Clutch Gallery

Greenswoggle by Paul Melvin Hopkin

2011-12-22T10:58:00.000-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Greenswoggle by Paul Melvin Hopkin. Creating a story with modest production values, Greenswoggle articulates contradictions though a minimal whisper. Salad bears the hallmarks of healthy and wholesome, but on many a menu the salad will have the highest fat content, the most processed ingredients, and the highest content of sodium based preservatives, emulsifiers, deflocculants, washes and flavor additives, not to mention the added sugars. Americans are familiar with the melting pot metaphor, but a salad remains more apt. The ingredients maintain discrete identity but the mix manages to be more than the parts. As interested in undoing wholesome as getting anyone to question menu item choices, Paul Hopkin intends the unpacking process to feel like an idiosyncratic carnival game more than a homework assignment. Greenswoggle runs through January 25, 2012.

Growing up in the Nevada desert, Paul Melvin Hopkin was raised to be a scientist; he was also raised in a profoundly religious home. He started his education as a chemistry major and began his art education at Brigham Young University in Utah. He received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1997 and continues working with non-traditional sculpture. He has taught video and performance as well as foundation level courses and exhibits his work mostly in unassuming apartment gallery venues in Chicago. Two and a half years ago he opened slow in order to develop an audible curatorial voice.

Clutch Gallery is a 25-square-inch space located in the heart of Meg Duguid's purse, which is currently being carried by Emma Robbins. The gallery is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art of all media. Clutch opened in December 2009 and was initially intended to maintain regular programming through December 2010. In December of 2011, Meg Duguid decided that she no longer wanted to carry Clutch, so her favorite accessory is being used by other curators. Clutch will continue to run as a curatorial project until the gallery wears out from daily use. To view this exhibition and find out where Clutch is going, follow it on Facebook, or you can make an appointment for a personal viewing time.

Emma Robbins is a photographer and fibers artist currently living in Chicago and studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Presently, she is making small scale, public installations and working on a photography book about her grandparents. When not working on these things, she “TAs” a photo class for high school students, works at the SAIC’s photo department, and sells cupcakes and coffee at a small bakery. Utilizing Clutch’s outside appearance and portability, she will bring the gallery into public spaces, where the work will go beyond the gallery walls, and intervene these spaces. Emma plans to work with Clutch’s unique characteristics that make it well suited to show work that can't really be shown in traditional exhibition spaces

Bon voyage Clutch!

2011-12-22T08:19:00.000-08:00

Greenswoogle by Paul Melvin Hopkin will be going on vacation to Buenos Aires with Emma Robbins.

After 2 years of operating a Clutch Gallery out of my purse, I am now opening the project up to others. No more will I be limited to carry just a wallet and keys in my purse; I have dusted off my old green bag and am passing Clutch on to a series of others. This last show with Paul Melvin Hopkin, was curated by me, yet will be carried by Emma Robbins to Buenos Aries and back to Chicago. Emma will then take on the mantle of Clutch curator through spring. I am delighted to see the project grow beyond my sphere and am grateful to all the artists who have exhibited in my bag. I am also thrilled that I am now able to carry a book, a lunch, and my personal belongings all in one place again.

Cheers,

Meg

A year of reorganization, exploration--Clutch in the Trib

2011-12-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

A year of reorganization, exploration

December 16, 2011|By Lori Waxman, Special to the Tribune

This was a year of institutional shake-ups, with a bizarrely reconfigured Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, the first new mayor in decades, a cutting-edge director brought on to the perennially stodgy Block Museum (at Northwestern University in Evanston), and the replacement of nearly everyone at the Museum of Contemporary Art. It's hard to know exactly what it will all mean for 2012, so best to look back and appreciate what we can know from a year full of so much novelty. Here are some highlights.

Man with a Vision: In the midst of a historic election season, Daniel Tucker organized "Visions for Chicago," a public art project in the form of a campaign for ordinary people. Through April, more than 100 Chicagoans posted handwritten signs on their front lawns from the 1st Ward to the 50th, announcing their hopes for a better city and giving voice to that rarest of rarities: meaningful political speech.

If sending artists to art fairs is like sending cattle to slaughter, the new MDW Fair is a gorgeous green pasture. With a first installment in April and another in October, the low-budget, feel good exposition at the GeoLofts in Bridgeport highlighted small local art spaces like What It Is and The Storefront, hosted DIY presses and displayed the work of curatorial collectives. Founded by the Public Media Institute, Roots & Culture and ThreeWalls, all perennial doers in the city's scrappy, expansive cultural scene.

The craftiest work at Art Chicago in April was not to be found in an exhibitor booth, or even at NEXT, its cooler, hipper sister fair. Adventurous visitors sneaked up to the 17th floor of the Merchandise Mart and haunted the empty hallways until they arrived at the Converso Modern showroom, where New Capital Projects collaborated with balloon to install punchy sculptures by emerging local artists like Carson Fisk-Vittori, Andy Hall and Andres Laracuente amid vintage Knoll sofas and Saarinen coffee tables.

The Most Auspicious New Start Award goes to the Chicago Artists' Coalition. The organization was founded in 1974, and hasn't been relevant for years. But under the directorship of Carolina Jayaram, the organization moved into its new West Loop quarters in May, complete with 2,500 square feet of gallery space and nine studios for the very promising inaugural artists of the BOLT residency program.

"Evidence of the Material World," at Devening Projects + Editions in October, was Dianna Frid's exhibition of sculptures, collage and artist books. Characteristically lush yet spare, it gave tactile, anomalous form to the ephemeral phenomena of love and being, light and space. Frid brings the planets home but keeps them strange; she puts death in the palm of your hand, lightly.

The award for Best New Chicago Monument absolutely does not go to the giant Marilyn Monroe on Michigan Avenue. Thank you, Tony Tasset for providing the perfect rejoinder to the most embarrassing public display of sculpture since Cows on Parade.

At least Hot Dog Man, the artist's exuberantly grotesque, 8-foot-tall fiberglass Chicago-style wiener engenders meaningful embarrassment, as well as a back story. This Dog wears a ring, and has been on display since November at Kavi Gupta Gallery.

Plenty of promising galleries opened in challenging spots this year, including Comfort Station, an abandoned, turn-of-the century resting place for tired travelers in Logan Square, now a multidisciplinary arts space; Terrain, a takeover of Sabina Ott's Oak Park front lawn; and SHoP, a kunstverein/nonsports pub/wood shop/radio station collaboratively run out of an 1890s mansion in Hyde Park.

