8 C H I C A G O W E E K L Y | M A Y 3 1 2 0 1 2

IT’S A QUIET EVENING AT THE CHICAGO URBAN ART SOCIETY (CUAS). A SMALLgroup huddles in one corner of a large light-filled gallery, anticipating a story slamto take place later that night. The song “Kryptonite” echoes softly in the background,as a few visitors break from the crowd to pace along the gallery’s perimeter, exam-ining collages of varying shapes, sizes, and media. These collages, created by thir-teen artists from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Moscow, and beyondcomprise the show “MEDLEY,” CUAS’s debut show in their new Cermak space.

“This show is meant to set the tone both for my voice as a curator and for thespace as a whole,” explains Peter Kepha, CUAS co-founder, curator, and featured col-lagist. Kepha explains that he was trained as an oil painter and initially planned tobecome a medical illustrator, but switched to collage because he could not fathomthe thought of drawing corpses for the rest of his life. Despite his casual tone andcheckered high-tops, Kepha’s eyes reveal an intensity that gives away his passion forcreating, showcasing, and collecting. “I already bought two pieces from this show,”he confesses,

The collages that comprise “MEDLEY,” rendered in bright colors, dynamic andgraphic cutouts, reflective foil, and in one case, a three-dimensional surface that lit-erally jumps out at the viewer, could not contrast more with the mellow mood of thegallery space. “People view [collage] as something so simple, when it’s actually real-ly difficult,” says Kepha. “You have so many images fighting with themselves…howdo you make them play nice?” In fact, the sizeable and diverse collection of collagesfeels immediately overwhelming. Kepha admits, “Collage can sometimes all runtogether…it’s hard to differentiate.”

The wide range, from the fantastical, pristine digital collages of Belgian artistOleg Borodin, to the illusionistic painted “layers” of acrylic paint in Jessica Bell’swork, highlights the versatility of collage, and its potential sophistication. Some ofthe artists, like New York based Matt Shaw, seem to address formal and medium-spe-cific issues. One of Shaw’s pieces includes a ripped black and white photographicprint of a woman’s face. Her eyes seem to roll back into her head as she staresupward, the top of the image ripped off to reveal blurred dots in primary colors likethose seen on printed images.

Other artists abandon the “formalism” route entirely. Kepha’s collages, for exam-ple, display a cheeky, nostalgic playfulness. One piece, in the shape of a skateboard,uses Styrofoam pieces to make photographs of wheels hover against the backgroundof the board’s underside. In the piece, Kepha incorporates a print of the dollar bill,old comic strips, and glittering baseball stickers. Yet, the board displays a calculat-ed composition and meticulous execution indicative of an adult creator. He juxta-poses, for example, the dollar bill with a selection of cutout words arranged to read“The original 1,” at once skeptical of mass media culture and wholly immersed in it.

Later in the evening, Kepha, with his sister and CUAS co-founder LaurenPacheco, carries a small desk out of the main gallery into a small side room to cleara “stage” for the later story slam. “Glamorous gallery life for you,” he remarks jok-ingly. But to call CUAS just a gallery is misleading. The not-for-profit space main-tains local ties and continues to support art production in the Chicago community.Kepha, for example, explains that he hopes one day to create a large collage muralproject in a Chicago community. “We’re cultivating younger kids,” he says, “We’re try-ing to show that Chicago is still a productive place for art. They don’t have to comehere for school and then move out.” One exhibited artist, Emily Haasch, is an SAICsophomore and former CUAS intern. Her graphic black and white series of wrestlershang alongside the work of other local Chicago artists such as Ruben Aguirre andChad Kouri. At the same time, by bringing contemporary art into Chicago from allover the world, Kepha creates a space where Chicagoans can see great works of col-lage in their home city. “We’re trying to constantly push further,” explains Kepha.“I’m trying to switch things up, keep things fresh.” Chicago Urban Art Society, 600 W. Cermak Rd. May 11-June 16. Thursday-Friday, 6-9pm;Saturday, 1-6pm. Free. (773)951-8101. chicagourbanartsociety.com

