GARDENfresh Gallery is pleased to finish out the season with a dramatic show by three of its core members. Husband and wife team Burtonwood & Holmes are paired with artist Alain Douglas Park and each offer their unique take on war, history, consumerism, and the act of making. Burtonwood & Holmes - "I Support the War / The War Supports Me (ISTW/TWSM)"
For this show, B&H have split their exhibition space in half, the first featuring a new installation, (Zeitgeist) MMIII - MMVIII, that draws on contributions from over twenty Chicago artists. In a return to heroic-scale painting B+H have painted directly on the walls of the gallery images of rubble, ruins and a helicopter gunship. Then invited the artists to hang their own works on top of these painted areas. The images of warfare and violence provide a lens through which we can re-interpret the art works displayed as products of a nation at war. In the second half, B&H have wall-papered the gallery with their trade mark junk mail and placed smaller sculptural interventions around the space, these objects are also covered in sales flyers and disappear into the background.
In the run up to the Iraq war, artists Holly Holmes and Tom Burtonwood began a body of work to protest the upcoming conflict and explore the wider implications of materiel culture. Recent exhibitions include Consuming War at the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago) curated by Barbara Koenen, Capla Kesting Fine Art (Brooklyn), and Subtle Combat at Around the Coyote (Chicago) curated by Alison Stites.
Alain Douglas Park - "Pedestal"
Park is best known for his large-scale literary inspired paper maché work that addresses the origins of meaning and the worth/futility of expression. The pieces are influenced by history, literature, science, and ideas of collecting and display. For this exhibition, Park continues this drive and adds large scale drawings and murals of overlaid images. Extinct animal skeletons, statues from antiquity, WWI relics, the kings and queens of France, are all coupled with more personal imagery of the artist's family, and together, they form a vanguard of the human experience, exposing and celebrating the whole breadth of our endeavors.
Alain Douglas Park is an artist and writer working in Chicago. He has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and teaches at Saint Xavier University. He has shown extensively around the country.
I wanted to draw attention to Barbara Koenen’s efforts with “Consuming War.” her website is: www.barbarakoenen.com
The exhibition is over, but it included two fine Chicago-based artists, Fredrick Holland http://www.chicagoartistsresource.org/visual-arts/node/385
and Mary Brogger. http://www.marybrogger.com (a great website)
Both are really top-notch artists who deserve to be looked at more closely. I’m hoping to see a great deal more work from Fred. He’s one of the most thoroughly engaged political artists I’ve seen.