rationality, minutiae and scope. Her negotiation of these dialectics, as well as the relationship between creative spontaneity and premeditation, inform the final products of her theoretical process.

Lisa Caccioppoli, Untitled (Colored Ks), 20" x 20", oil on canvas, 2007

Rachel Beach was born in London, Canada in 1975. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2001 and BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax Canada in 1998. Her paintings and sculptures have been included in various exhibitions at US and Canadian venues including Mixed Greens and HQ galleries in NYC, The New Wight Gallery in Los Angeles and The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax Canada.  Beach’s works have been described as “tough, precise and disciplined with a hard edged cheeriness” and “steeped in a pleasant pluralism, bound by a shared material intelligence”.  Beach lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Lisa Caccioppoli was born in New Jersey in 1974. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002, and her BFA from the University of New Mexico in 1998. She has had solo shows at Project Row Houses in Houston, TX; ThreeWalls in Chicago, IL; and the ASA Gallery in Albuquerque, NM. Her work has also been included in various group shows across the US and in Germany including White Columns in New York, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas and Lothringer Dreizehn in Munich. Caccioppoli currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Please contact the gallery for additional information and high resolution images.

Winter Exposure - Gallery Artists Group Show (main gallery)

Jenny Kendler: Wunderkammer (project room)

November 30 - December 29, 2007

Opening reception November 30, 2007, 6-9 pm

kasia kay art projects gallery is proud to announce its upcoming exhibitions, Winter Exposure - a group show of the gallery artists, and Wunderkammer - an exhibition of new work by Chicago-based Jenny Kendler, which inaugurates the gallery’s FRESH series for emerging artists.

Winter Exposure will feature work by: Kristin Anderson, (art)n, Sandra Bermudez, Cameron Crawford, Kim Curtis, Kinga Czerska, Kim Dorland, Carla Gannis, D. Dominick Lombardi and Brian Yates.

Extinction Portraits, graphite on paper, black frame, ribbon, 2007

Jenny Kendler's work revolves around the theme of humans’ relationship with nature and the natural world. Her work explores how we perceive ourselves: either as animals that are part of our environment, or as beings that are somehow separate from and above nature. She is most interested in how these views affect our treatment and conception of our world and ourselves. Many of her pieces deal with the fall-out from the increasing schism between nature and culture while focusing on our estranged relationship with the other species that inhabit the space we consider our own.

In her show at kasia kay art projects gallery, Kendler re-imagines the Naturalist of the past through the lens of modern ecology and environmentalism. If the Naturalist of the 18th and 19th centuries sought to lay personal claim to the natural world and contain it in a specimen cabinet or book of prints, Kendler presents her room of intimate drawings and sculpture as a definitive counterpoint to the view of nature as something to be possessed. Her delicate work suggests instead that it is we who are possessed by nature.

In common with those early Naturalists, however, Kendler shares the delight in nature's myriad forms and countless wonders. Referencing specimen etchings, wunderkammern (wonder cabinets), and funerary portraits, Kendler creates her own collection, based not on ownership and categorization, but on connectivity and compassion for the natural world.

One series is graphite portraits of humans wearing animal masks, each one the face of an extinct species, each portrait drawn from a photograph taken in the year the animal became extinct. Shown in black oval frames, similar to those of 19th century funerary portraits, and hung with “prize� ribbons dyed black, these portraits question our complicity in the extinction of these species, and intimate that we may take upon ourselves these lost identities. A sculptural piece is presented, echoing the treasures of the wunderkammern, in which a deer skull under a bell-jar grows new life --- tiny hand-sculpted plants creep from bleached bone and curl towards the light, a suggestion that regeneration and new life too, are possible.

Please contact the gallery for additional information and high resolution images.

