EXHIBITIONS . EXHIBICIONES

PAST . PASADO

The table in the formal room takes the form of the room, a two-person exhibition by Jackie Furtado and Jessica Tang

April 8, 2023 - May 27, 2023

No need to take your shoes off at the door. There’s nowhere to hang the keys when you walk inside, so you hold them. The table has no room because it’s been reformed to take your shape as you get nearby. A different kind of storage. A table rebuilt to support your reflection and its potential for intimate imitation. It will take a form—our form—and we will follow suit. 

So what are these makings of a home? But this is not one of those functions of the image, not another domestic projection. Instead, something new is coming together with every new mark on the floor and with every measure of the clock. Lines rising and falling and splitting and multiplying in a process that, when seen through bleary eyes, resembles genesis. When the line is the objective base of drawing, and drawing the subjective base of architecture, and architecture a question of image framing, it becomes clear how we’ve arrived at the home- space as it’s been given to us. An image, in this case, assembled through feeling. Touch not sight. The home abstracted and drawn out into the future. Windows to stare into and not out of. How long have we been sitting here? 

When we leave and we’re back outside of this place, I’m bringing something with me: the next time I ask you What time is it? I don’t want you to tell me, I want you to show me.

-Nabil Harb
artist & educator

Habitat, a two-person exhibition by Erin Margaret & JB Fry

February 11, 2023 - March 25, 2023

It is powerful to fantasize of different ways of being. A landscape only exists in daydreams and in a future reality. I draw pictures of plants with a friend, the ones you’ve never seen before. Makes my body feel like a queer plant, one I've never seen before. Other’s bodies start to feel that way too. I know and you know that this isn’t the only way of being. I fantasize, I draw, I watch, and I move. And without even trying I see the things I was dreaming here on my body and here in the world. A new reality to be in, to walk through.

Tactile and abstract, Erin Margaret and JB Fry's illustrative fantasies breathe life into an imagined landscape. Their exhibition, 'Habitat,' features ceramics, paintings, and writing by the two emerging Chicago artists. They rethink their relationships to their bodies and the world around them. Their works invite the viewer to imagine new ways of being and seeing. Erin paints intimate landscape scenes holding queer life and gatherings. JB designs ceramic objects informed by textures, forms, and gestures in nature. In 'Habitat,' Margaret and Fry invite viewers to step into their adapted environment.

Daughter of Wands, a solo exhibition by Victoria Martinez

September 3, 2022 - October 8, 2022

In her new body of work, Martinez will showcase textile-based paintings, sculptures, and installation art that explores her own abstract language with hybrid materials. The artist also has a background in public art and will contribute an outdoor painting on the west side of Produce Model’s building.

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With a background in public art, Victoria Martinez erects paintings and installation art that produce conversations with space and architecture. Contesting fabric’s traditional associations with craft and the decorative, she transforms swaths of cloth into structural elements as a way of honoring murals and landscapes. Attentive to the histories of place, she also creates portable works that bear indexical relationships with locations. Martinez builds tangible connections with her Mexican ancestry and investigates sites as repositories of cultural memory. Her practice also includes studying color palettes as she attempts to discover cross-cultural similarities through textile history and material exploration.

Her new body of work includes a series of paintings, mixed media prints, sculpture, and an art installation composed of textiles, dyes, paint, bricks, and fiber paste. The new projects were conceived during the start of the pandemic in 2020 until summer 2022. During this time of silence, reflection and experimentation, Martinez engaged in pulling the “Daughter of Wands” card. This moment of chance and intuition determined the artworks that are currently on view at Produce Model Gallery. The card also seduced the artist to develop abstract work that encouraged her to explore fragments of the figure and play with boundaries presented by stretcher bars.

In-between at rest, a group exhibition organized by Devin T. Mays.