The smallest and most portable by far, however, must be Meg Duguid's Clutch Gallery, housed in her boxy vintage purse, and currently featuring an installation by Jason Dunda.

ctc-arts@tribune.com

Twitter @chitribent

Boîte-en-valise by Jason Dunda

2011-11-09T13:22:00.000-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Boîte-en-valise by Jason Dunda. Boîte-en-valise ('box in a suitcase') is Dunda’s humble reimagining of Marcel Duchamp's portable miniature monograph of the same name. For this work, Dunda has installed a painted version of his Bridgeport living-room-slash-studio that he has occupied for the last eleven years. Among the objects in the room are Dunda’s handmade wheelbarrow, reproductions of drawings kept inside his desk, and his fridge with neatly piled plates on top. In keeping with his other works, Boîte-en-valise is created with an economical graphic stroke with a narrow but sophisticated color palette. Boîte-en-valise runs through December 7, 2011.

Jason Dunda was born and raised in Toronto and moved to Chicago in 1999. He trained as an oil painter at York University in Toronto and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally at Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects in Toronto; Dean Project in New York; Fluxspace in Philadelphia; Slow, Green Lantern, Kasia Kay, and the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; the Wexner Center in Columbus; and the Heine-Onstad Art Centre in Oslo. He is currently an adjunct assistant professor at SAIC and is represented in Toronto by Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects and in New York by Mulherin + Pollard.

Jason Dunda’s curatorial endeavors border on parody. From 2000 to 2004, Dunda ran Modest Contemporary Art Projects, a negligible 36-square-foot gallery space. Given Clutch’s small footprint, Dunda seemed like a natural match to the space. He is also one-half of the Alliance of Pentaphilic Curators, who in 2006 insinuated a 125-person group project upon the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Gallery 400. In 2011, they concocted Five Funerals, a series of artist-run memorial services, in an attempt to put a handful of cultural ideas to rest.

The making of Boîte-en-valise by Jason Dunda

2011-11-09T13:18:00.000-08:00

In process studio shots:

SUMMER IDYLL by Judith Brotman

2011-10-05T17:16:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present SUMMER IDYLL by Judith Brotman. SUMMER IDYLL acts as a loose-leaf book, a fiber installation, and a series of drawings all at once. For this work, Brotman has created a series of notes and abstract blueprints for potential machines that are intended to serve various (un)reasonable functions in life. Viewers are invited to flip through these handwritten, hand-painted, and stitched-on works as if Clutch were a file drawer housing a well-stored archive. Each of these self-directive notes starts with the mantra “I will build a machine that” and develops into a lyrical statement where form swerves away from function. The pieces together act as a poetic homily on the impractical imagination combined with the real-world implications of object making. SUMMER IDYLL runs through November 3, 2011.

Judith Brotman is a mixed-media sculpture installation artist who has exhibited widely in Chicago and throughout the U.S. Solo shows include Hampshire College Art Gallery in Amherst, MA; the DeVos Museum at Northern Michigan University; and Threewalls, MN Gallery, and the Chicago Cultural Center—all in Chicago. Group exhibitions include the Smart Museum of Art; Hyde Park Art Center; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Illinois State Museum; and the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston. Brotman’s work is included in the Drawing Center’s artist registry and on Re-title.com. Her work is in numerous private collections and in the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection. Brotman currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and previously taught at the University of Chicago’s Midway Studios as a Harper/Schmidt Fellow. Brotman received her BFA and MFA (Fiber &Material Studies) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Northway in Clutch mentioned in ARTINFO

2011-10-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

Downtown Outing: From Nauman to Occupy Chicago | True Stories: Life in the Art World | ARTINFO.com

TRUE STORIES

Life in the Art World

Michael Workman's True Stories

OCTOBER 5, 2011, 5:33 PM

Downtown Outing: From Nauman to Occupy Chicago

The view from Michigan Avenue just south of the Art Institute.

Author’s Note: I was directed by Donald Young Gallery to obtain permission to reproduce images from the Nauman show via the Artist’s Rights Society. Since I’m publishing my review on the internet, it’s the policy of the Society to only allow use of images for a finite period of time. As the author, I’d rather not have to take the images down 6 months from now, and thus alter its originally intended publication. Instead, I’ve opted to run the review without the relevant images and simply provide a link to the gallery’s artist page for readers who wish to view them.

In the back of a taxi, from my north side neighborhood of Lincoln Square, out on LSD, the lakefront is sheer and violent. Squalls and fifteen-foot breakers paint the view with heaving sprays of high, white foam. Going to see anything downtown is a little like going to see anything on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, except spiked with a Miracle Mile of the world’s largest strip mall, bulging with wide phalanxes of waddling tourists. No sweat. I’m not stopping until the easternmost bulge of the Loop, so unlike Manhattan after hours, when the workers flee the city night behind the green-glowing window slats of rapid transit. I’ve not been downtown in awhile, and it looks as if the lake foam has showered the sky, smoke rising out the tops of skyscrapers. They seem connected. It makes me pause to imagine an architect looking on the oil refineries with their tall, fiery black stacks poking up across the city’s South Side, burnt industrial waste pluming into the chill reaches of lower troposphere. Thus the skyscraper was born?

Inside the Santa Fe building, an old railway exchange built by Burnham and Co., I stroll in under, then up the steps to Donald Young’s gallery on the balcony one floor above. I’m here for “Combinations Described (Chicago),” a show of Bruce Nauman’s latest work. Usually I wouldn’t be attracted to a blue-chip exhibition, but as readers of my introductory column will recall, I have a soft spot for Nauman. And it’s a beautiful building. Young moved here some years back, abandoning the gallery’s former airy location in the West Loop, now a tiny front space and offices.

On a screen suspended in the middle of the front room, the artist’s hands are put through a series of commands audible from a speaker in each corner in the room, and in six different voices, audible four at a time: “Left hand, thumb. Right hand, index finger. Both hands…” and so on. Watching, it evokes for me a test of the communication between mind and body, similar those given to test the functioning of psychomotor skills. Likewise, here the hand movements read as a test for disjunction in a subject’s grasp of symbolic meaning, for this progression of hand combinations to create a dissociative effect from the specific gestural baggage that an extended index finger or raised pointer finger and pinky would usually carry. This procedural effect is preserved through the audio as well, with the voices uttering the finger-position instructions combining into the instantaneous utterances of separate commands (best I could tell). Making them impossible to follow has the effect of a glossolalia of sensory echoes caused in the association-making process that occurs between listening and hearing, cognition and memory.

In a back office hang a series of three mid-scale drawings (one was out for show at Frieze at the time of my visit). They seem drawn by tracing a hand on the paper, then filling in details. Rather than focusing on the skill of the drawings, or their bodily aspect, the efficacy of their effect is instead simply in the rendering of each instance of the combinations from the video. This led me, distinct from what I’d gathered from the video, to view each combination more like allusions to the set of teeth on a key. Drawn categorically, they represent the finger positions in all of the available permutations, left and right hand, then both hands, zero through five for a total of 31 different positions. Again without any indication of having taken on any specific meaning that may occur within them, as a whole they enumerate the finitude of a distinctly hyper-aware corporeality. Understated and suspenseful, I leave wanting more of the same.

