Chicago/Milwaukee
Milwaukee/Chicago
August 14–September 20, 2014
August 27–September 20, 2014
Photo by David A. Brown
Journeys are the midwives of thought.
Few places are more conducive to internal
conversations than a moving plane, ship or
train. There is an almost quaint correlation
between what is in front of our eyes and the
thoughts we are able to have in our heads:
large thoughts at times requiring large views,
new thoughts new places. Introspective
reflections which are liable to stall are helped
along by the flow of the landscape. The mind
may be reluctant to think properly when
thinking is all it is supposed to do.
Art of Travel, Alain de Botton
The standard “gallery exhibition”
is a theoretical proposition made
physical. A notion, experience, or
affect made concrete and enshrined
in a space through objects and
images. We are familiar with its
basic objective, the creation of
a profound or poetic experience,
ideally one that makes something
unfathomable, real.
The “artist residency,” by contrast, is fluid and
liminal. It exists to separate a maker from their
typical existence and then embed them in
another. It is an opportunity to force oneself from
the grind of quotidian concerns and to plant
oneself in a new and potentially fertile field, even
if it is only for a moment. Its aim is to create the
conditions for production and to generate new
possibilities for the individual artist.
Started in 2011, Christopher Sperandio and
Simon Grennan’s Cargo Space is the first fully
mobile, self-contained art residency and it takes
place in a converted diesel bus. At any one time
it sleeps a possible six artists—if four of them
pair off and figure out who gets to be the inner
spoon. It is the kind of residency that is about
personal transformation and tourism. An artist
hops on this magic school bus—complete with an
occasionally surly, but mostly Disney-esque tour
guide (often Christopher Sperandio himself)—and
has the kind of experience that can change their
life. Like Harry Potter catching the night bus, they
meet strange new people and travel, for a time,
with their brothers and sisters of the art road.
Although, it is fun to imagine Grennan and
Sperandio (one clutching a dogeared copy of
On the Road, while the other holds fast to a
beautifully maintained first edition of Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) as sculptors
merely crafting a bus, just setting a stage for an
infinite number of possible outcomes amongst,
an as of yet, unknown cast, but the project
accesses something deeper. Cargo Space begs
us to consider the form of residency. What
is a residency? How does it play a role in the
production of art and in the production of artists
themselves? If Cargo Space is itself an artwork
and a residency, where is the “art” experience
produced? And for whom does it occur? What
do we as viewers witness? What do we see?
Or is it about the experience of the artists on
their residency? Can the system produce an
exhibition? Who can claim authorship of what
we see? How on earth can it be presented as
an exhibition?
Cargo Space is a kind of whirling dervish, a
carnival-esque exhibition in which we have
asked 12 artists and artist teams from Chicago,
Houston, and Milwaukee to accompany Cargo
Space through a journey that will begin with
a weekend at the Poor Farm Experiment in
Wisconsin and roll on towards these concurrent
exhibitions in Chicago and Milwaukee. During
our time in Wisconsin, the artists will conceive
and develop what their residency experiences
should be and how those experiences will
translate into the exhibitions and events.
So, as of this writing I can tell you very little
about what these twin exhibitions looks like.
I can only tell you that by their nature they will
strip back some of the polish that we glaze on
to exhibitions and that each day the exhibitions
will physically change as the artists develop their
vision for the space and their residency. Together
we are creating an exhibition experience that
is open to sharing the development process,
connecting a viewer directly to the artists and
curators, and one that is a tad bit messy.
Duncan MacKenzie
Chicago/Milwaukee
Judith Brotman is an artist and educator
Heather Mekkelson lives and works in Chicago.
from Chicago. Her work has included mixed
media installations and theatrical immersive
environments that occupy a space between
sculpture and drawing. Recent work also includes
language/text based conceptual projects that are
meditations on the possibility of transformation.
Brotman has exhibited extensively in Chicago &
throughout the US in venues including threewalls,
Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400, Illinois State
Museum, the DeVos Art Museum, Hampshire
College, Smart Museum of Art, The Society of Arts
& Crafts, Boston, and The Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston.
Her work has been exhibited in solo and two
person shows at 65GRAND, Roots & Culture,
medicine cabinet, Old Gold, threewalls, and
STANDARD which are all located in Chicago.
