Category: Performance

Armitage Arts: Summer City in a Garden

4/3/2016

Saturday, June 25th (1-4 p.m.)

Mozart Park
2036 N. Avers Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647

free and open to the public

Mark your calendars! Borderbend presents "Armitage Arts: Summer City in a Garden" at Mozart Park. This Night Out in the Parks event features music, poetry, fiction and an arts workshop, with--

Regina Baiocchi -- poetry
Alpha Bruton -- visual art
Andrew Change -- poetry
Lou Ciccotelli -- drums
Jon Hey -- piano
Tanner McSwain -- fiction
Kenyatta Rogers -- poetry
Valerie Wallace -- poetry
Alex Wing -- upright bass, guitar
Dan Godston -- cornet

Weather permitting, "Armitage Arts: Summer City in a Garden" will take place in front of the Mozart Park fieldhouse. In the event of inclement weather, we'll be inside the fieldhouse. Stay tuned for more details!

0 Comments

Get Calumetized

5/6/2014

0 Comments

Saturday, May 10th (3 p.m.)

Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts
540 S. Lake St.
Gary, IN 46403

free and open to the public

"Get Calumetized" is a multimedia exploration of the Calumet region that includes music, visual art, movement and spoken word. An ensemble will creatively investigate interconnected themes that include nature, humanity, industry, witness. Ensemble members include Eliel Sherman Storey (saxophone), Angel Elmore (clarinet), Corey Hagelberg (poetry / printmaking), members of ARISE Youth (spoken word), Adam Zanolini (flute, alto saxophone), Dan Godston (trumpet), and Lou Ciccotelli (drums). "Get Calumetized" also includes projections of Notes for a People's Atlas of Gary as well as artworks by Alice Nebelsiek, Jesus A. Gonzalez, and Corey Hagelberg.

This performance happens during the Miller Arts & Creative District's Spring Bazaar.

Parking Lot Forest by Corey Hagelberg

Directions (from Chicago):

By car: take I-90 East toward I-65. Exit onto route 12/20 eastbound. Continue heading east on route 12 until you get to Lake St. Turn left onto Lake St.
By train: Take the South Shore Line to the Miller Station, walk three blocks north on Lake St. You will see the Gardner Center for the Arts on the left (across the street from the Woodson Branch of the Gary Public Library.

above: Interdunal Pipeline by Corey Hagelberg

0 Comments

Why Make Art? : Interview with Carron Little

2/15/2014

0 Comments

For my interview project with Borderbend, I set out to explore some of the unanswerable questions that have been squirming to escape my mind, and fired them on Chicago artists in search of some marinated wisdom. I ask why art is important in communities, why humans value art, why artists care, and what makes art art. All of their words have helped me on my path as an art student, and a person making sense of this world. Their challenges to survive in the art world of Chicago are inspiring yet devastating, their passions are strong, and their work is meaningful and genuine. Enjoy, and keep your eyes open for any of their upcoming work. Thanks for reading.
- Hannah Brookman

Carron Little

Why Make Art?

For change.

“When I was a young, I was very political and did a lot of direct action. At the age of sixteen I became a representative for youth CND in Yorkshire and Humberside, in the north of England. I had a big group of fifty young people. One of the first public performances I did was to organize all of these young people and to go to every main station in each major city in Yorkshire and Humberside, and we staged a nuclear fallout in the stations, so suddenly fifty people would drop to the floor, and people would come with theses radiation bins.”

Carron is now using performance to bring awareness to the Chicago public. Her most recent performance took place at Bridgeview Bank for Open House Chicago in October. It was called Unto Each Their Own Safe, and was conducted by Little’s extravagant alter ego, The Queen of Luxuria. “The philosophy of the Queen is to challenge the notions of patriarchal power, hence the celebration of the diamond dust breast plates, I call them gender plates.” On this special day, the Queen, and her lovely assistants were posted up at the bank to play games with the public. “I created this interactive performance where the public went up to these three different stations and either play chess or there was this game, Octagon, based on one of Duchamp’s games, and I created a Jenga/Queen of Luxuria style stacking game.” There was a fourth game, which the Queen herself administered. In this game, the participants would move around ‘gender plates’ and discuss their finances and earnings with the Queen of Luxuria.

“If a person was earning $30,000, according to the Queen of Luxuria, the minimum wage should be $80,000, so I would make up the difference. If a woman was sat in front of me I calculated her working life and multiplied that by the money she hadn’t been paid over her lifetime. One woman earned to $30-60,000 bracket. She was unhappy at work so I gave her an extra $80,000 so she could take the year off and find a job that she really wanted to do. And she was happy in life. If somebody was unhappy in life I would give them an extra $20,00 so they could take a holiday or go to the spa every once in a while. People that were retired were getting over a million dollars which wasn’t what I was expecting how much women would get. It really is a profound statement on the inequality of our lives.”

