Even twins are never exact copies of each other and yet, there lingers the common complaint that things seem the same everywhere. Films repeat the same threadbare storylines, grand political gestures are merely gestures of old with predictable outcomes, and the idea of the new (that which does not resemble anything else) becomes a difficult fiction.

Art consists of transformation, a transformation between the visible and the invisible relations between things. To make something strange throws a wrench into the habits of looking. Although looking can be one of the easiest things to do in the world—to gaze aimlessly, such as when window shopping—it can also be one of the most rigorous ways of experiencing the world. When using eyes to stare, they can pierce past the thin skin that covers all things.

The artists in this exhibition utilize the fiction of resemblance with artworks that are deceitful—quite simply, they look like other things. However, these artworks play with the subtle variations between things, the strangeness, intimacy, and even peculiarity in the world of objects, negotiating a balance between representation as an impossible act and the specific traces and thick materiality embedded within these works.

This installation draws upon the ecological effects of vibration and the history of sonic warfare. At root is an interest in the way sound both makes and disturbs place. Its very nothingness seduces us. Historically, sound has been an ideal medium for the performance of psychological warfare because of how efficiently it evokes events and locations. Whether declarative, as with anthems or artillery, or deceptive, as with sonic decoys or surveillance, the audiosphere is well disposed to militarization.

Inside the gallery, aural encounters occur in two strains: one territorial, where sound travels through the ground walked upon, as much felt as heard, the other aerial, as a sonic beam that occasionally sweeps the visitor unannounced like a wandering ghost. A third Aeolian harp element will occur outside the Art Center. This will be a wire made to resonate by the wind, and so aleatory by nature.

Work by Liz Nielsen, Kate Ruggeri and Brendan Sullivan.

Connectivity from the “real thing” is removed or sometimes replaced in art just as relationships are fabricated from false presumptions. We create expectations for one another that eventually either satisfy, call for compromise or lead to disappointment and failure. Feeble Intimacy showcases three artists who touch on methods of interaction with the viewer and incorporate themes that focus on human connectivity with one another and the environment.

Work by Elijah Burgher, Sara Fagala, Terence Hannum, Chad Harrison, Ivan Lozano, Adam Ludwig and Rebecca Walz.

Minutes away from downtown pairs the paintings of artist Orion Martin with an ambitious installation of post-war furniture from the collection of design scholar Hudson Harrington Berry. This collaborative exhibition activates the domestic tradition of the art object, as well as the designed object, as a ponderous and slowly unfolding artifact that adds pleasure to the everyday, both ontologically and aesthetically. Minutes away from downtown enacts a marriage of the gallery and domestic space, which explores this long-held human desire to augment one’s environment with cultured beauty.

“Interiors curated without compromise are an intellectual satisfaction.  They tell a story. They confer new understanding. They invoke our admiration. Interiors are ideas that you occupy- premium experiences.”

Presented by the Network of Crowded Art.

Actually, everybody is a dragon, but current conditions discourage and disallow us to express those sinuous traits.

Like a multi-headed hydra, Hey, We’re All Beginners Here! is an exhibition with numerous voices to illuminate our historical moment and paths into the future. It’s a series of social events and collection of images. Cultural workers and artists from different fields are contributing to this cloud of images. Among those contributing are Robin Hustle, Sarah Kavage, Pennie Brinson, Salem Collo-Julin, Sarah Ross, Red76, Sarah Smizz, Courtney Moran and Park McArthur. The exhibition includes drawings, an open stage and pulpit, a book making work shop, good food, video, wheat grass and a bike ride to Shaumberg.

With an unyielding interest in the formal explorations and history of abstraction, Carrie Gundersdorf‘s drawings and paintings reflect her interest in how line, form, color, and spatial compositions can be derived from other source materials, concerns similar to modernist artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Piet Mondrian. Her work articulates light spectrums as well as the progress of stars and planets through abstract compositions consisting of bars of color against atmospheric backdrops, taken from reproductions of astronomical photographs in books. Gundersdorf says, “My drawings and paintings refer to astronomical images that are created by time-lapse photography, spectroscopes, and computer-enhanced photographs. I find these images in books and on the internet, and extract shapes, lines, colors, and patterns that serve as a starting point for compositional strategies.”

While her work is partially submerged in documentation and science, the observable mark-making and its subsequent imperfections gives the work a subjective human element and speak to a desire to draw not only what can be seen but also what can be imagined. The result becomes more about her distillation and construction of illusionistic space, rather than a direct reference to the original source. Gundersdorf exhibits a group of new drawings that continue her investigation of abstractions based on representational source material.