She has also been included in group shows at
The Museum of Contemporary Photography in
Chicago, The Figge Art Museum in Davenport,
IA, The Poor Farm in Manawa, WI, Raid Projects
in Los Angeles, and Vox Populi Philadelphia.
Mekkelson’s work has been written about in Art
Journal, Broadsheet, Time Out Chicago, New City,
Chicago Tribune, and Artforum.com among others.
Alex Chitty is an artist who stands at about
5’6 and is of average weight and build.
Born = Miami, 1979
Lives = Chicago (mostly)
BFA = Smith College
MFA = School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Work = Educator at Museum of Contemporary
Art & School of the Art Institute of Chicago
See More = alexchitty.com
Erik L. Peterson is a pro-bono public artist,
sculptor, and curator living in Chicago. He is best
known for his large-scale urban interventions
(Face Value and Inner State) and signature edible
ice cream sculptures (CreamCycle and Soft
Palate). Public performances employing sculptural
elements like Two Tow’n and Square Dance, are
camouflaged urban spectacles, while the annual
Southwest Wisconsin Make Your Own Softball League
game gathers artists who build their own bats and
balls in order to play. Additionally, Peterson is a
founder of Hyde Park Kunstverein, a community
museum and solo project space in Chicago.
John Sparagana received his MFA from Stanford
University in 1987. He has presented solo
exhibitions of his work in New York, San Francisco,
Chicago, Houston and internationally. He has
been the recipient of numerous awards and
fellowships. Among these are awards from the
National Endowment for the Arts, the Cultural
Arts Council of Houston and Cité International
Des Arts, Paris (through Stanford University).
Wacom, TX is a comedy channel created by
Jay Meyers and Chris Kerr. The duo creates
and stars in episodes about art, comedy and
life. Jay Meyers received a BA in flim and video
from Columbia College Chicago in 2011. Since
graduation, he has created two human beings and
scores of feature length, shorts, documentaries,
music videos, animations, experimental work
and one wedding video. Chris Kerr received
a BFA in Fine Art from The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago in 1999. Since graduation,
he has shown his paintings, drawings, prints,
and sculptures nationally and internationally.
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Milwaukee/Chicago
Organizers
Sara Daleiden directs MKE<->LAX to
investigate cultural exchange between two
American regions through residencies and
public programs focused on the arts.
With bases in Milwaukee and Los Angeles,
MKE<->LAX offers support for empathetic,
structural development of independent,
organizational and community identity
embracing various scales of experimentation
and production. The initiative encourages active
interpretation and embodied exploration of local
places valuing public space, civic participation,
economic sustainability, pedestrian awareness
and celebration of difference. In Milwaukee,
Daleiden is currently working with America’s
Black Holocaust Museum, ‘Creational Trails,
Friends of Blue Dress Park and the Milwaukee
Artist Resource Network.
Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg have
Duncan MacKenzie is an Artist, Pundit, Educator
collaborated since 2001 in a wide variety of
media. Their work often incorporates scale
models to explore notions of scale, deception,
and suspension of disbelief. McCaw and
Budsberg are founding members of the
WhiteBoxPainters, a performance art group
specializing in large-scale, temporary public
projects. Recent exhibitions include solo
shows at Spaces Gallery in Cleveland and the
James Watrous Gallery in Madison. The duo
have had residencies with MKE<->LAX in LA
and the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s
outpost in Wendover, UT, and received a Mary
L. Nohl Fellowship for Individual Artists from
the Greater Milwaukee Foundation in 2008.
and a Founding Member/Producer of Bad at Sports.
(badatsports.com) His works have appeared in
galleries all over the world including Canada, Australia,
The United States of America, New Zealand, Estonia
and England. Bad at Sports, a project he began with
Richard Holland in 2005, is one of the USA largest
arts resources and continues to grow every week,
currently sharing an archive of 350 hours worth
of audio documenting the art history of Chicago,
New York City and San Francisco, and over 2000
posts by the best art writers in Chicago. His work
has been discussed in Flash Art, Art Forum, the New
York Times, Time Out, and many other venues. He
currently enjoys a posting as an Assistant Professor
in Art + Design at Columbia College Chicago.
Paul Druecke lives in Milwaukee, WI. For his
projects, Druecke has undertaken endeavors
as diverse as initiating a Board of Directors
to memorializing the at of memorialization.