“We as a society still have a long way to go in terms of creating peace and equality in the world and 40% of countries are still in a state of war. I often think about how women are treated all over the world, and our quality of lives and even in the western world, it went up since last year, it was 73 cents to the dollar and now its 77 to the dollar. I’ve been in positions where I’ve had greater qualifications starting out a job but was still paid less than my colleague that had less educational qualifications.”

“Every time I lose hope or contemplate giving up, which I don’t, I refuse to, I just look at the statistics of how many women have had solo shows in museums or how many are represented by commercial galleries. Even a gallery that I show at, I invited the director over for a studio visit and I asked him ‘how many women have you represented in your gallery over the year?’ And the next year he made a point to show one female artist for every male artist, and just by having that conversation I made him aware , its such a prevalent problem.

“The next big project that I’m starting to work on is ‘The City Alive With Dreams’. From 2012 to 2013 I interviewed one person a week about their dreams and then I wrote poems about their dreams and invited them to select their favorite line. One person I interviewed selected, “the sacred key of ecstasy and orgasmic health opened the door to everything that is a part of me” the poetry really documents the extremes of human experiences as a story or a reflection of the interview. I'm really excited to put those ideas into public space. I’m inviting all of the people who have participated to a meeting to discuss how they would like their stories placed in a public space, but I’m also thinking, how am I going to make it interactive so that theres lots of different things to think about. It’s really part of my artistic practice to create these interactive performance; it’s part of my feminist aesthetic. I think it’s a really critical part of womens practice and the way in which we all parade in the world.”

Apart from creating her own pieces, Carron also runs Out of Sight, a public performance festival in its’ fourth year, and growing. Carron also teaches art in city schools and is looking forward to a new teaching position in the SAIC performance art department. She currently has a piece opening at Fluxus in Minneapolis, is finishing The City Alive With Dreams, and is drawing all the time.

“The rhesus monkeys are the closest monkeys to us, but anthropologists have studied their behavior and said that they have greater empathy and community towards each other than humans display towards each other and my hope is that humans will become more intelligent through culture, and be able to figure out more peaceful ways. Through culture, my hope is that we will eliminate war and eliminate violence. We still have a way to go, and it won't happen in my lifetime but hopefully I can be a part of the train of change” -- Carron Little

Find out more about Carron Little by visiting her website at carronlittle.com.

0 Comments

Red Rover Series Experiment #67: Private Eyes (They're Watching You)

9/19/2013

0 Comments

A special event with 100 Thousand Poets for Change featuring:

Darren Angle

Adrienne Dodt

Nina Corwin

Rey Escobar

Cean Gamalinda

Jeanette Gomes

Kevin Gunnerson

Nathan Hoks

Joel Craig

Felicia Holman

J'Sun Howard

Noël Jones

Emily Lansana

Daniela Olszewska

Matthias Regan

Jennifer Steele

Russ Woods

Barbara Barg

Laura Goldstein

Jennifer Karmin

Timothy Rey

Larry Sawyer

Keli Stewart

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

On September 28, 2013, many poets around the world will make their voices heard. To declare the change they'd like to see most in the U.S. and throughout the international community, events are being staged worldwide as part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. This night of poetry and activism in Chicago asks the questions: What is freedom of expression? Is surveillance dangerous? Who chooses the information our government can access and censor?

Suggested donation $4
**proceeds to be donated to Kiva**

Logistics --
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

Co-presented by the Red Rover Series and Chicago Calling Arts Festival, & curated by 100 Thousand Poets for Change, Chicago Community Council 2013: Barbara Barg, Laura Goldstein, Jennifer Karmin, Timothy Rey, Larry Sawyer, Keli Stewart, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

https://www.facebook.com/events/580292085360475/

0 Comments

Harvest Fest: An Interfaith Arts Celebration

9/17/2013

0 Comments

Sunday, September 29 (2 p.m.)

Peoples Church of Chicago
941 W. Lawrence Avenue
Chicago, IL 60640

“Harvest Fest: An Interfaith Arts Celebration” features music, poetry, and readings from sacred texts—focused on the themes of harvest, thanksgiving, and autumn. This 2013 Chicago Calling Arts Festival event is co-sponsored by the Peoples Church, Treasures of Uptown, and the Borderbend Arts Collective. Free and open to the public.

