Join us for cocktails, conversation, and celebration! Linda Warren Projects is pleased to usher in the fall gallery season with two solo exhibitions by gallery artists Nina Rizzo and Doug Fogelson. For Rizzo, the notion of “environment” is at the crux of her exhibition, “You Are Here” (Gallery Y), with a new body of paintings exploring various sites, as far reaching as Iceland and as close to home as her very own studio. In “Broken Cabinet” (Gallery X), Fogelson too looks to environment, though for him, soon to be extinct flora and fauna are the subjects of his camera-less photograms.

Throughout her global travels, Chicago-based artist Nina Rizzo sees paintings in her surroundings. While many painters identify potential subject matter from the world around them, Rizzo recognizes compositions that resemble the hallmarks of the art historical canon: a monochromatic beach recalling de Kooning’s white on black pieces, or the Albers-esque medieval French gameboard of Jeu de Marelle. This “naturally occurring” formalism appears not only in the landscapes of far-flung locales, but also within the context of the everyday.

Prominently featured in “You Are Here” are compositions drawn from her paintings’ physical proximity to the walls and floors of the environments in which they are created and exhibited. Over the course of Rizzo’s career, “a frame within a frame” has been a recurring means of pictorial investigation. In works like You Are Here, the minimal subject matter is derived from observing a piece of blue canvas tarp that has been cut, exposing the white wall behind it. Here, the ephemera from the artist’s painting process becomes her content, additionally calling attention to the most basic identifier of an artwork’s location: the gallery or studio wall. And just as the “canvas void” paintings reference the vertical proximate space, Rizzo’s “studio floor” works invoke the immediate horizontal space of each painting’s existence and the ones that came before it.

In “Broken Cabinet,” Chicago artist Doug Fogelson highlights a disconnect between humans and the natural world. In his photograms, the artist places organic items like coral, coyote claws, moths and fox skulls upon photosensitive materials to create candy-colored shadows of these artifacts. Bringing the natural world into the manmade, Fogelson calls attention to the impact that mankind has on the environment; exhibiting the photograms beneath partially shattered glass, the artist emphasizes the fact that it’s most often at the hand of humans that various organisms are undergoing extinction.

Fogelson’s installation of this series of photograms is of particular importance. In an effort to reflect the vastness of the natural world, the works are displayed in a grid upon a single wall of the gallery. Here, mushrooms, horseshoe crabs, shark teeth and horsehair are presented democratically, reinforcing the artist’s message that each organism is of equal importance on earth.

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Tags: Art, Chicago, Doug Fogelson, Fulton Market, Linda Warren Projects, Nina Rizzo, painting, photography