Spudnik Press Cooperative is pleased to present States of I: A Conversation, an exhibition featuring work by artists Mary Jones and Jolynn Reigeluth.

Jones and Reigeluth are artists that live and work in states of “I;” respectively, Indianola, Iowa and Indianapolis, Indiana. In addition to living in states that start with the same letter, these printmakers have a penchant for building images from a central persona who is at best an unreliable narrator, caught and fraught in a landscape of self.

In their work, both artists celebrate the absurdity of being human by bringing to light some of our deepest, untold internal monologues. These autobiographical works by Jones and Reigeluth exemplify their shared interests in narrative imagery, as well as a love for the graphic legacy and energy coming out of Chicago, Illinois. For this exhibition, Jones and Reigeluth will contribute two bodies of work that culminate in a conversation with a set of two prints – one from each artist – that correspond in size and title.

States of I: A Conversation opens on June 15, 2018 and will be on view through August 11, 2018 at The Annex at Spudnik Press, 1821 W. Hubbard Street, Suite 302, Chicago, IL 60622.

About the Artists:

Mary Jones makes maps of the wilderness of personal histories. Images and words are layered out of time and perspective, and where and when are subjective. Space is delineated by the inhabitants, the who in the journeys being told. These personas are a combination of what is seen with what is imagined about encounters with people, places, and things. Details get piled on in the way that life is lived– in steps, notes, beats, breaths, and marks. Whether drawing or working in print media, collage is always an element. Trained as a printmaker, Jones is a scavenger of technologies, old and new.

Prior to moving to the Des Moines area, Jones lived in Chicago, where she exhibited at Ann Nathan Gallery. She was employed as an illustrator and designer, with work published by the Chicago Tribune, Playboy Magazine, and the Philadelphia Enquirer, among other publications. She was awarded residencies with the Ragdale Foundation, and with Anchor Graphics in Chicago. Twice she has taught photopolymer intaglio workshops for Frogman’s Print Workshops in Omaha, NE. For the past 17 years, she taught printmaking, design, and book arts courses Grand View University in Des Moines. She has work in several public collections, including the Illinois State Museum, and the Alter Collection of Art by Women at PAFA in Philadelphia. She is represented by Tory Folliard Gallery in Milwaukee and Moberg Gallery in Des Moines.

Jolynn Reigeluth’s work combines an array of printmaking processes with drawing, painting, and collage to create print and mixed media hybrids. The images earnestly and humorously reflect on the emotional and physical aspects of the human condition and its twisted ironies. By working in tension between intuition and structure, she creates imagery that playfully captures the complexity of ubiquitous human experiences and interactions. She has a distinct affinity for the absurd and scatological that manifests in these introspective self-portraits.

Reigeluth is an artist from Des Moines, IA currently living and working in Indianapolis, Indiana. She earned an M.F.A. in printmaking from Kansas State University in 2015. Since 2015, Reigeluth has completed a residency in Ontario, Canada, taught at Indiana Wesleyan University as well as other Indianapolis venues, and visited universities in Michigan and Kansas as a visiting artist. In 2016, she curated a traveling exhibition titled “Sateen Dura-Luxe,” an exchange portfolio in honor of Indiana born author, Kurt Vonnegut. The exhibition schedule included MAPC’s 2016 Conference in Louisville, Kentucky, and The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis, where Jolynn is currently organizing another exhibition for 2018. In recent years, her work has been included in exhibitions across the United States including the International Print Center New York’s New Prints Exhibition, Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition, Pacific States Biennial North American Printmaking Exhibition, and others. In 2018 Reigeluth will participate in conducting research for a project titled Transforming Printmaking Through Chemical Innovation lead by National Endowment for the Arts Grant Recipients, Jason Scuilla and Stefan Bossmann, of Kansas State University.

Image (left to right): Jolynn Reigeluth, These Are My Legs II, 2017 (detail); Mary Jones, Harryette, 2017 (detail).

Spudnik Press Cooperative is pleased to present Entre Rios y Montañas (Between Rivers and Mountains), a solo exhibition featuring new work by Chicago-based artist Jonathan Herrera.

The work featured in Entre Rios y Montañas stems from Herrera’s deep interest and continued investigation of the relationships between collective memory and historical instances of state-sponsored violence and trauma inflicted on politicized bodies. Often the victims of these crimes, or rather their bodies that disappear, leave behind stories not in words but in gesture. Trails of clothing are found in the deserts between borders as they get stuck on fences with barbed wire or wash up onto shores of beaches. These garments are sometimes attached to lifeless bodies while others manage to claim autonomy from the flesh.

Through these collographs, akin to rubbings, Herrera explores the connection between clothing and the body, as well as the relationship between forensic evidence and items of personal significance. By employing this print-based process, Herrera partakes in an act of remembrance as he produces tracings and impression of clothing left behind. His harsh, and almost violent, treatment of the objects carries forth into the artwork’s final presentation. Ultimately, the objects of clothing rendered in Herrera’s work are declarations unto themselves, left behind by bodies to evoke lived experiences.

Jonathan Herrera is a print-based studio artist and teacher from Chicago, IL. He holds a BFA from the Minneapolis College in Art and Design. Through his studio practice and teaching philosophy, Herrera engages multiple facets of place-making and thinking in order to express ideas through concept building, process, and materials. He constantly works to create accessibility in both art and education by connecting his studio work, public work, and community engagement. Herrera has recently exhibited work at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), and Concordia Gallery (St. Paul, MN).

Image: Jonathan Herrera, Untitled, 2017 (detail).

Spudnik Press Cooperative is pleased to present Roots, a solo exhibition featuring new work by artist Yasaman Moussavi.