Program:

Reverend Jean Darling reads "Wild Geese" by Mary Oliver, and talks about Treasures of Uptown.
Ali Khalil reads a passage from the Quran entitled "The Morning Light."
Margaret Shaklee reads "I Give It Back to You" and "Train" by Edwina Gateley.
Allan Johnston reads "Flight" and "Departures" (from Departures), and parts of Sable (a long poem based on the life of Phillis Wheatley)
Mi Yodea performs "Hakafot."

0 Comments

Interview with Meg Duguid

7/12/2012

0 Comments

Meg Duguid is an artist, performer and curator whose work has been presented at Defibrillator (including Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic), and collaborations with Out of Site.

Duguid received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her MFA from Bard College. She has performed and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, Macy’s on State Street in Chicago, the DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, and 667 Shotwell in San Francisco. She has screened work at Synthetic Zero in New York, Spiderbug in Chicago, and at the Last Supper Festival in Brooklyn. From 2009 to 2011 she ran Clutch Gallery, a 25 square-inch white cube located in the heart of her purse; since then she has lent my purse to others to curate and carry. She lives and works in Chicago, IL with her husband and three cats.

Recently Borderbend intern Ellyn Leahy interviewed Meg Duguid about her background, curating Clutch Gallery, and other projects.

Leahy: What artists most inspire you?

Duguid: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Marcel Duchamp, Aleksandra Mir, Pina Bausch.

Leahy: You've been living here in Chicago for a few years now. What is your favorite thing about living and working in Chicago?

Duguid: My favorite thing about living in Chicago is the fact that my husband lives here and all of my stuff is here. My favorite thing about working in Chicago is the community's ability to entertain anything as art. It makes the discussion about what art is and how it functions really great.

Leahy: "Recipe Roulette," which you and Catie Olson performed during the 2010 Chicago Calling Arts Festival, was wonderful. What role does humor play in your art?

Duguid: Recipe Roulette was a collaborative piece that Catie Olson and I created where I made chocolate bon bons while Catie hula-hooped. Every time the hoop would drop, I would drop a bon bon on the floor in solidarity with Catie's motions and also locking her movement into a certain part of the floor as the bon bons built up. This was a sister work of Jump Jump Pie Pie, that we performed in Brooklyn where we each made an edible mud pie while the other kept pace by jumping rope in high heels.

above: photos of Meg Duguid and Catie Olson performing Recipe Roulette

Catie and I investigate the create work using an iterative structure; we let our play-on-word conversations lead our projects. Our collaborative rapport is as important as the final events themselves. During our process the iterative word piles that we create allow our personal and political lives to float to the top as well as let us frame them through our own diverse experiences with different media and mediums. At first glance our work seems fun, but there is more to it than that; on closer inspection you will find that not only are we two women creating humorous work but we tend to reference word play, the body, and food as well.

Leahy: How did you first get involved with curating, and how does it affect your other work?

Duguid: I have personally curated and organized a few projects over the years. Usually I put things together because there were a number of folks I wanted to work with or put a show together with.

Beach by Kim Guare, presented by Clutch Gallery
photo credit: Emma Robins

In 2009, I moved back to Chicago and conceived Clutch, which is the longest-running curatorial project I have done. Clutch Gallery is a 25-square-inch space located in the heart of my purse. This curatorial project was dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art of all media. Clutch opened in December 2009 and was initially intended to maintain regular programming through December 2010, but I continued to carry and program it until the end of 2011 in the belief that it would die a fitting and natural death by wearing out from daily use.

During my time with Clutch, I showed 23 artists in 22 shows. I was responsible for each job in my gallery—I was preparator, gallery assistant, director, and marketing director, but most importantly I was a performer.

With Clutch, my intent was to play on the grand history of artist-run spaces in this city while extending my own practice as a performance artist. Clutch allowed me to create a scenario in which my daily interactions with people could become a performance at any time.

Clutch had an element of constant duration. The performance was larger than just opening up the piece to someone at any moment or explaining the nature of the work. Essentially as a performer, the duration of the piece was both constant and not at all. The potential energy of just holding the space, maintaining the space, and sitting near the space allowed its performative potentiality to radiate into all things Clutch, and the moment someone approached Clutch's conceptual sphere, the person became a part of it whether the purse was in a state of rest or motion. During my time with Clutch I performed alone, with shopkeepers, baristas, TSA agents, thieves, the Secret Service, artists, family, and many others.

Last fall I decided to stop carrying Clutch. So I put it up for others to carry. Emma Robbins is currently carrying and curating Clutch Gallery.

above: photos from Meg Duguid's
Sounds like Mustache

Leahy: Why do you often choose to use multiple media in your work -- for example, combining performance art, photography, and drawing in the Episode Series?

