http://bootleg-daycare.tumblr.com/
11/30/16
Research - Daycare Documentation Darkside
Heads up from a social media friend: "Have you guys seen this Tumblr?"
http://bootleg-daycare.tumblr.com/
http://bootleg-daycare.tumblr.com/
Research - Tornado Rainbow Imagery
No, it is impossible....but in the turbulent world of metaphorical childhood, this could happen. In the world of the internet, this was explained as Photoshop manipulation.
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| Tornado Rainbow |
11/27/16
Child Care - Homelessness and Immigration
Post election, we are all wondering about immediate deportation and the erection of walls. In the meantime, a recent headline in the Texas Observer went beyond our call for affortable, safe and educational child care:
Child Careless - Texas doesn't want to take migrant children out of prison-like detention centers, so it found a way to classify the facilities as child care outfits.
Highlights from the article:Licensing detention centers as child care facilities in order to circumvent rules banning the government from locking up kids and babies in cells. These places aren’t technically prisons; they’re just run by private prison contractors. You can’t just walk in, and the people inside sure as hell can’t just walk out. Just like in a jail or prison, journalists have to get permission to go inside, where they’re likely to be tailed by officials and flacks. Over the last year and a half, according to the Austin American-Statesman, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has recommended docking the prison contractors hundreds of thousands of dollars for various violations inside these facilities. Stuff most parents probably wouldn’t cotton to in a day care. Think “nonfunctioning security cameras,” “running out of baby formula” and “unsanitary food service.”See for yourself:
Compliance with basic standards seems particularly important in light of the history of abuse and mistreatment at the T. Don Hutto facility, where officials stopped housing kids back in 2009 after human rights advocates took them to task over prison-like conditions.
And yet Texas health officials have announced plans to license these kinds of places as child care centers, because doing so will let the authorities skirt judicial rulings that prevent law enforcement from throwing kids in unlicensed facilities willy-nilly, seeing as how it’s sort of, you know, un-American to throw abused children in prisons.
11/2/16
Exhibition - Playtime at Perspectives
Perspective Fine Art Photography Gallery
1310 1/2B Chicago Avenue, Evanston IL
November 3 - 27, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5, 5:00 - 7:00pm
Perspective on Photography Lecture
On Collaboration: One Thing Leads to Another
Sunday, November 20, 4:30pm
About Playtime
The sticky, colorful, in-your-face relentlessness; the shopping, meals, and laundry; the ever-present detritus on the counters and floor: this is daily life when raising children. We turned our cameras to this overlooked realm and embraced the chaos that humbles and exasperates, but ultimately enriches us.
When we were in the thick of child-rearing and holding down jobs, it was difficult to maintain our previous collaborative photographic working methods. We put aside the large format camera and tripod, loaded 35mm cameras with Kodak Gold 200 film and positioned them in easy reach. We abandoned the road trips and journeyed into our children's world. Hours in the darkroom were replaced with quick trips to Walgreen's to drop off film, returning in an hour for a stack of 4 x 6 prints to critique. The amped up color palette of “snapshot” film and the impressionistic grain of a shallow depth of field disassembled reality and yielded surprises. We stopped telling the children to clean up and delighted instead in the unfolding landscapes of their play, rich with transformation and wonder. By surrendering to the process, the mundane became the marvelous.
Ciurej and Lochman have been collaborating on photographic narratives since they met as students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. For nearly four decades they have chronicled the physical and psychological landscapes in which they travel.
Thanks to Bob Tanner and Perspectives Gallery for inviting us to revisit this work from 2002, and to our children who played so diligently. Special thanks to those who know that bringing children into light is critical to evolved thinking about women and work.
1310 1/2B Chicago Avenue, Evanston IL
November 3 - 27, 2016
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 5, 5:00 - 7:00pm
Perspective on Photography Lecture
On Collaboration: One Thing Leads to Another
Sunday, November 20, 4:30pm
About Playtime
The sticky, colorful, in-your-face relentlessness; the shopping, meals, and laundry; the ever-present detritus on the counters and floor: this is daily life when raising children. We turned our cameras to this overlooked realm and embraced the chaos that humbles and exasperates, but ultimately enriches us.
