courtesy of the Renaissance Society

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Just before last Sunday’s opening of Cathy Wilkes’s exhibit “I Give You All My Money,” Renaissance Society staff briefly convened to determine where the installation’s borders were supposed to lay. One staff member suggested that gallery-goers should be permitted to step over the small purple roses scattered on the floor. Another staffer agreed, but suggested using the disintegrating pink rubber mat as a limit. Guests could approach the small pile of matted hair and shattered pottery on the floor, but probably should not go behind the abandoned counters of the supermarket conveyor belt.

As anticipated, the boundary between art and gallery space was re-drawn as each viewer interacted with the piece. One man bent down to pick up a rose and was promptly informed that touching was not allowed. Later, a young girl gleefully approached a stovetop and reached for a worn plastic fawn resting atop the burners—only to be reminded by her mother that she shouldn’t grab at the toy because “this is art.”

“I Give You All My Money,” nominated for the Tate Modern’s prestigious Turner Prize in 2008, certainly defies any singular reading. Painted mannequins draped with rags are juxtaposed with food containers with crusty residues of marmalade and porridge, creating a scene with an uncertain narrative. “I am not interested in trying to be objective in a work of art,” Wilkes said in a talk with curator Hamza Walker last Sunday. “There isn’t a point to thinking what somebody else might think as I’m working.”

Though scattered bowls, an old stroller, a stove, and the exhibit’s title certainly address the issues of consumerism and womanhood, the objects in her installation do not insist on a singular interpretation. Wilkes says she was inspired by the notion of attention, “a contemplative openness without any thoughts, a non-aggressive thinking.”

In creating “I Give You All My Money” Wilkes says she drew from her own experience as a woman, a mother, and a Christian. Repeated motifs in the installation raise some objects to icon status, serving as vehicles of communion for their viewers. “There is a type of presence in repeated actions,” she explained in the talk with Walker. The image of a basket, for example, is included both in the form of a birdcage hung over a mannequin’s head and as a shopping basket, which serve as signs of entrapment in the role of a homemaker. Yet, according to Wilkes, it also references the basket Jochebed used to send Moses down the Nile representing the ultimate maternal sacrifice.

As viewers contemplated the installation components of “I Give You All My Money,” three untitled paintings lay on a wooden table on the other end of the gallery, largely ignored. The small canvases, abstract compositions with colorful undulating lines and amorphous forms, displayed a thick buildup of paint, smeared like mud on the image surface. Though these paintings seemed at first a far cry from the other symbolic objects in the exhibition, their placement on a table suggested that they, too, should be viewed as objects rather than fine art. But as Wilkes discussed how her paintings would accumulate layers of detritus from use as impromptu notepads and coasters, the paintings began to emerge as readymades in their own right.

By taking objects out of her own life—whether pots, pans, or paintings—and inserting them into the sterile “white cube” of the gallery space, Wilkes successfully transforms them. A viewer can recognize the objects as functional or sentimental reminders of home, but the desire to touch and use them is blocked by their status as art. “A feeling of alienation or not alienation with objects is important,” Wilkes says, later adding, “I was putting them inside a cosmic space, apart from the physical world we live in.” By suspending quotidian objects in a realm of contemplation and confusion, Wilkes encourages her viewers to reconsider the relationships and borders between people, objects, and the art we often take for granted.

The Renaissance Society, 5811 S. Ellis Avenue. Through Mar. 4, 2012, Tuesday-Friday, 10am-5pm; Saturday-Sunday: 12-5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

The process of adapting “Invisible Man” for the stage began some years ago when film director and screenwriter Oren Jacoby paired up with Christopher McElroen, a New York-based stage director. The work posed challenges for the two early on—getting the rights to the novel from the Ralph Ellison Trust was not easy. Because of Ellison’s qualms about letting out his work for adaptation, the trust has closely monitored use of the book.

The script is composed only of direct quotations pulled from the novel, which was published 60 years ago this year. Though the work’s first-person narration has been pared down considerably, it has been a battle to whittle down the script to a manageable length. The show runs for three hours with two intermissions, which seems long until you consider that for most of last year, Jacoby, McElroen, and Court staff traveled around the country hosting readings, cutting chunks of the script each time.

