Ten x Ten is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring visual and auditory interaction. By challenging artists to conceptualize their work across media, Ten x Ten asks participants to stretch and expand their creative process. Through producing a limited edition compilation and public presentation of the resulting artworks, Ten x Ten documents, celebrates, and promotes Chicago’s artistic community.

Ten x Ten is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring visual and auditory interaction. By challenging artists to conceptualize their work across media, Ten x Ten asks participants to stretch and expand their creative process. Through producing a limited edition compilation and public presentation of the resulting artworks, Ten x Ten documents, celebrates, and promotes Chicago’s artistic community.

I grew up visiting my grandparents in rural Michigan, where today, there are still dirt roads, fields of wild flowers and a sky so dark, you can really see the stars.  I still visit my parents there, and during this horrible pandemic, it has been a blessing to see my five-year-old – who lives in our city apartment – run free, grow a garden, watch bees pollinate the sunflowers and dash outside at night to see if the moon is a crescent or full.

Science has proved that being in nature reduces anger, fear and stress, and boosts our overall health. Yet, our experience of nature is becoming increasingly less direct. Man’s destruction of the environment and urbanization have made nature feel compartmentalized to me – somewhere to go on an outing — and for many, difficult to access at all. Add to that: Real human interaction is now often mediated by technology – a digital screen inserted between us and the physical world. During the pandemic, this issue has come into sharper focus. Ironically, the digitization that limited personal contact in the past, facilitates much of our safe communication today. Now, I think that being outdoors at a distance, safe in nature, is more than ever a much-needed salve to our jittery psyches. In my work, I sort through these ideas, while in my life, I am constantly in search of a more authentic analog experience.

The baculites fossil that my silkscreen piece is based on is is all that remains of a sea creature that went extinct around the same time as the dinosaurs, about 65 million years ago. The fossil has a lace-like pattern that is formed by the sutures that were in this animal’s exoskeleton. Baculites started out very tiny and had to grow quickly to protect themselves from predators, building new chambers on their shell as they grew. The contour patterns, which mark the different chambers, are not only beautiful but remind me of both the physicality and fragility of life.

Katherine Lampert is an artist and teacher based in South Haven, Michigan and Chicago. Her studio work considers texture, color, entropy, and the evolving relationship between nature and technology. Her multi-layered painting process often begins with a photographic study of pattern in nature, such as a cloudscape, the lace-like remnants of a two hundred million-year-old fossilized sea creature, or the unusual markings on a rare tropical insect. These images serve as inspiration and a point of departure for her semi-abstract works.

Ten x Ten is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring visual and auditory interaction. By challenging artists to conceptualize their work across media, Ten x Ten asks participants to stretch and expand their creative process. Through producing a limited edition compilation and public presentation of the resulting artworks, Ten x Ten documents, celebrates, and promotes Chicago’s artistic community.

This print, this project, this past year…. 

Everything about this print changed from when we first sat down in 2019 at the Sweet Water Foundation until finished in late 2020. We had talked about our work, about disenfranchisement, about building a path within limitations, the hope and belief in a beautiful world. That conversation became a candle in the dark for me, a touchstone transporting me back to the rooted and everyday quality of my work at Sweet Water. Andrew provided some soundtrack for the process, works by Nathalie Joachim and Tyshawn Sorey. Nathalie’s music especially resonated with me. It felt so joyful, powerful, deep, and light. 

Titled ‘Work with Whatchya Got’, the resulting visual piece is a 7-layer screenprint. The images were sourced from direct prints of found objects. I’ve included photos of the original prints, and you can see a loss of detail and subtlety from the original to the screen. Keeping in mind our thoughts on having to work without, I intentionally made some layers hard to print, producing small differences between copies in the edition. This became a lockdown print. The Styrofoam left by a resident artist, from a toy bought to occupy a child, the rhubarb leaf, the grounding quality of gardening while also mimicking the layout of a city – pathways, roadways, airways- highlighting a lung shape (misshape); the crow feather – freedom, sentience, joy, and mourning; the crushed cans and lid, remnants of lives lived, the seal and plaque on a memorial to our everyday; and a modern ‘tin can phone’ with plastic bottles, the fraught and incomplete communication through distance.

Ten x Ten is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring visual and auditory interaction. By challenging artists to conceptualize their work across media, Ten x Ten asks participants to stretch and expand their creative process. Through producing a limited edition compilation and public presentation of the resulting artworks, Ten x Ten documents, celebrates, and promotes Chicago’s artistic community.

The collaboration between composer Amy Wurtz and artist Susan Giles explores memory and gesture situated in recollections of the idea of “home.” Using the same source material of a recorded story and gestures of a member of a choir for senior citizens with early-stage memory loss, the artists develop dual works that bring into focus the ways movement and sound are connected to memory, place and emotion.

Susan Giles is an artist working in sculpture and video.

She has a MFA from Northwestern University and a MA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Giles’ work has shown in Chicago at THE MISSION Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and The Renaissance Society, as well as Mixed Greens in New York and Galeria Valle Orti in Valencia, Spain, among others. She has received several grants, including an Individual Artist Project Grant from DCASE in 2015, awards from the Illinois Arts Council in 2014 and 2009, a 2005 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and a 1998 Fulbright Grant to Indonesia to conduct research on the intersection of tourism and culture in Bali.

Giles is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Contemporary Practices at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ten x Ten is a collaboration between visual artists and musicians exploring visual and auditory interaction. By challenging artists to conceptualize their work across media, Ten x Ten asks participants to stretch and expand their creative process. Through producing a limited edition compilation and public presentation of the resulting artworks, Ten x Ten documents, celebrates, and promotes Chicago’s artistic community.

In regards to the form we –instead of patterns– are observing the spaces in between them. These repetitive divisions that interrupt a line, or define a beat’s closing/opening.

Our vehicle will be the mouth, our mouth, any mouth for that matter, those that surround us among family and friends, each of them seem very unique either still or gesticulating. They will tell us a story of voluntary death, the life-in-despair and death-in-excess, swapped for life-in-excess and death-in-despair. Each of these mental states linked by events that trigger and define these patterns.

Conceptually, the dialogue between sound and visuals would serve as reflective space for the audience to think about these spaces linking their own mundane routines.

Carlos Matallana is a Bogotá-born and Chicago-based visual artist, a teacher, and a New Tech Curriculum developer. He has taught graphic design, web design, and comics in different after-school programs around Chicago since 2005.