Heaven Gallery
A not-for-profit arts organization
Simple PleasuresFriday, February 3, 2017 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  Simple Pleasures This show is a love letter. From one artist to another. To those who give me hope in the wake of a new post-election reality. Absorbing the pain I was feeling myself and from those around me, I realized it’s more important than ever to speak to the issues presented here. I came to this show with the body and pleasure in mind. To put it simply: These artists work with the body, sexuality and gender in ways that push, seduce, and play with us. They bring forward the complexities of our bodies and minds with what it means to be seen, touched, hurt, and loved. What it means to be human. For me they are magicians in the studio, taking us to places that feel true and full of life. They all invite us to engage on an intimate level; one cannot look and look away. The afterimage stays. It sinks in. “And now, after living beside you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness - as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argu- ment, however loose) - I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.” -Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts New Year's Classical ConcertMonday, January 2, 2017 - 7:30pm to 9:00pm  For the third consecutive year, join McKenna Glorioso and friends at Heaven Gallery for a concert of chamber music following the busy holiday season. Repertoire will include works by Dvorak, Vaughan-Williams, Piazzolla, Beethoven, and more. $10 suggested donation at the door. McKenna Glorioso is an American violinist at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec. She currently studies with Axel Strauss and Marcelle Mallette and has also recently studied with Aurelien Pederzoli and Ilya Kaler in Chicago. McKenna has held the position of Concertmistress of the DePaul Chamber Orchestra and has played under the baton of conductors such as Dr. Cliff Colnot, Alexis Hauser, Michael Lewanski, and Darryl One. In 2017, she will appear as Assistant-Concertmaster of the McGill Opera Orchestra for their production of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. She plays a violin on generous loan by Dr. Wilhelm Schlag. Elizabeth Glorioso is an American cellist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is currently in her second year of studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, pursuing a Master’s Degree in Cello Performance and Suzuki Pedagogy in the studio of Sharon Robinson. Passionate about chamber music, Ms. Glorioso has had the pleasure of touring Italy and Slovenia with Trio Glorioso, a piano trio founded in Duino, Italy. This year, Ms. Glorioso was also pleased to be admitted into CIM’s Advanced Piano Trio Program with her ensemble, Trio Zeta. Jerome de los Santos, a Los Angeles native, has performed in venues across the United States, Canada, Italy, and Philippines. Praised for "possessing qualities of a true artist - maturity, imagination, musicality, sensitivity, amazing stage presence, passion, and effortless technique”, Jerome performs actively both as soloist and as a chamber musician. Aside from music, he enjoys studying foreign languages, spending time with his dog Yana, and traveling to new places. He holds a Bachelor’s of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, in the class of Daniel Shapiro, and a minor in Italian from Case Western University. For more information please visit: www.jeromedelossantos.com. Pierce the VeilFriday, December 9, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  Pierce the Veil Standing stones and monoliths, intentionally constructed so that at significant moments of the year – like transitions between seasons – the sun strikes on predetermined and symbolic elements, are often attributed to astronomical observance; suspected ritual sites but actual functions unknown. Lines of geomagnetic forces run through earth’s crust, and when concentrated in a specific place, intensify and amplify the magnetic field. Pierce the Veil, a group exhibition featuring the work of Sage Dawson, Chiara Galimberti, Victoria Martinez, Katharine Schutta, and Selina Trepp, takes its title from the historical television drama Outlander, based on series of novels by Diana Gabaldon. During the first season, an older local woman attempts to interpret the inexplicable disappearance of a visiting woman to her bereft and disbelieving husband. The visitor has touched a magical stone and been transported back in time two hundred years. Though not all of the included artists create work that explicitly addresses the time-space continuum, they all make work that allows the viewer to transcend reality – to physically or psychologically walk through a portal, connecting distant locations, alternate dimensions, parallel worlds, or breaks with the future and past. Originally from Italy, Chiara Galimberti is currently residing in Chicago. She earned an MA in Italian Studies from NYU in 2015 and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, where she was a Soros New American Fellow. Her work tends to be context and place specific rather than self-referential, and can take the form of drawing, installation or collaborative performance. She is particularly interested in looking at both public and private space as sites of continual power and boundary negotiation and contestation. Her work was recently shown at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago and New York University in Florence, Italy. She is a member of the feminist art collectives W.I.T.C.H and Tracers. Selina Trepp is an artist whose work explores economy and improvisation. Finding a balance between the intuitive and conceptual is the goal, living a life of adventure is a way, embarrassment is often the result. Sage Dawson is a Saint Louis-based artist, educator, and curator. Her work examines dwelling rights, land use, and the identity of spaces. Recent exhibitions were held at Pyramid