Friends, mentors and lovers, are the family you choose. The people that you elect to shape the direction of your life. Through conversations and experiences with those that you love, you form your moral compass, your priorities and contour your passions.

This exhibition is an appeal to those that have acted as architects in my life and career. Open House Contemporary, located at the intersection of art and hospitality, is a place for exploration and contemplation. Our audience is multifold. Engaging the Chicago arts community through public exhibitions, events, salons and dinners, Chicagoans have a diverse array of opportunities to experience our collection. As a fully functional “B&B”, OHC hosts thousands of visitors to Chicago every year. Providing a rare opportunity to live with truly compelling contemporary artwork while exploring one of America’s most vibrant cities.

Moments spent traveling are special. You linger a bit longer over nightcaps with friends as you gaze on an unfamiliar skyline. Meeting new people in new places brings a unique perspective. Conversations meander and wind through the familiar and unfamiliar without hurry when you have lazy days together. Open House Contemporary provides an opportunity to set the stage--to provoke a dialogue between--old friends reuniting in their old haunts--colleagues celebrating their victories--couples falling in love with each other and a new town.

Please join us for the opening of Intimacies and Influence Friday January 10th, 2020. We look forward to seeing you.

Matthew Kellen

Founder and Curator

Open House Contemporary

Featuring work by:

Melina Ausikaitis

Jeremy Boyle

Jens Brasch

Max Brodeur

Natalie Clark

Eli Craven

Jennifer Cronin

Jeffrey Forsythe

Kevin Heisner

Beth Hoeckel

Thomas Huston

Jamie Kelter

William Lieberman

Tom Lau

Bryan McVey

Eve Meilleur

Elaine Suzanne Miller

Erik L. Peterson

John Preus

Jason Robinette

Kathryn Rodrigues

Jessica Sladek

Preeti Samraj

Chris Strong

Dasha Tolstikova

Justine Tobiasz

Leah Tumerman

Genevieve Wolff 

Opening Thursday October 25th 7-10pm. 

Featuring works by:
Mikel Patrick Avery & Rose Velez
Devendra Banhart
Brielle Brilliant
Edgar Bryan
Ian Ferguson
Andrea Heimer & Brett Marcell
Rose Lazar
Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Charlie Michaels
Holly Murkerson
Sammi Skolmoski

Curated by Tim Kinsella

One show in three galleries / three shows in one gallery

Open House Contemporary Presents: Temporary Openings Show Us How

Years ago—maybe I was in my mid-20s, maybe 20 years ago—I read about the numbering system of a primitive culture. Its entirety was this: 1, 2, more than 2.

I can’t remember where I read it or when and I can’t remember what culture I was reading about. But the system itself has always stuck with me. Everything more than two was all the same number. That makes sense to me. Each thing is itself, this or that, and beyond that it’s all potential. Three isn’t just the necessary stabilizing leg for a table or a tent or a time-based dimension with depth. It’s also the door to infinite possibilities.

Here’s one show, three variations of the same show. Would I have preferred to have some unifying aesthetic organizing principle beyond that? Eh. I don’t know. This is the three-story gallery (or is it galleries?) that invited me to curate. And now is the time I’m not interested in anything more specific than the possibility of infinite possibilities.

Tim Kinsella

Three Stories

You open to a room. Elevator, door, aperture. The rooms open to other rooms. We’re all here temporarily—earth, that is. The rooms here too. But some of these rooms and opens are more temporary than others. One hundred thousand folding chairs flying or felled, unfelled or deeply felt. Imagine you are reading words on a page and then your mind starts to create an image based on their order and your cultural associations with them. Some things, like imaginative processes, are actually relatively easy to picture.

Every house is open when you’re a robber. The way over we saw a dog shouting from a window decorated with a surveillance camera. The youth feel much looser about taking video and making video of strangers, on the bus, in the park, in the bar. Though they aren’t calling themselves agents of the surveillance state, they work tirelessly to assert themselves as subjects, taking up space, making space. The idea of “making fun” has been professionalized by party-planners and vibes-curators.

