Gallery Y: Nina Rizzo “You Are Here”
Gallery X: Doug Fogelson, “Broken Cabinet”
September 11 – November 7, 2015
Opening Reception: September 11, 2015, 6-9pm
Nina Rizzo Artist Remarks: Friday, September 18, 2015, 7pm
Doug Fogelson Discussion with Giovanni Aloi: Saturday, October 10, 2015, 2-4pm
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.
Nina Rizzo, You Are Here, 2015, oil on canvas, 20” x 20
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. Rizzo looks even to the environs of the gallery and the studio for formal inspiration.
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. In addition to the wallbound works, Fogelson exhibits a vitrine filled with the actual objects indexed in his photograms, sourced from EBay, taxidermists, fishing stores, strange shops and on walks in nature. This collection of natural artifacts is the artist’s own “cabinet of curiosities,” providing three-dimensional counterparts to the reanimated yet flattened forms of the photograms.
Doug Fogelson, Fox Skull, 2015, archival inkjet print, Ed. 6 + 2 AP, 24” x 20” and Ed. 3 + 1 AP, 32″ x 40″
Chicago-based artist Nina Rizzo has exhibited widely across the globe including such venues as the Association for Icelandic Visual Artists in Reykjavik, Iceland; Akademia Sztuk Piknych w Katowicach in Katowice, Poland; Megumi Ogita Gallery in Tokyo, Japan; Tinlark Gallery in Los Angeles; E & W Gallery in Santa Fe; Art Palace in Houston; Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge; and Bad Dog Gallery in DeKalb, IL. Rizzo has been the recipient of a number of prestigious artist residencies including Marnay Art Centre in France; Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL; Vermont Studio Center; and Northern Illinois University Summer Research and Artistry Grants in Japan and Iceland. The artist received her MFA from The University of Texas at Austin, and her BFA from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Rizzo is currently Associate Professor in Painting at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at Linda Warren Projects.
Chicago-based artist Doug Fogelson’s recent exhibitions include such venues as La Luz de Jesus in Los Angeles; Kasher/Potamkin in New York, NY; Quintenz & Co. in Aspen, CO; Elmhurst Art Museum in Elmhurst, IL; The Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, IL; Marlborough Chelsea in New York, NY; and Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs, CA amongst many others. Fogelson’s work can be found in such permanent collections as J. Paul Getty Museum, Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, McCormick Place Convention Center, The Cleveland Clinic, Palm Springs Art Museum, and he has recently completed a permanent commission for the Chicago Transit Authority at the 69th Street Red Line Station Fogelson received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently the Openlands Organization Artist-in-Residence for 2015/2016. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with Linda Warren Projects.