Unsuspicious Activity Around an Attended Package

February 9, 12:00 p.m.—12:00 a.m.
Various locations along the CTA Blue Line

Clutch Gallery and The Society of Smallness present: Unsuspicious Activity Around an Attended Package, a 12-hour exhibition and performance as part of the 2nd Floor Rear Festival. We will debut Floating Drawings by Alexis Petroff.

For 2FR, the SOS will ride the rails with Clutch on the CTA Blue Line between Division and Logan Square. Our good looking and moderately talented docents will give guided tours of Clutch. Periodically, if we know our docents, they will grow distracted and wander off the El to get a drink, type an urgent letter, or visit other 2FR exhibitors. Accompanying them will be a tiny entourage of bureaucrats who are wont to tweet their location and perform clerical duties, like stamping all manner of surfaces with the SOS shrimp logo. Through these seemingly idiosyncratic tics the SOS will keep Clutch in the heart of the action and create a roving experience not to be missed.

See our itinerary on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter for updates on our location. Hashtags: #SOS, #Clutch and #2ndfloor. More on 2nd Floor Rear's blog.

FLOATING DRAWINGS by Alexis Petroff

Curated by Georgina Valverde

Floating Drawings is a delectable exhibition of miniature sculptures by Alexis Petroff. There is no excess in this otherwise filled to the brim show. All the elements in the tiny constructions are a culmination of a series of finely calibrated graphic transformations that are part of the artist's process for generating larger work.

An obsessive archivist with a keen eye for detail, Alexis Petroff has been collecting fragments appropriated from newsprint, coloring books, and junk mail since the pre-Internet era. Nowadays he uses Google Earth to find inspiration in the calligraphy of power lines, graffiti, clotheslines, and other features of far away urban environments. These elements serve as source material for drawings and collages, which in turn are the basis for the floating drawings.

The linear elements in the drawings are articulated as volumetric paper forms, painted with gouache and attached to wire armatures. They float in front of and behind cloth grounds appliquéd with opaque or semi-transparent silk shapes through which other layers and elements can be seen. Clean, elegant, and tactile, Alexis Petroff’s constructions create a theatrical interchange between painting and sculpture, matter and space.

Alexis Petroff was born in Bordeaux, France in 1955 and immigrated to New York City with his parents in the late 1960s. He was influenced by Pop Art and American artist and printmaker Jack McCaslin. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987. His work has been shown at the Evanston Art Center, Name Gallery, Klein Art Works, and Mess Hall, among other Chicago venues. He is a master of smallness and his crepes are unrivaled.

Alexis Petroff
Floating Drawings, 2013
Wire, cloth, silk, paper, and gouache

Coming soon: FLOATING DRAWINGS by Alexis Petroff

This is just a little taste of the next show at Clutch. It's eye-popping gorgeous!

Microcosmic Orbit by Patrick McGee

The Society of Smallness is pleased to announce Microcosmic Orbit, a solo exhibition by Patrick McGee for Clutch Gallery.

Patrick McGee is very much an inside the box kind of thinker. He has no patience for big ideas and his work navigates the narrow margin between gluons and tear offs. In his piece for Clutch Gallery McGee examines the comparative value of a drop of water versus a grain of sand and how that valuation is completely dependent on context, whereas a small patch of shade has a near universal valuation.

Microcosmic Orbit is on view at Clutch through the month of January.

Make no humongous plans

Clutch Gallery is pleased to become the headquarters for the Society of Smallness (SOS) from January through June 2013. The SOS was established to celebrate and preserve all things seemingly small and inconsequential.  Stay tuned for updates at SOS moves in.

Miniature/Gigantic

                                               

    

                  Miniature/Gigantic

curated by Paul Hopkin and carried by Jeffery Grauel

Is there a thing, really nothing, that just gets you? You just can’t get around it even though it is scarcely there? That hangnail, that tiny curl in the lip that makes you hate that goddamned smirking bitch.

We see genocide from so far away that we can conceive of sentences containing both genocide and lipstick more easily than we can imagine actual soldiers killing actual citizens of an actual sovereign nation. We can’t fathom that global warming amounts to anything more than a plastic bag form the corner grocer. We seem impotent to sweat the BIG stuff. Treat it like it ain’t no thang.

Objects in this mirror are closer than they appear.

Slow has packed up and moved into Clutch for a traveling exhibition.

The artists include Benjamin Bellas, Judith Brotman, CC Ann Chen, Andreas Fischer, Brent Garbowski, Joe Mault, and Mican Morgan. The purse will be carried by slow’s co-director Jeffrey Grauel. This curatorial project will begin on October 10, and run for 30 days including a trip to our nation’s capital. Jeffrey also plans to make the rounds through the MDW fair here in Chicago so that the show is available for viewing for the entire run of the fair.

Clutch is currently closed for renovation

Check for the next show in October.