The Intelligent Design Project III October 12-November 24, 2007 Opening Reception October 12, 6—9 pm The Intelligent Design Project, a collaborative project initiated by D. Dominick Lombardi and Michael Zansky, is a traveling exhibition (Silvermine Guild Art Galleries, New Canaan, CT; kasia kay art projects, Chicago, IL; Detroit Museum of New Art, Detroit, MI) that employs the concept of intelligent design as its inspiration. The Intelligent Design Project, through its artists, attempts to realign historic and fictional events in an absurd and challenging way. Artists previously included in the exhibition include: Lucio Pozzi, Kiki Smith, Stig Eklund, Michael Rees, and Joan Wheeler. Participating artists at the kasia kay art projects gallery exhibition include: (art)n: Ellen Sandor and other (art)n's collaborating artists; Kristin Anderson, Catherine Forster, Carla Gannis, Joseph Kohnke, D. Dominick Lombardi, David A. Parker, Bradley Rubenstein, Victoria Scott, Brian Yates, Michael Zansky.
	Michael Zansky, Pursuit to Lyon, mixed media, 11.5" x 16", 2006.
	Michael Zansky, The Overlord Area, mixed media, 10.5" x 13", 2006.
	D. Dominick Lombardi, an installation of "Heads"; black and white India ink drawings and sculptures, 2006-07.
	(art)n: Thomas J. McLeish, Ellen Sandor, Fernando Orellana, Nichole Maury, Todd Margolis and Janine Fron, Townhouse Revisited, Interactive Installation (Materials - HP/3M print, Kodalith, Plexiglas), 25 x 40 x 10 inches, 1999.

D. Dominick Lombardi and Michael Zansky initiated this Intelligent Design Project. The limited scheduled sites are Silvermine Guild Arts Center in New Canaan, CT, the Museum of New Art in Pontiac, MI, and Kasia Kay Art Projects in Chicago, IL. IL.

Special thanks to Kasia Kay Art Projects for the loan of works by:

Warhol: Factory Now
September 7 – October 6, 2007
Opening reception: Friday, September 7, 2007, 6-9 pm

Pink Marilyn, Giclee Color Print, 36” X 24”, (C) 1964 by William John Kennedy	gelatin silver print (1979) by Anton Perich

On the twenty-year anniversary of Warhol’s death, kasia kay art projects gallery is pleased to present a group exhibition Warhol: Factory Now, which brings together works by well-known celebrity artists from Warhol's Factory: Ultra Violet, Steve Joester, William John Kennedy, Ivy Nicholson and Anton Perich, as well as a group of artists who have been influenced by Andy Warhol and artist’s pop-oeuvre, including: Kristin Anderson, Sandra Bermudez, Cynthia von Buhler, Amy Cohen Banker, Cameron Crawford and T. R. Ericsson.

Warhol: Factory Now will feature paintings, sculptures, film screenings, installations and photography by exhibiting artists. The works reflect on Andy Warhol’s spirit that shifted our perception of America’s consumerist culture, as well as on his concentration on fundamental human themes – the beauty, glamour and fame, the passing of time, and inevitability of death.  The exhibition will provide the visitor with a variety of artistic experiences that resonate on multiple sensory levels. Kasia Kay Art Projects gallery will be transformed to resemble Warhol's Factory with aluminum foil drapes, disco ball, and Sandra Bermudez’s Mylar balloons installation.

Ultra Violet, born Isabel Dufresne in France, was an active participant in Andy Warhol’s “Factory” from 1963 to 1971. Today she is an active artist who works in the tradition of avant-garde and her installation and multi-media work will be presented at Factory Now. Ultra Violet has been profoundly influenced by her close association with three most influential artists of the 20Th century art: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dali, and Andy Warhol, and she was at the forefront of the Pop Art Movement. Her bestselling and signed by the artist memoir “Famous for 15 Minutes, My Years with Andy Warhol” will be available for purchase at the gallery.