Nicole Northway, "This Island," 2011. Courtesy Clutch Gallery.

Four short blocks up Michigan Avenue at the Chicago Cultural Center, on my way upstairs for “Write Now: Artists and Letterforms,” I bump into Michael Thomas, an art lifer and Director of the now-defunct legendary Dogmatic Gallery, an exceptional artist’s space where a list of notables such as Paul Chan got their start. After a few minutes of catching up, we’re joined by his wife Meg Duguid, who works in the building at the city’s Office of Culture and Tourism (formerly the Department of Cultural Affairs, which was somewhat controversially folded in together with Tourism just prior to Rahm Emmanuel taking office). An artist known for sharply clever and witty performances, she’s perhaps most well-known for her stunningly popular “Dance With Me…,” a silent, wireless headphone dance party held some years back at the city’s MCA that seemed to draw imitators out of the woodwork. This afternoon Duguid also happens to be toting her current project, a wood box occasionally filled with a rotating roster of diminutive-scale artworks she refers to as Clutch Gallery. While we’re waiting for the show to open upstairs, she indulges me a view of the latest installment in the series, a small geometric structure called “This Island” by Chicago artist Nicole Northway. Inside sits a small, vaguely trapezoidal articulation of an imagined island constructed of brown, brackish struts tied with red and green thread, and encrusted with a coating of hand-grown crystal. It clearly also resembles the structure of a live-firing neuron connection in the brain, lit from within, as if aglow with the soft electric light of active tissue. It’s a piece easy to imagine at several hundred times its present scale, filling a giant vaulted museum hall.

Chicago artist Meg Duguid with her Clutch Gallery project.

Upstairs, there’s a line outside the exhibit entrance. It’s no wonder why, curated by the Office’s intellectually stalwart and smart Nathan Mason, and promising a show of works by more than 100 artists. Waiting patiently, all of the earlier encounter with the conscious process of perception and meaning-making has me primed for an encounter with an exhibition on the subject of the human-functioning capacities of language. Right up front, before getting to the good stuff, it’s worth footnoting three things that made this exhibition less gripping for me than it could have been: first, it’s simply got too many artists, packed in too small a space. Secondly, while it’s understood that the mandate for the Office of Tourism and Culture is to in some degree support the community as a whole, there is also just too much a mix of good with rote work and, thirdly, though there is indeed much to recommend it, it does feel as though the topic was so compelling that it got top-loaded with much of the city’s Rolodex of go-to talent, and not always in a way that strengthens the overall encounter with individual works.

Joel Ross, "Torture Sounds Incredible," 2011. Courtesy the Chicago Cultural Center.

All that said, it’s hard for a writer not to find easy delights in a show about words, and I do. Initial stand-outs include Joel Ross, whose “Torture Sounds Incredible,” an LED lighted-form wall-hanging, wins the bold statement award for its needling of the public conscious about torture. In this over-the-top proposition, standing a roughly good eight feet in height, the glowing red letters tower over the viewer, commanding attention and reducing human proportionality against the height of the proposition. Its declarative ambiguity hinges on the word “incredible,” obviously. Is that to say, delightful? Not likely. Pleasurable? Masochists may agree. More likely: beyond belief, difficult to process the existence of, absurd. Binding together in this predicated language the acceptance and simultaneous rejection of the act of torture (since it’s always an act, of course, prosecuted upon an other), linguistically recreates the confusion and mindlessness of torture, of resistance and denial, pain and its resultant evacuation of the minds of both torturer and victim.

Aron Gent, “Interstate (Toll Receipts)," 2011. Installation view (detail).

Speaking of torture, Aron Gent’s “Interstate (Toll Receipts),” which collects together several hundred Chicago toll booth receipts, pretty much gets the feeling right too. It’s a perverse pleasure of a sort to see one city agency using their platform to support a work that lands another city agency stone-cold in its crosshairs, especially one which has been the subject of an outpouring of such derision in recent years as the Department of Transportation. A subject of massive privatization, the CDOT has been sold off wholesale by the former Mayor Daley just prior to his leaving office, in a budget fire-sale nonpareil. Since their outsourcing to a private agency, Chicago motorists need maintain a travel budget equal that of a Scrooge McDuck-sized swimming pool of gold coins for the privilege of parking at city meters, and the similarly privatized Chicago Skyway tolls have been no less merciless. Of course, that’s not to mention fuel prices often among, and in a few instances actually ranking as, the very highest in the nation. The wall installation, which arranges the toll receipts in a grid that rises from the floor to the considerable heights of the exhibition hall ceiling, points up the monumental impact of this niggling daily shakedown that is a quotidian bane for the average Chicagoan. Punny and deadpan, it’s a real groaner.

Tom Torluemke’s “Atone. Dedicated To Amber: A moment in time that changed the rhyme,” 2011. Installation view.

Hung high in a back corner of ceiling and presiding over the entire exhibition is Tom Torluemke’s “Atone. Dedicated To Amber: A moment in time that changed the rhyme,” a wall-painted and suspended, cut-paper installation. Whimsical and childlike in its aesthetic, the installation depicts an imagined piece of sky-writing as drawn by the contrails of a paper airplane against an inverted, heart-shaped swatch of blue background. Its high placement, of course, signifies a divine commandment, an incitement to seek out reconciliation and correct the inevitable error of our all-too-human vicissitudes. Viewers are left to reflect on what, if anything, they are being asked to atone for exactly, except for the context of the curatorial focus on language itself, perhaps indicting the ambition that resulted in the Scriptural division of language. Elevating the word to superhuman proportions, though clearly locating issuance of the commandment from the hand of the artist that has set the paper airplane aloft, may also indicate an edict to humble artistic ambitions in a self-aware and droll reflection on the mysteries of language and art, equally alive and capable of lapsing into the sin of seriousness. Maybe. But it could also just be a good fun elaboration of heartbreak blues.

The Occupy Chicago crowd in front of the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank.