When we were in the thick of child-rearing and holding down jobs, it was difficult to maintain our previous collaborative photographic working methods. We put aside the large format camera and tripod, loaded 35mm cameras with Kodak Gold 200 film and positioned them in easy reach. We abandoned the road trips and journeyed into our children's world. Hours in the darkroom were replaced with quick trips to Walgreen's to drop off film, returning in an hour for a stack of 4 x 6 prints to critique. The amped up color palette of “snapshot” film and the impressionistic grain of a shallow depth of field disassembled reality and yielded surprises. We stopped telling the children to clean up and delighted instead in the unfolding landscapes of their play, rich with transformation and wonder. By surrendering to the process, the mundane became the marvelous.
Ciurej and Lochman have been collaborating on photographic narratives since they met as students at the Institute of Design in Chicago. For nearly four decades they have chronicled the physical and psychological landscapes in which they travel.
Thanks to Bob Tanner and Perspectives Gallery for inviting us to revisit this work from 2002, and to our children who played so diligently. Special thanks to those who know that bringing children into light is critical to evolved thinking about women and work.
11/1/16
Exhibition - I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement Politics
Exhibition - I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement PoliticS
Curated by Krista Wojrtendyke and Margaret Le Jeune
Heuser Art Center and Hartmann Center Gallery,
Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois
August 8 – September 23.
Selections from Watch Me Grow included in this exhibition of artists whose work addresses issues of social justice and political engagement to create a platform for discussion through the visual arts.
6/6/16
Variant - Greymatter Gallery Exhibition
April 15 through June 3, 2016
207 E. Buffalo St. Suite 222, Milwaukee,
Artist Reception Gallery Night April 15, 5-9pm
featuring photographs Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
Artist Reception Gallery Night April 15, 5-9pm
featuring photographs Barbara Ciurej & Lindsay Lochman
with response by Nicole Naudi
curated by Paul Drueke and Sarah Sutterfield
Art City Review
The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.
Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs turn out to be of daycare centers in economically distressed areas of Milwaukee, so they're packed with social significance. But the social material is girded with exceeding formal rigor. Beyond the precise, gridded arrangement on the wall, the photographs themselves have the internal composure of a Piet Mondrian, with door jambs, window casings, and vertical blinds reacting to an implied grid that seems imposed by art history as much as carpentry. In many cases vertical blinds in the windows of the establishments frustratingly obstruct our view inside. And yet the visceral humanity of the content throbs from beneath and behind the formal elements.
Quirky handmade lettering on one storefront reads "Watch Me Grow" between two crudely painted but welcoming trees that disrupt the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of the spare storefront. Another photo is cropped to reveal only part of the center's handmade signage. The lettering "…BABY" and "…G ACADEMY" hangs conspicuously against a frieze of vertical strips as regular and perfect as caring for children is irregular and imperfect.
The photographs send beautifully conflicting signals. One naturally wants into these spaces, physically, emotionally and psychically, but our urges are continually impeded by visual elements. The form becomes metaphor.
Naudi's interpretations of Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs are scattered atop three shelved stations in the gallery. Each features loose pages of graph paper containing verse and prose passages, some hand written, some printed, with the strikethroughs and erasures indicative of a fitful editing session. They give off the manic energy of someone writing to catch up to a truth that will forever outrun their thoughts.
Naudi writes, "See them cradled in rectangular mangers/ these static tools of bisection/ units snapped from units/ autonomies sanctioned from and by you/ see your hand build the apparatus/ dividing into oblivion…"
Another passage reads,"…all is shared and all is deceit if not sensed lying down at the feet of our fixed fractals," followed by the word "gestalt" repeated four times.
Randomly placed doodles of hands, lists and diagrams mingle with her cryptic copy. And the more you look, the more a picture begins to emerge. A picture of structure as both urban module and compositional device — a picture where the grid and communities of flesh aren't mutually exclusive.
Gestalt indeed.
Naudi continues, "The shy temporal lobe collecting data like diamonds/ is compressed by neighborhoods/ gated as we peer/ between God's venetian shackles"
"Variant" provides a bird's eye view of the social question, offering not simply a perspective but a metaphorical bridge between multiple perspectives. Naudi's scribblings and text go a step further. They paint a picture not only of social structures, but of complexity and emergence, where structure erupts from simplicity and repetition.
And still no consensus has been reached on how to resolve individual interests and social well being in a free society. So what is the future to hold for an art world more and more equipped and more and more inclined to take on the social question?
So, what will happen to our own motley feudal ties to the aesthetic past? Will traditional art making merge smoothly into a new age of connectivity, interactivity activism and what's called social practice? Will aesthetics and social practice annihilate each other? Perhaps beauty and activism will simply live side-by side as unlikely admixtures.
