The Chicago Show

May 2018

PRESS RELEASE April 2018 — Brooklyn, NY

Curator Madeleine Mermall is pleased to present The Chicago Show, a selection of work from emerging Chicago-based artists alongside the Imagists of the 1960s. The Chicago Show will open on May 12th at at a private residence being opened to the public, 56 Downing St Brooklyn NY 11238. Mermall invites you to join artists Sarah Canright and Richard Hull for a conversation on the terrace from 6PM that day.

The Chicago Show provides an insightful look into the work of a distinct community of Chicago artists, comprised mostly of painters, who developed their style and visual modes of expression in a vein that runs outside of the mainstream, bicoastal scene. Chicago, largely overlooked by the New York and LA circles currently monopolizing the art world, has a culture and environment vastly different from the other major art hubs. Situated in the middle of the country, Chicago has a unique Midwestern-Americana culture that has been created by long stretches of highway—roadside attractions that feebly call out through cheap blinking signage and kitsch ornamentation—and endless lines of railroad track that converge on the big shoulders of the country, flooding the city with traces of lowbrow, American culture picked up along the way. Since The Imagists of the 1960s, Chicago painters have episodically embraced the city’s distinctive blend of metropolitan buzz, environmental blend of hard-edge urbanity, the expansive flatness of the lake, and unpretentious, sometimes unpolished, Midwestern appeal—the visual language of middle America, found in comic books, caricatures, and “uncouth” commercial art. The current contemporary Chicago artists featured in The Chicago Show are a part of a “second coming” of sorts. Similar to The Imagists, these emerging artists are a part of a smaller community of painters, inviting their direct environment and individual experiences to speak through their work. Though these artists have the shared experience of living in Chicago and encountering and engaging with similar visual stimuli, idiosyncrasies arise from the infusion of the individual into the work. There is also a turn towards the representational within painting, blending the weird and surreal with a formalist investigation of color and composition. The contemporary Chicago painters embody the audacious, unabashed, rebellious spirit of The Imagists, embracing alternative imagery and the individual experience through humor, illustrative narrative, distortion, brazen vulgarity, and an awareness of both art history as well as unsophisticated, commercial imagery. Chicago-born curator Madeleine Mermall exposes New York audiences to the burgeoning art scene in Chicago, presented alongside the works of the Chicago Imagists as an insight into the unique art historical lineage that has developed on the “Third Coast”. The Roger Brown Study Collection (RBSC) was the curatorial inspiration behind The Chicago Show. Preserved by The School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) special collections, RBSC is the former home and studio of SAIC alum and Chicago Imagist, Roger Brown. The space is decorated with Brown’s art collection, including works by the Imagists and other lesser known local Chicago artists. The artist’s former home is also brimming with personal items and sources of inspiration; folk and tribal art, costumes, furniture, and found objects. The intimate experience of the RBSC influenced the decision to exhibit The Chicago Show in a brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, as opposed to the traditional, white-wall gallery setting. The pieces in the show are not organized by artist or time period, but rather are curated like a personal collection, arranged around the townhouse to facilitate a dialogue between Chicago artists of the past and present. In presenting the works this way, The Chicago Show exposes New York audiences to the work of some lesser known Chicago artists and secures the Imagists their rightful place in twentieth century art history, all while staying true to the movement’s intimate, hometown origins. Art History enthusiast and 23-year-old Chicago artist Darius Airo’s painting style was largely influenced by his father, a comic artist. Childhood exposure to comic book art led Airo to find inspiration from other forms of lowbrow art and pop culture, including graffiti, cartoons, and obscure commercial imagery. These aesthetic interests lead him to the work of the Chicago Imagists, where he found an art historical precedent for the pictorial language he still works in today. Jenn Smith, a recent MFA graduate from SAIC, uses religious imagery gathered from Christian children’s books, basement-made HTML websites, and low-grade educational materials to create flat, cartoonish, satirical works that are comedic and outlandish—the humor both masking and exposing the spectacle that distracts from the sinister underbelly of extreme religious fervor. Similar to the Imagists, Smith is interested in and inspired by imagery outside of the institutional lexicon, sharing inspiration with The Imagists in the form commercial and alternative illustrations, outsider and folk art, and low culture, universally known visual symbols. Creating works in a similar vein of drawing and rough cartoon style, Anwar Mahdi is another emerging artist in Chicago who fuses mythology and queer theory to create his own aesthetic narrative. In his grandiose scenes, Mahdi mocks patriarchal gender norms in an attempt to arm the power of the feminine by reimagining its archetypal expressions in history. His work is heavily illustrative, grounded in drawing with mural-like, narratives unfolding as the eye moves across the scene.