Last night I discovered the PIlsen Arts district of Chicago! My former co-intern at Thirst told me about this place so I looked it up and found a
blog all about the art happenings in the Pilsen area. Super cool! Last night was August's 2nd friday event they have once a month where all the galleries open their doors for show openings from 6-10pm. I
biked home from work grabbed some dinner and got Lisa on board and we headed down for the last hour of the openings. The area is incredible, I'm not joking when I say there are two blocks with nothing but art galleries on both sides of the street. This place is chock full of young artists creating interesting and some not so interesting work. The first gallery we stopped in was the
EXP Gallery where I met Michael Wasniowski of the
Pilsen Photo Group. He had some polaroids on display. Their color tone was beautiful as is the case with polaroid images, they were beautifully composed, and the presentation was nice, but I felt the concept behind the images left something to be desired.
Michael Wasniowski
From there we moved on down the street and around the corner to the rest of the galleries. We stumbled into the
Chicago Art Department (CAD) where they were having an art auction fundraiser. There was some good original work there and a very good vibe the place was filled with people and they had a DJ upstairs. I bid on a small piece that was one out of a series of 4 and also met a couple new friends ;-), Marla and Emily. Emily apparently thought that a certain piece reminded her of
Donnie Darko and wanted to confirm her suspicions by asking me if I agreed. I didn't, but said I did anyways. After CAD we headed down the street and saw an interesting architectural piece at the
Extension Gallery. Then some nice wood collages by Russ White at the
Vespine Gallery. Lanza studios was displayed some work by
Gabe Lanza which looked incredibly similar in style to one of my favorites in this vein of illustration,
Jason Sho Green.
The super fat hissing cat that lived at the Gallery.
The wooden man with witty sayings.
Farther on down the road a gallery was featuring an installation by Derek Monroe titled "Tree of War". The piece itself was poorly crafted and had no emotional impact on me at all. The artist makes many claims in his artist statement as to what the intended purpose of the installation is, but the piece fell far short in achieving those goals.
Tree of War by Derek Monroe
"The project is not a political statement by any means. Instead the purpose is to make people think about their everyday realities as well as historical conditioning that often pushes whole societies into a war."
He also stated that the white fabric that was thrown over the metal pole fastened to the ceiling was intended to represent death and passing as in many asian cultures. The CDs scattered on the floor were intended to mimic land mines, in that you step on them and your natural reaction is surprise... just like your natural reaction would be if you stepped on a land mine... yeeeeahhh. We moved across to
4art inc which had a nice gallery space and a lot of work ranging from
digital photographic manipulations to multimedia collages. My favorite piece of the night was titled "The Nobel Peace Prize" by Ned Broderick was a large scale found object sculpture painted completely gold. It was a visually stunning, well crafted piece that was injected with political commentary, humor, and satire.
The Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize Detail
This ended up being our last gallery of the night. From there Lisa and I went over to Wicker Park and grabbed a couple drinks before heading back out to the burbs.
Overall the experience was very cool. The vibe of the area was great, with lots of young artists and gallery goes around. The art was good, There were few pieces that really stopped me in my tracks and impacted me. Much of what I saw seemed to go only style deep and was not all the time that well done. The true plague that I experienced full force were the numerous long overdrawn artist statements that were injected with every bit of fancy art speak the writer could muster, when many times they could have simply written "I made this 'cause I thought it looked good."
