CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Three new shows are on view through Nov. 18 at I space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: “Alison Dalwood and Stephan Klimas: Location Matters” features billboard-format works that integrate digital printing, photography and traditional painting mediums.
Dalwood, who was born in England and lives in Oxfordshire, uses photographs of the Chicago skyline – viewed from the John Hancock building — as the base for her “painted interventions.” In her work, she focuses on extremes of scale and tension between the brushstroke and the photographic image. Visual icons representing aspects of Western industrial culture and society are a hallmark of Klimas’s work. In this exhibition, the artist — who was born in Germany and now works in London — has selected as his focus a child’s “magic slate,” scanned and enlarged to billboard format. Printed as a series, each slate carries a different handwritten message, statement or commandment of cultural, political or religious content.
“Mark Rooker: Short Stories and Rocket Science” is inspired by the “pulp art” of science fiction magazines in the 1930s and ’40s. In the “Short Stories” series, the artist — an Urbana campus alumnus with an undergraduate degree in graphic design and graduate degree in metals — uses styles and forms of sci-fi pulp to create mixed-media wearable objects that illustrate simple narratives of the future. In the “Rocket Science” series, he combines the same styles and forms with traditional, functional objects to create whimsical, toy-like flatware and hollowware.
“Raoul Deal: Reinventing Jimmy Green” takes its title from the artist’s family anecdote, in which an impatient immigration official reassigns his grandfather (Eugenio Greco) the name “Jimmy Green.” The show functions as a symbolic reinvention of the artist as he navigates toward a “new” life in his native United States, after living in Mexico for 10 years. In the exhibition, Deal – who earned a bachelor’s degree in painting from the Urbana campus and a master’s from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, San Carlos – manipulates ordinary found objects, such as driftwood chair seats, and imbues them with new visual meaning.
I space gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
