Whitney Johnson and Hannah Songer: kind in the right stomach

Project 1612 is proud to present Whitney Johnson and Hannah Songer: kind in the right stomach on Sunday, September 10th from 5:00 to 7:00pm in the backyard location in Morton, Illinois. Following a week-long artist residency, Johnson and Songer will collaboratively respond to the outdoor exhibition setting, interacting with the garden and yard as they see fit for their work. During their residency, Johnson and Songer will also participate in the Big Picture Peoria Street Festival in Peoria, Illinois on Saturday, September 9th from 10:00am to 4:00pm. The Street Festival’s admission is donation-based and is a “one-of-a-kind interactive celebration of the arts in our community.”

kind in the right stomach is influenced by a poem titled '“Eggs” in Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons.

Kind height, kind in the right stomach with a little sudden mill. Cunning shawl, cunning shawl to be steady. In white in white handkerchiefs with little dots in a white belt all shadows are singular they are singular and procured and relieved. No that is not the cows shame and a precocious sound, it is a bite. Cut up alone the paved way which is harm. Harm is old boat and a likely dash.

Johnson and Songer will be working together to share an exhibition centered around painting. They are curious to see what kind of connections form between their painting practices during the residency.

Whitney Johnson (she/her) makes work to share space in life, and to imagine engagements with all forms of life we share this earth with. Her practice revolves around an expanded sense of painting, and relationships with fellow living beings. These habits act separately in some moments, and work together at other times. The projects Johnson engages in often ask for care and support from viewers or gallery staff. Johnson’s work stems from worries and desires for a future that supports life. These feelings drive her to make work that encourages meaningful somatic explorations of connections in environments shared with each other.

Whitney Johnson lives and works in Peoria, Illinois. Her interests live in painting, material investigation, and relationships with non-human kin. She received her BFA from Illinois State University in 2017, her MFA from Northwestern University in 2022, and currently teaches at Bradley University, Illinois State University, and the Peoria Art Guild.

“Currently my research is in the materiality of painting. I’m interested in the life of pigments - calcium carbonate from chickens’ eggshells, knit together with heme, the pigment of their own blood which has given their shells color and protection - iron oxide, from a degrading freight railroad track in Peoria - and verdigris, dissolved from a collection of pennies. I’m interested to engage with the plants and gardens in Project 1612’s space.”

Hannah Songer (she/her) explores the difficulty of living a queer life in a culturally conservative environment, and how her experience taught her to think quickly and be resourceful. Songer is interested in recreating memories of her personal history into improvisations. Through painting and drawing, she combines references of her everyday life and cultural events into repetitive interpretation. Songer’s animations of high tempo drawings are projected into an environment shared with viewers. The transformational nature of erase and redraw animation allows her to reveal connections intuitively.

Originally from Southern Illinois, Hannah Songer is a visual artist living and working in Bloomington IL. She received her BFA from Illinois State University in 2021 and is an artist at ComeTogetherSpace in Bloomington, Illinois. Songer is primarily a painter and uses drawing techniques to create animations. She gathers inspiration from the internet, books, video games, and weightlifting.

“My paintings explore the surveillance of nuisance animals native to the American Midwest. I am interested in exploring the behaviors of nocturnal nuisance animals. “Nuisance animals” refers to wild life that are potentially destructive and harmful to human populations. The conflict between wildlife and humans is a shared issues of habitat loss. I’d like to explore the commonalities between rural queer life and nocturnal wildlife.”

Project 1612 exhibitions are organized by co-founders Jessica Bingham and Alexander Martin. The 2023 micro-residencies and exhibitions are sponsored by Big Picture Initiative, a Peoria, Illinois grassroots 501(c)(3) organization “formed by a group of dedicated volunteers who believe that art has the power to change our community.”

