Philip Vanderhyden continues his ongoing investigation into the manner in which a painting makes contact with its surroundings. Making use of sets of varying techniques, his new group of paintings can be addressed simultaneously as separate objects and as a single work. As much as they demonstrate a closeness and separation from one another, the works, which are installed on a single wall, emphasize, as a whole, a distance from and proximity to their audience.

Vertically facing the open space on the long horizontal expanse of the gallery wall, the works are meant to evoke decollage and black and white halftone printing, while the surfaces bring to mind the compression and tactility of the more direct techniques of process-based paintings from late modernist abstraction and Support Surface painting of the 1970’s.

Much like his previous groups of paintings, Vanderhyden alludes to modernist painting not through citation and pastiche but by a unified single image that compresses contradictory impulses into an uninterrupted field.

The cold sensuality of the surfaces, while at first unyielding, gives way to shallow, evocative depth: the surface of the painting tears itself up into a pattern of noise. The artist creates a painting that holds uneasily within the confines of the frame; at once appearing to be a cropped image, like a badly composed and developed photograph, while simultaneously clinging to its dark edges, which stamp themselves aggressively against the white of the gallery space.

Mike Schuh is interested in the way we negotiate our daily lives with and around objects. He performs acts with and upon objects in order to subvert specific aspects of their given functions.Through these manipulations and productions, the artist does not aim to somehow inject meaning into objects and experiences, but rather to create catalysts for questioning the very impetus to make meaning of the world and the role of empirical knowledge in our day-to-day existences. Utilizing familiar and often practical objects, the productive acts are gestural and restrained.The result is an object that has not merely been altered by re-contextualization, but one whose essences have been reorganized.

Comprised of multiple elements in various media, Occupation revolves around different notions of what it is to occupy and be occupied. Occupation is something that both informs and results from all manner of daily activity. Be they considerations of one’s role as an agent of culture or politics, literal spatial occupation, how one occupies time or how something might occupy our psyches, occupation can exert power over someone as well as be a manifestation of one’s own power. In this exhibition, works occupy space in conventional ways as well as ways that more directly question these notions of occupation. Whether photographic, sculptural or architectural in nature, the objects created and selected to share this space ask the viewer to question their own immediate occupancy of the exhibition space as well as their position relative to the literal and figurative spaces that each piece inhabits or alludes to. Images, materials, objects and ideas are removed from their intended contexts, reconfigured and placed within this show in order to initiate a situation in which everything and everyone must contend with the simultaneity of being located, dislocated and relocated.

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Tags: Andrew Rafacz Gallery, West Loop