Betsy Odom: Gentlewoman (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

About the Artist
Betsy Odom is an artist living in Chicago. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2007 in sculpture, and a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002. She has been in numerous group and solo exhibitions both locally and nationally. Her most recent solo shows, ‘Registry’ at ThreeWalls Gallery and ‘Sis Boom Bah’ at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago explored the ways gender is embedded within materials and within ways of making.
For more information visit www.betsyodom.com.

About the Work
My work explores the ephemera surrounding displays of identity. I work with specific materials like tooled leather, sporty fabrics, chunky silver, automotive finishes, and airbrushed paints. Seen in the right context these materials become signifiers of the cultural phenomena that have surrounded my own development: Southern culture, women’s athletics, queer lifestyles, car enthusiasts, hobbyists, fantasy, or camp. The aesthetics of these groups, although rooted in functionality, often serve to reinforce embedded messages about gender, class, race, and sexuality. I attempt to use a combination of earnest craftsmanship and humor to extract and subvert these messages, creating objects that entertain a fantasy of moving freely among social groups and confronting the contradictions therein.

I employ a variety of media and techniques to create my work; I use skills ranging from leather tooling to woodworking, ceramics to airbrushing, mold making to woodturning, sewing to metalworking. Although I often subvert these traditional processes, I try to stay as true as possible to the original crafts I reference. I fully engage in the “hubris” of making, examining the ways a well-crafted object can point to a larger sense of pride, value, and identity. I imagine parallels between my pride in making and the pride claimed by minority communities—dignity evoked as a contradiction to a history of shame. I direct my own “pride in making” towards the creation of specific objects with symbolic, romantic, and humorous meaning. In this endeavor, I try to embody the ghosts of women’s gym coaches, crushes on camp-counselors, slightly too-old tomboys, or brassy-old maids-- illuminating and conflating the unique aesthetics that accompany these invisible cultures.

In the exhibition, ‘Gentlewoman’, opening on Friday, January 20, at Woman Made Gallery, I included lots of new works meditating on materials and the discomforts of the gendered body. This exhibition is concurrent with ‘20 in their Twenties’, a group show I juried for WMG.

Alexandria Eregbu: A(ph)FRODITE (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

About the Artist
Alexandria Eregbu is a Chicago-based artist currently pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in performance and fiber & material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

About the Work
My work investigates social identity through exploration of the body and attempts to understand how my role, as a young Black woman, functions within any given environment. I am interested in interpreting the body as a spectacle and the relationship of the gaze between myself, as an artist, and my viewers.

Currently, through performance I am exploring my identity as a “sexually attractive being” and how this newly observed identity has served purpose in my community. Rather than just limiting myself to generalization, categorization, or stereotype, I am devoted to creating art from personal experience. Public response, outside of the institution, has also been essential to my practice because it has allowed for me to more accurately develop an assessment of the content in my work. Here, I have been able to conduct series of experiments such as laying my vulnerable body passive aggressively in areas that contain high traffic and diverse groups of people like sidewalks, parks, and storefronts of downtown Chicago for several hours at a time.

As my transition from childhood to womanhood has been challenging, confronting my sexuality and the consistent un-consented exploitation and objectification that I have experienced has led me to reconsider and reexamine the way I perceive my environment. While this recognition has given me fresh material to work with, it also has not fallen short of revealing to me the ugliness that comes with being Black and being a woman.

For more information visit http://aeregbu-portfolio.tumblr.com.

Claudia Kleefeld
Patterns of Nature: The Spiral and Interconnectedness (Click Here for an online preview of this exhibit)

About the Artist
Claudia Kleefeld is a performance artist and painter living and working in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

About the Work
Utilizing practices similar to the Surrealists, the Spiral emerged as the primary focus of my work over three years ago, based on received information from my conscious and subconscious mind. The Spiral now prevails in my iconography. For example, RC Israel, who introduced me to Dennis Hopper, sat for me after I went to Hopper’s memorial; I drew his ear, which is a Spiral form, unwinding that story.

Soon, I began noticing the Spiral in everything, and my process became exclusively about understanding this form and its meaning. My research, and creation of imagery linked with text, has led to scientific discoveries that relate to the Spiral. Further, this form points to the interconnectivity of all of nature.

The Spiral symbolizes, and recalls, the source of all energy. Internalizing and externalizing the Spiral illuminates the spirit within all of us. There is a direct correlation between people, introspection and self-discovery, the creation of energy, action and interaction, which exists in the individual and the universal on a scientific level both physically and ethereally. The spiral unfolds as being one of the most potent forms in nature’s patterns.

My art has long since been concerned with an interdisciplinary approach to art-making. During my studies at UCLA, I began to experiment with performance art. As a dancer, I explored movement by incorporating models, sound, photography, video, spoken word, the written word, and figurative imagery. I continue to make art that considers my humanness. Today, I connect the individual’s journey and the external world together through nature’s symbols.

For more information visit www.kleefeldart.com/spiral-catalog.html.

Artist's Talk March 4, 2012 from 1 to 3 p.m.