The first of these readings was held in November of 2010, and the idea of adapting “Invisible Man” immediately struck a chord with Court and its audiences. “The show represents an intersection of Court’s recent mission—new adaptations and African-American stories,” says Court dramaturge Drew Dir. According to Dir, this story should be especially interesting when told in Hyde Park, both a South Side cultural hub and Barack Obama’s home base.

Both the novel’s content as well as it form proved difficult to rework—its non-linear, first-person narration of the title character’s journey from aspiring professor to radical spokesperson for “the race” is difficult to present onstage. The flashback, the voiceover, the memory, which are all vital elements of Ellison’s prose, might be better suited to the silver screen, where it is easier to rapidly switch between images. Court has taken on the challenge, and the product comes very close to a screen-like adaptation, even if at times the visuals come off more assaulting than arresting. The production is clearly meant to astonish and entertain—the sheer mass of lighting and projection effects make the small theater space shimmer like Times Square.

The design is difficult and intense, incorporating many intricate movements of partial walls and floor props. The effect is a little odd—the design is so technical and sophisticated that it feels slightly over-executed. The director and the designers,  brought in from New York, have had over a year to stew on the project, so every detail has been calculated and checked over. The whole technical component, dubbed “aggressive” by Dir, is so powerful it’s almost blinding. The unfortunate result is that it’s powerful enough to overshadow the acting, which often manages to hit right on target, especially considering the number of roles each actor must play—there are ten actors and twenty four characters. Invisible Man, played by Teagle Bougere, has more lines than you can shake a stick at, and he delivers them flawlessly and with poise. The actor playing Ras the Destroyer and the university president is also a standout.

What’s next for Jacoby’s “Invisible Man?” Dir says that there are many different productions to come. “The book has never not been relevant…we want to reexamine “Invisible Man” in a new epoch,” he states, sharing the sentiment of many other theatres around the nation. The script is expected to develop beyond this stage and emerge within a few years as a more polished work—hopefully with fewer flashing lights. And in case you’re wondering, Court’s master electrician proudly delivers the number of bare bulbs onstage in Court’s design at exactly five hundred thirty-five.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through February 19. (773)753-4472. courttheatre.org

Mueller, a priest from the UofC’s Orthodox Christian Fellowship, came to bless rooms in honor of the recent feast day of Theophany. The holiday celebrates the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, and according to Orthodox tradition, the practice of blessing the home represents the ongoing sanctification of the material world.

Mueller has performed the annual blessings at UofC dorms for four years. As of Friday morning, he had blessed seven rooms and expected to carry out nearly 20 more by the end of winter.

In one room, Mueller began to sing in front of a makeshift altar he placed on a desk. The tenants participated in the ceremony, contributing names of deceased loved ones and listening to the prayer. Mueller placed the incense stick into the bowl of holy water and showered the room, droplets splattering across dressers and walls.

The students stepped forward to receive the priest’s blessing. Mueller dampened their heads with holy water as he held up a carved wooden cross. He then anointed the doorway with oil and once more sprinkled water on the heads of the students.

Though they had different reasons for requesting the room blessing, the students enjoyed the ceremony. One resident, Alexandra Mathews, explained, “Growing up with the Orthodox tradition, I always feel a bit of comfort when my house gets blessed because it provides security.” For some of the other, though, this was a new experience. Alexandra Bassen, who is not Eastern Orthodox, got her room blessed because she thinks “It [is] a culturally enriching experience.”

The oil, bowl, stick and cross returned to Mueller’s bag. He then departed, passing a pile of pink pillows and a display of paper cutout snowflakes, on his way to bless another room.

Isaac Dalke

Norma van der Meulen says that she is getting old, that she can’t quite remember as well as she used to. She is modest, seated in front of a pot of tea in her Hyde Park apartment. Her eyes come alive behind her glasses. Opera comes from WFMT in the background.

A small-town Ohio girl, she fell in love with the Spanish language in college and later taught at Hope College in Michigan, where she met her husband, an architect. For a while, they traveled around Europe; he designed buildings for the State Department, she cared for their two young children. In 1956, the young couple moved to Hyde Park where she has lived continuously ever since (minus a four-year respite to the Virgin Islands) raising three children and keeping active in the neighborhood community.

She speaks lucidly of the time a student she advised offered her marijuana, of befriending the future proprietor of the Medici when he was a graduate student, of a neighborhood with strong currents of change, and brings up the racial tension in the neighborhood with a frankness that would leave some addled.

