Joy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck, Worms are The Words, 2010, installation at LUMP, Raleigh NC. Courtesy of the artists. Photograph by Aaron Igler / Greenhouse media.

JOY FEASLEY + PAUL SWENBECKJoy Feasley and Paul Swenbeck’s collaborative installa-

tion, Worms Are the Words, creates a space between the

austere world religious regimen and one of hidden Pagan

rituals. Transforming part of the gallery into a Shaker

cabin, the bare furnishings create a scene of orderliness

that is belied by phantasmagorical details tucked within

the paintings and surrounding furniture. The altars,

talismans, and imagery hiding throughout the installation

contradict the sterile and definable world of organized

religion and point to the power and ecstasy of religious

experience that is normally kept out of sight.

CRAIG YUIssues surrounding trauma and the representation of traumatic moments are reoccurring topics that Craig Yu’s work addresses. Airline disasters, natural catastrophes, chemical accidents, war and physical threat, have all been explored in Yu’s paintings and drawings. While the subjects depicted are often intentionally difficult, Yu’s highly nuanced skills as a draftsman and painter make the work aesthetically appealing and draws connections between trauma and the sublime. In this recent body of work, Yu replaces the imagery of trauma with the act of painting itself. Trading in the brush for the bucket, these canvases have been created by working into and scraping away paint that is poured directly, dragged across and splattered on the canvas. The trauma is no longer represented by external imagery but instead within the process of their creation.

Craig Yu, Even, 2010, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the artist.

DEPS MISSION STATEMENT

The Department of Exhibition and Performance Spaces (DEPS) is the student-centered galleries and venues of Columbia College Chicago. An extension of the classroom, DEPS fosters vibrant environments for students to interact, exchange ideas, and view and showcase bod-ies of work within the larger urban community. The spaces provide students from every discipline myriad opportunities to gain essential, hands-on experience, stimulating artistic expression and professional development through collaboration.

DEPS incorporates the College’s curriculum by partnering with academic departments and centers, the urban community and profession-als in all fields, merging formal pedagogy with each student’s individual learning path. In our commitment to produce the most innovative, distinguished and accessible programs, DEPS addresses contemporary issues concerning the diversity of thought, values and culture.

Columbia College ChiCago1104 S. WabaShChiCago, il 60605WWW.Colum.edu/depS

glass curtaingallery

JUST IGNORE ITIan Chillag

It was April when I moved to Chicago. I have lived in Philadelphia and Brooklyn, two cities about which residents tend to be evangelical, but this was the first place I ever felt like defending in a fistfight. I even bought a pin of the Chicago flag and put it on my laptop bag. It was both my first pin and my first flag.

Still, everybody said. Wait for Winter. Like when you’ve just fallen in love with a girl who everybody else knows is bad news. Wait for Winter. You don’t know how hard it is to love her yet.

But I was determined. Before the first snowflake fell, I decided: I would spend an hour outside every day that Winter, no matter how cold it got. I figured it wasn’t the season itself that got to people, it was who we became in Winter: isolated, stranded, hibernating bears, waiting it out till we could see the grass again.

Winter itself is just numbers: fewer degrees, a specific tilt to the axis of the earth. Those figures are not what Winter feels like; they are just the architecture on which the sensation of Winter is built. They may be the early darkness that makes it hard to leave the house, but they are not the feeling of wanting to stay home. I figured by ignoring the Winter around me, I could resist the Winter within.

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Most of the ninety-some hours outside were spent running. After a short time I knew without thinking which snow would sound like ground glass under my feet, and which would sound like Styrofoam. I began to accept only a general idea of what time it was, because I never wanted to pull up my sleeve to see my watch.

I learned there is only one path in Chicago that is always—always—shoveled: the ring road in the Lincoln Park Zoo. On most days the only animals out were the Polar Bear and the Bactrian camels. In their natural habitat, the deserts of Central and East Asia, temperatures fall to 20 below. They are unimpressed by Chicago Winter; all it’s done as far as they’re concerned is change the color of the tiny desert they’re now trapped in.

When the temperature would rise to 30 or so, the flamingos came out too. Seeing them after so much gray and white is what it must be like to be suddenly cured of colorblindness.

One day, it was eleven below, and after ten minutes into the wind, my head started to hurt. After a half hour I felt confused, as if it were taking an inappropriate share of my brain just to lift my feet to get me back home again.

I passed overcrowded busses, their steamed-up windows dripping on the inside and making them look like long saunas on wheels. I thought: well, it’s going to suck one way or the other. I thought: well, I’d rather be warmed by the heat I’m making myself than by electricity and strangers. And after ninety-some days of hours outside, I figured something out. This is how you keep alive in Midwinter: just keep moving.

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The very act of overlooking what Winter should do to you, it turns out, places you smack in the middle of it. Here is something about Winter I wouldn’t know if I hadn’t tried to ignore it: there’s a beach downtown where the waves lap up on the sand, and a tiny bit of them freezes in place while the rest stays liquid and flows back out again. Over time the waves of ice on the beach get bigger and bigger, like the way they used to make candles by dipping a wick in wax over and over again.