The visual content of the Moussavi’s work for this exhibition is personal and intimate, consisting of etchings that depict creatures entangled in a natural space. As she explores the ties between individual and environment, she begins to unearth emotions, associations, and memories that one attaches to physical spaces to discover the abiding bond between nature and us.

For Moussavi, etching is a dance of covering and uncovering, building and destroying whatever she imagines onto her copper plates. In this sense, printmaking bridges her inner and external worlds. Moussavi also crafts an intimate relationship between her medium of choice and the visual message she wants to communicate by making her own paper. Upon layering and reconstructing handmade papers, she fuses the intricate forms found in her etchings with dynamic natural forms.

At a time in history when we suffer from great divisive rhetoric and disconnect in and with politics, the environment and each other, Moussavi dreams of growing roots and connecting with the self, nature, and people.

Yasaman Moussavi was born in Tehran, Iran and received her BFA in painting from the Al-Zahra University of Tehran and an MA in Art Studies from The University of Tehran. She also holds an MFA with an emphasis in painting and printmaking from Texas Tech University, where she explored and developed her skills in papermaking, printmaking and installation art. Moussavi has participated in many national and international exhibitions, including the Juried International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Irving Art center, TX, A.I.R Gallery Biennial, Brooklyn, NY, “Norouzaneh” International Mini Print Annual Exhibition at Sagene Kunstsmie, Oslo, Spazio 74/b Milan and Chicago.

Image: Yasaman Moussavi, Breathe on me, 2017.

Spudnik Press Cooperative presents new work by Chicago-based artist Alex Kostiw. She is an artist and graphic designer based in Chicago. Her practice combines short stories and experimental comics with book design and printmaking. She is interested in themes of fragmentation, communication, and incomprehensibility. Using interactive book formats and minimal visual and textual detail, she crafts loose narratives that reveal something more felt than understood. Her work offers readers traces of subjects that remain largely inaccessible. Kostiw received an M.F.A. in visual communication design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in English literature from the University of Chicago.

The exhibition, titled “I’m calling from a great distance,” through a variety of miniature and postcard-sized prints, large-scale artworks, and an artist’s book of indecipherable texts, relates the communications between a lighthouse keeper and an interplanetary explorer. The work explores the tension between physical distance and the closeness that technology can create; memory; and the scale of humanity. The prints are divided into two series. One details a sequence of a woman turning around. The other depicts planets and abstracted landscapes. The gallery becomes as a space for this two-part story to unfold.

During recent travel, Kostiw’s interest in immeasurable spaces shifted from metaphorical interior or mental spaces to physical ones. She was drawn to parallels between explorers in history who crossed oceans and the speculative exploration of other planets. She finds intrigue in the gut-wrenching contrast in size between the ocean or space and the individual, as well as in exploration as an expression of, and cause for, longing.

Throughout her practice, Kostiw’s interest is as much in what a story presents as in what it does not—in what is not said or done, as in what is. Oceans and outer space are settings that sharply highlight the inconsequentiality of humankind, but also our need for intimacy and our yearning for connection at the heart of the story.

Spudnik Press Cooperative presents new work by Chicago-based artist Viraj Mithani.  The exhibition, titled “Paper to Plastic” explores time and contemporary printmaking. It investigates the relationship between the hierarchy of print, painting and drawing by challenging the established norms of the mediums. By combining painting techniques with both traditional printing processes and digital prints, Paper to Plastic questions the historical segregation between the mediums. It further explores the fading practice of traditional printmaking processes and sustainable way of living with the oversaturation of digital technology. Responding to these phenomena, the constructed forms and images capture the permanence of constant change, and evoke feelings of inevitable destruction.

Spudnik Press Cooperative presents new work by Chicago-based artist Jake Saunders.  The exhibition, titled “I Will Love You Forever/Hans + Eva Rausing 4/1/12-7/10/12” is a body of work by Chicago artist, Jake Saunders. In this series of etchings, the artist employs events surrounding a three month period in the relationship between Eva and Hans Kristian Rausing. These works mine for aesthetic tropes and symbolism while occupying landscapes reminiscent of European Romantic Era artists such as Fuseli, Gericault and Goya. Amalgamating these events and symbols with those of his own life, Jake conveys the deeply personal through the veil the Rausings. Merging the idiosyncratic with that of the publicly known, Jake contemplates love, anxiety, loss and the malleability of narrative.

Spudnik Press Cooperative presents new work by Denver-based artist Kim Morski.  The exhibition, titled “Populace Mechanics” will feature prints, artist books and handmade objects that explore the themes of secrecy, privacy, and the compartmentalization of information in covert U.S. military and scientific operations.

In 2013, Morski learned about a series of secret tests conducted in St. Louis, Missouri shortly after WWII in which the U.S. Army worked with scientists to spray residential areas with zinc cadmium sulfide. Since then, her artwork has responded to simliar little-known histories as well as broadly addressing the underlying themes of willful deception and complicit action.

Doubling and duality is a central visual and conceptual device throughout all of the work. In Populace Mechanics, doubles occur in the form of repeated symbols and motifs, divided compositions, as well as text or imagery with inferred double meaning.

In several prints, insidious clouds billow in the background of isolated figures engaged in various kinds of work. A looming planet-like orb in one print echoes the crosshairs of a large, white circled “X” from another. Bricks, which appear in 2D and 3D form, specifically refer to secret military testing done in St. Louis, but they also represent a psychological burden. While the narrative within the artwork refers to specific people and events, it is intentionally abstracted and symbolic, allowing for multiple levels of interpretation.

Download the Press Release