Atlantic, the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston University, the City University of New York, and the International Print Center New York. Sage’s work has been featured in Elephant Magazine and in From Here to There published by Princeton Architectural Press. Her work has been reviewed at Art in Print, Hyperallergic, and by Lori Waxman for 60 wrd/min art critic. Sage teaches printmaking at Washington University, and runs STNDRD–a gallery project based in Saint Louis. Victoria Martinez is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Chicago who explores installation, site-specific intervention, screenprinting, and painting. She believes in chance and intuition, creating projects for galleries and ephemeral experiences in the urban environment. Martinez works with vibrant colors; pattern based textiles, and overlooked items, sewing them together to create fresh perspectives. She has exhibited at Northwestern University, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Cultural Center, the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, and Chicago Artists Coalition. Upcoming projects include group exhibitions at the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Franklin, and a solo exhibition at Washington State University. Katharine Schutta is a Chicago-based artist. She creates paper collages, visual poems, that are explorations of the human condition - of art, intimacy, and transgression. Culling, cropping, repositioning and realigning images from a vast collection of auction catalogues, magazines and books, Schutta collides contemporary art and art history, science, technology and the natural world. We Have A Back Room With Other ThingsFriday, October 21, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  We Have a Back Room With Other Things Mel Cook and Megan Stroech address the conceptual space of the conventional through a combination of images, objects and replications. Taking a skewed glance at domesticity and the production of place, their collaboration makes various gestures towards a generalization of home that is at once political, satirical, man-made and personal. Both artists make work that is most comfortable communicating indirectly. Megan Stroech’s irreverent approach to material and the appropriation of luxury puts her work both at odds with authenticity and squarely embedded in it. By straddling humor and earnestness, the real and the fake, and the original and the reproduced, she initiates a conversation between high and low culture that invites the viewer to have the last say. Like Stroech’s sculptural compositions and installations, Mel Cook’s paintings disrupt traditional models of space. Cook’s work is often evasive, gesturing loosely towards the political of the everyday and the construct of place-making, while embracing the way images often fail in their attempts to articulate. Permanence collapses into suggestion, and desire for the represented object quickly switches to ambivalence. If both artists’ work moves towards a translation of home, it is one mediated. Mel Cook is a visual artist currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio in 2009 and attended Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois where she received her Master of Fine Arts in Painting in 2012. She has previously taught at Illinois State University and Illinois Central College. She currently teaches at Marwen in Chicago, Illinois. Her work has been featured in Art in Print, Studio Visit magazine, and most recently in New American Paintings, Midwest ed. No 125. This year she was a participant in The Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center and a resident at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Most recently her work has been exhibited at The Hyde Park Art Center. Megan Stroech is an artist living and working in Chicago, IL. Stroech received her MFA in Printmaking with Exceptional Merit from Illinois State University in 2012, and her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Stroech was a recent artist in residence at the Wassaic Project (Wassaic, NY) and has completed artist residencies at Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH Projects (Chicago, IL) and ACRE (Steuben, WI). Stroech has been a featured artist in the contemporary art publications: Artforum, Hyperallergic, LVL3 Media, and New American Paintings. Some recent exhibitions include: Ortega Y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), PULSE Contemporary Art Fair (Miami Beach, FL), Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center (Austin, TX), Fernwey (Chicago, IL), ROCKELMANN& (Berlin, Germany), The SUB-MISSION (Chicago), and Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass, CO), where she was an artist-in- residence in 2012 Nothing TwiceFriday, October 21, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  Nothing Twice Opens October 21 Heaven Gallery is pleased to present Nothing Twice, a two-person show featuring two Chicago based artists, Magda Dudziak and Annette Hur. Dudziak’s practice explore topics of displacement, memory, intimacy and relationships. Through abstraction and process of deconstruction/reconstruction she is interested to interpret familiar places that over time get altered and reimagined and to question how physical and psychological experiences of displacement effect and reshape a sense of one’s identity. Hur’s practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative. Magda Dudziak is an artist born in Poland. Dudziak holds BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied in Painting and Drawing Department. She is a recipient of Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship and is currently a MFA Candidate at the University of Illinois in Studio Arts. Dudziak work has been exhibited at Hokin Gallery, Woman Made, Beverly Arts Center, Artis’t Run The Satellite Show in Miami, and Woskob Family among others. Dudziak currently lives and works in Chicago. Annette Hur is originally from Korea, and has been living and working in Chicago