Fresh Cuts

by Julia Silverman

A “MEDLEY” of collages at the ChicagoUrban Art Society

arts & culture

DAWOUD BEY’S PORTRAITS HAVE A HABIT OF STAR-ING YOU DOWN. YOU GET sucked in, ensnared by thesubject’s eyes and attitude. “Charita, 2002,” likemany of Bey’s portraits featured in the RenaissanceSociety’s Picturing People, hits you full on. Direct andunapologetic from the blaze in her eyes to the tilt ofher hip to the cheetah-print slippers on her feet,Charita makes you feel like you’ve just met her. Butof course you haven’t. It’s just Bey’s style.

From Harlem and Chicago to his artist residen-cy at Phillips Andover Academy, Dawoud Bey hascaptured people with his lens. He is a portrait artistin the classical sense of the word. Taking cues fromthe likes of Rembrandt, he captures drama and experi-ence with what he calls the “humanist impulse” of photography.

A Chicago-based artist these days, Bey’s work is currently featured both in “Harlem,U.S.A.” at the Art Institute of Chicago and in “Picturing People” at the RenaissanceSociety. On Sunday May 13th, Bey spoke about his life and work to a packed lecture hallat the University of Chicago. He cited Coltrane as his “ epiphany moment as an artist”and Hendrix as his “radical reinvention.” He talked about his first encounter with pho-tography’s narrative power at a 1969 Met exhibit, “Harlem on My Mind.” The exhibit wasa collection of photography, film, and records that sought to tell the story of 20th cen-tury African American life. He was so inspired by the exhibit’s powerful narratives at theage of sixteen that he bought a camera, took to the Harlem street photography beat, andopened his first exhibition in 1979.

Bey strives to create work that engages in a dialogue with the viewer. Whether he isdocumenting a place as iconic as Harlem, or a face as boundlessly relevant as Charita’s,he is sparking thought, igniting a conversation through the frontal gaze. Still, he con-cedes that referring to his early work as “the Harlem photos” does have “a kind of weightto it.” Though these portraits capture so much more than the subject’s race, class, andneighborhood, they can still be distilled down to a title like “Harlem, U.S.A.”

Bey started his ongoing project, Strangers/Community, as an inquiry into the notionof community, a word he says “gets thrown around a lot.” He sought a way “to visualizea community” and “who speaks for whom.” A project that began in Atlanta at EmoryUniversity and has since travelled to Hyde Park, this series poses two strangers who arepart of the same community side-by-side.

The Hyde Park portraits feature a diverse range of subjects photographed inUniversity of Chicago locations like Mansueto Library and Ida Noyes Hall. But there’ssomething almost sterile about the Hyde Park photos. They’re a portrait of the Universitycommunity, not the surrounding neighborhood, and they feel corporate. The settings ofBooth and Mansueto cast the subjects in a washed out light, and positioned on a stageof linear metallic forms.

One of the most striking portraits in the series is titled “Paula Beigelson and ShirleySims. Emory University, Atlanta, 2010.” A young white woman with grey-blue eyes andpearl earrings sits next to an older black woman in the kind of blue collared shirt youmight associate with custodial staff. They sit in a room full of whitewashed pewsarranged in two long rows, which appears to be in either a church or some kind ofUniversity hall. This portrait is distinctly Southern with bright white pews gleaming inrows behind them, and green lush light flooding in through a wide open window. But Beytells you these things in the title. This is Georgia, this is Emory. He invites you to makean assumption about the subjects. You’re given hints at who they are in their clothingand body language and facial expressions and the very space that they occupy. These arestrangers, part of the same community.

Unlike Bey’s Harlem photos and other street photographs, “Strangers/Community”poses the question of how “we”—subject, photographer, and viewer alike—imagine ourcommunities and our nation. They examine how strangers, linked by their membership toa geographic community, interact with each other, with their setting, and with the pho-tographer: but ultimately, they pose a question to the viewer himself.

Capturing CommunityDawoud Bey pictures people at theRenaissance Society

by Meaghan Murphy

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