Participating artists:

Alberto Aguilar 

Johnny Doley

Kenise Gaston

Jasmine Monarrez

Guthrie Paulson

Ndivhuho Rasengani

May 21, 2022 to July 30, 2022

Artists encounter the world as material. There is a material potential that gives shape to what’s shapeless, makes visible what’s not and offers an understanding of the things we may never understand. It is a paradox that invites artists to consider, and reconsider, the space and place of things: the things in-between and the location of the immaterial. In Devin T. Mays's practice, he attempts to avoid immediately turning this material world into his material supplies. Before a found object is branded as a tool for sculpture, it is an encounter with shape, scale, weight, position and location. It is a proposition of space and place, a proposition of possibility. 

Mays has invited six artists to make propositions of space and place at Produce Model. Each artist has made various sculptural interventions both inside and outside the boundaries of the walled gallery. Some interventions are autobiographical, using remnants of early childhood to examine the implied tension between story and survival. Some are interested in the bodily relationships between the architecture of the gallery and the architecture of the human form. Others are interested in the ecological mark-making from nonhuman interventions.  It is all with the intention of developing an acute sensitivity to the space and place we occupy and occupy us. 

larger work, (“tea for two” Monk’s version) by deborah handler

February 12, 2022 to April 09, 2022

Night Swim, Madeline Gallucci and Elissa Osterland

October 30, 2021 to December 11, 2021

The Chicago Years by Max Guy, curated by Alex Jen

June 26 2021 to September 5 2021

Fleece Engine by Angela Ziqi Zhang

April 24 2021 to June 12 2021

January 17, 2014 The lesson is to copy an existing artwork. Notes from class read: “Angela Zhang: Paul Gauguin, The Day of the god, 1894 Color as plastic and materiality”. Mahana no aqua. The physical act of copying builds awareness between the eyes and the hands. It is training, instinct and mimicry. It opens the door. Why is a face beautiful? The second or third lesson, a theoretical prompt from a text. Angela and cat hair. Angela and materiality, Angela’s childhood home. Angela’s mother.

February 7, 2014 I post a photo of Nora Schultz’s artwork, from her exhibition Parrot Tree, to my Instagram. The words “MACHINE DREAMING MIND” are cut out of a piece fabric hanging from the rafters.

February 14, 2014 Nora Schultz’s Countdown performance is discussed in class. Slowly the artist and her assistants move through the exhibition space, detaching suspended works, cutting numbers 1-10 from them, laying each down on the ground, neatly in a row. This countdown is rote labor that borrows from a ritual reserved for endings and beginnings. To watch is to join the waiting and the anticipation. We are all working together. What are we going to find? What is next? 

A countdown avoids a permanent feeling, forever.

February 16, 2014 I visit Parrot Tree a third time. I look up, crouch, bend, sit, stand on my tip-toes to find materials and shapes. It feels good to find and in this way surprise and unknowability create pleasure. Solveig Øvstebø writes that Nora Schultz “frees ‘things’ by disassociation, estranging them, removing them from their context so they can become: forms, colors, lines, themselves.”

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Recent works by Zhang suggest the experience of driving a car and dreaming. The viewer is confronted with speed, fuzz and placement. Contents of the paintings quote objects we all live with, but they feel memorialized in a way that is comforting and soft. 

Car travel can be intentional or wandering. The driver does not need a passenger and scenery unfolds like sunlight on a blanket. Moving forward continuously, everything is always new: the light, the presentation, the wanting. This desire can feel like many different things at once and in Zhang’s work it could be a napkin folded into a swan or a jewelry store at night. 

Similar to Nora Schultz’s suspended fabric pieces, Zhang’s use of negative space is always working and laboring, behaving as both the organ and the blade. Through shape and tonal puddles we are led to confusion. Is the surface overworked into erasure or barely worked at all? It could be a form or the shadow of a form. This ambiguity creates an emotional tenor uncommon in things like furniture, shoes and fruit. Not having to know what is top or bottom, coming or going, is the artist’s gift to us.

precarious dazzle by Anna Horvath

September 12 2020 to November 24 2020