since 2013. Her practice lies in narrative potential in relation to history of forgotten struggles of the face in different cultures and our mind reading ability. Hur navigates shifting identities - cultural and social - as to from long history of decolonization of her own country to direct observation of present moments. Borrowing and elaborating the space of our most revealing part: face, she creates images that plays dichotomy between rendering the surface of the face and the interiority of it to open the meaning to certain culture or history of individuals. Serial attitude as the act of keep recording those freeze faces with flux and transforming them into infinite spaces let viewers fill in the ambiguity and completes the narrative. Hur is currently a resident at Chicago Artists Coalition BOLT residency, and she has exhibited at Gallery X, Zhou B Art Center in Chicago and Mist gallery among others. Hur holds BA(education) from Ewha Womans University in South Korea, and BFA(painting and drawing) from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. EVERYTHING MUST GO! Art FairFriday, September 2, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  Everything Must Go! Opens Septmber 2 Wicker Park says goodbye to its colorful history from the Lumpen Buddy days, to the Around the Coyote art fair and now the Double Door. Everything Must Go! reflects the selling of our neighborhood and with it our art and culture. This new wave of corporate colonization is being felt all over the city with Google’s tech boom in the West loop, displacing artists and galleries. Historically Wicker Park was home to artists. By the late 70’s artists that were gentrified out of Old Town and Lincoln Park began settling there in large numbers. As more artists came they began to transform loft space into livable studios, storefronts became galleries, music venues, coffee shops, and bars. Roberto Lopez a native and long time superintendent of the Flat Iron Building said “Wicker Park wasn’t just a place, it was a state of mind.” At it’s peak was Around the Coyote that began in September of 1990, this art fair changed the cultural landscape by drawing tens of thousands of visitors--and hundreds of thousands of dollars--to the community. A victim of its own success, this new bohemia attracted economic investment. The neighborhood feared yuppies and "Lincoln Parkization." They recalled how the visual arts industry created a real estate boom on Manhattan's lower east side, that ended in the Tompkins Square anti-gentrification uprising of 1988. The community feared that Wicker Park’s unique ethnic and artistic diversity was at risk and that its growing popularity would lead to their displacement. “Anytime a community is discovered, the indigenous population is forced out and the new colonizers reap the benefits.” Theories of gentrification indicate that capital follows culture and identify artists as the main agents for gentrifying working class neighborhoods. Whatever pandered to the "commodification of the artist's lifestyle in the service of a real estate market" was fair game for protest wrote the Lumpen Times in the mid 90’s. Back then anti-gentrification groups and radical neighborhood activists printed flyers and used guerrilla tactics. They sabotaged businesses by gluing their doors shut, breaking windows, and spray painting “The Natives Are Restless” and "Gentrafux". Many people fought to keep the neighborhood but as time went on one by one they all left. The nail in the coffin came in 2012 when Wicker Park was featured by Forbes as one of the 5 hippest neighborhoods in the U.S. Everything Must Go! speaks of the loss of authenticity and to a new era of political passiveness where people are carried by the wave. Over the past 15 years many artist and independent businesses have been priced out of Wicker Park. Heaven gallery that was established in 1998 in the Flat Iron building and in its current location for the past 16 years is one of the last stands that reflect the spirit of the old neighborhood. Claire Molek and Heaven Gallery invite galleries and curators to rummage through works they have on hand, as a celebration of unique producers, and recalls the collective histories and togetherness of artist neighborhoods and street art fairs. Intersecting the boundaries between a clearance sale and an art fair, the exhibition further explores the magic of unknowable context, and what it means to encourage practice over product, or product over practice. Galleries include Chicago Artists Coalition featuring work by Jaclyn Jacunski, Amina Ross, Sanaz Sohrabi, and curated by Teresa Silva; , The Franklin, featuring work by EC Brown, Jeremy Foy, Diana Gabriel, Jessica Harvey, Daniel Hojnacki, Kelly Reaves, James Jankowiak, Catie Olsen, Nicole Lane, Melissa Oresky, Victoria Martinez, Michael Rea, E. Aaron Ross, Luis Sahagun, Christopher Smith, Dan Sullivan and Edra Soto; Heaven Gallery, featuring work by Sarah and Joseph Belknap, Morgan Sims, Sarah Mosk, Annie Kielman, Soo Shin, Jessica Caponigro, Marissa Lee Benedict, Ilan Gutin, Lesley Jackson, and Arianna Petrich; , LVL3 featuring work from Allison Wade, Frances Roberts, Josh Reames, Paul Kenneth, Guy Conners, Matt Nichols, Marianne Wehr, Kate Bonner, Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell; ,Woman Made Gallery, featuring work by Maira Egan, Juliet Eldred, Olivia Rogers, Renee Robbins, Tiffany Funk ,Sarai Redmond, Yevette Mayorga, Alessandra Hickman, Tonia Hughes, Michael Zhang, Lisa Vinebaum, Martha Morimoto, Vivian Le, Michelle Miller, and Annie Grossinger; ,Boyfriends Gallery featuring work by Kiam Marcelo Junio; ,Fernwey Gallery editioned prints and multiples and Co-Prosperity Sphere prints and books. Curators include Claire Molek, featuring work by Ariel Baldwin, Banrei, Marcelo Eli, Julia Haw, Lindsey Liss, Stephanie Burke, Kira Scerbin, Lucy Ellerton, Steven Vainberg, and Xiao Tse Janice Bond, featuring work by David Anthony Geary, Una Delic, Sonja Henderseon, Zakkiyyah Naieebah, Martha Wade and Reisha.
