Call for assistants // Taking over the world, Step 1

Chicago is huge. I need help leaving postcards for Dreams of a City. Spread the word / let me know if you’re interested!

In other news: On January 13, I’ll be curating the art exhibit for Caitlin Bergh’s comedy show. (For those of you who came to Exquisite Corpse last year, she was the half-naked girl I smeared paint all over while we blasted weird music and ruined the Fulton Street Collective’s floor.) (For everyone else, she’s a kick-ass rising comic.)

And, in case you missed it from the last post: My most recent show, I CAN DO THAT, was named the audience choice for “Best Art Exhibit” in the 20^th anniversary edition of NewCity’s Best of Chicago issue! I cannot thank you all enough. Online and at newsstands now.

One week and two days ‘til Miami!

All good things must come to an end // But live forever on blogs

Tune in to WBEZ at 5:50am and / or 7:50am CST to hear some cartoon character me ramble on about I CAN DO THAT. I’ll also provide a link once the clip is available online. Thank you, Alison Cuddy, for the interview!

Congratulations to participating artist Glendalys Medina—she is a 2012 Visual Arts Rome Prize Fellow! The announcement ceremony was in New York just last night, so press photos and the like are forthcoming.

The show closes tonight! Expect more of the magic from the opening reception, plus new ways to interact with the art, like an audience participatory performance by Caitlin Bergh, who was featured in the Tribune yesterday. Don’t miss it!

Hear, hear. Here.

Photo by Andrew Roddewig, 2011.

This is a look of love and trust. Love between first-time performance artists whose one “rehearsal” consisted of merely talking through what might happen in the actual performance. Trust to not get paint up the nose.

Photo by Andrew Roddewig, 2011.

Thanks to Andrew Roddewig for taking photos of Caitlin Bergh’s Exquisite Corpse performance and posting a slideshow on Sixty Inches From Center. If you have a Facebook account, you can view many more—90 total, including outtakes not seen in the SIFC article—in albums here and here.

Thanks also to Dubi Kaufmann—view his photos on Flickr.

The next post will include videos [and even more photos!] of the performance.

Here, I’ve created a new page for write-ups in the press, including such pieces as Paul Klein’s preview / review of the exhibition and my interview on Gapers Block.

I’ve also created a new page for the virtual gallery here. It’s still under construction, but for now, you can check out Spiritus Saltus (which I profiled in these three posts) and Opposition (shown here). I’ll be spotlighting the artworks in future posts as well.

I have been following Caitlin’s budding comedy career since Day 1 (all of six months ago… but hey, the short amount of time makes her progress all the more impressive), ever since she told me she decided to take a stand-up class taught by Cameron Esposito (whom Caitlin eventually opened for as her first “real” comedy gig). She’s already come a long way yet, in her words, you’ve only seen the “tip of the iceberg(h).” Comedy Cares presents: A Benefit for The Broadway Youth Center is tonight at 8pm.

-math? Aftermath.

“I just peed acrylic paint.” –Performance artist Caitlin, to me.

Saturday night was pure magic. Infinite thanks to: all the artists, all who attended the show, Joe LaNasa for letting me have free reign over the Fulton Street Collective exhibition space, and you. If you took any photos at the closing reception for Exquisite Corpse, please email them to artists.on.the.lam {at} gmail {dot} com.

The highlight of the closing was Caitlin’s performance piece:

Towards the end of the reception, a guest approached me and made my night by raving about the performance, telling me how much it moved him—that he had a moment in which he realized he got it—and showing me, literally, pages he’d written as a response to the piece. (I told him to type up the written reaction and to email it to me, so if you, good sir, are reading this, please do!) That’s all I need, knowing that art had a profound and even transcendent effect on someone. Well, that, and I need to get rid of this paint still encrusted under and around my fingernails.

Here’s a link to Caitlin’s artist statement. I’ll post videos and more photos soon, so keep checking back.

And here’s the performance soundtrack listing:

            I’m Not Done – Fever Ray

            Beat and the Pulse – Austra

            Earth Intruders (XXXChange Remix) – Björk

            When I Grow Up (D. Lissvik Remix) – Fever Ray

            Lose It – Austra

You can listen to the songs here. (I’m now addicted to Austra.) To recreate the experience as closely as possible, I’d suggest cranking up your speakers and blasting the music at full volume. And then rolling around on your floor. With possibly toxic materials. In a bikini.