We leave satisfied, and fried from visual overdose. Afterward, joined by a few friends, we decide to catch the train down to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago for the solidarity protest withOccupy Wall Street (#occupywallstreet). We decamp at the Quincy stop and walk the remaining few blocks between us and the financial zone lorded over by the Chicago Board of Trade at one end, and the Reserve Bank adjacent. It’s an almost perfect segue way from the Cultural Center’s textual agglomeration to the frenetic scatter and desperate calls to action on the streets at Occupy Chicago (#occupychicago). And, where else to find language put to good use than on the protest signs of those seething crowds of humanity calling for a better world? Immediately after the turn off onto Jackson it’s a madhouse, hundreds of cyclists on a Critical Mass rally pouring through the streets, bells ringing, lights, voices and sirens filling the air, white-collar workers scrambling across the intersections to escape the heaving crowds of Occupy Chicago demonstrators. It’s an impressive sight, a few minutes of which are captured in the following video:

Once the cyclists move on, a crowd of roughly one hundred protestors linger on, hemmed into the width of the narrow sidewalk, chanting slogans calling for common-sense financial reforms, quotes from Goethe and Jefferson clearly enjoying a vogue among the activists. Protest signs are drawn in colored marker and Sharpie, hand-scrawled slogans of anger and disbelief at current social inequities, almost all of them drawn onto found pieces of cardboard. There’s a palpable sense of delight and a ludic spirit that permeates the air, and it gets me thinking about the radical imagination and the histories of protest and activist art.

Occupy Chicago protesters making signs. Image courtesy Rachel Helene Swift.

Chicago, of course, has been the scene of some of the most radical and markedly violent movements in the history of social unrest, from theHaymarket riots to the Weathermen bombings and Days of Rage. But something is different about the nature of this moment. While I don’t think it’s useful exactly to track the well-documented origins and history of protest art—there are diverse available examples ranging from Guernica to Hans Haacke to Fairey’s Obama posters—the participatory nature of these virally-spread, now-global protest events clearly denotes a degree of social performance, one where the crowd identity is galvanized into a rough approximation of community action as a sort of Beuysian social sculpture. It’s a new kind of world population, a distinctly American-influenced one, trying to find and claim its soul.

A protester holding his hand-made sign at Occupy Chicago.

Heading out for cocktails with editors from the local alt-weekly at Printer’s Row, we pass a window display at the Paul Stuart clothier a few steps down from the Federal Reserve building. In it, a headless suit and disembodied pair of hands are posed as if in mid-performance. Businessmen as musicians fiddling out the tunes the rest of the world are forced to dance to, shades of human beings reduced to corporate phantasms. Invisible hand become invisible man, Babbitt’s ghost. Looking at this window display, I’m prompted into a reverie on the art world’s relationship with society, how our ability as people to communicate has been reinvigorated by a resistant strain in our still-nascent global market culture, intervened on by a sense that the connection and communication our recent technological advancements have afforded us is insufficient, that we do in fact need something more than a reassurance of power to define ourselves and the world we live in. It will be interesting to see what reverberations occur in the art world, shot through and shaped by its difficult and unending reliance on patronage and the corruptions of its incipient private-interests. Not much is likely to change. But perhaps a critical reevaluation of its relationship to commerce on some level could open up fecund and interesting artistic dimensions beyond the myopia of the usual market-dominated productions of the last roughly ten years.

The window display at the Paul Stuart clothier next to the Federal Reserve.

We hail a taxi at the corner and hop in. As the street lights divide up the darkness, I realize I’ve been unconsciously tapping my fingers against my palms, moving them in a loose approximation of those earlier combinations. I’m frustrated and tired of feeling isolated in my thoughts. I sit down more. Maybe I’m casting after a glimpse of some elusive, new inner moment that corresponds with the shifting surfaces passing outside. If so, it hasn’t come yet. It’s okay. Maybe it never will.

This Island by Nicole Northway

2011-09-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present This Island by Nicole Northway. Nicole Northway utilizes the idea of landscape to investigate invented space. By creating her own geography which she explores with an imagined narrative, she seeks to understand the indescribable and the unknowable. With This Island, Northway has created a sculpture cloaked by hand-grown crystals. Resembling part landscape and part image of a synapse firing, the work navigates the gaps between fantasy and reality, interiority and exteriority, the gigantic and the miniature. This Island runs through October 1, 2011.

Nicole Northway earned her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2008. She currently maintains a studio in her Humbolt Park apartment, which she shares with her supportive boyfriend and several species of animals. Her work has been recognized by the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation in the form of two first-place awards, and she was the recipient of the CAAP grant in 2010. Most recently, her work was exhibited at the Thomas McCormick gallery. She has also exhibited at the Contemporary Art Workshop, Next Fair at Art Chicago, Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts in St. Louis, and the Sullivan Gallery. Nicole is currently teaching at Columbia College, hosting underground dinner parties, finding subversive potential for Mod Podge, and working on a new series of paintings and sculptures for an upcoming group show illuminated by black light at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Angela Watters is Gallery Opening Barbie

2011-09-07T07:29:00.000-07:00

Angela Watters is Gallery Opening Barbie  and she will be Carrying Nicole Northway's exhibition in Clutch Gallery for one night only!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 
Angela Watters is Gallery Opening Barbie 
Gallery 60% H2O 
West Loop and River North Gallery Districts , Chicago

Premiering September 9, 2011

Everyone knows Barbie drives a pink Corvette and loves Ken – or did they break up? – but Barbie’s passion for art collecting has been one of her better-kept secrets, until now.

On September 9, 2011, artist Angela Watters will become an exhibition within an exhibition as she performs “Gallery Opening” Barbie at the alternative art venue Gallery 60% H2O. Watters will wear a custom-made human sized outfit that is both an homage to and critique of Mattel’s 1997 “Gallery Opening” Barbie, and will carry Meg Duguid’s “Clutch Gallery”—a miniature self-contained gallery—as her purse. Through her performance, Watters acts as artist, collector, critic, curator, and dealer simultaneously. This exhibition is the result of a cross-state collaboration with six artists culminating in Watters’s attendance at the Chicago fall gallery season opener.

For specific locations and announcements, please follow the Gallery’s twitter feed at: http://twitter.com/#!/60percentH20

Gallery Opening Barbie marks a homecoming for Watters, who obtained her MFA at Columbia College Chicago and lived in Chicago until 2010. She currently lives and works in Carbondale, Illinois.

Referring to the approximate amount of water that the human body contains, Gallery 60% H2O’s group exhibition will include three-dimensional work by Amanda Bless, Jessica Allee, Kelly Marie Novak, Andrea Lebeau, and Cole Robertson. Clutch Gallery will contain new work by Nicole Northway.