Exile Inside Out/ Soheila Azadi, Grace Cross, Sherwin Ovid, Soo Hyun Kim, and Roni PackerFriday, July 15, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  EXILE INSIDE OUT Exile Inside Out is a group exhibition that brings together artists Soheila Azadi, Grace Cross, Sherwin Ovid, Soo Hyun Kim and Roni Packer to investigate the insurgent nature of the domestic sphere, which localizes the global. As immigrants to the United States we all inhabit the interstitial space between what is homely and what is (un-homely) uncanny. The home is an assumed incubator of gender roles, a space of security, and a site of insurrectionary praxis. The security that protects some citizens, is the same mechanism that misconstrues foreign bodies. Our show interrogates our permeable exilic existence governed by the insecurity of the benevolent nation-state. This show strives to bridge our space of belonging that breaches the borders of our twin homes both physically and ideologically. The symbols and memories of the kitchen table, the families silverware, mother’s knitting, and the family photo-wall, make shifting recipes for artworks embedded in cross-spatial borders. From the ideological knitting with the slogan #madeiniran, that covers Azadi’s exercise balls, to Packer’s lush plate paintings that recreate her sister’s family meals cooked back in Israel; the artists in this show investigate the familiar in an unfamiliar guise. The material choices of each artist transgresses conventional artistic-material borders; like Ovid’s use of unruly, liquid resin and glue to create his poured paintings or Cross’s corporeal mixed-media, felted paintings, or Kim’s depiction of ephemeral dwelling material in his native Korean shanty town caught through the camera lens. Ovid’s material curiosity is forged into visual composites of Trinidadian parlor interiors, delftware, and depression. His plethora of objects found in domestic spaces of leisure are painted as symbolic references of class and race. Trans- Packer’s visceral paintings transport the viewer to a different location, into a space of nostalgia. Her reconstructed home meals, made of oil and panel, pivot the hyper local specificity of food to a public ingestion of longing. Packer’s work deals with the transmigration of images through the web, where locations and experiences can be shared in an instant. The substrate of paint and the charged content of exile cannot be separated because of their symbolic nature. Exile Inside Out unearths the day to day living of the disenfranchised. The show grapples with physical and psychic struggle, with intimacy and desire for life between all of us, not settling for freedom even in the most private aspects of our lives. Kim’s visceral photographs document his mother’s makeshift home in Guryong Village, Korea, juxtaposed with photographs of his nuclear families urban Chicago living. His photographs collapse intimate moments of everyday life with the coarse urban milieu of city space, to emphasize the unspoken contradictions of places shaped by neo-liberal economic policy, and to reveal the private relationships of the home. Azadi, a similarly displaced body, creates performative installations of potent social interactions, to investigate the separations embedded in Iranian and American society. She is a dedicated transnational feminist invested in granular political action that calls out gender and race inequality through interactive, spatial interventions that carve out space for dialogue. The images throughout each artist’s practice, coalescing in the show, are talismans for a deep history, bringing transformative cultural wisdoms and materials that erode, uncover, excavate and perforate boundaries of the ‘homeland’. The foreigner lives within us: she is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. Amarillo / Lesley Jackson and Matt ManciniFriday, July 15, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  AmarilloLesley Jackson and Matt Mancini
The city of Amarillo, also known as “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” was originally named after the wildflowers that grew in bounty along the countryside. The flowers flirted with the water in Amarillo Lake, turning the soil a cool yellow. Decades later, those open plains grew few and far between and a new nickname developed. Now known as “Bomb City,” Amarillo is home to the largest nuclear weapons assembly plant in the country.