His residencies and fellowships have
resulted in permanent, public installations
of bronze plaques that commemorate their
own legitimacy. Druecke has worked with
the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, The
Suburban in Chicago, and the Many Mini
Residency in Berlin, among other national and
international venues. His work was included in
the 2014 Whitney Biennial and he is an invited
resident at the 2014 Zentrum für Kunst und
Urbanistik in Berlin.
Ashley Morgan received her MFA in
sculpture from the University of WisconsinMilwaukee and her BFA in visual arts at
Arkansas State University. She has created
site-specific installations and been a part of
numerous group exhibitions both nationally
and internationally. Morgan was selected
as a fellow for the Greater Milwaukee
Foundation Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and
awarded a Sonnabend Fellowship from
the Museum of Jurassic Technology
in Los Angeles. She lives and works in
Milwaukee, where she is an instructor at
the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design.
Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio met
at the University of Illinois, Chicago in 1988 and have
worked together exclusively as a team since 1990.
Grennan works from North Wales, and Sperandio
works from Houston, Texas. Two things remain
constant in their practice: they always work together
and their work invariably involves the authorial
or editorial participation of other people—other
members of the public. Their work often utilizes media
that are culturally compromised: chocolate, comic
books and television, appearing at social sites of
consumption in the home and store and on the street.
They are often seen as part of a critical history of
artists whose work is focused on social narrative and
social exchange. Over the last twenty years, this history
of practice has been described as ‘interventionist’,
‘New Genre’, and ‘Relational’. In 2010, Bucharest
Biennial curator Felix Vogel chose the term ‘handlung’
(‘acting together’) to describe the social turn in
this approach to practice. thecargospace.com.
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Judith Brotman, The Reading Project, 2014,
Photo credit: Kurt Peterson
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Alex Chitty, Of Wood and Other Bodies Petrified,
2013, Powder coated steel, green and clear glass,
black class cups, stoneware, ash baseball bat,
porcelain, shoelace, jewelers pincers, stainless
steel, Photo by Joseph Rynkiewicz
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Heather Mekkelson, Blue Crater No. 5,
2013–2014, 24” x 24” x 7”, Blue marking chalk,
glass, plastic painter’s points
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Erik L. Peterson, Plop, 2014, Neon
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John Sparagana, Crowds & Powder: Kennedy
Brothers, 2014
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Wacom, TX
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Sara Daleiden, MKE<->LAX Suitcase,
© MKE<->LAX, 2012, Photo by Harvey Opgenorth
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Paul Druecke, Poor Farm, 2012, Cast aluminum,
wood, cement, fastening hardware
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Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, Foundation,
2011, Charcoal, Earth, 300” x 300”, Photo by
the artists. Location: Lynden Sculpture Garden,
River Hills, WI
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Ashley Morgan, Complete, 2013
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INSTITUTE OF VISUAL ARTS
a+D
I NOVA
AVERILL AND BERNARD LEVITON
GALLERY HOURS
2155 North Prospect Avenue
GALLERY HOURS
A+D GALLERY
TUESDAY – SATURDAY
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202
TUESDAY – Saturday
619 SOUTH WABASH AVENUE
12PM – 5PM
(414) 229-5070
12pm – 5PM
arts.uwm.edu/inova
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60605
312 369 8687
THURSDAY
COLUM.EDU/ADGALLERY
12PM – 7PM
Admission to INOVA is free
THURSDAY
12pM – 8PM
Started in 2011, Cargo Space is a
residency housed in a converted diesel
transit bus. Sleeping up to six, this
mobile living unit provides direction
connections between practitioners
who are geographically separated.
Chicago/Milwaukee
Milwaukee/Chicago
August 14–September 20, 2014
Reception: September 19, 5–8PM
August 27–September 20, 2014
Reception: August 27, 6–8PM
Participating Chicago Artists
Judith Brotman, Alex Chitty, Heather
Mekkelson, Erik L. Peterson, John
Sparagana, and Wacom, TX.
Participating Milwaukee Artists
Sara Daleiden, Paul Druecke,
Ashley Morgan, and Shana McCaw/
Brent Budsberg.
Cargo Space (thecargospace.com) is a project by
Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio
Co-organized by Duncan MacKenzie
Cover Photo by David A. Brown
INSTITUTE OF VISUAL ARTS