Programming

  • September 4-10

    Artists-in-residence in Morton, Illinois


  • Saturday, September 9, from 10:00am to 4:00pm

    Participating in the Big Picture Peoria Street Festival


  • Sunday, September 10, from 5:00 to 7:00pm

    Exhibition for Whitney Johnson and Hannah Songer
    Artist talk beginning at 5:30pm


Related websites and social media

Tyanna J. Buie: Self-Preservation

Project 1612 is proud to present Tyanna J. Buie: Self-Preservation on Friday, July 14 from 5:00 to 8:00pm in the backyard location in Morton, Illinois. Following a week-long artist residency, Buie will respond to the outdoor exhibition setting, interacting with the garden and yard as she sees fit for her work. The ephemeral exhibition is free and open to the public. Further exhibition information and accompanying programming is listed below.

Tyanna J. Buie's (she/her) recent work utilizes video and print media combined with methods such as, painting, drawing, collage, screen-printing, and Deep-Fake technology. Buie’s work intersects between self-portraiture, personal narrative, pop-culture, Black cultural significant moments, social movements, and authorship. These intersections allow Buie to challenge her history through the retelling of past events, and the remaking of images as she reimagines the future.

A Chicago and Milwaukee native, Tyanna J. Buie received her BA from Western Illinois University, and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Buie is the recipient of multiple awards including the Mary L. Nohl Fund Fellowship, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2019 Kresge Artist Fellowship/Visual Arts, 2019 Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, the 2020 Fellowship.art award, and was selected by artist Shepard Fairey to collaborate on the Milwaukee mural titled Voting Rights is Human Rights. Her work has been acquired by major institutions, such as the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Henry Ford Cancer Institute, and the Northwestern Mutual Tower and Commons, as well as private collections nationally. Buie has been reviewed on Hyperallergic.com, Newcity Chicago Magazine, South Bend Tribune, and featured on Essay’d.com and New American Paintings, Midwest edition No. 155.

Project 1612 exhibitions are organized by co-founders Jessica Bingham and Alexander Martin. The 2023 micro-residencies and exhibitions are generously sponsored by Big Picture Initiative, a Peoria, Illinois grassroots 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to build a thriving & vibrant community for all by using arts and creativity as a driver for social change, economic development, and wellness. They do this by providing arts-based solutions, promoting and supporting artists and arts initiatives, and advancing arts education.

Programming

  • July 10-14: Artist-in-residence in Morton, Illinois

  • Wednesday, July 12, from 5:30 to 6:30pm: Artist Talk at Morton Public Library 


  • Friday, July 14, from 5:00 to 8:00pm: Exhibition for Tyanna J. Buie
 Artist talk beginning at 5:30pm


Related Websites & Social Media

ZW Buckley: Climate Changes! (Peoria)

June 23, 2019

Composer R. Murray Schafer believes that we should all try to hear the environment as music. More audaciously, he suggests that we should all take responsibility for its composition. This is the foundation of Acoustic Ecology, a discipline that attempts to understand the world around us not through what we see but instead through what we hear. It is at once both art form and conservation effort. It implies that there are changes that can’t be seen but, oh, they sure can be heard.

But what if this composition isn’t the cohesive brilliance of a symphony but instead hot, sweaty jazz? Everything that’s making sound around you is improvising — environmental bebop. It’s fast, it’s exciting, and we don’t always understand it. But, ask any good jazz musician, and they’ll tell you that half the fun is figuring out what’s being played. It’s about learning the changes - the way the harmony shifts from one place to the next. Once you understand that, the music opens up for you. So, maybe, we need to start there. We don’t often have names for the sounds around us; we just say “the sound of a helicopter” or “the sound of the river.” But, how can we understand something that has no name? And if we don’t understand the thousands of nameless sounds around us, do we really understand our environment? Instead, let’s think about that helicopter over your head, let’s think about the river that runs through your town, and let’s give their jazz a name. It’s active listening as music critique! It’s music critique as climate justice! So, from now on, the cow goes “Moo!”, the helicopter goes “Skabridash!”, and the river goes “Ropliga!”

Climate Changes! is a new series of site-specific installations by composer ZW Buckley that exists at the intersection of climate justice, soundscape composition, and community-engaged art.