Contact information:
Angela Watters
info@angelawatters.com
312-316-8742

Chance Encounters with Joan: Invitations toward an Epilogue by Trevor Martin

2011-08-06T11:28:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Chance Encounters with Joan: Invitations toward an Epilogue by Trevor Martin. Playing on the participatory nature imbued in Clutch, Martin has structured this work as a chance encounter and a series of performance engagements. For this project, phrases from the stage directions of George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan have been custom-fitted as written text into a series of fortune cookies. The viewer may interpret these individual fortunes as fragments of poetry or, in the spirit of Yoko Ono’s “Instruction Paintings,” as invitations for his or her own performative response. Upon opening the fortune, each viewer is invited to offer a short performance response with the curator of Clutch, using the fortune-encrypted text as a script for a chance happening. Any response is acceptable and welcomed. Chance Encounters with Joan: Invitations toward an Epilogue runs through August 27, 2011.

Trevor Martin is a multidisciplinary artist who currently serves as the Director of Exhibitions and also teaches in the Performance Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Trevor received his BA in literature and studio art from Transylvania University (1992) and MFA from SAIC (1998). He has shown his solo and collaborative works both locally and internationally in festivals and curated programs.

Training by Rich Mansfield

2011-07-07T19:25:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Training by Rich Mansfield. Mansfield's sculptures are influenced by his life and have a sense of humor usually in either their content or use of materials, or both. Training is about boyhood—both Mansfield's and that of his sons. Since nothing speaks to boyhood like a bike, Mansfield centered his piece for Clutch on it. As a child, he had a very small bike, so small that his parents bought a bigger crank for it so he could keep pace with his friends. For safety reasons his parents also insisted that a tall orange flag be attached to the small bike to ensure cars could see him. Now Mansfield has kids, and although he does not share the same concerns as his parents, he is concerned for all the other dangers out there, like sharks in puddles. Training runs through August 3, 2011, and can be seen both in the bike basket of the director of Clutch and around town.

Artist Rich Mansfield lives in Omaha, Nebraska; he received an MFA in art and technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 and a BFA in sculpture from Northern Arizona University. In Chicago he has shown at the Cultural Center and ThreeWalls along with a vast array of former spaces he truly misses. In Nebraska he has shown at The Bemis Underground and Tugboat and has an upcoming show at the Lux Center for the Arts. He is the former founder, editor, and photocopier of Regulator magazine. He misses Chicago, but loves his family.

Image: courtesy of http://richmansfield.com/home.html

Taining Installation Shots

2011-07-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

Cross Pollination by Cathi Schwalbe-Bouzide

2011-06-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Cross Pollination by Cathi Schwalbe-Bouzide. Schwalbe-Bouzide engages in a deep exploration of cultivation utilizing the concepts of plenty and want, reuse, food systems, and the human condition to hang her practice on. For Clutch she has created a mausoleum-like structure built of beeswax that is adorned with text taken from two interviews she had with beekeepers Tanja Deshida and Charlie Koenen. Throughout the run of the show this malleable structure will slowly take on the shape of the gallery, mimicking the way industry has shaped global hive structures for agricultural use. In Cross Pollination, the absence of the bees within the structure is palpable as the residual smell of their work lingers within Clutch. Cross Pollination runs through July 2, 2011.

Cathi Schwalbe-Bouzide received her BFA from the University of Wisconsin. She has exhibited at the Lilstreet Art Center in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, and the Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City, Indiana. She is a member of Women Made Gallery, Chicago Sculpture International, and the Illinois Artisans Program. She currently lives and works in Chicago.

A Snowball's Chance by Iain Muirhead

2011-05-02T06:34:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present A Snowball's Chance by Iain Muirhead. Muirhead’s work is influenced by his childhood years as a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Recent Global events like blackbirds falling from the sky and millions of fish washing dead on the shore are used to give contemporary relevance to the prophesies contained in John's apocalyptic visions. In February 2011 Snowpocalypse dumped a record amount of snow across the Midwest. For this exhibition Clutch Gallery becomes a reliquary for snow Muirhead gathered during this epic snowstorm. Muirhead has tasked Clutch's director, as guardian of the reliquary, with the impossibility of keeping this snowball intact. As snow is unable maintain it's physical state of being when separated from it's place and time, the reliquary becomes a holding place for an ever-changing concept of religion and ritual. A Snowball's Chance runs through May 28, 2011.

Iain Muirhead’s studio practice is rooted in painting, sculpture, and performance. He received his B.F.A. in 1996 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has been in residence at the Cliff Dwellers Club and the Ragdale Foundation. In Chicago, he has exhibited at Northern Illinois University, Evanston Art Center, Beacon Street Gallery and Performance Space, Dogmatic Gallery, and Deluxe Projects. He is a founding partner at NFA SPACE, an international exhibitions consulting and logistics firm that originated as a pioneering artist run space programming exhibits of emerging artists from 1996 through 2002.

A Snowball's Chance preparation shots

2011-05-01T10:23:00.000-07:00

Clutch at Art Chicago

2011-05-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

MONDAY MAY 2

Shows from the Insider: A Discussion With Artists Who Curate
12-1P
Presented by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The art scene has a long history of presenting exhibitions curated by working artists. Hailing from different points of view and backgrounds these artists who curate provide unique art experiences for their viewers. Simultaneously, they are expanding the means of exhibiting and discussing art through new possibilities and innovative avenues. Join us for this panel discussion as we convene artist/curators from various generations and practices to investigate the art of curating from an insider’s perspective.

This panel will feature Juan William Chavez, an artist and cultural activist, whose studio work focuses on the art experience while his activism includes organizing events & exhibitions throughout the city of St. Louis to promote a cultural dialog in the form of public art. Artist Meg Duguid, director of Clutch Gallery, a 25 square-inch space located in the heart of Ms. Duguid’s purse will also be a panelist. Michelle Grabner, Professor and Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an artist and writer based in Oak Park, IL. Also hailing from St. Louis is Kim Humphries, Director of Exhibitions & Collections at the Laumeier Sculpture Park and independently curator of various projects and performances around the Midwest. And, former chief art critic for the Chicago Daily News & Chicago Sun-Times, currently Corresponding Editor of Art in America magazine, and Professor of Art Emeritus at Lake Forest College, Franz Schulze will be joining the conversation. The panel will be moderated by Laura Caroline Johnson, SAIC Dual Degree graduate student in Art History, Theory, & Criticism and Arts Administration & Policy.

Clutch Gallery in the Reader

2011-04-28T12:34:00.000-07:00

You Are Here / Show Us Your... Show Us Your...Purse

Posted on Thu, May 5, 2011 at 3:00 PM

Each week we ask you to show us something. This week it's your PURSE—a rather unique handbag belonging to artist Meg Duguid. Got something to show us? showus@chicagoreader.com

"Because Chicago is so known for its alternative spaces, I decided to open one up in my own space—which is my purse," Duguid says of her decision to launch 25-square-inch Clutch Gallery in what happens to be a fully functional purse.