Meanwhile, back to the house, the one house without a door, the one that’s three. We were admiring the persistence of buildings. Trees and their tresses, trespassing and slow-going. The leaves dropped, I eavesdropped. Springing and falling, summering within our discontent, this continent. Every morning they audition for the role of still going. Were stealing: glances, etc. Toe shoes in toe socks, a finger licking goo, an audiologist insisting we call her an “ear bud”. The egress and the egret, endangered but, as they say, still never out of the woods (yet). Swooning leads to spooning, in the big room that’s empty except for all the things. Every thing (and most likely everything) has a barely kept secret resonance, has a dozen hidden sounds waiting for another thing (and most likely anotherthing) to contact it. Sometimes the slow decay of a stick on paper or an arm on a picture can be heard for years. And when we build our own worlds, we decide on gravity, on how fast sound moves, on walls or not.

Xerox is a proprietary eponym while photocopying is a conceptual technique.

I have no advice if your neck is too long or too short. I didn’t even think that this was a problem until now. I didn’t know knowing nothing about necks would come up at this, my job interview for escalator attendant.

Lol why would someone want to interview a Job?

If or when the eave dropped: The only person in a place talking, like the lone noun preposition article noun voweling. Pre-, post- or us. Zinging, zigging, zagging, either way: zzz. But also how fun is that sound? The term mouthfeel is what they meant by vino and veritas. The truth is that some words are tannic—they make your mouth and their ears dry. Yuck. People become foodies because no one asks a dish what it means. And if they do, the answer is almost always memories, matrilineal lines and political histories. I’m not in opposition to those ideas (who hates “positive memories of home” as a category?) but I wouldn’t mind a soup about the ecological crisis or mental illness. Maybe all soups are about that and I’m wrong. I went to the store and discovered I was wrong.

The empty streets at dawn or on Thanksgiving, like an ad museum ad nauseum.

Let us not forget that there are also gains in translation. Place names are always better in translation. Paintings too.

I never mind someone telling me their dream until I discover that it was a dream. Just like how many of our favorite stories are ruined when we learn the person was “flipping” on “flop” or whatever new chemical excuse is being invoked. Your DJ name is a book you claim you didn’t read with the vowels replaced by your cousin’s favorite houseplant’s.

Who didn’t name Studs Terkel’s “Working” “Job Interviews”?

Musing on the diegetic space of an artist’s drawings, we wondered if all these little guys hang out together (hanging out together is like commingling for people who aren’t recycling) and if there can be crossover episodes from one sketchbook or studio to another. Benny was obsessed with this idea and wondered if since he’d been willed into being through my typing he was now present in every other thing I’d ever written. It wasn’t enough though. By the end of this sentence, he wanted to be in other universes too. If you think infinity is immense, try feeling things. Improvisation can be irresponsible when every utterance begets a new world. That is a lot of worlds. The infinity character, its elegance and its resemblance to a belted zero reclining on a fainting couch having pondered its own immensity, seems to bely the messiness we can imagine when everything imaginable and then everything those things can imagine and then those things can imagine, (...) , get together. We all have a lot to do, so friends ask how we juggalo. The notion of knowing how magnets work is, get this, both simple and complicated: on one pole anyone who has played with them understands how they work, on the other, are so-called scientologists who know why they work. I am not paranoid: Benny lives in ones and zeros. Benny went through all my shit. He didn’t have to go to school. He lives on all three floors at once, even if he only now realized the pun with story.

What is the current tax on brass?

Epanalepsis is the repetition of the initial part of a clause or sentence at the end of that same clause or sentence is what epanalepsis is.

Jesse Malmed

In 2013 the city of Chicago closed 50 public schools, almost all in low-income neighborhoods, citing decreased enrollment and budgetary concerns as the primary reasons. Through a random set of associations, Chicago artist John Preus gained access to the materials - desks, tables, chairs, bookshelves - that were bound for the landfill, and struck a deal with the moving company contracted to clear out the schools. 6 semi loads of wobbly chairs, marked up desks, and gum-laden bookshelves were frantically packed into a donated vacant store front in Washington Park. The materials have since been the primary source for Preus's work in art, commercial, and domestic venues. Because of the social complexity of the issues raised by the materials, Preus invited 50 artists, designers, and architects to weigh-in with ways to approach this and future material sources embedded with the pathos of history. The response is Infinite Games 50/50, a kaleidoscopic observation on a perplexing and seemingly intractable set of social dilemmas. Infinite Games 50/50, in association with Rhona Hoffman Gallery, EXPO Chicago, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, includes wall pieces, installations, functional objects, re-designs, prototypes, utensils, furniture suites, and instruments, all made from or inspired by this collection of CPS materials.