A place romanticized in old country ballads, where all the cowboys longed to be, Amarillo is just like any other paradise, riddled with contradictions, unfulfilled promises, and much too hot to stand still.
Like a cowboy moving towards the sun, we too are profoundly restless, trying to escape wherever it is we find ourselves. We move around, never quite present, or we stay where we are and dream up what’s missing. We look to the past, back to the open plains, when the present seems too frightening.
So if paradise is eternally elsewhere, what are we supposed to do while we’re here? Lesley Jackson is an artist living and working in Chicago. She graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in 2013. Recently her work has been shown at Cornerstore Gallery, Born Nude Gallery (solo), and Nada New York with SPF15 Exhibitions. Forthcoming projects include a show at Efrain Lopez Gallery in December, and a solo exhibition with 4th Ward Projects in the Spring of 2017. Matt Mancini was born in Philadelphia, PA. He currently lives and works in Chicago, IL. He recently completed his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and holds a BFA from Rutgers University. Forthcoming projects include a show at Julius Caesar. He has recently shown at Little Berlin in Philadelphia, Fernway Gallery, LVL3, Ballroom Projects, and Roots and Culture in Chicago. ROBOPOCALYPSE Heaven 16th Annual Benefit & Art AuctionFriday, June 24, 2016 - 7:00pm to Saturday, June 25, 2016 - 1:00am  Feeling nervous about the robot apocalypse? Is Ray Kurzweil's singularity nearer than we think? Heaven Gallery celebrates 16 years with ROBOPOCALYPSE, the machine uprising party. Welcome to the future where the acceleration of technology causes an intelligence explosion, creating a new superintellengence that surpasses humans and Google robots take over the world. The evening will feature a silent art auction and AI dance party, where you can dance your robotic fears away to the soulful beats of Ayana Contreras host/producer of Reclaimed Soul, on Vocalo.org (WBEZ), Jesse Andwich from Danny’s Nightmoves and Cordell Johnson & James Vincent (JV) Excursions House Music. *Futuristic Attire Suggested* Auction work by: Howard Fonda (Auction ends at 10pm) Special thanks to Urban Belly, Big Star, Handlebar, Garfield's Beverage, Revolution Brewing, Perrier and Starbucks for donating to our event. Fanfare for the TimesFriday, May 13, 2016 - 7:00pm to 11:00pm  Fanfare for the Times II New work by Lauren Edwards and Eric Watts Opening Reception: May 13, 7-11PM
Fanfare for the Times (a horn sounds) "Hello." "Narrators oversee - observe, approve, reject - a deja vu formed in new terms. I, Narrator, having not seen the sun, the wind, the rain, nor the dust, am trying to embrace this way. The official looking thing, promising an exit (or an entrance) waves its sexy little body; just out of reach. According to my calculations, the room I am looking for should be on the second floor. Walking the length of it and coming back, the corridor seems to have no way out. As I return to my point of departure, I set out again, this time slowing my pace, sticking close to the wall and following its scars with my fingers. This second attempt is no more successful than the first. However, since my first inspection, I noticed a door, covered with thick curtains, above which was written in crudely traced letters: Hello!" In Fanfare for the Times, Lauren Edwards and Eric Watts use multiple sites of projection and architectural intervention to question distinctions between the real, the psychological, and the hypothetical. LAUREN EDWARDS uses various strategies including installation, projection, and sculpture to create framing devices which question the relationships between experience, perception, and representation. She has exhibited in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. A recent recipient of the Provost Award for Graduate Research, Edwards will be attending the Institut für Alles Mögliche residency this summer in Berlin. She received her BS in Psychology from Northeastern University in 2004. ERIC WATTS is a Chicago based artist working in moving image and installation. He received his MFA from the University of Chicago , and his BFA from The School of Visual Arts. In 2014 Watts was a resident artist for Winterjourney at The Banff Centre, Banff, AB and at The Klondike Institute of Art and Culture (KIAC) in Dawson, YT. 1550 North Milwaukee 2nd Floor, Chicago, IL 60622
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