Andrea Bauer

click to enlarge

Andrea Bauer

There are no regular viewing hours: "Sometimes if somebody tells me I have a nice purse, that's a really great entry into showing someone the space. When I buy things, that's another good entry in showing the space. My wallet and my keys fit in there. I've actually stopped carrying my birth control in it, because so many people have grabbed in and pulled it out. After the fifth time, that became unfunny."

On Monday, Clutch Gallery opened the "multimedia reliquary" A Snowball's Chance by Iain Muirhead (pictured), in which the artist turned the space into a cooler to hold long-leftover snow from the February 2 storm. Her job as gallery owner, Duguid says, is to be "the guardian of a snowball from Snowmageddon."

For more information, see clutchgallery.blogspot.com.

The Cave by Krista Peel

2011-03-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present The Cave by Krista Peel. Peel creates works that resemble Americana but engage with the aesthetics of depth and plane. Utilizing a roadside America culture with a nod to the mid-century modern, Peel conveys a sense of familiarity imbued by a twenty-first-century allure. Peel’s work bypasses the nostalgic and cuts straight to the modern experience of representation and the act of looking. Peel created The Cave after a trip to Carlsbad Caverns, where she was lured from the world above by the vastness and mystery of the space. This work reflects that experience, amplified with color. The Cave runs through April 23, 2011.

Krista Peel was born in Saugatuck, Michigan, and raised in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 1996. She currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband, Zak. They are co-directors of the Philadelphia Art Hotel. Her favorite things include painting, drawing, jewelry making, dioramas, miniatures, sleight-of-hand magic, the supernatural, roller coasters, swimming, mini-golf, and discussing movies. Ooh! and tiki drinks.

www.philadelphiaarthotel.org

www.kristapeel.com

Haven's car located, but Fine Lines is missing

2011-03-21T06:36:00.000-07:00

Last week Sue Havens went to meet the police where they found her missing car, gutted. The box that carried Fine Lines which was to be exhibited in Clutch was on the seat, OPENED, with the piece GONE. The note to Meg Duguid was still there. Apparently the car had been sitting there for two months.

Hot Dots by Sue Havens

2011-02-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Hot Dots by Sue Havens. Hot Dots was created when Fine Lines, her original show for Clutch, was stolen along with her car in Brooklyn, New York, earlier this year. Hot Dots is optimistic yet painted in somber tones. Havens’s work demonstrates precision with a persistent irregularity. Her paintings are structured yet have underlying undoing, creating a paradox: flat but dimensional, bold but quiet, hard-edged but fragile, cartoonish but serious. Her work is based in geometry with a built-in wobble, creating a tension in places where planes transition and collide, where muted colors meet bright colors, forming a harmonic, balanced tension. Hot Dots runs through March 19, 2011.

Sue Havens holds a BFA from Cooper Union and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She received 2008 fellowship in painting from the New York. Foundation for the Arts and has exhibited with Postmasters, Jeff Bailey, PS 122, Friedrich Petzel, Art in General, Momenta Art, Sara Meltzer, OK Harris, Pierogi, Portland Art Center (Portland), And/Or (Dallas), Cooper Union, and Clutch Gallery (Chicago) among others. She is the author of a newly released book, Make Your Own Toys (Random House, Potter Craft). Havens currently works in a studio in Brooklyn.

Hot Dots was created When Fine Lines was stolen

2011-02-16T18:10:00.000-08:00

Fine Lines image courtesy of the Collection of Sue Havens' Car Thief

Space in Between wall drawings

2011-02-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

Over the course Allison Fall's exhibition, the raw clay works became mark makers on the galley walls.

Space in Between by Allison Fall

2011-01-21T10:44:00.001-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Space in Between by Allison Fall. Fall confronts the issue of connecting and communicating with one another. She creates an awareness of space through her body and tactile objects. Space in Between invites a closer connection to the viewer by creating intimate objects for interaction and simple awareness. In collaboration with Brett Douglas Davis, Fall constructs raw porcelain works crafted between the artists' bodies in a shared space. The clay records are on display, allowing the viewer to freely examine and handle the physical space of connection, promise, anticipation, and yearning. Over the course of the show, the raw clay works will also act as mark makers on the galley walls, changing the space inside while acting as reminders that connections crumble and renew. Therein lies the bliss. Space in Between runs through February 12, 2011.

Allison Fall recently received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, integrating performance, sculpture, and installation. Allison began dancing professionally in 1998 and soon after discovered ceramics and sculpture at Ohio State University, where she received her BFA in ceramics. Allison investigates space and material through her body and connects to the audience by blurring the space between us. She lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Translations by Tom Burtonwood

2010-12-17T07:11:00.000-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Translations by Tom Burtonwood. Translations explores color and plays with sequence. The piece is a color-blocked laser-cut accordion- folded paper work. At rest, it takes up the volume of Clutch; when expanded to its full length, it extends Clutch’s space 8 feet up. Each fold of the accordion is created from a series of negative spaces and colored planes that are revealed when the work is expanded. With each viewer, the work takes on a new shape depending on the amount of expansion the viewer gives the piece. This work is meant to be seen in many contexts and locations so that viewing is a different translation of the context and literally a translation of the planes in space. Translations runs through January 16, 2011.

Tom Burtonwood was born in Manchester, UK, in 1974. He worked as a studio assistant with noted English landscape painter David Blackburn from 1993 to 1997. He received a BA Hons. in Fine Art from Loughborough University in 1997 and an MFA from Southern Illinois University in 2001. Between 2003 and 2009 he worked for Bridge, an arts and culture nonprofit based in Chicago, first as managing editor for their magazine and later as operations director of their successful international art exposition, producing shows in Miami, New York, London, and Berlin. Recent exhibitions include Gillock Gallery, Paris; NOISEfestival, Manchester; The Center for Book and Paper Arts, Columbia College, Chicago; Version Fest 2010, Chicago; Fountain, Brooklyn; and ThreeWalls, Chicago. Burtonwood teaches at Columbia College Chicago and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Danielle Ash: Secrets Hidden Deep Within the Clutch

2010-11-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present the Secrets Hidden Deep Within the Clutch by Danielle Ash. In an urban environment, the purse often becomes the space that supports a life outside the apartment. It is the go-to spot for everything: one's identity, transit fare, snacky sustenance, face paint, over-the-counter medical help, and satisfaction of vices. In Secrets Hidden Deep Within the Clutch, Ash offers an animation piece created from items found in her purse. Loaded on an IPod, her video sited within the very materials that the piece was created from. Ash often draws from her New York upbringing, incorporating characters such as pickle vendors, street performers, and pigeons. In this work she went on a search for something personal. Secrets Hidden Deep Within the Clutch runs through November 27, 2010.