Artists featured: Alberto Aguilar, Mark Baker (Flint), Iris Bernblum, Jeremy Boyle (Pittsburgh), Cassat and Dehais (France), Juan Angel Chavez, Tadd Cowen, Lily Dithrich, Jim Duignan, Patricia Evans, Assaf Evron, Douglas Ewart (Minneapolis), Will FitzPatrick, Peter Fleps, Iker Gil and Thomas Kelley, Kelsey Harrison, James Jankowiak, Misha Kahn (NYC), Seth Keller, Matthew Kellen, Jenny Kendler, Walter Kitundu, Barbara Koenen, Tom Lau, Jason Lazarus, Laura Letinsky, Faheem Majeed, Lou Mallozzi, Sabina Ott, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Matt Metzger, Parsons and Charlesworth, Dan Peterman, Erik Peterson, Colleen Plumb with Roosevelt Buress, Cheryl Pope, John Preus, Michael Rakowitz, Karen Reimer, Kevin Reiswig, Brian Saner and Teresa Pankratz, Christopher Schanck (Detroit), Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan, Marvin Tate, Norman Teague, Lauren Valley (Pittsburgh), Dan S. Wang (Madison), Fo Wilson, Amanda Williams, Titus Wonsey

This exhibition is generously supported by Chicago based Lagunitas Brewing Company. 

*Photograph by Colleen Plumb 

Please join Open House Contemporary (OHC) for an exciting evening where we celebrate dual openings! OHC is proud to be showing a selection of Eli Craven's new work and partnering with VGA Gallery to host a collection of distinctive game art!

Eli Craven is an interdisciplinary artist based in Champaign, Illinois. His work explores the role of images and objects within the development of identity, memory, and desire. The acts of looking and collecting are central to his process. Each project begins with a search for redeemable sources at estate sales, thrift stores, and digital archives. Through methods of photography, video, sculpture, and collage, the reclaimed materials are charged with new possibilities directed at the senses – the familiar, the bizarre, the boring, the erotic. His work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally including at the Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia and in the book Unlocked, from Atopos CVC in Athens, Greece.

Open House Contemporary is delighted to partner with VGA for a summer survey of video game art. The survey will highlight distinctive game art by emerging and established artists and game developers from across the field and across the world, as drawn from the VGA print collection. This exhibition is organized by VGA Gallery in partnership with OHC. 

VGA Gallery is generously supported by the Illinois Arts Council Agency, individuals and private and corporate foundations.

Prism Nutrition

Please join us for an exciting evening exploring the many health benefits of sea vegetables. This intimate event includes an-depth nutrition presentation, elegant, multi-course meal featuring creative seaweed-inspired dishes, as well as hands-on workshop to create your own seaweed treats!

Nutrition lecture led by Nutritionist and Registered Dietitian, Ingrid Clark. Ingrid is the founder and owner of Prism Nutrition, a holistic nutrition practice. In addition to Prism Nutrition, Ingrid is also the Nutritionist at Lotus Center, a holistic psychotherapist private practice and Clinical Nutrition Manager at Saint Anthony Hospital. Ingrid received her Masters of Nutrition from Bastyr University, a leader in natural health and natural healing located in Seattle, Washington.

Multi-course seaweed-focused meal prepared by Chef and Holistic Health Coach, Cristy-Lucie Alvarado. Cristy has many years experience working in the culinary world in both New York and Chicago's restaurants. Most recently, working as the Culinary Director for Farmer's Fridge and now as a private chef, Cristy infuses fresh produce and nutrient-dense foods into all her dishes.

Click here to reserve your spot!

Jennifer Cronin

Artist Statement

Wandering.  Looking for something to follow.  Hoping to find a hint of something that is genuine and true.  In my early work, it is a playful tale of imagination weaving itself throughout my daily life.  It is a dream that has taken grip in my consciousness and won’t let go.  A wistful yearning for something more.  A quiet reflection on the mystery of the everyday.  The brilliance and beauty that can be lost if you don’t try to catch it. 

