yours truly

I moved back to California on September 1st and now I live within biking distance to the beach and the Redwoods and I have a cool new job. Life is good.

And while I do miss the people in Chicago, I have to admit that I don’t miss the city much. It’s a wonderful city, really, but I guess I’m just not city folk. Five years in Chicago altogether. I don’t think that I will live there again.

I noticed on Gaper’s Block that this David Schalliol print is available (and affordable) through a project called Wall Blank for a limited time. This is the first I’ve heard of Wall Blank, but I do really like this series by Schalliol, a Chicago photographer whose work can also be seen in Catherine Edelman’s Gallery’s Chicago Project. I guess this print will be unavailable after next Thursday, dating this post rather quickly — but I’ll be interested to see what other prints they put up for sale in the future.

Not a very bloggy summer. More of a summer for sweaters and training for marathons.

When summer begins, I become sad. It would seem that the luminosity, even if it is acrid, of summer hours should delight someone who doesn’t know who he is. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t delight me. There is too sharp a contrast between external life, which overflows, and what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think — the perennially unburied body of my sensations.

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

It’s time to get outside and start bothering people on the street for portraits. So that’s what I did today. See more portraits as I add them here.

Hyde Park Art Center, May 10, 3-5

At the NEXT Art Fair yesterday, I listened to a talk on alternative spaces for art given by Allison Peters from Hyde Park Art Center, Jen Bekman, Heather Hubbs from NADA, and Britton Bertran, along with the unexpected and much appreciated addition of a local art collective known as Law Office and founder of FGA (Fucking Good Art), Pedro Velez, who both had some entertaining anecdotes about making art and money (and refusing to make money) in Chicago.

I have this habit of serendipitously arriving at events or meeting people who relate to something taking place about a week ahead in my life — Last weekend, we accidentally drank beer with a guy who worked at the office where Greg would be interviewing this week for a job. This weekend, I found myself listening to a talk that schooled me a little in local alternative art spaces and pointed to the show this next weekend at Hyde Park Art Center, Artists Run Chicago, that harkens back to the now discontinued Stray Show, an annual fair for alternative galleries — I had already been planning on attending this show as my brother’s work once again makes an appearance in Chicago, being represented by local gallery, devening projects + editions.

Overall, NEXT and Artropolis was overwhelming, as it was last year, but I also felt underwhelmed by the work there. It felt loose and haphazard, but also a little more cramped. And frankly, it wasn’t as cool-looking, in general. The art just wasn’t as pretty. I didn’t walk out of there feeling that anything had made a big impression, intellectually or aesthetically.

However, I’m more hopeful about the Hyde Park Art Center show this weekend, so that’s where I’ll be on Sunday!

from Barrio

S. Prairie Ave in Bronzeville - photo by Micah Marty

I picked up this enormous book from the 6th floor of the Harold Washington Library last week called City 2000. There are a lot of photography books on that floor, the Social Science and History Division of the library, because obviously, photography sits on the fence between art and documentation: One man’s portrait is another man’s photojournalism… and it can often be the same man.

Anyway, this book is just what I’m interested in right now, Chicago-based photography. The strange thing about living in Chicago is that on a national scale Chicago seems to be ignored in a large part, overshadowed by N.Y. and L.A. and other smaller cities that have interesting scenes. The things that are distinctly Chicago in nature can often produce an aesthetic not unlike that of New York, especially in street photography and architectural photography. The two cities look a lot alike in the brick.

City 2000 was a project executed in the year 2000 (the year of all-Flash websites) to document Chicago at that point in history by some of its notable photographers. There are 199 photographs in the book by 39 photographers. There’s also text provided by 15 authors regarding the project and regarding the city. The corresponding archive on UIC’s library website includes work from over 200 photographers that participated in the project, including some audio and video files, that documents every neighborhood in Chicago in some way (use the search field to find places that interest you!). That’s where I was able to find a copy of this photo, which serves as a cover to the book.