Duguid: I believe that documentation is paramount to my art making, and I’m invested in the ways that documentation and art can be integrated in a single practice. At one point I felt comfortable talking about my work as performance art. But now I have found that the term performance art no longer encompasses what it is I do. I am actively seeking to articulate the relationships I am making between the performative and photography, video, sculpture, and drawing.

Drawing has proved to be a really effective tool for me in a few ways. First, for creating objects that stand in for the real deal. A mustache can suddenly just be a drawing of one held up in front of one’s face, and that’s enough for the viewer to say “Hey, look. A mustache."

Second, drawing is a really nice tool to use in conjunction with photographs of an action. In 2003, I started a series of street performances based in early filmic comedy. These performances derived from the simple question of what happens when you take a comedic moment out of its media context and re-present it in real life. While performing these acts in public, I have found that video cameras become too intrusive and upset the performance, usually contextualizing it as reality television, rather than being a calculated moment. As a result I switched my format to still photography, which allowed my documenters to remain as unobtrusive as tourists or other passersby.

When I got the photos back, I began to ask myself, how do I make this more than just documentation? It’s this question that led me to start erasing the performers out of the images and drawing them back in. The result is a photograph of an actual place and time with a comic book performer doing the action. It plays with the idea of what is real and what isn’t, as well as starts to refer to the idea of comic in all its meanings.

In the autumn of 2007, I staged a 15-person slapstick performance in Battery Park in New York City. The performance consisted of an all-female cast, five photographers, and the backdrop of the Statue of Liberty. I am currently in the process of creating a comic book from it. There are about 200 images in the book, so this piece has taken up various portions of the last five years, and I am finally going to be ready to unveil it by the end of this year.

Leahy: Last October you had a performance art piece called "Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic," which happened at Defibrillator during Chicago Calling. Would you mind giving us a glimpse into the creative process behind that piece?

above: photos from Bubbles Plus Bubbles
Divided by Traffic

Duguid: This work was twofold for me. I have been thinking about the performative quality of action painting lately, and I am really interested in how a piece of documentation from a previous work can carry over to the next work. The work in Defibrillator was called Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic, and it took place in the two windows at Defibrillator. This performance consisted of two men wearing Speedos, one in each window, making action paintings by blowing colored bubbles onto paper to a sound piece of traffic over bubble wrap.

Bubbles Plus Bubbles Divided by Traffic utilized a sound piece that was created as a part of Sounds Like Mustache that was performed at the Polish Triangle in August of 2011 as a part of the Out of Site Performance Series. In that performance I poured soap into the fountain in the triangle while bubble machines spewed bubbles into the triangle while a three-person mustache, a mustache that is so big two people must carry it so a third can wear it, walked on bubble wrap that was laid down throughout the triangle. The documentation of this work was the sound work Bubble Wrap Over Traffic.

Leahy: What are you working on now?

I have some work, including some of the newer parts of the episode series, going to the ZonaMaco Art Fair in Mexico City. Catie Olson and I are collaborating on a 10-course performance that is going to be performed at Defibrillator in September of 2012. And I am at the tail end of negotiating the rights to produce a screenplay that I have fallen in love with. I don't want to say what it is until the ink is dry on the contract, because you just don't know until the signature hits the dotted line, but if it all works out well, this will be the largest project I have ever taken on.

0 Comments

Visual Music: Piano + Painting Concert with the Justin Dillard-Junius Paul Duo & DOE Projects / Deborah Doering

2/3/2012

0 Comments

Saturday, February 25, 2012 (7:00 p.m.)

Curtiss Hall
Fine Arts Building
410 South Michigan Ave., tenth floor
Chicago IL 60605

Justin Dillard-Junius Paul Duo
   Justin Dillard -- piano
   Junius Paul -- upright bass

DOE Projects / Deborah Doering -- painting
   with assistance by Audrey Schlofner

ADMISSION: $20, $10 for students

You are invited to attend "Visual Music," a piano + painting concert that introduces a unique collaboration between the Justin Dillard-Junius Paul Duo and DOE Projects / Deborah Doering. This concert is being presented by PianoForte Foundation, in partnership with the Borderbend Arts Collective and IS Productions. A reception follows the concert.

This is the second concert in this series’ fourth season. Frank Abbinanti, Jim Baker, Renée Baker’s TUNTUI, Ben Boye, Ari Brown, Phyllis Chen, Steve Cohn, CUBE, Justin Dillard, Irina Feoktistova, Paul Giallorenzo, Burton Greene, Jonathan Hey, Sebastian Huydts, Keith Kirchoff, Mabel Kwan, Matthew McCright, Adam Marks, Thollem McDonas, Eric Glick Rieman, Kathleen Supové, Adam Tendler, and Ann Ward have performed during this concert series.