Artist Website:
ZW Buckley

Haley Funk & Dylan Pashke: Grey Area

May 5, 2019

Grey Area is a body of work that emphasizes the void, or lack thereof, ‘grey area’ within myself. After talking to a former professor, I realized that my life is captured in either black or white, there is no in between. That’s what sparked the idea for this series. These works encompass an array of subject matter such as my life experiences, the people I’ve come in contact with, and how this molds the world into meaningful interactions. My paintings utilize design elements and principles of art such as line, color, value, and repetition as I’ve found some of the most basic building blocks of art, to be the most inspiring. Line in my work conveys connectivity, causality, direction, movement, my content, and is an overall unifying element you’ll see throughout my work. All of my paintings, except for Progression of Greys like a Funeral of Sanity, which is made from hung slats of masonry board, are oil on stretched canvas.

My content thrives off of the frustration, beauty, and liberation of being a person with no ‘grey area’. It’s quite the paradox, really. Works such as Obsessive, Compulsive; Repetition; Recluse; with their counterparts; I am the Catapult; I am the String and the Hand; and I can Read Between the Lines, further solidify the message. We are meant to have grey area as human beings, so perhaps this is a bridge-way to begin my next series, Searching for my In Between.

Artist Website:
Haley Funk

Until recently I’ve had always thought that art needed all sorts of layers. Art always seemed to need many complex reasonings and explanations for the world’s unknown. That each impression on a canvas or layer of media needed more than a, “I did it, because I liked it”. Artists always seemed to have a comprehensive “why” to their art. It’s not until this show, where I figured out my “why” as an artist ... which is creating art that I am drawn to.

No complex reasonings, just creating work that I want to create.

As an artist, I have always been drawn to a minimalist aesthetic. I am drawn to portraiture, abstraction, pattern, repetition, typography, and interactions between both color and mediums.

In this show, I wanted to depict what I am drawn to as an artist, but overall I wanted to try something new. As a continuous learner of life, I always hope to explore and charge into unknown waters. For example, utilizing a polymer plate and metal type, on a printing press, is something I would have never imagined I would have had the opportunity to test out.

Artist Website:
Dylan Pashke

Rachel Hausmann: 12 oz. Lounge

November 2018

12 oz. Lounge is an exhibition of works by Milwaukee-based artist Rachel Hausmann. Her paintings will introduce a midwestern sensibility through the past-time of “throwing one back” or “crackin’ open a cold one,” remind us that any good beer slogan may also be words to live by.

Artist Website:
Rachel Hausmann

Derek Clem: Bodyguard Binge

October 26, 2018

You know how you want to make a dessert for people you love? How do you do this for someone who’s passed? Since the unexpected passing of my stepfather, Byron, in 2012, a facet of my studio processes have shifted toward themes of mourning, reconnection, and tribute. I felt a deep urge to make something for my stepfather; something to express my love and to honor him and his unique life. I can’t make him a dessert; he’s not here to eat it.

While saving up for medical school in Los Angeles during the 1980s, my stepfather worked as a security specialist/bodyguard to various celebrities and as an extra in films and television. While growing up I tried to bring these stories up as often as I could with him. His life in Hollywood and movies, in general, were some of our biggest conversation topics. Renting and going to the movies was one of our most frequent activities.

Since I can’t make him a dessert, I made him a movie franchise—The Bodyguard Franchise. This film series is an exaggerated account of his experiences working in Hollywood. I don’t make films for this franchise but instead focus on making artifacts and objects that share relationships with naive fan art, film marketing and memorabilia, and film criticism. The making process creates a reconnection point with my stepfather. The objects, like engravings or flowers on a headstone, memorialize his life as well as aim to provide an access point to encourage playful world-building or mental screenwriting by the viewer.

Artist Website:
Derek Clem

Eric Anthony Berdis: Hey is for Horse and Hook ups

September 9, 2018

Derived from childhood fantasies Eric Anthony Berdis’ work explores the metamorphosis of becoming. Set among plush, embellished objects, and playful faux-fur sculptures, Berdis transforms into a nonviolent homophobia fighting superhero. Their non-violent performance practices seek to simulate the jarring experience of being stereotyped while simultaneously examining the ways we navigate towards and create safe spaces. Of course, the only non-violent way to fight homophobia is no other than with a trusty hobbyhorse sidekick? Why not have 12 of them? Why not a race?!