I love this photo by Micah Marty, because it captures something I wanted to capture about the South Side of Chicago - those open spaces next to buildings that were clearly built for compact architecture. Three-flats like this are usually seen built into a neatly-packed row of three-flats with small gangways in between each building, and that kind of neighborhood justifies their narrow layouts and cramped bedrooms (that often barely fit a bed). But take away that context and you happen upon this stark scene — the drastic lines of the residence demand your attention, and you can’t help but kind of daydream about what goes on in the empty lot on the corner. Often there are foot paths carved into the grass that you can see from the elevated train, people wearing away the grass to make the walk around the corner less square.

Carl Heldmann talks with Lou Manfredini

Here’s the follow-up to my photo post about going with my dad to do a taping of HouseSmarts TV to talk about his book Be Your Own House Contractor. House Smarts has updated their website with the segment from my dad’s interview and it’s totally neat!

right to left: The "gloomily sooty" Monadnock building, the Fisher Building reflected, Metropolitan Correctional Facility

“Like the difference between Communion and communion, between obligatory ritual and the experience of oneness, there is a vast distinction: there’s standing in front of the Monadnock with Bach’s book, and then there’s coming up from the subway to find the Monadnock on your left, gloomily sooty and magnificent.”

Peter Bacon Hales in his introductory essay to Bob Thall’s The Perfect City

If you’re in the Chicago area this Sunday, please stop by 3039 West Carroll between 4 and 7 for the opening reception of Christopher Michlig’s  solo exhibition at Devening Projects + Editions.

Chris is my brother-in-law and has gotten really great press over the last year, including a review in Artforum. He will be at the reception, and he’s super nice and articulate about his work. So, go!

Here’s the gallery write-up:

devening projects + editions is pleased to present Christopher Michlig: MAN MAN MAN in his first solo exhibition in Chicago featuring new collages and a sculpture installation. Made from reconstituted fluorescent street posters whose advertised events have passed, the collages in MAN MAN MAN cut away all but one detail of the publicized occasion. The collages produce a constellation of fragmented information that oscillates between direct communication and abstraction. Whereas each individual poster previously conveyed concrete information relevant to a particular event, the new collages collectively insinuate a woolly, indefinite event.

Accompanying the collages is a group of sculptures that dissemble and reform the structures of public communication: kiosks, street signs, etc. Redacted panels atop active supports, toppled signposts, jumbled letterforms, and crumpled paper bases lay bare the potential of these forms to shift the function of language from the communicative to the poetic.

Christopher Michlig is based in Los Angeles and works in a variety media including video. Michlig was featured in the exhibition Half-Life, curated by Thomas Solomon at LACE and Yellow, curated by Lia Trinka-Browner at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in 2008. Michlig was recently part of group exhibitions at devening projects + editions, CSLA Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles and 1000 Eventi Gallery, Milan. Michlig’s solo debut at Jail Gallery, Los Angeles, was reviewed by Jan Tumlir in the May 2008 issue of ARTFORUM.

Copyright © 2009 Theresa Lynn

I am completely enchanted with this set of photos by simple moth on flickr. I could stare at these photos all day.

This won’t come as a surprise to some readers, but Greg & I just started a foodblog about our eating habits and research and health in general, because aside from photography and websites, respectively, those topics are what we spend a lot of time researching and talking about. I came up with the name The Casual Vegan, because it describes what we are in a few words. In more than a few words, we eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet and generally do not eat meat or dairy, but we are not strict vegans. We’re terribly passionate about things like whole grains and the error of a daily diet of meat and dairy, and rather than having to explain this extemporaneously in social situations and annoy friends endlessly, it’s nice to have a website that we can point to and say, Uhh, just go there and read our articles. So, uh, go there and read our articles.

© Joe Kirschling

My neighborhood, aka Jackowo, according to Wikipedia. I’ve never heard my Polish-speaking friend, who also lives here, mention it having a different name. This is a neighborhood in Chicago that even long-time Chicago residents have never heard of, so I tell everyone that I live in the adjacent neighborhood.

The red swing has been disassembled in the unprofessional sense of the word. The ropes are still there, dangling from the beam. Pictures forthcoming if my Holga worked this morning on the way to work. I’m pleased that we had our moment with it.