"Variant" is curated by Milwaukee artists Paul Druecke and Sarah Sutterfield and is on view at Greymatter, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 222. It closes after Friday.
Shane McAdams is an artist and Art City contributor.
ART CITY An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.
curated by Paul Drueke and Sarah Sutterfield
 |
| Installation - Watch Me Grow, 2009 - ongoing |
The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.The modest but resoundingly insightful show called "Variant" manages to address some of the most existential quandaries facing the art world today, all inside the 140-square-foot Greymatter gallery.
The Western world has long reckoned with a social question, which is: What is society's responsibility to those who fall through the cracks?
Similarly, since being emancipated from traditional practices and media over the past half century, the art world faces its own social question, which is: If art is not simply a formal or aesthetic enterprise (meaning: art isn't simply pretty paintings and sculpture in the round) what is its obligation to use its seemingly limitless agency to address social problems?
At first glance, "Variant" appears routine enough: a grid of nine photographs of storefront architecture by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsey Lochman, and three shelves displaying sketches and text by Nicole Naudi.
Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs turn out to be of daycare centers in economically distressed areas of Milwaukee, so they're packed with social significance. But the social material is girded with exceeding formal rigor. Beyond the precise, gridded arrangement on the wall, the photographs themselves have the internal composure of a Piet Mondrian, with door jambs, window casings, and vertical blinds reacting to an implied grid that seems imposed by art history as much as carpentry. In many cases vertical blinds in the windows of the establishments frustratingly obstruct our view inside. And yet the visceral humanity of the content throbs from beneath and behind the formal elements.
Quirky handmade lettering on one storefront reads "Watch Me Grow" between two crudely painted but welcoming trees that disrupt the otherwise perfect bilateral symmetry of the spare storefront. Another photo is cropped to reveal only part of the center's handmade signage. The lettering "…BABY" and "…G ACADEMY" hangs conspicuously against a frieze of vertical strips as regular and perfect as caring for children is irregular and imperfect.
The photographs send beautifully conflicting signals. One naturally wants into these spaces, physically, emotionally and psychically, but our urges are continually impeded by visual elements. The form becomes metaphor.
Naudi's interpretations of Ciurej's and Lochman's photographs are scattered atop three shelved stations in the gallery. Each features loose pages of graph paper containing verse and prose passages, some hand written, some printed, with the strikethroughs and erasures indicative of a fitful editing session. They give off the manic energy of someone writing to catch up to a truth that will forever outrun their thoughts.
Naudi writes, "See them cradled in rectangular mangers/ these static tools of bisection/ units snapped from units/ autonomies sanctioned from and by you/ see your hand build the apparatus/ dividing into oblivion…"
Another passage reads,"…all is shared and all is deceit if not sensed lying down at the feet of our fixed fractals," followed by the word "gestalt" repeated four times.
Randomly placed doodles of hands, lists and diagrams mingle with her cryptic copy. And the more you look, the more a picture begins to emerge. A picture of structure as both urban module and compositional device — a picture where the grid and communities of flesh aren't mutually exclusive.
Gestalt indeed.
Naudi continues, "The shy temporal lobe collecting data like diamonds/ is compressed by neighborhoods/ gated as we peer/ between God's venetian shackles"
"Variant" provides a bird's eye view of the social question, offering not simply a perspective but a metaphorical bridge between multiple perspectives. Naudi's scribblings and text go a step further. They paint a picture not only of social structures, but of complexity and emergence, where structure erupts from simplicity and repetition.
And still no consensus has been reached on how to resolve individual interests and social well being in a free society. So what is the future to hold for an art world more and more equipped and more and more inclined to take on the social question?
So, what will happen to our own motley feudal ties to the aesthetic past? Will traditional art making merge smoothly into a new age of connectivity, interactivity activism and what's called social practice? Will aesthetics and social practice annihilate each other? Perhaps beauty and activism will simply live side-by side as unlikely admixtures.
"Variant" is curated by Milwaukee artists Paul Druecke and Sarah Sutterfield and is on view at Greymatter, 207 E. Buffalo St., Suite 222. It closes after Friday.
Shane McAdams is an artist and Art City contributor.
ART CITY An online journal about visual art, the urban landscape and design. Mary Louise Schumacher, the Journal Sentinel's art and architecture critic, leads the discussion and a community of writers contribute to the dialogue.
5/5/16
Featured - Doorways
Milwaukee has an abundance of lovingly decorated daycare centers. The sign on the door announces "Blessed Coming In" and here is one of the host of angels from the facade.
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