Threewalls was founded in 2003 by a group of artists and emerging curators in Chicago IL. When it opened, Jonathan Rhodes, Shannon Stratton, Sonia Yoon, Jeff Ward and Ruba Katrib led the organization with members cycling off for other opportunities, residencies and education. An all-volunteer staff until 2007, it later employed Elizabeth Chodos, Abby Satinsky, Lauren Basing, Danny Olendorf and Chase Martin in varying roles.
I left the organization after 12 years for the Museum of Arts and Design to be their Chief Curator. You can see the organization’s exhibition and program history from its founding until my departure on the “wayback machine” here.
Taylor’s work cuts across disciplines, with a history in textile and fashion design, as well as painting, sculpture and set-design. His new exhibition at Threewalls reveals these intersecting sensibilities, embarking on an installation of his sculpture series, Black Flowers alongside the new printed work, Scalloway.
In conjunction with Or Gallery, Vancouver/Berlin and part of the Slow Frequency collaboration between Or, devening projects + editions and Threewalls.
In all her work, Mary Patten seeks to address collisions as well as alignments between the worlds of “politics” and art-making. The frailties of memory, speculative fiction, and the archive of the everyday are all evident in her “singular” work – where she claims authorship, fully aware that there are no wholly original ideas.
MSHR (pictured) with Edie Fake. Co-curated with Mack MacFarland as part of a 2-part show with the Pacific Northwest College of Art Feldman Gallery.
Harold Mendez’s exhibition but I sound better since you cut my throat is a meditation on two liminal characters who seek to transcend boundaries, borders, and the trappings of place – revealing the slippages between memory, fact, and fiction. Working from his 2010 publication Texts for Nothing, Mendez utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to sculpture, installation, photography, collaborative projects, drawing, and text, employing the strangeness of fiction, poetics, and politics, interwoven with personal meditations and memory fragments.
Reber and Ruhwald are sculptors, whose seemingly formal work, locates and amplifies the subtle and elegant materiality, geometry and detail of the built environment. Where Reber’s work draws on the exterior, Ruhwald’s turns to interior architectures, with both artists highlighting and extracting the poetics of design through the minimal quotations they extract and reinterpret. Together their objects shift from outside to inside and back, constructing minimal sets that retrain our attentions on those oft-muted details that surround us in our everyday.
What is fated and what is free-will? In a country that depends almost equally on a narrative of the self-made, pragmatism and the maverick alongside the relatively dominant influence of Christianity and the concept of serving God, the chronicles that make-up American identity are an amalgamation of symbols cut-up and repurposed into a collaged taxonomy.
The League of Dark Departments have joined forces in the Gesture Guild, a bureau for the recovery and acquisition of lost gestures. The Gesture Guild aims to return and reinforce the primordial anxieties responsible for head-bending weight and other liquid spiraling disasters, topical and tropical.
Culmination of Smith's long-term residency and research project with Threewalls into Sun-Ra's life and work in Chicago.
With hybrid material use bringing into conflict modernist histories of collage, craft, textiles, design and painting,Diana Guerrero-Maciá’s work suggests a new relationship between these histories. She makes surfaces and objects that question their own classification and reference literary and scientific representations of archetypes, symbols, and signs through her interests in abstraction, representation, and semiotics.
A. Laurie Palmer’s research-based art practice explores matter’s active nature on a range of scales and speeds. Her work taps into and collaborates with material forces and constructs situations and structures that invite consideration of our own capacities and agencies.
Zachary Cahill proffers a solution to use-value by his creation of an Orphanage here in Chicago. The Orphanage Project, out of which Cahill’s fall SOLO exhibition arises, looks to examine the position of the ultimate “other”–the mythic Orphan, torn from any root or history and presumably set free to self-author. Cahill’s Orphans are models, “modes of being” that The Orphanage Project wishes to make relatable through its study in human capital and the condition that awaits all.
Working collaboratively within the simple constraint of a white carpet, Laura Davis, Carson Fisk-Vittori and Julia Klein combine, overlap, manipulate and prop-up each other’s objects, making decisions about the nature of display and decoration as they are considered in the art gallery, the retail venue and the home.
