Photo by Sarah Perez
Deadline Projects, a Chicago-based arts collective, recently held a single evening exhibition for their one-year anniversary, hosted by Happy Dog Gallery in Wicker Park. The collective, which began to coalesce while the members were in school together, holds four themed shows a year. "Bigger Than Your Life" was the theme they grappled with for the anniversary, addressing issues that overwhelm and numb people with their complexity and impenetrability.
Screen printer Shawn Stucky folded delicate winged Victorian figures into a minimal landscape of text from the Icelandic bible in which the lamb and the snake continue to act out their history-long rivalry of wills. His hand-pulled prints are richly symbolic and quietly demand to be looked at.
Interdisciplinary artist Sarah Perez entombed 35 dollar bills in separate clay tablets and let one fall to the ground where it shattered. The currency was both unreachable and imprisoned while also illustrating the viewers imprisonment to the meaningless paper as the clay swallowed, at varying degrees, the face of George Washington.
nikki hollander's vivid painting took viewers behind the lens of the paparazzi, criticizing celebrity worship by reducing its palette to the stark colors of greed and envy. The painting represents a new direction for hollander, whose past work has been more docile and charming than thought provoking.
As a group of artists at different levels in their careers, there was surprisingly and refreshingly no competition between any members of the collective. In fact, a nourishing sense of mutual respect and support seemed to permeate the evening, and that positive energy helped draw in crowds of people familiar with DP's shows. Video artist and documentarian Peter James said, in regards to the importance of an open and encouraging environment for emerging artists, "these shows give artists the experience to move to the next level in their careers and eventually become masters."
The artists of Deadline Projects offered an interactive atmosphere for patrons and provided a space in which people could enjoy themselves with art, eliminating the kind of stiff and over-intellectualized setting that characterizes many art events and alienates people from exposing themselves to new work and ideas. At one point there was a nearly-naked dancing septuagenarian who left his own indelible mark on the evening, an exclamation point on the collaborative statement made by Deadline Projects.
Damien James
Gabe Mejia, portrait of Damien James
DAMIEN JAMES is an unschooled and untrained Chicago artist and whose bedroom is his studio. Much of his inspiration comes from my two daughters and his 'paramour'. To see his work click here:
www.flickr.com/photos/damienjames
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