The following is an edited interview with her, on a sunny New Year’s Eve, sitting in her apartment overlooking the Museum of Science and Industry. She speaks with a soft, sweet voice, and her arms move energetically as she tells her stories.

You volunteer at the Oriental Museum?

I do! I’ve been there for thirty years. I’m behind the counter Wednesday mornings, and Monday mornings I make jewelry for them. It’s a little room that’s  stuffed with ties and carpets and boxes and all kinds of stuff. I have these metal cabinets with amber and amethyst and malphite and lapis and fish vertebrae and little hand-carved skulls from Africa—all kinds of stuff. Wonderful stuff. And a lot of Afghani pendants and beads and what-not. It’s just like Christmas, I go in there and I say, “What will I make today?” And I pull out the drawer. I make about five, six necklaces a morning. Most of them sell.

I’ve made some observations of men shoppers, vis-à-vis men shoppers. Men come in and they have a purpose. They come in and say, “I’ll take that one.” Bingo. The women: “Can I see this one? Well, no wait a minute…” It drives you nuts! It’s a different thing, a man and a woman shopper. I also learned that people in general like an even string of stuff. They don’t like kooky things on their necklaces.

So that’s what I do. I have great fun. I go down there and turn on WFMT, the classical music station, with my bottle of water and my banana, and I make jewelry. I still don’t know how on earth they make those little beads.

How was advising at the UofC?

You know who one of my advisees was? Though I take no credit. David Axelrod. Nice bright boy. Barbara Curry, in the senate here, was one too. I had a lot of wonderful kids. [Axelrod] wouldn’t remember me, but I remember him. I didn’t have that much do with him, I would have these appointments and they would come in.

Some of these kids were very dependent, they would come over and over again whether they had an appointment or not, because they were lonely and they needed some advice or just to vent a bit, you know?

I had one boy from the North Shore—gorgeous tailoring, very handsome boy. He would come to my door with his coffee Thermos in his hand and we would talk a while. He is now in New York a huge success with some sort of advice for finances, I don’t know, it’s more than I can figure out. He writes books and things. I hear from him every Christmas, he sends me a picture of his kids. They’re a very treasured lot, that lot over there. A very privileged lot I would say.

Do you know any UofC Professors?

I used to, but I don’t anymore because they all died or moved. A lot of them went to Hawaii. They weren’t going to hang around here. Saul Bellow, he used to be very apparent in the neighborhood. Good writer. He knew so many people who had lived and died and remarried and had fights and what-not. He said too many houses had ghosts so he moved to Evanston (laughs). Got a new wife and all that. He used to eat over here at Piccolo Mondo.

Harold Washington used to live around here?

I know exactly where he lived. There is a tennis court over here on 53rd Street. There’s an apartment building on the corner; he lived there. He could see the green cockatoo birds out there.

We had some trees with big nests. Some green parrots got out of their cage out of O’Hare. They made it down here and made that their home and they squawked away. You could see these cubbies of green parrots flying all around the neighborhood. Harold loved those parrots!

What was it like raising children in Hyde Park?

Well, I’ll tell you. I had them walk to school every day when they were little. My eldest daughter went to Hyde Park High School, one of the last viable classes. The day Martin Luther King was killed, she came into my office wearing a dress about the green of your jacket and she was ashen-faced. She had been with one of her little boyfriends, who had glasses on. They kicked him to the floor and broke his glasses and beat him. She was absolutely undone. That was a bad thing.

My second daughter went to the new Kenwood High School [current-day Kenwood Academy]. Because it was new, [the administration was] trying very hard. They had a wonderful music teacher, and really nice teachers. She got through that all right and then went to Oberlin.

My son, Peter, went to Kenwood. When he was a freshman in high school, about 14 or 15, we lived in a six-flat down here. He was coming down the alley and a guy from Kenwood High School came behind him, jumped on his back, put his hands in his mouth and pulled and slammed his head on the sidewalk. Peter screamed out. The lady on the first floor heard him, stuck her head out the window and yelled at [the assailant] and he ran away.

Well, the kid was the son of two doctors—Haitian—who had lied about their address to get him into Kenwood High School. We got Peter out of Kenwood right then and put him into the Lab School. But the thing is that kid still remained at that school and he attacked the son of a lawyer. The fur flew, and they got him out of there and sent him to Haiti. When we got back from the Virgin Islands, his name was a headline in the newspaper. He had just murdered a DePaul student, a tennis star.