Danielle Ash received her MFA in experimental animation at CalArts in 2008. Her stop-motion animated films made of cardboard, clay, wire, tape, and a wide array of found objects have screened in festivals near and far. In 2010 she was awarded the Helen Hill Animation Award for her work in animation as well as the Stellar Animation Award at the Black Maria Film Festival for her recent film, “Pickles for Nickels,” a recycled cardboard creation. Currently based in New York and teaching and working in animation, Danielle enjoys contemplating the universe while playing her saw.

Secrets Hidden Deep Within the Clutch Animation

2010-11-01T08:05:00.000-07:00

Installation

2010-10-18T08:51:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is closed for installation.

Stay Tuned for New Work by Danielle Ash opening next week.

Novelty by Zachary Rawe

2010-09-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present My Novelty/ Your Novelty, Zachary Rawe’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. Rawe is a maximalist who presents installations that burst at the seams and for this exhibition the gallery has been placed on sensory overload (TMI). This playful exhibition is a small case study of America and its trickle down effect of pop culture. From a vibrating toucan, to a crudely designed plastic dinosaur, to a wrestler with a shirt stating ‘come get some’ this display offers the chance for viewers to locate and appreciate the sincerity and sarcasm, irony, pathos, and generosity in this work. Atop the pile lies one key chain that reads ZACHARY anchored the artists house keys thus creating a scenario where one can’t quickly dismiss the sculpture as unneeded refuse. With his name tied to these wonderfully (and ominously) semi-persuasive objects, the artist becomes more of a passionate advocate than a social critic. This exhibition runs through October 15.

Zach Rawe is a graduate of the Art Academy of Cincinnati with a BFA in sculpture. As an emerging artist, Rawe has already received honors including a semester long residency in New York City. He has participated in exhibitions in Cincinnati, OH: New York, NY: Covington, KY and Frankfort, KY. His work has been written about in City Beat and has recently worked with Cameron Knight on the web project about Rawe’s art practice for Citybeat in 2010. In 2009, Rawe founded the U·turn Art Space with the four other collective members. Rawe is originally from Northern Kentucky, but now lives and keeps a studio in downtown Cincinnati, OH.

New Work by Trevor Gainer--Post Mortem

2010-09-30T05:58:00.000-07:00

New Work by Trevor Gainer
Post Mortem
One 12-pound meteorite carried in Clutch Gallery for the run of an exhibition

During this period:
145 miles were traversed by the meteorite, via bike, walking, and public transit
740 additional calories were burned via bike rides
43 staircases were avoided
10 escalator rides were sought out to replace normal staircase use
1 faux Chanel over the shoulder boulder holder’s handle became crackly
47 faux Chanel leather handle bits were left on the gallery owner’s shoulder
2 Gallery walls were cracked by the meteorites weight during travel
4 Gallery Walls were scratched by the meteorite’s daily path

Clutch Gallery on Chicago Arts

2010-09-22T07:14:00.000-07:00

Trevor Gainer

2010-09-14T16:51:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present a new piece by Trevor Gainer. For this exhibition, Gainer continues an examination of the point between abstraction and utility. By placing a 12-pound meteorite in Clutch he proposes a dialogue between the primordial Atlas and the doomed Sisyphus. The great and subtle distinctions in their personae act as fixed points of reference that Gainer utilizes to highlight our own teleological limitations. For Clutch to accommodate such a hefty object, Gainer has provided a faux Chanel purse as an over the shoulder boulder-holder. This exhibition was curated by Shannon Stratton and runs through September 25, 2010

Trevor Gainer obtained his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BFA, from the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has had numerous exhibitions in Boulder, CO, San Francisco, CA and Chicago, IL with a recent solo show at the Gahlberg Gallery. Upcoming shows include BEN RUSSELL in Chicago on September 25th, and KOH-I-NOOR in Copenhagen on January 8th. Trevor lives and works in Chicago.

Gainer was selected by Shannon Stratton as an extension of the project Survival that threewalls' co-organized with Harold Arts this summer in Morgan County, Ohio. Survival is a three-year collaborative residency project between Harold Arts and threewalls. Stratton is Executive & Creative Director threewalls. Founded in 2003, threewalls host residents artists, produces solo exhibitions for local and regional artists, manages the Propeller Fund, and produces a number of public programs and publications, including the Hand-In-Glove arts administration conference slated for fall 2011. Independent of threewalls she has curated a number of exhibitions around issues of craft and performance. She also teaches part-time at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Installation

2010-09-07T07:47:00.001-07:00

Clutch is closed for installation

Keep it Simple

2010-08-18T05:13:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Keep It Simple by Meghan Wilbar. These paintings are brief histories of moments constantly shifting, reorganizing to reveal the underlying essence of living in a city. The pulse, vibrations, sensations of this experience are revealed through bursts of color, form, and depiction. In Keep It Simple, Wilbar squeezes expansive landscapes into a tension-filled compressed space that becomes its own experience. This tension and compression is further amplified by the nature of Clutch, where the compressed landscapes take on an enormous scale within the Gallery’s 25 square inch footprint. Keep It Simple runs through September 5, 2010.

Meghan Wilbar was born and raised in Pueblo, Colorado. She received her BA from Knox College, IL, in Studio Art with a minor in French. During undergraduate study she spent a year abroad at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Besancon, France, as well as a semester in Chicago. She obtained her MFA from the New York Studio School and completed a summer residency at the Chautauqua Institute Intensive Studio Program. This fall, she was an artist in the Bronx Museum, Artist in the Marketplace program (AIM 30). Her work is exhibited at the John Deaux Gallery in Pueblo, Colorado, and Prince Street Gallery in Chelsea. She currently lives and works in NYC.

Day Planners by Emily Roz and Carmelle Safdie

2010-07-15T17:15:00.000-07:00

Superstition, the need to keep organized, and the goal of always looking good are at the heart of “Day Planners,” Clutch’s new exhibition by Emily Roz and Carmelle Safdie. As a collaborative pair, Roz and Safdie bring together combined "character enhancements" to keep up with the demanding pressures of being a contemporary New York artist. Safdie, an expert in color seasons as well as in the efficacy of pleasing shapes to control and conquer moods, has created a seasonally colored wall-sized calendar that sits between Roz’s paintings. Roz, who is just plain paranoid and who has all manner of lucky charms at the ready, has adorned Clutch with delicately painted images of a lucky rabbit's foot and an evil-eye charm to ensure stability and good fortune in the past, present, and future. In the center of the gallery the pair has created an installation of black-eyed peas that traditionally symbolizes good luck on New Year's Day and the entire year that follows. “Day Planners” runs through August 14, 2010.

