As a Graphic Designer and painter, Katherine creates easel-size paintings of stylized landscapes that include references to microscopic biological forms and macroscopic extraterrestrial masses. She uses organic shapes, thick layers and bright colors that suggest planets and cellular structures to evoke the processes of many natural systems moving from their creation to decay. These pieces are juxtaposed to Letterpress prints that are personal statements that represent changing thoughts and emotions. Oil paints on canvas and oil based ink on paper show a variety of texture that symbolizes inconsistency, abnormal ideas and anxiety. This series is a timeline showing her discomfort within her environment over the period of one year.
Services Offered:
- Exhibition Opportunities
- Graphic Design
Website:
www.katherinensmith.com/
Chris Devins is a local Mural Artist/Urban Planner who creates outdoor Public Art installations designed to attract tourists and increase community pride. He is part of a team that won a 2016 Best Practices award from the Illinois Chapter of the American Planning Association.
CDC began in Bronzeville, Chicago as an outgrowth of Chris’ work on the Residents at Risk study conducted by the Urban Institute and Harvard University. Residents at Risk was a profile of the Ida B. Wells/Madden Park housing complex conducted just as residents’ homes were being demolished. As he pondered the loss of yet another important Bronzeville development, Chris began to think about Identity and the role it plays in a neighborhood’s economic and social viability.
The Bronzeville Legends Identity Initiative was a part of Chris’ Master Thesis, the East 39th Street Commercial Corridor Plan. The plan is a comprehensive development plan that envisions the future of the corridor, based on current real estate market data.
Website:
www.chrisdevinscreative.com/
Anna Rae Gilbert was born in Northwest Indiana, attended The School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1997 – 2000, and finished her undergraduate degree in Interdisciplinary Art at Herron School of Art and Design in 2007. She continued with her academic career at Maine College of Art and acquired an MFA in 2009. Since then, she has retained a spirited studio practice and a distinctive signature thread throughout her entire body of work. Each piece is assembled with thoughtfulness and delicate care.
Her work is informed by an interest in architecture as a living organism, the evolution of personal and objective narrative in dwellings, and a playfulness in composition. In each piece, there are equal parts sincerity, provocation and dry humor. She has tried to categorize the thread within each work and the category she drew up was Intuitional Abstract. Her line and palette are driven with sentimentality. Tapping into emotion, nostalgia, and capturing a heightened occasions. Her paintings and prints become a souvenir and her way of offering those two dimensional and extraordinary moments.
For a custom commission, check these out or email her!
Services Offered:
Website:
annaraegilbert.com/
Corinne is currently a sophomore at Loyola University Chicago, pursuing a Film and Digital Media Production major and an Entrepreneurship minor. She grew up in Maryland, near Washington D.C., where she first fell in love with filmmaking when she began making short music videos and PSAs. She is also extremely passionate about playing guitar, dancing, environmental advocacy, and social justice.
Services Offered:
Website:
corinspiration.com/
Jolanta Soares, grew up in Communist Poland, coming of age during the Solidarity Movement, before emigrating to the United States. This background intermingles with her experiences as a mother, her love of sailing and working as an IT professional, to inspire her many different series of works. “Stories” describes her life’s journey, “Into the Cloud” conveys a rebellion against the digitization and vulnerability of our identities, “Poppies Fields” embodies the beauty and pathos inherent in poppies, and “Don’t Think” being the Joie de vivre. Reminiscent of De Kooning, Joan Mitchell and other Abstract Expressionist artists, Jolanta uses an Oil & Wax and Encaustic techniques to create paintings.
Image: Detail of Jolanta Soares, Blind Justice, Printing Ink on Paper, 2019
Services Offered:
Website:
jolantasoares.com/
Calvert & Co
Shawn Calvert is a Graphic artist and web/ux designer.
Services Offered:
Website:
shawncalvert.com
Intern
Lydia James is a studio art major at Grinnell College in central Iowa and will graduate in the spring of 2019. She grew up in Atlanta, Georgia but has found quite a home in the Midwest. Her work is not explicitly based in a single medium but she enjoys printmaking, watercolor, embroidery, knitting, and sewing. She is always drawing and has consistently kept a sketchbook since the age of 5.
You can keep up with her day-to-day making on instagram at @lydiajames.art and contact her at lydiajames.art@gmail.com
Services Offered:
- Exhibition Opportunities
- Illustration
Website:
lydia-james.squarespace.com/
Aspiring scientific illustrator and printer: almost always sunburned.
Services Offered:
- Exhibition Opportunities
- Illustration
- Printmaking Commissions
Website:
www.instagram.com/100yrsold/
Intern
Ali is a 24-year-old graphic designer pursuing her MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She graduated from Northwestern University in 2016 with a degree in History and Integrated Marketing. Her work focuses on the interplay between text and image on the printed page. She writes, illustrates, and designs content, then prints and binds it into unique book forms.
Contact her at atomek1@saic.edu
Services Offered:
Website:
alitomek.com/
Member
Holly Cahill draws inspiration from the spaces we inhabit within our shared environment. Rather than referencing any one place, the visual seams and illuminated marks in her works point to patterns drawn from construction frames hidden beneath the walls of buildings and the various functions of rooms. She is fascinated by the idea of a portal that can be defined in architecture and science fiction as a passage way for the body from one space to the other. The marrying of this concept of a portal that can bend rules of time and space with its more mundane counterpart in architecture creates a space to consider the possibilities of things beyond our comprehension yet in relationship to what is in front of our eyes.
Trained as a painter, Holly Cahill uses an exploration of materials and process to engage with ideas connected to choreography, landscape, hyper-dimensional phenomena, and architecture. Her work has been shown at Penn State University, DEMO Project, Chicago Artist Coalition, the David and Reva Logan Center for the Arts, D Gallery, The Franklin, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Walter Philips Gallery in Banff Canada, among others. She received her BFA in painting from Syracuse University and an MFA from the University of Cincinnati. She has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center, 8550 Ohio, the Banff Centre, and Ox-Bow. Holly is an artist member of the newest branch of Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Chicago.
Website:
www.hollycahill.com
Residency Period:
Jun 2018–Jun 2018
Project Statement:
As an artist in residence at Spudnik Press Cooperative, I plan to develop a new series of work that builds off of forms and processes utilized in my painting and drawing practice. My painting practice is often sculptural and I would like my works on paper to investigate a more three-dimensional component. I have been using sprayed ink and transfer processes for sometime in my works on paper and canvas. More recently, I began to use paper as a form of resist in my paintings as I cover the surface of the canvas. The paper, which becomes saturated with ink in the painting process is cut or torn and then reused in a series of collages. I am particularly fascinated by the luminous pixellated, atmospheric quality that I can achieve with spray ink and want to bring this element into a series of prints through acquatint techniques. There is also a layering process in my works on paper and canvas, that I would love to develop more through printmaking by using reflective and transparent inks.
In the print studio, I also plan to experiment with textured papers that can be molded, torn, and reassembled to lift off the two-dimensional plane. These abstractions mimic clusters of soft natural environments and patterns that would then be altered by inserting geometric elements that refer to built environments such as the home, religious spaces, monumental architecture and gardens that form a bridge between interior and exterior spaces.
Image: Holly Cahill, Through the Eaves, 2013 (detail).
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