We had some bad, bad things happen in Hyde Park. They still do… These are not politically correct things to say, but I’m telling you, well, that’s the way things are.

These questions are left unanswered in Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s compelling adaptation of Homer’s classic tale of the Trojan War. “An Iliad” tells the story of the last few weeks of the war, when the Acheans Agamemnon and Achilles are fighting over a woman, Briseis. Achilles loses Briseis and refuses to fight in the war. As the struggle within the Achean ranks unfolds, the war wages on outside the walls of Troy.

The story is recounted in its entirety by only the Poet, turning the performance into more of a storytelling event than a traditional play. And, as a result, the vivacity and emotional range of the storyteller comes to the foreground. But while the original poem—or at least the version known to modern readers—focuses on the triumph of Achilles, “An Iliad” centers the attention on Hector, the defeated Trojan warrior. This simple shift in perspective—from an emphasis the experience of heroism, success and glory to one of defeat and death—exemplifies the adaptation’s powerful underlying anti-war message.

The play begins with the Poet listing significant wars, from Troy up to the current conflict in Afghanistan. This serves to confirm what this adaptation’s title suggests: this is “An Iliad,” not “The Iliad.” It is about every “Iliad” that has happened after the first one, and the many more that are to follow still. The storyteller says that the war only went on for so long because both parties, having already put so much time into it, could not leave without some final resolution. The Poet attempts to put the story in twenty-first century terms. He equates this type of mentality to being stuck in a long grocery line: you can see that there is a shorter one, but you feel obligated to stay in your line because you feel as if you have invested something in it.

But Peterson and O’Hare use more than modern analogy, language and tone to make the story feel relevant. Above all, they bring the epic back to its original and most effective form: oral storytelling. Presented with one man recalling a story from his memory and imagination, the audience becomes a collection of listeners rather than spectators, establishing a rapport with the actor and the play itself.

An Iliad also returns to its ancient roots of oral tradition by incorporating the original Greek verse into parts of the play. The conglomeration of ancient verse, lines of Robert Fagles’ award-winning English translation, and colloquial speech to spice up the formal prose, was the most striking example of the play’s intermingling  of the ancient, the old, and the new.

When a tale is passed through the oral tradition, the story changes with the storyteller, the audience, and the culture to which it is loaned. The story itself is ancient, but an attempt to preserve every element of the original epic poem would lose the uniqueness and malleability of the present moment that is essential to the oral tradition. That is to say, an effective storyteller knows how to relate to his audience. Timothy Edward Kane does a phenomenal job of captivating the audience and performing the role of the Poet. He is not only a storyteller, but also an enigmatic, dynamic personality who, in retelling the epic, carries on Homer’s great tradition.

Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through December 11. (773)753-4472. $40-60 general/$10 students. courttheatre.org

Jane Fentress

“How can we help expand a community for woman artists and artists of color throughout the city and South Side?”

Theaster Gates, Director of Arts and Public Life at the University of Chicago, has asked himself this question for years. A nationally recognized artist who is trained in urban planning, Gates is known for taking a leading role in community development programs on the South Side. One such development, the Dorchester Project in Grand Crossing, is a house that Gates transformed into a performance space and multimedia library. But one project is not enough to serve an entire city and satisfy what Gates calls his “grand ambition” of “seeing the arts flourish on the South Side.” As a result, Gates is spearheading a new UofC Arts and Public Life initiative aimed at strengthening the connection between the arts communities on and off campus.

The cornerstone of this $1.85 million University-funded initiative will be an “arts incubator” in Washington Park. The space, a nearly century-old two-story terra cotta building and former liquor store on Garfield Boulevard, is currently being transformed into a space for South Side artists to gather and work. The initiative will fund three one-year artist fellowships and residencies in order to create an environment of collaboration that Gates feels is key to the creative process. “The value of having multiple artists sharing one space is that they can be colleagues and engage each other in the why of their practices,” he says. In addition to studios, the incubator will also host performance and exhibition space. And Gates plans to reach out to neighborhood schools through a K-12 after school arts program that will collaborate with existing UofC student organizations engaged in teaching art across the South Side.

The incubator is set to open in late 2012. Gates has worked closely with Bill Michel, the executive director of the UofC’s Reva and David Logan Center for Creative and Performing Arts. The two have been collaborating with existing arts education programs in the area since the beginning of the last school year. They see the new incubator as a response to a pressing need: “There is no lack of culture on the South Side. There is no lack of creative people on the South Side. The thing we lack is spaces where people can convene, rehearse, we lack venues for arts engagement. When venues are identified, the cultural wealth of the neighbors makes itself present.”