As time has passed, I have turned my search outward.  Searching for meaning in the lives of others and the surrounding world.  Hoping that we can all connect through our lives lived, our sense of empathy, our individual stories, our hopes and aspirations, and our shared struggles and disappointments.  Chasing after the mystery and complexity of our lives, and the fingerprints that we leave behind in this world. 

Come enjoy a Memorial Day Concert @ OHC! Doors will open at 6:30pm with the show starting at 7pm. BYOB! 
 

Suggested donation of $15 with the proceeds going to the bands.

Limited space, only the first 30 can get in, donate now!

FRESH SHEET: Erik L. Peterson, the first solo art exhibition dedicated entirely to works that investigate the sharing economy

Open House Contemporary (OHC) has invited conceptual artist and public sculptor Erik L. Peterson to completely take over three Airbnb apartments with site-specific artworks. Peterson is known for artworks that engage audiences with familiar surrounding in unexpected ways: a gigantic neon sculpture that oozes down the wall and spills onto the floor (Seep); a forklift ballet performed under the gaze of “The Picasso” on Daley Plaza (Square Dance); a pair of reflective “beach paintings” that flash when car lights rake across their surfaces (The Oasis). For FRESH SHEET, Peterson moves indoors, but the works retain the same generous spirit of the public works, infused with a subversive underbelly. The art in FRESH SHEET cannot be experienced in an art museum or commercial gallery, but only by renting an apartment at Open House Contemporary during the run of the show. 

Peterson's work explores today’s sharing economy by activating a new way of observing, experiencing, and “collecting” artwork. Instead of buying a painting, for example, guests interact with (and within) the artworks as a part of their Airbnb experience. The pieces have contemporary glam attitude that simultaneously encourages the publicizing of private life and the privatization of shared domestic spaces. Included in the price of admission are chauffeured automobile performances, alarm clock selfies, steamy shower apparitions, giant paintings of rumpled post-coital sheets lifted from historical canvases, and interactive neon motel signs. This set of artworks, in fact, only works in the semi-private shared domestic space of the OHC Airbnb apartments or the ride-sharing cars. The conceptual art pieces are made specifically for bedrooms, showers, living rooms, and the local city streets. Likewise, FRESH SHEET challenges the model for the art economy, which is based on an anachronistic system where discrete objects are bought and sold. OHC, on the other hand, proposes a model based on the sharing economy, where guests pay for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Rather than taking home an object, they take home a story.

Erik L. Peterson is a public artist, sculptor, and curator living in Chicago. He is best known for his large-scale urban interventions (Seep, The Oasis and Inner State), signature edible ice cream sculptures (Creamcycle and Soft Palate), and public performances and camouflaged urban spectacles employing everyday scenarios in absurdist flux (Two Tow'n, The Large Glass Company, and Square Dance). Peterson has been shown in solo exhibitions at The Arts Club of Chicago, Bert Green Fine Art, Bolt Gallery at the Chicago Artists’ Coalition, and EXPO CHICAGO. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at Gallery 400, A+D Gallery, INOVA at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Step Gallery at Arizona State University, Doudna Fine Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University, the Pick Museum of Anthropology, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, among others. Additionally, Peterson is a founder of Hyde Park Kunstverein, a community museum focusing on solo projects, and Qeej Hero, a trans-cultural video game featuring an ancient Hmong musical instrument.

http://www.eriklpeterson.com/

The SAL ET CORIUM collection explores the shifting qualities of power and presence through a series of sculptural adornments created from pre-worn black leather garments. Inspired by pre-iron age armor and contemporary leather culture, the accessories designer proposes a new approach to creative ritual and self-realization through the spirit of DIY music and fashion. Each piece in the collection only becomes fully realized when worn; taking on its true shape when united with its ultimate muse. Demonstrating the powerful tension between idea and presence, skin and form, figure and muse.

SAL ET CORIUM launches the second presentation of the collection with an unreleased video by Chris Hefner / score by Seth Sher / modeled by Heather Gabel and fashion show in an intimate setting.

Hosted by Open House Contemporary (building has elevator access)

Pieces from HVNTER GVTHERER's collection will be available for purchase.

www.hvntergvtherer.com