Catch Caitlin this Wednesday at Cole’s weekly Comedy Open Mic, where she’ll most likely do a standup set about this performance. More importantly, she’ll also be doing a set this Friday at Comedy Cares presents: A Benefit for The Broadway Youth Center. Laugh for a great cause!

It was our first time collaborating on anything like this, and both of us have caught the body-painting-and-rolling-onto-a-canvas bug. We have so many new ideas reeling around in our minds (Caitlin being birthed out of a tree with me as the midwife? strip clubs where ladies peel their skin off?), and we can’t wait to share them with you. This is just the beginning.

Reversible Eyes

Unlike over a blank canvas, I can’t wash oil paint and turpentine over an empty blog to make the whiteness less intimidating. Bear with the semi-bareness for now. In the meantime, you can:

Find out who I am and what this blog is; and

Check out some of the articles I’ve written for Sixty Inches From Center, an arts archive that documents Chicago’s peripheral art scene, by either clicking on my author link or my tag. My latest piece, an interview with the Puterbaugh Sisters and review of their Art It Out show at Humboldt Park’s Reversible Eye Gallery, may look long, but I swear it’s a quick read and half of it’s comprised of [laughter] brackets. An excerpt of the review:

In anticipation of their Art It Out show, I sat down and chatted with Danielle and Tiffany Puterbaugh, sisters whose brand of comedy is “experimental ridiculousness.” Before I hit “record,” we talked about how someone broke into their Humboldt Park apartment and stole their 11-year-old computer and their weed; how I heard about El Circo Cheapo Cabaret, where I first saw the duo perform as pill-popping ‘50s housewives locked in a nuclear bunker; our mutual friends, who are all, as Danielle put it, radical females in the Chicago comedy scene; the Exquisite Corpse show I’m curating; drunken/stoned exquisite corpse rounds; and gummy worms combined with society. We also talked about art.

The show—a combination of art, comedy, and performance, with the requisite dance party thrown in—descended upon the world last Thursday night at Reversible Eye Gallery, an interdisciplinary arts space committed to experimental art and performance, outsider art, art from the surrounding Humboldt Park community, and folk art from around the world.

The Puterbaugh Sisters hosted and, in their opening, remarked of the painted-on-jeans- and questionable-facial-hair-sporting masses congregating in the ethnic neighborhood, “This is the part where the Puerto Ricans meet the hipsters. The ripsters.” They continued to rip on the audience through a song with On the Road mentions and lyrics that included “I just cut my bangs in my bathroom” and “My dad’s paying off my college debt.” They were equally self-deprecating: “Artists do art. Performance artists do… whatever they want. And comedians are broken and sad.”

First up were Chris Condren, who played/”played” the keyboard and did stand-up, and Think Tank, who relayed fashion parables and commandments as the Fashion Police. Aptly voted Chicago’s Best Stand-up Comic of 2010 by the Chicago Reader, Beth Stelling followed with impressions that included “the longest drink order ever by a drunk girl.” She and the sisters then launched into The Go Gals, a routine that can be seen at their weekly Entertaining Julia show.

Headlining was DAAN, whom Tiffany insisted I would love, an assumption probably based on my Aladdin Sane necklace and the fact that I’m perpetually cloaked in sequins and glitter (the latter may or may not true). Judging a book by its cover has never been so accurate. The group’s official bio reads, “Imagine a world where Focus on the Family, Westboro Baptist Church, and Fox News were correct in their accusations of an epic homosexual agenda hell-bent on world domination.” That is a world I want to live in. Rapping over abrasive electro beats, crawling around on the floor, and shoving bananas down their throats, the boys got the guests dancing—or, at least, off-rhythmically bopping along to 80s synths.

The night concluded with Danielle as the Industry, who interrupted DAAN in an attempt to compromise their art, and Tiffany as Katy Perry, who somehow managed to avoid setting alight her hair as “Firework” blared in the background. “That was the most amazingly gay thing I’ve ever seen,” said Caitlin Bergh, who has an unwavering affinity for spandex and frequents Berlin so often she’s memorized the playlist and can tell you what song/video comes after Cazwell’s “Ice Cream Truck.”

Read the rest, including the interview itself, here.

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