As an artist with considerable skills and extreme dedication to making my art, I am able to work in virtually any artistic style, format or medium.  Allowing me the flexibility to communicate visually in any way that suits the ideas I am trying to portray.  The inspiration for my work comes from many places, experiences I have had, socio-political events and ideas and a long standing search for ways to depict the elusive qualities and feelings of living. In order to convey some raw truth of these elusive elements, it is part of my regular practice to draw memories or visions with my eyes closed. Oftentimes, these drawings become the central component of my work.

My work does not easily fall into any one category commonly used to describe contemporary art. In part from my continued exploration for new invention and ways of communicating through the various media I use. The central thread that weaves through my work is that I strive to maintain the ability to experiment and freely express inner thoughts and feelings, no holds barred. These paintings are made with passion and urgency in an effort to have the viewer not only be invited into my world, but for them to see and feel familiar elements of their own experiences.

BIO:
Born and raised in Chicago’s inner city, Tom Torluemke has always had a powerful impact on his immediate environs, including his current home of Dyer, Indiana, just across the Illinois border, as he continues to advocate for the educational role of the arts and strengthening the social and civic bonds between people and their communities. Through numerous public art projects, he has successfully employed the visual arts as a means to catalyze life-affirming skills in diverse groups of people, allowing them to realize their unique potential to improve society.

While Torluemke’s work in many ways is anchored by a firm sense of place, including the rich cultural diversity of his life-long home, his aesthetic transcends the concrete and allows for a fully developed voice within the context of his concern for truth and expressions of deep emotion, feeling and spirituality.  At the heart of Torluemke’s work is a yearning to understand and improve the human condition while coming to a greater understanding of humanity’s true place in the universe.

Torluemke works prolifically in a variety of media, including mural painting, stage design, mosaics, oil and acrylic painting, watercolor and sculpture. Solo and group exhibition highlights include: “After Glow” at The Chicago Cultural Center; “The Inland See: Contemporary Art Around Lake Michigan,” curated by James Yood; “Critic’s Choice” at Jan Cicero Gallery in Chicago; “Present” at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; “In the Company of Strangers” at the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, Indiana; “Bounce” at the South Bend Regional Museum of art in South Bend, Indiana; “Peace in the Arts” Baíhai International Peace Conference in San Francisco; the Alabama Watercolor Society Exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the “In Indiana” series at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

In 2007, Torluemke was named a recipient of the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship (Central Indiana Community Foundation) for the period of April 2007 – April 2008 and a winner of the Great Ideas Competition of the Arts Council of Indianapolis. His project “Light The Way” was completed in December 2008. Three large-scale commissions in the city of Indianapolis are testament to the relevance and scope of his ideas, and his ability to present them in a meaningful context within
their communities: In 2006, Torluemke was commissioned to create two 1,000-square- foot terrazzo floor designs for the redesigned Indianapolis International Airport, which opened in 2008. Torluemke’s epic mural at the main branch of the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library, reviving a rich tradition in the spirit of the public works projects of the WPA era, was unveiled in April 2009 in the Nina Mason Pulliam Special Collections Room on the sixth floor of the Central Library.

Looking outward and inward in tandem, Torluemke’s work transcends boundaries of race, class and gender, as he makes art as a collaborator in the diverse communities of Indiana and Chicago’s steel belt, his individual work often directly faces personal or socio-political concerns. “I try not to concern myself with categories, descriptions or rules when viewing or making visual art,” Torluemke says. “I feel this makes the work honest, flexible and hopefully fuller.”

For more info: http://www.tomtorluemke.com/

Hugo Michel Hernandez

Artist Statement

My body of work focuses on the duality of meaning in reclaimed objects and images. The paintings, drawings, and installation work are research oriented-projects informed by various interrelated sources including cultural history, architecture, language, and literature. The work attempts to seduce the viewer into places that are once eerily familiar yet ineluctably foreign. It wants to convey a sense of nostalgia based on memories that bespeak a culture of reinvention and banal planes of reflections. These references are conveyed through the specific and repetitive use of images, objects, textual language, as well as the use of traditional and non-traditional materials.

Finishing School

M.O.L.D.

M.O.L.D. is a hot zone-themed wet lab and workshop at Angels Gate in San Pedro (5/3-6/12) that investigates the science, politics, and culture of food decomposition. The audience is invited to participate in various experiments and build their own amateur bioindicators to assess food quality and safety. www.finishing-school.net/mold.html

Finishing School is an interdisciplinary artist collective that explores contemporary social, political, and environmental issues. Their projects conflate praxis, play, and activism and seek to engage audiences through various participatory models. Finishing School was established in 2001 and is based in Los Angeles.