Co-curated by Kate Hackman (Charlotte Street Foundation) and Shannon Stratton (threewalls), THINGS TO BE NEXT TO is a group exhibition of Chicago and Kansas City based artists that was on view in Kansas City at The Charlotte Street Foundation’s La Esquina Gallery before traveling to threewalls in November.
Developed as a collaborative project where artists from each partner city would exhibit in the other, Hackman and Stratton settled on a group show that addressed the conditions of creative production, in terms of studio and exhibition space, unique to each city. Whereas Kansas City might enjoy ample real estate options for making and exhibiting, Chicago artists frequently work out of their homes, and curators often find their footing curating out of apartments. For THINGS TO BE NEXT TO, the curators selected work by four artists that reflected those conditions, and in their work, evidence of the site-specificity of their studio and city in terms of space, architecture and intimacy are apparent in their objects and their materiality. With: Pete Fagundo, Alberto Aguilar, Warren Rosser, Jim Woodfill
Odie Off is an off comment, off the books, off kilter, face off between artists Mike Rea and Kelly Kaczynski. Begun as a simple provocation, Odie Off assumes a position somewhere between process, performance and production where the interactions between the two artists equally elicits both banter and dialogue.
Either/Or/Both explores the poetics of relationships and correspondence through painting, drawing and text based work that troubles the boundaries between the intuitive and the systematic by making do within a set of givens and the possibilities in them. Either/Or/Both is an attempt at dispassion, but rather than overtly reveal the messy stuff, it wonders about the human inclination and struggle to mediate the subjective, the body, the emotional, the intuitive through the invention of predictable systems. With: Casey Droege (pictured), Stephanie Brooks, Michael Milano, Hans Peter Sundquist, Samantha Bittman (pictured)
Certain conventions of American home decorating and interior design from the seventies and eighties and the mundane domestic objects featured in that décor become fantastic when in the hands of Mindy Rose Schwartz. Working in ceramics, paper, and plaster, Schwartz’s sculptural installations blur the boundaries between recognizable household trappings and almost nightmarish manifestations from the natural world that encroach upon and overtake their environments.
Montgomery Perry Smith presents Milking, two new sculptures that focus on an otherworldly relic and the tools used to milk it. Smith’s work combines portions of domestic furniture and fixtures, decorative textiles, fake flowers, and miscellany from candy to incense in the creation of primarily wall mounted sculpture. His evocative forms are often orifice, portal, flower and reliquary at once, resulting in ‘creatures’ that hover between sci-fi beast, rare organic growths and sexual innuendo.
The Stagehand’s Unseen presents a synopsis of a play in its objects and documents. situated between a collection and a tableaux with the potential to historicize the play’s origins. Handled as props in stasis, the objects of Olympus Manger are simultaneously sculpture and artifact – leaving the role of ‘artist’ latent: progenitor or activator, either/and.
What is the proper tenor between dissonance and harmony? What lies amidst the physically experienced and that which our brain grasps and calls knowledge? That unintelligible undercurrent of “what” –the torn out page that you thumb with frustration or the holes in your mind when you search for words and summon only dumb feeling – trembles in the work of Michael Jones McKean.
William Cordova’s work has wove itself into the public’s conscious as of late, through sculpture, drawings, installation and public art projects that investigate and deconstruct the cultural landscape; marshaling new material, knowledge and readings of the architecture, sites and media that are marginalized by the forced predominance of other, status quo perspectives.
meanwhile is space and time at the in-between; the membrane through which memory, desire and longing pass. Tessa Windt’s sculptural forms, although deflated are still lucious, while Jenny Walter’s images of empty blankets retain their poignancy and hope despite their depiction of absence. Although the body has vacated these artworks, they retain the trace of presence, both remainder and reminder, embodying both the potential and the surplus of life and love.
Tackling the reality of white privilege, Dani Leventhal leads the viewer through a personal course of realization and acknowledgment, as she works to eradicate her own racism. Undoubtedly one of our culture’s most uncomfortable topics and hotly disputed realities, Leventhal steers the course in a personal journey that is as beautiful and poignant as it is political.
Gossip lies in the intersection between the gendered and marginalized position gossip holds, and the extreme social power possible by such an activity. It is between these spaces that lies a potentially disruptive, pluralistic and ultimately feminist social practice.