I am interested in how fluorescent color affects us in a daily base and the rich history of Chinese Painting and the philosophy. The artificial (unnatural) colors I investigate represent the vision of reality, beauty, and the color scheme of my generation. Through the meditational process of mark making, I am examining neon color, space and landscape. The visual statement envisions the entity of being. I believe the continuing pursuit of physical being of nature merging or conflicting with fluorescent color will define who I am as a visual communicator.

www.chungfanchang.com

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

Patrick Holbrook
http://www.patrickholbrook.com/

A Record of Consumption HDV, 2 Minutes and 23 seconds 2009 WATCH VIDEO HERE	Markers HD DVD (2 minutes), 2008. WATCH VIDEO HERE	Limb HDV, 2 Minutes 40 Seconds, 2008. WATCH VIDEO HERE

Shane Mecklenburger

Artist statement

My work investigates post-industrial culture through the common uses and origins of modeling, gaming and information technologies. In my projects 3D models represent a quixotic attempt to make sense of things. To me games draw attention to the rules we (un)knowingly agree upon from one situation to another. I also use games and models for their association with childhood, which I see as an endless condition.

Lately I’ve become interested in shooter games and how they construct and conflate entertainment, childhood, war and masculinity. The video “Halcyon Atmosphere” and the sculpture it generated, “Semi-Automatic”, both use the sublime transformation of fearsome or horrific subjects into objects of contemplation and beauty, approximating of the kind of sublime experience of becoming immersed in a shooter game.

In shooter games, the gun quickly replaces the body as the primary site of agency, status and control. So in “Friendly Fire” we stripped a shooter game of all its other elements, including gravity. Only guns are left, floating in an infinitely empty expanse. “Friendly Fire” explores basic questions of personal agency within a set of rules and a field of “play” that appear to be familiar, but are in fact all inverted. The more the player shoots, the more guns appear and the less control the player has.

This sort of inversion is similarly illustrated in “on_The Ball”. A cue ball, which, like the shooter’s gun, is another presumptive “actor” or site of agency and control, has been fixed to the center of the video image. The table bounces around the ball, an inversion which calls attention to the limits of the playing field. The table becomes a metaphor for the unspoken rules we agree upon from game to game, from moment to moment. Who has more agency, the player or the agreed-upon boundaries of the game?

Contact Information
shane@shmeck.com
http://www.shmeck.com
Download CV

SEE THE VIDEO HERE	SEE THE VIDEO HERE	SEE THE VIDEO HERE

Yong Choi

“The Statue of Yong” is a self portrait bronze sculpture by artist Yong Choi. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago let him display his sculpture throughout the museum. Yong Choi received a BFA from the School of the Art Institue.

Art statement

My art is the best method to communicate with others. I want to share my feelings with other people because I can get inspiration from my ordinary life and others are in my story without their will and opinion. So I want to give a little present to them in return. When I carted my statue on the street, many people asked me to take picture of me with my bronze twin, and I was glad to pose with their children and answer their questions. I tried to do my best. Some of them got my information, and sent emails including the photo images with cheers. I love the mutual activities. I would not expect spectators see my work raise their heads. That is why I made him laying down on the ground, and people can come and see him easily.

At 4’ x 5’11” and 400 lbs my bronze piece is not light. The traditional medium, bronze, makes me jump into history. I recorded my idea and thinking of every single day. And bronze “YONG” can travel the world and survive after a couple of thousand years conveying my will. Nobody knows the future. That is why life is so hopeful and I overcome my difficulties in the moment. The affirmative concept of my life often helped me to grow into a better man, and overcome my anger and frustration. If I change my point of view, my keen cutthroat competition can be comic film to others. So I do not want to be too serious and will take a cheerful view of life.

Contact Information
cbj181818@gmail.com

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

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