Eric Anthony Berdis is a visual artist and curator whose work explores masculinity, narrative, and subversion through live and video performances. Berdis’ work and performances have been exhibited at Bunker Project, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Random Access Gallery, Syracuse, New York; The Second Floor, Karachi, Pakistan; and Little Berlin, Baltimore, Maryland, among others. Berdis has been a visiting artist at Syracuse University and participated in “Abandoned Practices” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Berdis received their BFA from Slippery Rock University in 2013 and their MFA in Craft & Material Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Artist Website:
Eric Anthony Berdis

Joey Knox: I Take The Weight From Your Hands

August 10, 2018

I Take The Weight From Your Hands exists in a created space where Masculinity is merely a shield not an institution of strength. Grainy pictures of muscle cars and muscle boys blown up to a physically imposing scale shows the graphic breakdown of images--while glowing neon charges the space in saturated color that feels vivid and urgent.

Artist Website:
Joey Knox

Alex McKenzie: Carousel

April 29, 2018

A word repeated 100 times breaks down phonetically. As auditory perception changes, meaning is separated and a word as simple as “dog” can sound foreign. This semantic satiation acknowledges that repetition is not always sameness but can be understood as a form of change. Much of McKenzie’s practice focuses on this tension. Through the creation of sound pieces, screensavers, physical performances, and other media, his work investigates the structures of repetition and change in memetic culture, information dissemination, and systems as a whole.

Artist Website:
Alex McKenzie

Mona Gazala: Given the Circumstances

March 2, 2018

Given the Circumstances is about memory, place, and justice. It examines the aesthetics and politics of abandonment and gentrification through the remnants of Franklinton's Bellows School, an abandoned school building that is currently being gutted in anticipation of conversion into condominiums or some other new use. The struggle between preservation and progress, what is to be discarded, and who decides is an analogy for how we perceive the people in marginalized and low-income communities.

Gazala is a resident of Franklinton, an inner-city neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio; and her home is just across the street from the Bellows School. Mona navigates her art with the aesthetic of an "urban archaeologist," assigning value to discarded items that others may consider of little worth. Her artworks often go the extra step and address social justice issues surrounding under-served communities and their overlooked human value, particularly as real estate speculation, gentrification, erasure, and displacement become growing concerns.

As an American-born artist of Palestinian descent, Gazala often draws on the mystique of ancient ruins and artifacts that were the normal environment of her parent's upbringing to make parallels with aged and decaying structures in modern American cities. Her Palestinian heritage also imbues her with a keen sense of spatial justice in issues of colonialism and displacement.

Artist Website:
Mona Gazala

Chintia Kirana: Through the Cracks

November 11, 2017

Chintia Kirana’s formative years were surrounded by geographical and spiritual duality: East/West and Buddhist/Christian. These aspects of duality are evident in an ever-changing multicultural society. Specifically, they influence her interest in life and death, absence and presence. In her process, the act of art-making is to generate possibilities and questions, because, naturally, things are uncertain. In this possibility, she can start seeing a renewal in ideas, concepts, and emotions. She explores the versatility of drawing, painting, and installation.

Chintia Kirana's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad, in venues such as ISE Cultural Foundation, New York; Zhou B. Art Center, Chicago; National Art Gallery Dhaka, Bangladesh; Sienna Art Institute, Sienna, Italy; Gallery Aswara, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and The Whitney Museum, New York City, among others. Kirana is the founder, editor-in-chief for Expose Art Magazine.

This exhibition and programming is part of Peoria's 3rd Citywide Celebration of Women in the Arts.