Ultra Violet will also present a VISIONARY INSTALLATION entitled "Till Death Do Us Part," featuring: THE ELECTRIC LOVESEAT, which questions the dichotomous duality/opposition of contemporary romance/ love in direct correlation to the "spider/fly" relationship of the executioner
/executed.

Ultra Violet has been featured in many solo exhibitions worldwide. Her work was included in the Audart exhibition commemorating the tenth anniversary of Warhol's death. In August - October 2004 she had an exhibit at the Washington County Museum of Fine Art.

Steve Joester is a British-born rock photographer and mixed media artist, currently living and working in New York City. Joester is known for his photos of rock icons such as Mick Jagger and Sting, and also caught Andy Warhol on film with Rob Halford of Judas Priest.  He translates these images into Warhol inspired Pop Art collages. In November of 2005 and 2006, Joester exhibited his work in a private show at the former Andy Warhol Factory located at 860 Broadway. Joester's photographs have been featured in numerous publications including Rolling Stone, Interview, Cream, and Cosmopolitan. Joester has worked with every major record label and created album sleeves and posters for musicians including Bob Marley, Ginger Baker, and Be Bop Delux. Currently, Steve Joester is working on a group of paintings for a solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in April of 2007 and Mr. MusicHead Rock Art Gallery, Hollywood, CA in May 2007.

William John Kennedy photographed Andy Warhol at The Factory and on-location beginning in 1964. Robert Indiana introduced Kennedy to Warhol after showing him photographs Kennedy took of him. Warhol invited Kennedy to The Factory to shoot him and his work where he eagerly acted out the creative scenes devised by Kennedy. Kennedy’s Warhol archives were forgotten and placed in storage at his New York City studio where they remained for many years while Kennedy achieved great success in the New York City advertising agency arena. Kennedy’s historic collection of Warhol photographs were recently brought out of storage and were exhibited at a Miami Art gallery for the very first time in 2004. Kennedy attended the Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts. The Warhol archives is just a segment of Kennedy’s extensive photographic archive. Kennedy lives in Miami, Florida and continues to shoot for his fine art collection.

Anton Perich is an inventor, painter, photographer, video artist and Night Magazine publisher. In the early Seventies he was a contributing photographer for Warhol’s Interview Magazine. He was born in Croatia, and in 1970 he moved to NYC. In the late Sixties he was in Paris active in the Lettrist Movement. In 1973 he created the first Underground Show on Manhattan Cable TV. In 1977 he invented and built the Electric Painting Machine, an early predecessor of inkjet technology. Perich is an early pioneer of Digital Art. In 1978 he started publishing Night.

Ivy Nicholson is mother to twins - Gunther Ethan Palmer and actress Penelope Palmer. Their father is John Palmer, who is often credited with the idea for the film, Empire, and also went on to direct/write the non-Warhol film, Ciao Manhattan. Ivy's son Gunther was a child model and teen actor in Paris and the lead vocalist of the alternative rock band, Mandrake, before going on to become the vocalist and percussionist in the band Stagefright. Ivy occasionally performed with her son's band in the late nineties. During November 2004 she returned to New York temporarily to direct a film - The Dead Life. She is currently creating films in New York City.

Kristin Anderson is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist living and working in Manhattan. Her work explores interrelations, interpretations and influences of the concepts of identity, human nature, context, perspective, the role of the image, and the role of the viewer.

Her photography, video, internet and installation work is exhibited internationally, including at Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art (MONA), MI; Herziliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; USF Contemporary Art Museum, FL; Lancaster Museum of Art, PA; Gigantic Art Space, NYC; Pablo's Birthday, NYC; LMCC, NYC; KMG Gallery, NYC; Rocket Projects, Miami; Collaborative Concepts, Beacon, NY; Nese Alpan Gallery, NY; and art events in Japan, Australia, The Netherlands and Russia. Her work is in the collection of The Tate Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The New York Public Library, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Rhode Island School of Design and others. Anderson is on the advisory board for NURTUREart Non-Profit, Inc. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Blue Andy, mixed media on paper (2007) by Steve Joester	Mickey (Michelangelo series), mixed media (2006) by Ultra Violet