Finishing School
www.finishing-school.net

ARTIST STATEMENT:

My goal is to make simple and effective modifications to everyday objects in order to open up their meanings triggering new associations for the viewer. For me, the best art engages and stimulates perception. I hope to exploit an object’s communicative potential and lead the viewer to consider the source and function of the object within the material culture and the contradictions and complexity of such culture. I work with a variety of media including craft, video, ready-mades, and found objects.

I spent my childhood and adolescence in Mexico City absorbing a visual landscape spanning pre-Columbian, Colonial, and Modern times. My sensibility is informed by these early experiences and most powerfully by the ingenuity of folk culture and its capacity to assimilate and corrupt/transform all these languages into hybrid forms of expression. After moving to the United States I drew from my aesthetic reservoir in an attempt to cope with the loss of the visual stimuli of my youth. I favored the low-tech processes of silk-screening and block printing which allowed for more immediate self-expression and often used folk motifs retrieved from memory.

In my current work I investigate the intersection of different cultural registers (e.g. the language of modernism and minimalism vis-à-vis feminine handicrafts, consumer society, design, and the everyday). I continue to use what is at hand and process materials through the grid, repetitions, pairings, and juxtapositions. I am interested in how something small and mundane can open up to larger meanings.

BIO:

Georgina Valverde is a Mexican artist, born in Mexico City, 1962 and lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2003.

Contact Information
http://www.georginavalverde.com/

Photo credits: Bill Bengtson

Making Certain It Goes On (For R. H.) Cloth, cotton thread, dried lime, metal staples, plastic bread ties, steel and paint 29¼ in. x 3 in. x 7 in. 2009	Making Certain It Goes On (For R. H.) DETAIL 2009	Unraveling Acrylic yarn and plasticine 42 x 38 x 60 inches 2002
The Sparrow Shits Upside Down (For A. G.) Acrylic and wool yarn, soil, polypropylene rope, bamboo and paint 2009	The Sparrow Shits Upside Down (For A. G.) DETAIL 2009	Blue Extension Nylon, acrylic, and synthetic hair 216 in. x 17 in. x 17 in. 2002
Planets & Pyramids Acrylic yarn, paper and resin Dimensions variable ongoing since 2006	Spiral The artist’s hair Dimensions variable ongoing since 2004	Daily Coffee Coffee on 50 paper towels 55 in. x 62 in. 2004

England, 2007, 24″X30″

ARTIST STATEMENT:

With influences including Gustav Klimt, Joseph Cornell, and Georgia O’Keefe, Kristen’s mixed media paintings and installations are constructed with paint, paper, fabric, and her own photography. Her style is often striking, dealing often with patterns found in nature and geographical maps. Fascinated with the aspect of time, her work explores the past and the future, and their relationship to the present.

BIO:

My work examines the passing of time. Fascinated with both natural and urban environments, I attempt to capture delicate details and cycles of transformation that often occur in overlooked, everyday moments. Buildings are torn down and replaced, flowers fade and bloom, and people come and go. In my art, I’m addressing the fleeting feelings of isolation and comfort that can result in these periods of change and stasis, and the sense of wonder that the world and its movements give me.

Combining multiple artistic mediums in the process of constructing my layered collages and paintings, I collect and experiment with photography, paint, watercolor pencils, and found materials.

After growing up in Iowa, and graduating from the University of Iowa, I lived in Chicago for 13 years. I moved to Los Angeles in 2007 with my husband Brett, a writer, and my daughter, Lia Pearl.

Contact Information
http://www.kristenneveu.com

Another Day, 2009, 24″X30″	Nest, 2008 – 60″X36″	Starry, 2008, 30″X24″

Following one of the most cliché definitions of the art as a self expression method, I am trying to open each area of my life to it. Everything that I perceive combines with the imagination and becomes a reflection of the human being. Even though that I have attempted to do this in different ways, academic music has been dominant. But unfortunately, in some certain cases music can not be sufficient to express myself. Everything related to the human being, exists in the handwork; in the objects, cities, buildings, societies. I am also a part of this circle. To understand it better, in someway I am trying to reflect everything that I see, hear, taste and feel. Till now, apart from music, photography guided me. I searched in my mind and humour when I took photos. I have experimented to show people and cities from this point of view. But the variety of the expression types is still there and I want to take this diversity into my life.

I am looking for an interdisciplinary approach. Until this time I tried to learn more about semiology. I also wanted to reflect this diversity, the experience that was collected and created by my perceptions.