Artist Website:
Chintia Kirana

Programming:
November 11
Exhibition Opening and Artist Talk

The 3rd Terrain Biennial: Connor Shields, Gina Hunt, Ryan Paluczak, and Bryony Hussey

Terrain Biennial
October 1—November 15, 2017

Project 1612 is participating in the 3rd Terrain Biennial and will be hosting a one-night event on Friday, October 6th from 5-9 pm. This event will feature an installation in the front yard by Gina Hunt, which will remain installed for the duration of the biennial, a performance piece in the back yard by Dawn Robin (artist’s former name was Connor Shields), a sound installation in the garage by Ryan Paluczak, and an installation on the sun porch by Bryony Hussey.

Artist Websites:
Gina Hunt
Dawn Robin (previous name Conner Shields)
Ryan Paluczak
Bryony Hussey

Alix Anne Shaw: Of Our Labor

September 17, 2017

Alix Anne Shaw thinks of their work as a process of weirding space in order to challenge our predominant modes of encounter. Shaw is interested in our encounters with the natural environment and in the refuse of our industrial existence. The points at which we touch the natural world are among our most mundane and intimate; redemptive and damaging. Shaw wants to encourage closer consideration of the traces that remain.

Shaw variously vies for, invites, demands, and confronts the attention of the viewer by creating small acts of lyricism, a reconsideration of the objects one takes for granted. Co-opting, disrupting, destabilizing, opposing, holding forth, building small fires of meaning and protest in the cracks.

Alix Anne Shaw is a Chicago-based visual artist and poet. Her sculptures and installations have been exhibited at galleries including Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago; AS220 Project Space, Providence; and Kriti Gallery, Varanasi, India; among others. Her public works include Findings, a permanent installation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Shaw is the author of two poetry collections.

Artist Website:
Alix Anne Shaw

Jake Vodgs: Company Cuties

August 27, 2017

Multidisciplinary artist Jake Vogds fabricates conceptual, toy-like objects and paintings that speak to his practice as both a pop-singer and performance artist. With most of his vocal inspiration coming from Black female artists, Vogds finds it essential to create physical works that call out and question the inherent appropriation laced within his voice. Microphones in object-drag as parrots sensualize this self-parody, using strategies of camp, humor, and accelerationism to dismantle systems of privilege within the pop-scene as well as the self. Stuffed-animal product-self-portraits mock and reveal the shape-shifting, mind-colonizing aspects of whiteness in hopes of trapping this trauma in surrealist riddles.

Artist Website:
Jake Vodgs

Angie Saiz: Jauria

May 21, 2017

Angie Saiz (Chile, 1977) is a visual artist with production of works in painting, photography, public intervention, video installation, and sound art. Her work develops aesthetic problems based on the biographical imagery and the intersection and crisis between new technologies and the concepts of time, limbo, and ruin. She has exhibited in important spaces in Chile, such as MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Visual Arts MAVI, and Galería Metropolitana.

Artist Website:
Angie Saiz

Adam Farcus: Protest Song

May 14, 2017

Visitors are invited to enact the score, Protest Song, and create protest songs with language generated through automatic writing by Adam Farcus while they were watching and listening to Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. Automatic writing is a Surrealist technique where the movement of the hand is separated from what the eyes see and the mind thinks, with the goal of tapping into subconscious thoughts and feelings.

Exhibition Info:
Link to Protest Songs
PDF version of Protest Song zine

Artist Website:
Adam Farcus

Grant Gill: Extra-spectral

April 23, 2017

Magenta, not found within the natural spectrum of light, fires off the red and blue cones inside the human eye. In this unusual combination, the brain is forced to assemble a new, distinct color. In a way, magenta is a paradox in color comprehension, it is an illusion. Extra-spectral plays with magenta-colored gels that both vanish and introduce information to photographs, creating illusions within a viewing experience. The gels are held in monolithic structures and require the viewer to dance around them, not granting images in full, rather in pieces.

Artist Website:
Grant Gill

Ben Cook: Image Construction

February 26, 2017

The processes of drawing on Snapchat photos, rendering layered shapes in Photoshop, cropping, concealing, grids and abstracting palettes from video games or blogs all come together to create images that exist in an awkward, in-between state. They exist fluidly in both a digital and physical world as both photographs disseminated digitally and works displayed in brick and mortar locations.

Artist Website:
Ben Cook