Amy Cohen Banker has been around the New York and international art scene for over twenty years. Banker admires Warhol's strong use of portrait as landscape, his Involvement with repetition and current events as subject matter. Her most recent acting work is in Ivy Nicholson's "The Dead Life" which also includes her daughter Meredith Banker as another character. Amy also worked with Ultra Violet on a Delaware County Museum exhibition.  Amy Banker has been featured in many solo and group shows in the U.S. and beyond.

Using the mediums of photography, digital prints, video installation, and sculpture, Sandra Bermudez delves into issues of gender, explores the conventions associated with love and sex, and presents the paradoxes of human nature in dealing with these very primal emotions. In her latest work, Sandra Bermudez reflects on cultural values of our pop-culture oriented society, and an accompanying loss of selfhood in its main-stream. In her letter-shaped Mylar balloons installations, Sandra Bermudez utilizes them as ephemeral, mobile sculptures. With the use of text she makes an analogy between balloons and interpersonal relationships.

Cynthia von Buhler is an internationally exhibiting visual artist, illustrator, children's book author, and performer living in New York City. Von Buhler uses traditional as well as unconventional media: painting, sculpture, performance, video projection, installation, living fauna, collage, photography, human detritus, and electronic audio. In March 2006, Art & Antiques named von Buhler as "one of the top contemporary surrealists", however, she has also been linked to the Fluxus movement. Von Buhler's illustrations have appeared in more than a thousand magazines, books, publications, billboards, and CDs.  Howard Stern owns a portrait of himself painted by von Buhler, while Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, bought von Buhler’s portraits of Madonna and Jimi Hendrix, both of which were featured in his magazine. Von Buhler's work is also in hundreds of private and public collections all over the world. Von Buhler’s solo exhibit, Flora, Fauna, and Flame, is currently held at The Staten Island Museum of Arts & Science from April – June 2007.

Cameron Crawford is an emerging and Chicago-based artist who makes sculptures out of commonplace things – cups, newspapers, electric fans, poison. The sculptures do not offer transformation and nothing transcends; they depict commonplace things – boxes, chairs, doorstops, ointment. Cups are stuck as cups, the poison stays poisonous.
Cameron Crawford graduated with BFA from the School of Art Institute in 2006. His work was exhibited in one solo show and in several group exhibitions.

T. R. Ericsson is a multi-media artist based in New York. He publishes bi-annually a limited edition of art serial called Thirst Magazine. Some issues include editions of screen prints. The aesthetics of screen printing and advertising are a nod to Andy Warhol, for whom appropriating existing images was standard practice.  Ericsson will create an edition of Thirst (no.12) for the exhibition.

Thirst began in 2001, appearing in New York at bookstores and museum shops including The New Museum, St. Mark’s Books and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. In 2004 the artist Maurizio Cattellan purchased issues of Thirst Magazine and reproduced one of the page designs in his magazine made from magazines, Permanent Food. In 2006, a documentary film, which had formed a part of Thirst no. 8, The Year of the Motorcycle, (an installation for The Progressive Art Collection) was shown at The Cleveland International Film Festival. Editions of Thirst Magazine have been included in The Rockefeller Libraries Serials Department, The Ingalls Library at The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Joan Flasch Artists Book Collection in Chicago.

Warhol: Factory Now was inspired by Cynthia von Buhler's curatorial project, Andy Warhol: In His Wake, which was on view at he Carrozzini von Buhler Gallery, NY, Feb. 22 - March 14, 2007.