Recently, in my second Winter in Chicago, the temperature reached 50 degrees and melted the feet of snow and ice that had been accumulating on the ground for weeks. I ran on grass I hadn’t seen in forever. It wasn’t much to look at, but it was soft under my feet.

I came to a tunnel under Lakeshore Drive I’ve run through a hundred times. The approach was a steep downhill and usually covered with rutted ice. But it had all melted and collected in a foot-deep pool in the middle of the tunnel. Suddenly, in the temporary, simulated Spring, it was impassable, the water no longer solid enough to walk across.

DANA CARTERInstead of You There are Halogen Lamps is an ongoing series of drawings and objects that pull inspiration from the writings of Paul Celan.* There is a kinship between gestures and physical traits in the work of this series and the descriptive material nature of Celan’s language, which often references salt, charcoal, dust, shadow, fabric and erasure. The varied materials in Carter’s work are remnants of process culled from previous projects in an ongoing exploration of the velocity of loss, wordplay and the rituals of drawing boundaries across idyllic landscapes. Rather than attempt to represent what is seen, each piece in this series directs the viewer toward an indefinable space that exists behind or beyond the work. Referencing the unseen, the work is tethered to a dark point between memory, projection and visual perception.

* Paul Celan (1920 - c. 1970) Born Paul Antschel into a Jewish family in Romania, Paul Celan was one of the major German-language poets of the post-World War II era. The death of his parents and the experience of the Holocaust are defining forces in Celan’s poetry and his use of language.

ISAAC RESNIKOFFIsaac Resnikoff’s labor-intensive wooden sculptures are about weight; not the considerable physical weight that many of his objects possess but instead the weight of memory that they can carry. A student of American history, Resnikoff isolates objects that for him serve as the visual keystones for our country’s recent and distant past. Modern House and accompanying wood block prints of 2x4’s present the skeleton of unfinished structures. In the past, such images were synonymous with progress and deeply tied to America’s growth and prosperity; however, in the wake of the recent housing crisis they no longer present a solely optimistic future but reference the many unfinished and abandoned houses that now dot the landscape. The framed-out walls depicted in this work pose open-ended questions regarding the fate of these structures. Are they soon to be completed or have they long been abandoned?

IRENA KNEZEVICHypnopompic Bower is a two-part installation compositing 19th century phantasmagoric display and contemporary signifiers of horror. The first part of the work presents a monument to an adolescent girl protagonist- a hybrid of female heroines oscillating between Alice, Isis, Olympia and Samara. The second part of the work presents a tilted model of Lewis Carroll’s looking glass chamber propped up by stilts, transforming the whole installation into a life-size pop-up book. The title alludes to the term for the moment before waking, when imagination confuses the vivid dream state for reality. The fantasy and dream narratives mesh, their rules and permeability overlap and nightmares come to life.

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MICHAEL ROBINSONMichael Robinson recycles popu-lar culture through his use of rock ballads, ridiculous sitcoms and psychedelic cartoon footage. Using sound and visual distortion, Robinson takes hackneyed pop remnants and splits them open, placing the viewer between a point of nostalgia and horror. Although constructed from familiar songs, television shows and images, he creates foreign worlds that expose the real emotion lying beneath culture’s plastic veneer. Robinson’s films take the viewer on a ride where the vehicle is at times familiar but the destination is entirely unclear and where the apocalypse seems to be waiting around each corner.

ROXANE HOPPERThrough the sequence of photographs in the series Frost, Roxane Hopper captures the delicate beauty of ice crystals forming on her car window at night. Illuminated by streetlights, these images transform a small corner of a Toyota Rav 4’s windshield into desolate and exquisitely beautiful landscapes. While Hopper’s work is concerned with light the photographs in Frost capture a singular moment that could only exist in the darkness of a winter’s night.

MIDWINTER: Embrace The Darkness draws together artists who have engaged with the vagaries of darkness, not only in its absence of light, but in references to that which is unseen, un-knowable or ignored. What remains discretely in the shadows or beneath layers of material and meaning is what generates the real potency of their work. Circumnavigating moments, events and experiences that are difficult to define, these paint-ings, photographs and installation pieces exist on the margins of perception.

In its bleakest sense, the term midwinter denotes the moment at which there is the least amount of daylight and the longest period of night, but it also marks the returning light and as such this exhibition is neither sinister nor bleak. Instead it em-braces what lies in the shadow of our lives, when the balance between light and dark shifts.

As we again find ourselves in the darkest period of winter, this exhibition values that time in the dark and offers up moments in which to contemplate subtleties of shade and to acknowl-edge what is often overlooked in the full glare of the light.

CURATOR’S STATEMENTJustin Witte

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank all of the artists in this exhibition for the time and work they put into making this show a success. I would also like to thank all of the outstanding people inStudent Affairs and The Department of Exhibition and Performance

Spaces for their support and guidance, specifically Neysa Page-Lieberman, Camille Morgan, Jennifer Kiekeben and Susie Kirkwood. Finally I would like to thank Olivia Schreiner and Tekla Schreiner-Witte who make it all worthwhile. Thank You!

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Michael Robinson, The General Returns From One Place To Another, 2006, still from 16mm color film. Courtesy of the artist.

Irena Knezevic, Drawing for Hypnopompic Bower, 2011