But Gates doesn’t think the work he and his colleagues are doing stops at the promotion of culture. “When culture lives in a place and when space is made for cultural life, other things grow in this kind of ecological system. How do we make space for artists so that the creative community around them has a place where they can share culture?” he asks. With the new Logan Center opening in 2012 and the Washington Park incubator to open soon after, it seems as though the South Side art scene will have lots of new room to grow.

fore/flickr

After self-assuredly taking to the rostrum and subduing the ambient chatter, Jessica Stockholder delivered a talk last Thursday before a crowd of colleagues, art patrons, and enthusiasts gathered in the University of Chicago’s International House. Stockholder, a sculptor, painter, curator and site-specific installation-creator for over three decades, will begin her tenure as chair of the University’s Department of Visual Arts (DOVA) this summer. She spoke earnestly about her body of work, furrowing her brow on occasion to study the projection screen. Rather than identifying any particular ambitions for DOVA’s future, Stockholder’s presentation was a more personal introduction: a retrospective look at the contents of her career.

Stockholder’s work enters into a tactile and dimensional confrontation with the viewer. Often, the spectator must walk through a multileveled space in order to encounter the entirety of her installations. ‪Her ability to draw her viewer into her work (not just up close to it) remains one of Stockholder’s definitive accomplishments.‬  Where representational sculpture is quite literally based upon the pedestal, beholden to what it approximates, and often resignedly inert, Stockholder’s constructions are shaped by her impulses and liberated from formal presentation.

Stephanie Smith, chief curator at the Smart Museum of Art, described Stockholder and her peers as “people who think through making”—and Stockholder’s artistic, academic, and curatorial pursuits, as well as critical responses to her work, have greatly impacted the international art community. Odense, Denmark; Saint Gallen and Basel, Switzerland; Torino and Ferrara, Italy; Palm Springs, California; and Duisburg, Germany have in recent years given Stockholder’s colorful swathes of construction material, clustered balloons, and modified backyards a home. Stockholder’s practice has long emphasized how transience can elevate the meaning of a space and its contents. She values, she says, “the idiosyncrasy that’s possible when things aren’t kept.”

The diversity and constant evolution of Stockholder’s materials and work surely portend new benefits for DOVA. While she didn’t go into detail about her plans for the department, Stockholder commented on what her artistic ambitions were not. She explained that her work is not “literary or narrative, not storytelling.” She does not “make environments,” she said, but is interested in creating a coherent whole that intersects a space. She rejects the idea that art can be divorced from self-expression, believing that, “insofar as each of us is authoring a work, it is the expression of our person.”

Twenty years ago this fall, the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society hosted Stockholder’s exhibition “Skin Toned Garden Mapping.” At the time, Stockholder’s colleague Joe Scanlan noted, “every object or color that Stockholder chooses has many functions or ‘lives,’ depending on whether we look at it personally, socially, or aesthetically.” This observation perseveres as an apt characterization of Stockholder’s subsequent installations, with their vivid, larger-than-life quality.

In response to an inquiry about her transition from oil paint to algae floating on an astral-shaped dais, Stockholder described the first time she attached a wire to a wall hanging, and the natural extension of that impulse—attaching material to that wire, and eventually allowing that material to be an autonomous installation within the space. But Stockholder’s proclivity for dynamic tableau doesn’t mean that less immersive, less expansive art is unwelcome at DOVA—she intends to celebrate, she says, “that [which] isn’t spectacular also.”

Last Wednesday, Peirce screened this clip during a public discussion at the University of Chicago with the UofC English professor Lauren Berlant. Though the film went on to win an Academy Award, it was initially given an NC-17 rating by the MPAA, which would have banned the movie from playing in most theaters. It was this scene, showing the female protagonist in the throes of an orgasm, which caused most of the hullabaloo. However, after an appeal by Peirce, the rating was eventually lowered to R. Peirce, a UofC alumna, has gone on to direct two more major films. In her talk, Peirce poked fun at the prudishness of the Motion Picture Association of America, asking the audience, “When has anyone ever been hurt by an orgasm that lasted too long?”

