Chicago-based artists Emily Kettner, Kelly Lloyd and Danny Volk come to editions to give performative lectures about desire.

This event is the first installation of Soapbox, a thematic lecture series hosted by edtions wherein artists and writers can present their work or ideas around a particular idea. While each event relates to a specific topic, interpretations of this can vary between academic presentations, artist talks, political lectures, literature readings, public speaking, short workshops, and more.

Emily Kettner on Bodily Perfection

How can the image of a disabled woman move us? In Andrew Wyeth’s 1948 painting Christina’s World, the eponymous figure crawls through a fallow field toward a distant farmhouse. This paraplegic woman, like mythic portrayals of the cripple, speaks to a long history of artists representing marginalized bodies as peering into society from the outside. By joining these depictions across folklore, painting, and her own experience, Em Kettner’s written pastiche seeks to chip away at those categories that delimit notions of bodily perfection, suggesting instead a new paradigm of stillness and frailty as both liberatory and disruptive physical conditions. Her lecture thereby develops a history of the immobile alongside the peripatetic, and forms the differently-abled, maimed, and phantom-limbed into a golem of prostheses–a conspicuous occupant of our able-centric society.

Kelly Lloyd on Man Artists

Man artists have this crazy sexy mystique about them: look they’re so sensitive, look they’re so crazy but not physically threatening, look at how sexy they are when paint gets all over their undershirts. Images of these sexy man artists, painters and draftsmen in particular, are everywhere in popular culture but things start to fall apart when you look closely at their artistic product. Their art sucks. Their stupid little charcoal drawings of the people that they love are rendered decently well, if without imagination, as they are generally done from memory while concurrently brooding. Bottom line, they are sentimental and really not worth showing anybody.

This paper takes two such sexy artists afloat in popular culture: Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and Luc Laurent from Brothers & Sisters, and analyzes their artistic product as well as their making practice in an attempt to dismantle their unearned sexy artist mystique.

Still Boys Manager Announces Upcoming North American Tour

WHAT:

• Still Boys will be presented to the Chicago press along with details of the upcoming tour and debut studio album release. The band’s manager will guide a conversation for the audience with ‘the Boys’.

MODERATOR:

♣ Danny Volk, Still Boys Manager

GUEST SPEAKERS:

♣ Charlie Murray

♣ Sebastian Butt

♣ Randy “Manny” Grange

♣ Jamie Shannon

Bios:

Em Kettner grew up just north of the Philadelphia city limit and studied Painting and Drawing at the University of the Arts. She was named for her mother’s favorite poet. Once, she visited the Dickinson homestead to see Emily’s bone-white dress floating in a glass display case at the top of the stairs, its handless arms raised in a mute gesture of protest. This encounter, among other instances of finding alterity in bodies, informs Kettner’s artistic and research-based pursuits. Kettner currently teaches in the Painting and Drawing and Liberal Arts departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kelly Lloyd earned her BA from Oberlin College where she double majored in Studio Art (with Honors) and African-American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies, and is currently in her final year of a 3 year dual M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies and M.F.A. in Painting & Drawing at SAIC. Lloyd has recently presented “Katie Sokoler, Your Construction Paper Tears Can’t Hide Your Yayoi Kusama Grade Neurotic Underbelly” on The Retro-Futurism of Cuteness panel at the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, and this February contributed an essay, “Cute Camo” for Third Object’s publication accompanying Mossy Cloak at Roots & Culture. Recent exhibitions include Retreat at Valerie Carberry Gallery and Richard Gray Gallery, a solo-exhibition at TRUNK SHOW, Ground Floor at the Hyde Park Art Center, and Closer Still at the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Danny Volk’s work assumes that superficiality is the essential truth of objects and actions, and uses theatrical semiotics to explore the social world. His on-going project, Made-Up with Danny Volk — in which he visits artists in their studios to talk about life and art while they do his makeup — was deemed “Best Art YouTube Channel” by NewCity (Chicago) in 2014. He has exhibited at both national and international venues, and is currently a HATCH Projects Artist in Residence with the Chicago Artists Coalition. Volk graduated with an MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago in 2014.

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Tags: Danny Volk, Emily Kettner, Kavi Gupta Editions, Kelly Lloyd, West Loop