SIX FLAGS: POLVO EST. 1996
February 11- March 2, 2006
Opening Saturday February 11, 2006 from 7-9:30pm
Polvo is a grass roots cultural space based in Chicago since 1996. Most of the artists exhibiting with Polvo are creating work in subversive formats: socio-polical critiques, aesthetic investigations and alternative media. This is the second time this artist collective's exhibition is in the lone star state.
This exhibition marks ten years of Polvo (1996-2006) curating, coordinating, and organizing contemporary art exhibits; it gives a brief and small survey of contemporary artwork produced by urban midwestern visual artists.
| Artists: Kimberly Aubuchon Kimberly Aubuchon was born in rural Illinois in 1967, grew up in Missouri, and currently resides in San Antonio, TX. She earned a degree to paint pretty pictures from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2001. She likes to make digital images that are whimsical, childlike offerings of momentary thoughts that are generally created under the influence of classic rock, television, domestic beer, and everyday life. Kimberly has recently shown in group exhibitions at Little Known Gallery, Charcoll, and had a solo show at 3Arts Gallery in November 2004. Kimberly is also the director of Unit B (Gallery) and has curated shows in Chicago, San Antonio, and Detroit. |
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EC
Brown EC
Brown (b. 1971, San Diego) is primarily a painter (although an occasional
curator) in Chicago creating illustration-style tableus of esoteric
labor
guilds and the resultant pre-industrial technologies and adjusted
lifeforms.
He teaches media theory and web-based subjects at Columbia College. |
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| Miguel
Cortez Miguel Cortez(b. 1970)is an artist living in Chicago and born in Guanajuato, Mexico. He has studied filmmaking at Columbia College and fine art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Miguel has exhibited for more than a decade in Chicago, Mexico, and Spain. Recent exhibitions include "Reencounter" at Prospectus Art Gallery and "Lies that Bill Gates told me: Exploring the Digital Divide" at VU Space in Melbourne, Australia. He is a co-founder of Polvo, an alternative cultural space in Chicago. |
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Lauren
Feece Lauren Feece has been making things to look at since she was
a little tiny girl. After a childhood creating and an adolescence of
art, she
decided being an artist was the only career that wouldn’t make
her a sad, mean person. While working toward a Bachelors degree in
fine art she began to exhibit her work. After finishing her degree
she moved to Chicago in 2002 and began a rigorous exhibition schedule.
She has enjoyed several solo exhibitions, including “For the
Birds’ at Gallery 645, ‘In Bloom’ at Hotcakes Gallery
in Milwaukee, and ‘Blossom’ at the Lobby Gallery in Chicago.
Often Lauren’s work has focused on the snapshot; how a snapshot,
an unpretentious mirror of reality, can be translated into the iconographic
language of painting. At times her work focuses more on her own response
to photographs or contemplations on the reality of time and space.
Whatever the subject of her work, she muses on the everyday, its supposed
monotony and the layers of meaning and beauty buried below the surface. |
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| Stacy
Hand Stacy continues her exploration of how consumable products define an ever-changing vocabulary of sensory experience that collapses the distinction between inner and outer space. In Soft Tissue Stimulator III, subterranean desires for intestinal health find unexpected counterparts in industrial lubricants.Stacy is both an artist and a career art historian. Originally from Orlando, she completed her BA at Vanderbilt University with a dual major in studio art and aesthetic philosophy. She subsequently completed a MA at the University of Chicago where she is currently working on a Ph.D. in Art History. For 2003-2004 Stacy was awarded a Fulbright to Germany to complete research on her dissertation, Empathy and Biological Fantasy in Art Nouveau Design. In addition, she teaches as part-time faculty at both Columbia College and at Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies. In Chicago, Stacy has exhibited through Artemisia Gallery, which unfortunately closed in May 2003. Her most recent solo show was at Bad Dog Gallery (DeKalb, IL) in April 2005. |
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Terence
Hannum  Breton
starts his novel "Nadja" wondering who he
is, concluding quite
briefly, that he is who he haunts". In a similar sense,
I believe,
to know who you are you must be aware of who, or what, haunts you.
I
am interested in ghosts and memories captured in videos of hardcore
bands. The apparitions of rebellion that fade with the audience's
camera flashes. In the deteriorating static of the medium of video
the paintings start, the videos start, the audio starts - echoing
away, vanishing, transforming, becoming. My MFA comes from the School
of the Art Institute of Chicago (c. 2004), my BA is in Religion and
Philosophy; which gave me a love of Gnosticism, Phenomenology, and dead
languages. I teach, I used to write, and occasionally my work is
exhibited. |
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| Gisela
Insuaste Gisela Insuaste is an artist currently living in Chicago, born in New York City, 1975. She creates art inspired by her travels in North and South America. Her work is based on episodic memories that are triggered by real and imagined ethnographic experiences in rural and urban landscapes. These landscapes are precarious: shifty, unstable, unpredictable, unsettled and ambiguous. She received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a B.A in Anthropology & Studio Art from Dartmouth College. She is a recipient of several art and research grants that have funded her artistic and academic pursuits, including the recent 2004 Richard H. Driehaus "Emerging" Individual Artist Award. She has exhibited in several group shows in Chicago, Kansas City, MO, Washington, DC, and Ecuador. |
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Scott
Kildall  Scott
Kildall creates sculptures and installations incorporating video, audio
and electronics to examine themes of personal and collective memory.