Notions of Wilderness
curated by Catherine Forster of LiveBox

June 1-July 28, 2007
Opening Reception June 1st,   6-9 pm

Exhibiting Artists:
Adam Chapman
Kim Curtis
Kim Dorland
Howard Fonda
Carla Gannis
Claudia Hart
Jodie Jacobi
Heather Lyon
Chris Oakley
Julia Oldham
Dominika Skutnik
(art)n collaboration Gerhard Mantz, Ellen Sandor, and Chris Kemp

The word wilderness is derived from the notion of wildness; uncultivated, uninhabited, in other words without human modification. The social and political realities of “nature verses economics” makes defining wilderness in the 21st Century ever more elusive. What is “wild”, what can be called “wilderness”, what is the measure of human “influence” that defines wildness?

Conceptions of wilderness have been important subjects for visual artists throughout history. Notions of Wilderness includes artists deploying multiple mediums to uncover their context of wildness.

Chris Oakley’s “Sight/Seeing video installation explores the commodification of the wild as typified in the modern safari (i.e. “seeing” through a camcorder viewfinder, through the windscreen of a bus)
Adam Chapman’s new media installation “Legible Nature: Fate is an Afterthought”, models the flight patterns and physical movements of Atlantic Grey Gulls, which are altered to periodically converge and form letters. These letters slowly spell out poems from the Manyoshu, 8th century Japanese poems.
Claudia Hart's Timegarden" is a one-hour 3D animation. The second in a series of "Timegardens"; a camera revolves 360º from the center of a circular walled garden, like a clock. Four time spans are represented simultaneously. Flowerbeds cycle from spring to fall; trees cycle from spring to winter, and the dome of the sky moves from dawn to dusk.
Howard Fonda’s tree paintings are ambiguous; are they scenes of a bleak winter or the aftermath of some human intervention? They seem to ponder why we both revere nature and taint it?
Julia Oldham translates invertebrate rituals into choreography that she performs and films. The resulting performance videos are concerned with playful anthropomorphization, using dance to bridge species
Heather Lyon Installation
Carla Gannis Digital Photography
Kim Curtis Paintings
Kim Dorland Paintings
Dominika Skutnik Sculpture
Jodie Jacobi Paintings

From Poland?
April 5 - May 26, 2007
a group show of young Polish artists
Opening reception: April 13, 6-9 pm

From Poland? is an attempt to answer questions about the sources of contemporary Polish art’s identity by presenting various artistic methods which define it. Focused on young Polish artists and on the ways of perceiving “Polishness” in the context of ongoing globalization, place, and space in which it is created, the exhibition will also address the questions to what degree the consciousness of the authors and recipients of the visual arts changes the ethnic narration and what delineates the borders of its territorial identity.

Jaroslaw Fliciński
End of Summer
Alkyd enamel, MDF, 30 x 30 cm, 2004

Jaroslaw Fliciński is a painter of large-scale canvases with repeated motifs of lines, circles, and stripes or stenciled patterns, which are usually applied as simple geometrical forms. Formal limits imposed by the medium itself have never been a real hindrance for him, often he will exceed the frame of the canvas towards space and paint directly on walls or specially constructed elements which compose the architecture of the exhibition, or he will use light, sound, photography or video. His thinking in the categories of a given site and its spatial and architectural conditions disrupts the neutrality of exhibition space and encourages our perception to go beyond a Minimalist lesson of sensitivity.

Robert Maciejuk
Untitled
oil on canvas, 2005

Robert Maciejuk belongs to a group of the most outstanding Polish painters. In his latest work he borrows images from books, postcards, and old music postcards. His method of almost literal transposition to canvas is connected with the question of the rhetoric of representation. In the early 1990s his painting was determined by set systems of geometric forms. Later the sign - an ideogram borrowed from the world of contemporary civilization -was central to his work. Impersonal and neutral, painted signs were juxtaposed and accumulated in cycles, as in his paintings of aircraft signs series displayed as large panels.