Peirce went on to discuss a clip from her 2008 film, “Stop-Loss.” The movie, inspired by her brother’s experience in the Iraq War, portrays the emotional devastation of GIs. The three-minute clip she showed depicted an urban firefight in which American soldiers were simultaneously victims and villains shooting into civilian homes where attackers sought refuge. The film explores what happens after such a morally ambiguous encounter, and, according to Peirce, proves that “a story can have a tragic ending and still move forward.”

But this event’s ending was a happy one—for some, the climax of the night was the reception, bringing to students and guests an opportunity for hors d’oeuvres and more intimate conversation with Peirce.

Courtesy of the Renaissance Society

An otherworldly drone wavers in and out of audible range, welcoming visitors to the show, “In a Saturnian World.” The exhibit’s walls set up a loosely circular trajectory, throwing visitors into orbit as they enter the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society. Lacking placards, translations, and a definite order, the exhibit by Belgian artist Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven aims to disorient all who enter.

The show’s title comes from the French Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine’s “Poèmes Saturniens,” a work which explores the spiritual and occult. Accordingly, walking into the exhibit feels like stepping onto another plane of experience. Colors and bodies are familiar but not quite right: the most representational series of collages shows mildly pornographic photos of women with planets for heads. Though Van Kerchkhoven uses many different media—pages ripped from sketchbooks, plexiglass, old advertisements from magazines, pastel, and markers—all of the pieces are similar in style, immediately recognizable as a unified work. As a whole, this collection may best be understood as a mythology of an unknown Saturnian race.

The gallery’s literature on  Van Kerckhoven’s exhibit alludes to an attempt at cultural critique, comparing the “kitsch” of the soft pornography that she uses to present-day American Apparel ads. She attempts to undermine the mission of the “hidden persuaders”—the marketing industry—by giving sexual advertisements a completely different ethos. Pages from fashion magazines are torn so that the women’s bodies, situated in pencil-lined rooms with neon-colored shapes, appear distorted and unreal. The show tries to alienate us from the media but goes too far—such earthly social commentary seems removed from the artwork, especially when the show holds such a tenuous connection to our world. Instead the exhibit seems to study imagination, narrative, perspective, and the appeal of irrationality.

Her artwork makes predictions and claims dealing with the existential concerns and mortality of the Saturnians. One piece reads: “Sometime between 2002 and 2008 earth-based gravitational wave detectors will watch blackholes collide and watch their collisions trigger wild vibrations of spacetime warpage.” The works are both futuristic and low-tech, using images from old advertisements and 2D rudimentary graphics. A video piece layers transparent colors and photographs on top of a seated woman’s figure so that she is slowly obscured. The artist’s interest in manipulating and iterating colors and text is also manifest on a wall nearby, where a series of fourteen drawings of twelve circles are alternatively flagged as studies in color, chemistry, and the occult, depending on the superimposed text.

The pinnacle of the exhibit is a 24-minute video that shows an audience watching a piece of performance art. We see an almost-nude man posing on a mat and interacting sexually with a few stone-faced audience members.  It almost seems like a documentary, or a memory: all aspects of the staging (the crew, the lighting, etc.) are visible, but the video is shot with alterations in the tones and white balance, making it dreamlike. At points the video is so grainy as to eliminate the details of the nude man’s face and body, leaving the viewers to reconstruct what the people in the room are seeing. In other moments, the performer’s body is so distorted and the camera angle so extreme that the human form becomes virtually unrecognizable.

Be warned—the “In a Saturnian World” experience is largely reflective of the visitors’ mood; the cynic enters the exhibit and is unimpressed by just another example of post-modern meaninglessness. The ardent viewer, however, will find pieces that challenge perspective and time in what seems like an eerie retrospective of the present akin to prehistoric man visiting the pyramids at the Field Museum. As an actual memory, the show seems like an after-image, fantastical moons and electric orange lips burned into the brain.

The Renaissance Society, Cobb Hall 418, 5811 S. Ellis Ave. Through December 18. Tuesday-Friday, 10am–5pm; Saturday-Sunday, noon–5pm. (773)702-8670. renaissancesociety.org

Courtesy of Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford

Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford stands behind his worktable, wearing camouflage patterned pants and a work shirt. The Hyde Park Arts Alliance space, where Hulsebos-Spofford has set up camp, looks more like the backstage of a high school theater than the studio of an artist-in-residence. Two large structures resembling parade floats rest in the middle of the narrow workspace. A foam figure, covered in intricate carved designs and a thick coat of black paint stands in a solid, domineering pose. At around six-feet tall, this statue could be the mascot of “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world,” Hulsebos-Spofford’s current collaborative work.