Contact Information
Gökçen Dilek Acay
Born in Istanbul 19.11.1983
gokcendilek@gmail.com
myspace.com/gokcendilek

statement:

My work is based on personal experience, convictions, education, and personal taste. My current primary focus is on concepts of identity (in general), the idea of a sponsored identity, consumerism as a creator of identity, and post-colonialism. This subject matter can be very specific and personal at times.

An important aspect the work is its relationship to the audience. While I do exhibit in traditional spaces such as galleries, more often than not I create pieces for community spaces. In this way the work breaches the correlation between art and consumerism and becomes something to talk about rather than remaining simply a “precious art” object.

The end product of most of my work has aesthetic elements that visually engage, inform, educate, or create interest for a viewer on the given subject.

bio:

Pellot was born in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico, and resides in Chicago. He received his BFA from the University of Illinois, at Chicago, and his MFA from Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois. Pellot works in various mediums such as painting, screen-printing, video and sculpture. He is a conceptual artist who engages social critique, politics and humor.

Contact Information
info@josuepellot.com
http://www.josuepellot.com/
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Bodhisattva #2 Paper, tape, thread, gouache, ink, fabric, 2008

Navajo Rug (a little sex, a little violence) Paper, tape, thread, postcards, fabric 2008

Polly Perez
Currently living and working in El Paso, TX

Print media and packaging from various cultures and eras, political propaganda, historical and scientific drawings, pop art, industrial design, and recycling are my influences. Examining consumption of the visual as a unique commodity is my curiosity. I approach it like a scientific process, with results depending on chains of small experiments.

I favor the use of recycled and found objects, especially old slides, books, advertising, and used fabrics in my current work. The shortened life cycle of goods in the global marketplace begs intervention – after being sold, bought, and used – things can become something different in their afterlife. With a sewing machine, tape, and intuition I test how feasible it is to intervene.

I feel like I straddle an invisible fence between cultures and histories; soaking in what I see in the world at large, mainly through print media, hybridizing it to my specs, and then turning it loose upon itself. It is either adulteration or making with what is at hand when there is lots at hand. Seeing things being thrown away as a byproduct of the current mass digital conversion of libraries, print media, and photographs is the perfect way to have lots at hand.

Education
2003 University of Texas at Dallas (B.A. in Art & Performance)

Contact Information
veggiecat@juno.com

Brave but Doomed Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

Mount Everest Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

Perlas y Almendras Paper, tape, thread, gouache, photographic slides 2008

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Artist Statement:

Lauren Feece is motivated by the challenge of being present in the moment. The paintings and drawings she creates are thoughts about the nature of things, musings on the everyday, and studies of the layers of meaning just under the surface. Losing track of the everyday details, life becomes a photo album of decorated daydreams.

Inspired by the connection of the artistic process to ritual, myth, and meditation she layers: brushstroke, line, swirls, drips, explosions and movements of paint, birds, clouds, color, flowers, trees, light, lace, pattern, blooms, webs, waves, vines, twilight, leaves, and sunsets into ornate visions of passing memories.

Lauren has been exhibiting her work since 1998. In 2002 she moved to Chicago to pursue a full time career as an artist. After years of rigorously exhibiting her work, she felt the need to return to a simpler life, more connected to the relaxed flow of the natural world. She and her equally creative partner relocated to a run down farm in Puerto Rico. In this beautiful environment, inspired by the natural world, she continues to explore life through her drawings and paintings.

To see more of Lauren’s work click here: http://laurenfeece.com/

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Ben Dallas

Significant art surprises and confounds us by escaping conventionalized appearances or identities devised to accomplish some specified purpose; this includes the conventions of art itself. As a result, its quality is directly dependent on its ability to evoke some degree of vagueness and incompleteness that forces us to feel and contemplate the unfamiliar. This experience usually reveals more than it reinforces. Because they do this, good art works are like visions even when they have no aspirations to revelation or prophecy. A vision’s look is unexpected and holds your attention for as long as it remains a vision. To stay alive it must be stronger and more demanding than the satisfaction and assurance felt from believing you understand it or from knowing what it is; this we determine later after the experience. Attributing its appearance to metaphor or symbol or finding the patterns within yourself that remind you of something like it will break the vision’s spell, so it works to deny our ability to do this while it’s in our presence. Without equals, it resists resolution and clarity, as it doesn’t seem to belong to the world as it is. Instead, it partially brings the past to a close and redirects what will be by adding itself to our experience. I work to make objects that function as visions.

To see more of Ben’s work click here: http://www.bendallas.com