Tomasz Partyka
Mars Black
acrylic on canvas, 50x50 cm, 2006

Tomasz Partyka is the youngest artist in the “From Poland?” group. For him painting is a kind of notation, a way of recording observations in a short and often very playful manner. His canvasses are covered with inscriptions that sometimes are impossible to read and force the reading into a visual experience. In the series of his paintings presented in the exhibition, Partyka’s sources of inspiration are linguistic paradoxes, famous couples of twins; he compares the surnames carried by popular figures with their true surnames that sound quite impersonal and calls attention to the phenomenon of the popularity of comics and film characters.

Dominika Skutnik
Reconstruction
Vintage porcelain, polymer clay, 2006

Although trained as a painter, Dominika Skutnik has mostly been creating installations. She has been interested in structures which consist of equally important visible and invisible parts. ReConstruction consists of several individual old and broken collectable porcelain figurines. Missing parts have been re-constructed from polymer clay and added to each sculpture so they no longer create any logical whole, instead each reconstruction is abstract, bad form, as if the work was unskilled. In her ORWO series, she uses a popular brand of photographic negatives and transparencies from Eastern-German, ORWO brand, which was the favorite medium for educational reproductions, specifically for art history. For Skutnik the aged and discolored slides have a special "childhood" feel, a sensation when one tries (mentally) to peel off the discolored layer and guess what the real colours, real size, and real impact were.

Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went
From the Viaducts series
     Photograph
     35 x 65 inches, 2006

Alicja Karska and Aleksandra Went belong to a group of emerging Polish artists. They work together as authors of videos and films which combine real scenes with hallucinatory narrative. Working around the urban context the artists enter suburban areas and transform them into a dream-like mental space in an uncertain time frame . Their film Spatial Planning and Organisation was titled after the name of their studies faculty at Academy of Fine Arts, where they graduated in 2003. Making reference to modern ideology they comment on its persistence in contemporary life. Their vision of functionality approaches the absurd and resides within utopia. The idea of functionality inherent in contemporary thought also appears to be a psychological pressure.

Kim Curtis: DRIVE
April 5 —May 26, 2006
Opening reception: Friday, April 13, 2007, 6-9 pm

Whether it is farmland under January ice, oceans of corn and soy in August, the turned, black Earth of December, or seas of Prairie Grass in July, the vast Illinois countryside can seem monotonous.

Climb into a car however, and you have the kinetic feedback of constant, repetitive pattern; geometry, color and light quickly shifting along these vast areas of open space. Machinery and granaries, ice beds and their sky’s reflection all compete for the brain’s attention as it quickly processes the simultaneous input of abstractions. We understand too quickly and lose the chance to revel in nameless shapes, foreign color and reiterating pattern.

The paintings in Kim Curtis’s new show DRIVE at kasia kay art projects will investigate and highlight these moving abstractions, bringing to light the elements of nature that are so easily passed by and overlooked.

Kim Curtis comes to painting from a rich background in theatrical costume design. She holds a degree from UC Berkeley in History of Art as well as in Painting from the California College of Arts and Crafts. Both her costume work and her study of art have brought her to work extensively abroad, mainly in Italy and Germany. Curtis has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions at kasia kay art projects, the Illinois Institute for Research in the Humanities, and Isabelle Percy West Galley, Oakland; and in numerous group shows, including at kasia kay art projects, Chicago; Bleu Acier Gallery, Tampa, FL; TOJO Art Gallery, Chicago; Springfield Art Association, Springfield; and Woman Made Gallery, Chicago. Curtis also has works in private collections. She now paints in her studio in Urbana, IL.

February 23, 2007

Brian Yates: The New Anomie & Kinga Czerska: New Works
February 23— March 31, 2007
Opening reception: March 2, 2007 , 6-9 pm
kasia kay art projects gallery

CHICAGO, IL : kasia kay art projects gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of new work by artists Brian Yates and Kinga Czerska. Both artists’ work is abstract and lyrical, while continually making reference to some kind of reality, whether physical or psychological.