As a teacher at the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts), Hulsebos-Spofford noticed that “there are a number of CPS kids who are undocumented. We all know—some of these kids can’t even apply to college or request financial aid.” Moved by their stories and the diversity of their backgrounds, and interested in the idea of “how people end up where they are, what they find, and what happens in their transit,” the artist mapped out a plan for an “immigrant landing.”  He says, “I just thought about how strange the situation was—where is Chicago with immigration? What could we do to make a statement or ask these questions?”

Hulsebos-Spofford’s answer was to build rafts. Working with his ChiArts students everyday after school and on weekends for the past few months, the team has designed and begun to build usable rafts out of discarded construction materials from projects on the University of Chicago campus. They have made two wooden rafts and one out of PVC pipe, sealed at the ends and tied together.

Along the side wall of the studio, rows of inner tubes are stacked up. Hulsebos-Spofford plans to attach them to the two wooden rafts so that they can float on Lake Michigan. According to Hulsebos-Spofford, “Lake Michigan has become this beer drinking, recreational body of water. There is no longer that aspect of transit or the movement of goods.” He hopes to dramatically reimagine the lakefront: “I had a vision to come off the water with a flotilla of rafts.”

This vision pays homage to George Streeter, whose story Hulsebos-Spofford elaborates upon excitedly: “So you know Oak Street Beach, where that weird, crazy boathouse is? Well, the myth goes that a guy named George Streeter beached his ship there. Historians debate it, but basically he carted sand and debris and made a sort of squatter’s community right on this patch of beach where bankers and wealthy Chicagoans lived.” Laughing, he continues, “Then the bankers of the Gold Coast tried to get him evicted. This story really feeds into my project, where the paths people take meet.”

But on April 21 Hulsebos-Spofford’s plan came to an unforeseen halt. The Chicago Park District denied his formal request to land his three rafts on Oak Street Beach, citing injury and safety liabilities. Hulsebos-Spofford says, “I would have paid all the insurance necessary for this…I guess they just didn’t want to support the project.”

Hulsebos-Spofford, like rejected immigrants before him, dealt with the setback as best as he could. He rerouted his trip to a beach in Gary, Indiana where he and his students have been given the go-ahead to land. “It’s funny, maybe it’s perfect that the authorities wouldn’t let us land where we wanted to,” he says, alluding to the stringent immigration regulations that his work comments upon.

Over the past few months, as the project came to fruition, Hulsebos-Spofford has built a sense of community and collaboration in his studio. Faiz Razi, a colleague of Hulsebos-Spofford’s has stepped up to provide a live soundtrack for the landing. Hulsebos-Spofford’s students have undoubtedly been both the impetus and the force behind the project. “The kids, they come from all over Chicago. ChiArts is about 50 percent African-American, 25 percent Latino and 25 percent ‘other.’ We’ve got all types of students working on this project.”

Several of the students have consistently come in to work, and it will be these students who ride and steer the rafts ashore, while Hulsebos-Spofford films from the sand.  “One of my students brought in their mom, dad, and siblings,” he says, beaming. “It was great to see them all here.” He explains how a more reserved student “just started building one of the rafts almost entirely by himself and truly making it a personal project.” Parents have been so supportive that Hulsebos-Spofford wants them to sit on the rafts with the students. Some have gone above and beyond in their commitment to the project: “One of the moms brought home our garbage bags and created costumes for the kids to wear.”

As much as the students have inspired and contributed to the project, Hulsebos-Spofford takes pride in the personal touches he added that appear throughout the rafts and the statue. “I’m really into sci-fi, so we’re riffing off of Tron. And also, the Mayan 2012 myths, some jungle relics….” In his excitement, Hulsebos-Spofford almost resembles an eager kid, gushing about his favorite subjects in school. It is clear that this project has been brewing in his mind for a while. “This project has made me re-evaluate my practice,” he says. “It’s bringing my work together.”

The efforts of Hulsebos-Spofford, Razi, the students, and their families will culminate this upcoming weekend. On June 3 HyPa and Hulsebos-Spofford will be hosting a pre-launch event at the HyPa space from 6:30pm to 8pm. On June 4, he and his students invite everyone to head to Gary, Indiana for the long-awaited landing.