Media Contact
Susan Heiserman: [email protected]
PianoForte
410 South Michigan Ave., first floor
Chicago IL 60605
(312) 291-0000

Deborah Doering received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She visualizes the zero and one moving in space as the point of departure for her projects, prints, and paintings.

Doering's work has been honored by Sotheby's International Young Art Competition and juried in two Exhibitions of American Art, by James Rondeau, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, sponsored by the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. The Puffin Foundation

and Chicago Artists’ Assistance Program grants have supported her work.

Deborah has attended artist residencies in the US and abroad, including Ragdale/Lake Forest and Public Art Residency, Kassel/Berlin. Her work is in US and international collections. Doering works collaboratively as “DOE Projects,” a sponsored project of FracturedAtlas.org. http://www.deborahdoering.com

Justin Dillard was born and raised on the west side of Chicago into a rich thriving musical home. He has had the honorable privilege to perform with and/or receive tutelage from (in no particular order) McCoy Tyner, Hamid Drake, Eric Lewis, Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, Wynton Marsalis, Willie Clayton, Don Moyé, Herbie Hancock, Henry Grimes, Clark Terry and Ellis Marsalis among others. Justin has had the esteemed pleasure to work in conjunction with, record, and/or study from prominent world-renowned resident musicians in and around the Chicago area (in no particular order), such as Von Freeman,

Bobby Irving III, Roscoe Mitchell, Ari Brown, Orbert Davis, Hamiet Bluiett, Erma Thompson, Fred Anderson, Bill Dickens, The AACM Experimental Ensemble, Billy Bang, Nicole Mitchell, Kahil El’ Zabar, and Ernest Dawkins (Live the Spirit Big Band and The Chicago 12 ensembles).

His media accolades include features in various periodicals including The Chicago Reader, and The Chicago Sun-Times. Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune arts critic, writes: “A new generation of jazz improvisers has emerged in Chicago in recent years, but few are more promising than pianist/organist Justin Dillard. Musically, Dillard tends to be all over the keyboard, drawing upon the examples of virtuosos such as Oscar Peterson and McCoy Tyner. But there's something more to Dillard's work as well -- a quest for new ideas in music, in the manner of his AACM mentors”. Performing countless jazz festivals nationally and abroad, Justin has performed on national television (ABC) with his organ expose’ The D-O-3-0 and in a documentary produced by George Lucas Studios. Justin continues to advance his ambitions and transform his career by leading, orchestrating and creatively composing for The DOT and his vast array of ensembles all while accompanying great musicians in and around Chicago and the world. Stay tuned. http://aacmchicago.org/justin-dillard

Junius Paul has established himself as a reputable electric and acoustic bassist on the Chicago music scene. Born and raised in the Chicago area and a graduate of St. Xavier University in Chicago, his passion for music shows consistently in his playing. Junius is well established in many genres, ranging from jazz to hip-hop, house music, funk, classical and gospel, and has shared the stage with such artists as Wynton Marsalis, Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd, Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, Donald Harrison, Kahil El’Zabar, Hamiett Bluiett, Nona Hendryx, Chico DeBarge, Eric Roberson, KRS-One, Dee Alexander, Roy Hargrove and Corey Wilkes to name a few. He has appeared on audio and DVD recordings for many artists, including Corey Wilkes, Abstrakt Pulse, Dee Alexander, DJ Shannon Harris, the St. Luke COGIC gospel choir, Peven Everett and Kahil El'Zabar. Junius also performs internationally, notably the Southport Weekender Festival (Southport, England), the Sons d’hiver Festival (Paris, France), the Made In Chicago Series (Poznan, Poland), the

INNtone Festival (Austria), as well as festivals in Ghana, Italy, and Brazil. Junius is currently immersed in creating a new studio project, scheduled for release in early 2012. http://www.juniuspaul.com/

Justin Dillard and his trio performed at PianoForte during the inaugural Experimental Piano Series concert in November 2008. Here are some audio recordings from that concert --

0 Comments

Armitage Arts: Summer City in a Garden

Get Calumetized

Why Make Art? : Interview with Carron Little

Carron Little

Red Rover Series Experiment #67: Private Eyes (They're Watching You)

Harvest Fest: An Interfaith Arts Celebration

Interview with Meg Duguid

Visual Music: Piano + Painting Concert with the Justin Dillard-Junius Paul Duo & DOE Projects / Deborah Doering

Authors

Archives

Categories