Brian Yates uses old player piano rolls in his paintings and sculptures. The rolls reference a grand romantic past, but are brought sharply into the present by their manipulation into objects that look eerily like bombs or explosives. His work contains elements of the unexpected and an apprehension which resides in a wider context of the contemporary American present.

Brian Yates
Welcome to an Occupation
Found objects and mixed media, 2006

Kinga Czerska’s paintings are both beautifully made objects and complex investigations of the intricate webs of patterns that make up our structured environments. Pulling influences from architecture, engineering, and science, she uses rhythm and contrast to play with the flow of a straight line and the fluidity of usually rigid elements. By simultaneously building up an intricately layered surface and using simple lines and colors, Czerska manages to walk a tenuous line between an overwhelming complexity of pattern and a playful lightness of form.

Kinga Czerska
Aurora
Acrylic on wood panel, 30" x 30" x 2", 2006

January 12, 2007

David A. Parker: On and Off the Grid at kasia kay art projects gallery
January 12—February 17, 2007,
Opening Reception January 12, 6—9 pm
kasia kay art projects gallery,
1044 W Fulton Market St. Chicago, IL 60607

David A. Parker uses humor, pathos and satire to comment on daily life and to raise a call for alternative thinking. Since relocating to suburbia in 2004, he has created works based on his own life that address larger social issues of control, conformity, and complacency. His photographs, sculpture and video works engage the uneasy tensions between acceptance and yearning, certainty and doubt, freedom and confinement.

In his “Escape Strategy Series” of large-scale photographs, Parker plays a character who strives to leave behind the sameness of tract housing and featureless landscape. His method: to use a trampoline to launch himself skyward, Superman-like, and soar off for parts unknown. The images are uplifting; at the same time, the doomed nature of this enterprise is pathetically clear. Another image from the series strikes a darker note. In a shot of the artist’s backyard, we see a landscape sectioned off by fences, neat lawns and car dealerships; in the foreground is what appears to be a hidden entrance to an underground tunnel, or perhaps to a grave; radically different forms of exit, in either case.

“Circuit” is a participatory sculpture made from a pocket billiard table that was discarded in Parker’s neighborhood. Starting with the ball-return system of channels that is normally unseen, he rebuilt the pool table, and invites people to run balls through the tracks. The balls’ movement in and out of play, above and below the visual plane, is offered as a metaphoric model for considering our own transit between this world and the next.

For Parker, aspects of modern life can give over to numbing routine and mental passivity. In response, he wants his works to implant notions of fantasy, mischief and subversion in the mind of the viewer in order to spur the imagination to envision something better. On and Off the Grid is his first solo exhibition.

David A. Parker is a Chicago-area artist whose conceptually-based work spans all media. He studied comparative literature at Cornell University and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at numerous venues in the US, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and Macalester College in St. Paul, MN; currently, he is planning a 4-person exhibition to travel to Japan, Korea and China in summer 2007.

kasia kay art projects gallery represents contemporary art in a wide cultural context. The gallery shows works from both national and international artists and highlights new tendencies in the visual arts. One of the KKAP intentions is to incorporate pivotal artwork into diverse public arenas while simultaneously supporting the vision of contemporary artists. The gallery’s program is comprised of established and upcoming artists working in a variety of media, gallery exhibitions and curatorial projects, as well as one-time, site-specific installations, which often take place in public space environments. By promoting a diverse group of artists, the gallery wishes to create a continuous dialogue with both a local and global community.

