Artists respond to the Whole Earth Catalog with various media and teach-ins.
Featured Artists:
Chicago-based artists ACT Collective, Alberto Aguilar, Jesse Malmed, Jaclyn Jacunski, Jason Pallas, Ryan Thompson, Hui-min Tsen, and national artists Sarah Hotchkiss (San Francisco), Jen Smoose(Seattle), and Leah Wolff (New York).
Dates:
8/12/2016 – 9/24/2016
Location:
The Annex @ Spudnik Press
Corresponding Events:
Forthcoming; As part of the opening reception, a short artist talk will feature many of the participating artists discussing their practice and contributions to the exhibition and their reflections of the Whole Earth Catalog. There will also be additional programming associated with the exhibition, including a series of teach-ins with community partners at Spudnik. All events are free and open to the public.
Opening Reception:
Friday, August 12, 2016
6:00-9:00pm
Media Coverage:
Not Another Exhibition Catalog | Newcity Art
Press Release:
Spudnik Press Cooperative presents “Rules, Tools, and Fools,” featuring Chicago-based artists ACT Collective, Alberto Aguilar, Jesse Malmed, Jaclyn Jacunski, Jason Pallas, Ryan Thompson, Hui-min Tsen, and national artists Sarah Hotchkiss (San Francisco), Jen Smoose(Seattle), and Leah Wolff (New York). This exhibition will feature the artists’ various responses to a key piece of printmedia – the Whole Earth Catalog.
Whole Earth Catalog is a counter-cultural touchstone that presaged many of today’s artistic and social modes of engagement. Rules, Tools, and Fools serves as a vehicle for artists to be provoked by and respond to the Whole Earth Catalog using a range of materials and conceptual strategies. The exhibiting artists all have a relationship with at least one of the themes explicitly embedded within the Catalog–alternative education, off-the-grid living, self-sufficiency, do-it-yourself culture, ecology, utopian ideals, communal action, holism, and access to tools. All of the artists are crafting new responses and activities to the Catalog for the exhibition.
The show is presented in The Annex, an educational and exhibition space within the non-profit printmaking studio, Spudnik Press Cooperative. The show is not only a response to all that the Whole Earth Catalog embodies, but is a visual manifestation of the role that Spudnik Press plays in the Chicago ecosystem.
The organization of Rules, Tools, and Fools mimics the strategies that drive Spudnik Press as a collectively managed and cooperatively run printshop. The progressive ethics used to bring the artists together and create programming mirror the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalog. This equitable effort puts trust in artists’ voices to shape how the show manifests. Rather than a nostalgic revisiting of a bygone era, the show offers poetic and practical solutions from our contemporary relationship to the Whole Earth’s problems.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
The Rules, Tools, and Fools Reading Library
The artists and exhibition organizers have collaborated to compile a selection of books and related ephemera to augment the exhibition with a reading library. This reading area, currently on view at Spudnik and continuing throughout the exhibition, serves as a public resource for deeper investigations of the source material and other scholarly works.
Rules, Tools, and Fools is organized by participating artists Jaclyn Jacunski and Jason Pallas in collaboration with Angee Lennard, Founder and Director of Spudnik Press.
Bios:
Jaclyn Jacunski (jaclynjacunski.com) is a Chicago-based artist and a current Bolt Resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition. Her works takes on various formats from printmaking, installation and sculpture which are tied around themes of community and its boundaries. She has M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and B.F. A. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and has taught at SAIC and Harrington College of. She worked for many years as an assistant to the master printers at Tandem Press in Madison, WI along with local artists/professors Joan Livingstone, Michael Miller, Jeanine Coupe Ryding and Mary Jane Jacob. Her artwork draws from protests and acts of resistance in local communities and how one discovers a more equitable, interesting life. Currently, she thinks about how these things manifest in signs in the landscape, and media, while paying attention to how an individual’s voice is revealed out in the world in relation to mass culture and powerful systems.
Jason Pallas (jthomaspallas.com) received his MFA in Contemporary Art Theory and Practice from the University of Chicago. His studies focused on the dialectics of abstraction/representation, authenticity/appropriation, complicity/political activity, and ethics/aesthetics. He earned BA degrees in Studio Art/Art History and English from Rice University with a thesis focused on contemporary queer drama, and has also studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the European College of Liberal Arts (Berlin). His work has been exhibited in Chicago and at venues throughout the country, such as Arthouse at the Jones Center (Austin), Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids), Truman State University Art Gallery (Missouri), Arizona State University, and the Indianapolis Art Center. He works as the Manager of Community Engagement and Arts Learning at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, as well as teaching and consulting at the Museum of Contemporary Arts Chicago and the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. His work sits at the intersection of the personal, the popular, and the political, and his driving concerns are community empowerment projects, pedagogical theory, and copyright issues.
Angee Lennard is an artist, art administrator, and teaching artist. As Founder and Executive Director of Spudnik Press Cooperative in Chicago, Angee oversees a range of community-based arts programming including open studio sessions, classes, a residency program, publishing and collaborative projects, youth programming, and exhibitions. As a teaching artist through Marwen and Spudnik, she develops curriculum addressing print media, community projects, and illustration. Her own artistic practices combine fine art printmaking and freelance illustration. She holds a BFA from SAIC.