He uses humor, recognizable objects, repetitions of the physical and
video monitors as psychological windows to provide entry points for
the audience. He was born and raised in Northern California. He has
a Bachelor of Arts in Political Theory from Brown University and is
currently pursing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited in San Francisco, Chicago,
Miami and Romania. He has also produced and edited numerous documentary
video works on social justice issues. |
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Jesus
Macarena-Avila  Jesus
Macarena-Avila has MFA degree from Vermont
College of Norwich University and studied painting as
well as sculpture at the School of The Art Institute,
where he earned his BFA. Macarena-Avila has obtained a
high level of artistic accomplishments and experiences
exhibiting his work in both the United States andinternationally including Australia, France, Mexico, Senegal, South Africa, Spain and Zambia. Publications such as Gravy Magazine, Art Throb, Dialogue, Exito!, New Art Examiner, and El Portaliano/ Fundacion Diego Portales have highlighted his studio work and community art projects. Macarena-Avila has lectured internationally at many educational and arts institutions such as Antioch College (YellowSprings Ohio), Columbia College Chicago (Chicago Illinois), Northern Illinois University (DeKalb Illinois), and Spaza Art Gallery (Johannesburg South Africa). And including Community Arts Project (Cape Town South Africa), Bellview Art Centre (Bellview South Africa) and the Victorian College for the Arts (Melbourne, Australia). Macarena-Avila has been a recipient of many grants and awards including the International Governor's Award (Illinois Arts Council), Neighborhood Arts Program Grant (City of Chicago), and Chicago's Boy & Girls's Community Volunteer Award. |
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| Harold
Mendez Harold Mendez is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Chicago. His work explores issues of masculinity and identity politics in contemporary society. His work is informed by history, the use of language and people’s behavioral patterns in society. While attempting to engage people in a reflective discourse on gender roles and their subjectivities, his creative process initiates a dialogue that points to the complexities of our legitimacy and their contradictions. Mendez’s large-scale drawings, sculptural installations, photographs and video based works have been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally in Chicago, Texas, Australia, Spain, The United Kingdom and West Africa. He has received numerous grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs for his research and development of new work. He has worked with Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra and is currently seeking avenues for experimental collaboration with established and emerging artists in their development as cultural leaders. He is currently attending The University of Illinois at Chicago
for his M.F.A in Studio Arts. |
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Kristen
Neveu Kristen Neveu projects a sense of possibility in the abandoned.
Combining photography with found materials, she constructs layered
mixed media
sculptures that are reminiscent of shadowed memorials. Like an artistic
anthropologist, she searches demolition sites, alleys, and thrift stores
to salvage wood, glass, and fabric. For reference, she also photographs
urban decay and renewal. While growing up in Iowa, Kristen worked in
a lumberyard to earn extra money. A classically trained pianist, she
also participated
in piano competitions. She graduated from the University of Iowa
with a degree in Communication Studies and a minor in Anthropology.
Currently, Kristen lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright
Brett Neveu. |
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| Odie
Rynell Cash Odie Rynell Cash works in the mediums of video, digital imagery, installation/interventions, collecting/drawing and actions in public. His work is concerned with a variety of issues from the political to the mundane, simplicity, repetition and anticipation. His 2005 schedule includes a three-week performance residency with Skaftfell Arts Center, Sey›isfjör›ur, Iceland (Aug.) and a four-week residency with Factor44, Antwerp, Belgium, (Sept). Previously he has been included in international exhibitions such as Co-ordinates of the Supersensible at High Street Projects (New Zealand), Text Associations (solo) Factor44 (Antwerp, Belgium), eKsperim[E]nto Film and Video Festival, (Manila, Philippines), kaBOOM, The Museum of New Art (Detroit), and The Drawing Show, UnitB Gallery (Chicago). Cash is also an independent curator of work dealing with social issues and/or the examination of experimental practices. |
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Deb
Sokolow
pen, pencil, correction fluid on paper 5ft x 9ft, 2004 Using pen, paper, correction fluid, and the voice of a paranoid, indecisive narrator, Deb Sokolow maps out the lives and circumstances of various semi-fictitious inhabitants of Chicago neighborhoods and work places through floor plans, text, and illustration. Sokolow’s narrator, referred to throughout each drawing as “you”, uncovers an underlying climate of fear, imagined or perhaps quite real, that exists at a local level in relation to contemporary events occurring on a much larger scale. Sokolow’s recent shows include a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work has been reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Art on Paper, and NYFA Quarterly, and featured in Punk Planet, Flavorpill, Timeout Chicago, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Reader. Sokolow is a recipient of a 2005 Visual Arts Fellowship Grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She received her MFA in 2004 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996. |
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Edra
Soto  Edra
Soto ( b. Puerto Rico,1971). In 1995 she received the Alfonso Arana
Fellowship to work in Paris, France for a year. She attended
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she obtained her Masters
degree in 2000. Immediately after, she attended a 2 months residency
at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Some of her latest presentations
include a live performance at El Museo del Barrio in New York, a solo
show and live performance at El Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, UIC Gallery
400, NIU Museum in Chicago, and Polvo in Chicago. |
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 Stacy Hand |
 Kristen Neveu |
 EC Brown |
 Kimberly Aubuchon |
 Edra Soto(performance and installation) |
 Scott Kildall |
 Stacy Hand |
 Terence Hannum |
 Deb Sokolow |
 Lauren Feece |
 Gisela Insuaste |
 Teresa O'Connor, Edra Soto and Randall from PLUSH Gallery in Dallas |
 Frances Trotter |
 Vicky Fowler and Candace Breceno |
 Rene Cruz from MFA Gallery in Dallas |
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more Photos from Randall's travelogue here
DOWNLOAD PDF BROCHURE
Commerce Street Artist Warehouse
2315 Commerce Street
Houston, Texas 77002
www.commercestreet.org
713.226.7897
organized by
miguel cortez of www.polvo.org