Safdie and Roz met in 2007 through a mutual friend at Cooper Union, where Safdie went to college and Roz works. They shared studio space until 2009, when the City of New York sadly shut down their studio building. They become fast friends as soon as they met. Roz enjoys watching Safdie's band, the Beachniks, and Safdie likes to push Roz's son on rope swings. Both women eat Syrian food and pickles. Every day, Roz wakes up around the same time that Safdie is going to bed.

Carmelle Safdie lives and works in Queens, NY. Safdie is an MFA candidate in painting at Bard College and received her BFA in 2004 from Cooper Union. She has been self-publishing First Rate Second Hand, a thrift store calendar, in collaboration with Sophy Naess since 2007 and has attended residencies at Art Farm in Nebraska and the Vermont Studio Center. Her solo exhibition “Carmelle Safdie: Paintings at Heist Gallery, New York NY” in May 2008 was reviewed in Art News, and she has participated in numerous group exhibitions nationally.

Emily Roz received a BA from Hampshire College, where she studied art history, literature, and weaving. She went on to receive an MFA in fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited at Front Room Gallery, 31Grand, HKJB, and Parlour in New York; Decatur Blue in Washington, DC; and Gardenfresh in Chicago. Roz works in New York, where she lives with her husband and son.

Impractical Specimens by Jessica Peterson

2010-05-25T08:36:00.000-07:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Impractical Specimens by Jessica Peterson.

While woes of the world increase in speed and complexity, those in Gordo, Alabama (33°19′17″N 87°54′13″W) endeavor to move as slow as possible while considering life, love, and typography with careful deliberation. Impractical Specimen offers a small souvenir of Gordo, Alabama’s lifestyle: a letterpress printed phrase, selected from a list of truisms used in and around Peterson’s print shop. These phrases were selected from her wide-ranging collection, compiled in the state of Alabama starting in 2006. Each phrase has been handset in a different metal typeface and then printed using a Vandercook SP-20, model number 22646. Impractical Specimens runs through July 9, 2010

Jessica Peterson is a book artist and letterpress printer, who is currently artist-in-residence in the town of Gordo, Alabama. She has been an adjunct faculty member at Purchase College, The University of Bridgeport and The University of Alabama, and has led workshops and lectured at Printmaking Council of New Jersey, The Art Institute of Chicago and The Center for Book Arts in New York. She graduated with an MFA in Book Arts from the University of Alabama in 2009 and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Her artists’ books are included in academic and private library collections around the country. She invites all interested individuals to visit Gordo to experience the only true way to live.

Matt King

2010-04-19T05:43:00.000-07:00

There There/Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?

April 15- May 15, 2010

Melted lollipops that land on handkerchiefs or jewelry that is discard to the depths of a handbag only to come out wrapped around the remnants of life are suggested in Matt King’s sumptuous constructions for Clutch. Matt King has fashioned these profanely elegant sculptures for coupling with either “day” or “evening” attire. There There and Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? will rotate accordingly. There There is mounted in the space for everyday use like going to work, or walks in the park while Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? will be mounted for it's more formal outings such as cocktails, or cotillions. There There and Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? are sensual in nature, discretion is encouraged and parental guidance is advised.

Matt King is a sculptor whose exhibitions include solo shows at Werkstätte (NYC), Massimo Audiello (NYC), and Fourteen30 Contemporary (Portland, OR) as well as group exhibitions including Guild & Greyshkul, Lurhring Augustine, Stux Gallery, and the Vienna Kunsthalle. He received his MFA from Bard College and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program and Cooper Union. King lives in Richmond, VA and is currently an Assistant Professor of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Google Fresh Grapes

2010-03-09T18:47:00.000-08:00

Adam Sipe

Google Fresh Grapes

March 8 - April 8

Adam Sipe's fresh approach to installation is as keenly observed as it is simple. Throughout the month-long exhibition fresh grapes will be installed and offered to gallery goers. In the context of Clutch’s twenty-five square-inch exhibition space the fresh grapes take on the scale of an Oldenburg sculpture with their constant rotation mirroring the actions of information within Google. The grapes being reset through various means; decay, eating, the rotation of one bunch for another, is much like information being sifted, updated, and rearranged.

Adam Sipe completed an MFA in 2006 at Bard College in New York in and currently lives and works in New York City. Sipe currently exhibits in various alternative spaces and is working on a project with clothing designer Arati Rao, painting on silk to create unique pieces for the clothing line Ayes. In February, he and Rao traveled to India for six months to research dyes and "to meet the worms who make the silk."

Google Fresh Grapes

2010-03-09T05:49:00.000-08:00

March 8- April 8
Adam Sipe
Google Fresh Grapes

Adam Sipe's Artist Statement

2010-03-09T05:42:00.001-08:00

Clutch is closed for installation.

2010-02-24T11:40:00.000-08:00

Opening next week will be Adam Sipe's Google Fresh Grapes

Pickle

2010-01-26T18:00:00.000-08:00

Clutch Gallery is pleased to present Pickle by Nick Black. Nick Black is a maker, a tinkerer, a mad scientist whose materials are animatronic plastic novelties cobbled together to create a sublime clusterfu**K. Pickle is a work that on the surface has all the elements of a bawdy practical joke, but when activated the grinding rotation of miniature dill pickle and the raising up of a mechanized crocheted flower reveals a layer of self-effacing wit.

Nick Black was born in Chicago in 1958. He has attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Massachusetts College of Art. His recent exhibitions include Byron Cohen Gallery in Kansas City, Uncle Freddy's Gallery in Highland, IN, Joymore Gallery in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center and he recently created an installation for Pop-up Art in the Chicago Loop.

2010-01-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

2010-01-26T16:45:00.000-08:00

Coming this Week

2010-01-17T13:12:00.000-08:00

New Work by Nick Black will open this week.

Check back for more information.

Top 5 of 2009

2010-01-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

Clutch was picked as one of the Top 5 New Spaces that opened in 2009 by Jason Foumberg of New City:

Top 5 New Spaces

Mvseum
Clutch Gallery
Ebersmoore
Eel Space
Spoke
—Jason Foumberg

Check out all of the top five's of 2009 by clicking here.

Bird Entrepreneurs

2009-12-06T13:04:00.000-08:00

Clutch is proud to present new work by Catie Olson
December 5, 2009- January 10, 2010
Bird Entrepreneurs is an installation created from materials that are both found in purses and birds nests. Items such as wallets, gum and gum wrappers, make-up, ticket stubs, hair pins, rubber bands, tissues, and feathers have gone into the creation of a mobile bird food cart situated in the prime location of Clutch. Hot Grubs, Corn Worms, Fried Seeds, Bugs on a Stick, Candied Ants, and more all available from the bird vendor. Birds will enjoy the convenience and delight that this carnival bird food vendor operated by bird entrepreneurs.