December 1, 2006

Kim Dorland: The Edge of Town
and
Holiday Art Sale in the Project Room

opening reception, Friday, December 1, 6-9, 2006
kasia kay art projects gallery
1044 W Fulton Market St. Chicago

exhibition dates: December 1, 2006 – January 28, 2007
gallery hours: Wednesday - Friday 11 - 5:30, Saturday 11 - 5
Tuesday by appointment

kasia kay art projects gallery is proud to announce its upcoming show of new work by Kim Dorland in one of the painter's primary solo shows in the U.S. Kim Dorland's paintings push the boundaries of representation while thematically exploring memory, nostalgia, and the psychology of the outsider. Teenagers populate his paintings, often smoking, drinking and partying around bonfires in the woods. The gatherings are not buoyant or celebratory, however, but decidedly melancholy. Even in groups, the figures seem isolated and lonely. The scenes are both eerie and nostalgic; Dorland pulls inspiration from memories of his own adolescence and specifically the landscapes he occupied while growing up in Alberta, Canada. The painted landscape is a mirror of his painted figures; their psychological and emotional states are reflected in their chaotic or run-down surroundings. Dorland under-paints with glaring fluorescent acrylic colors which radiate out from behind his heavily applied oil painting. Aggressive impasto brushwork and slashes of thick paint become forests, fires and rubbish under train trestles. Faces peering out from hooded sweatshirts are created using globs of paint. Close inspection of figures which seem normal at first glance reveals extra arms or missing legs. Dorland's paintings play with both the expectation of the viewer and the conventions of modern figure and landscape painting.

Kim Dorland lives and works in Toronto. He holds an MFA from York University in Toronto and has exhibited work in shows in Canada, the U.S. and Italy. In 2006 he received an Ontario Arts Council Emerging Visual Artists Awards Grant.

October 20, 2006

Carla Gannis: Everything that Rises Must Converge
Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery
October 20-November 25, 2006
Opening reception Friday, October 20, 6-9 pm

Inspired by a same titled collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, Carla Gannis’s first solo exhibition at Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery explores themes of "Southern Gothic", scrutinizing issues of race, class, and otherness with a darkly absurdist and tragicomic prose. Gannis, a native of the southern United States, creates digital paintings, drawings, and video works that are rooted in a storytelling tradition-embracing allusion, shunning the didactic, and revealing universal archetypes and patterns of human behavior.

October 21, 2006

This Store Too: Marion Wilson
October 21-22, 2006, 12-4 pm

In conjunction with the Fulton Market Arts Walk and Chicago Artists Month, kkap gallery presents This Store Too, a collaboration project between artist Marion Wilson and Chicago homeless veterans. This "store" is a home-made street vendors' cart, what Wilson calls "a cross between a hot dog stand and a boutique", from which the artist sells items she has bartered and collaborated on with the homeless. All decisions about marketing and pricing are made in conjunction with her collaborators, and a percentage of the profits are donated back to the local homeless program. In Chicago, the works made respond to the question, "What advice would you give somebody who is about to go into war?"

This Store Too at kasia kay art projects gallery is part of Chicago Artists Month, the eleventh annual celebration of Chicago’s vibrant visual art community. In October, 250 exhibitions of emerging and established artists, openings, demonstrations, tours, open studios and neighborhood art walks take place at galleries, cultural centers and arts buildings throughout the city. For further information, call 312/744-6630 or visit www.chicagoartistsmonth.org. The Sara Lee Foundation is the lead corporate sponsor of Chicago Artists Month 2006. Additional support is provided by the Chicago Office of Tourism and Podmajersky, Inc. Chicago Artists Month is coordinated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

October 18, 2006

LiveBox Gallery presents
Unfolding Space: Julieta Aguilere
October 18-November 25, 2006
Opening night October 21st
At kasia kay art projects gallery, lover level

Inspired by a same titled collection of Flannery O'Connor's short stories, Carla Gannis’s first solo exhibition at Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery explores themes of "Southern Gothic", scrutinizing issues of race, class, and otherness with a darkly absurdist and tragicomic prose. Gannis, a native of the southern United States, creates digital paintings, drawings, and video works that are rooted in a storytelling tradition-embracing allusion, shunning the didactic, and revealing universal archetypes and patterns of human behavior.