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WORK WITH ME

Collaboration is a process where two or more people or groups work together to realize a shared goal. More than the intersection of ideas, true collaboration is a deep, collective investigation of a common endeavor. Work With Me, the 5th Art + Design faculty exhibition at A+D Gallery, highlights the collaborative process through a representation of strategies, methodologies and discursive practices.

Participating collaborators include Compassionate Action Enterprises; Laura Davis and Paul Melvin Hopkin; Whitney Huber and Delmore Lazar; Industry of the Ordinary; Sabina Ott and Alison Rhoades; Petra Probstner, Miklos P. Simon, and Gyorgy Orban; Evan Ward, Glenn Wexler, and Mary Martin; Jim Zimpel; and essayist Ames Hawkins.

Jennifer Murray Director, A+D Gallery

CONSIDERING COLLABORATION {A BAKER’S DOZEN}

{ONE}

{TWO}

July 1982: We were building a tree house. My brother Chad, his two friends Josh and Danny, and I carried scavenged lumber the way surfers hold their long boards, left hand on the handle bars, right arm dropped to the side balancing a piece of wood cradled in the right hand.

If the piece was too long for one person to manage, we’d extend the wood between two of us and ride bikes in tandem. Though more than three years apart in age, my brother and I were the same size; nearly a foot taller than the other two boys. The wheels on my ten-speed topped the circumference of all of the boys’ BMX tires by at least fifty percent. Successful transport depended upon the coordination of speed and movement in order to compensate for the extreme differences in the lengths of our legs, the distances of diameters.

Ames Hawkins Ames Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Columbia College

BY AMES HAWKINS

Chicago. Her collaborative work includes a number of team-taught courses, multiple creative nonficition publications, and work on the art activist initiatives The Cradle Project and One Million Bones. Hawkins is a recent contributor to the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and a 2010 Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices Fellow.

day being able to spend the night in our co-created space. It’s because whenever we were building the tree house, I wouldn’t fight with my brother. It’s because during the process I came to identify in my brother a scavenger’s sensibility, in Josh logistical agility, in Danny intense focus and in myself pragmatic presence.

It’s because we opted to disassemble the tree house as often as we’d assemble it, agreeing to dismantle any bit of our creation in favor of the next cooler idea.

It’s because when we finally did ‘finish’ six weeks later, we celebrated with a pizza party, accordioning Little Caesar’s pepperoni slices into our mouths fast, washing the doughy triangles down with Tropical Punch Kool-Aid. It’s because I would never after that lunch climb into the tree house again, though it remained a locus of play for the three boys for years to come.

It isn’t the cooperation of this moment that allows me to identify the tree house as my first collaborative project.

It’s because we shared the common stated goal of one

It’s because our tree house was not a problem to be solved. Our tree house was a work of art.

At around seven years old, Laura Davis remembers playing Barbies with the girl down the street. They built an elaborate “dream house” for the dolls in a spare room in the basement. Water in a Ziploc® bag covered with a washcloth became a waterbed (hey it was the

’70s!); shampoo bottle caps transformed into vases.

Ever-naked Barbies were clothed in Kleenex® and tape.

Be a doll and note that Barbie is pleased with the way that Laura and Paul Melvin Hopkin make dreams in a house here for you today.

{THREE}

Sometimes I respond to Twyla Tharp’s name-dropping in The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together with vanity-exhausted eye-rolling. But there’s no denying that having had the opportunity to engage in creative projects with the likes of Milos Forman, Bob Joffrey, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines, Billy Joel, Elvis Costello, and Danny Elfman provides her with the experience to make insightful observations regarding the nature of collaboration such as: Collaborators aren’t born, they’re made. Or, to be more precise, built one day at a time, through practice, through attention, through discipline, through passion and commitment—and, most of all, through habit.

Twyla, who I picture telling me, were I to ever meet her, that I have not earned the right to call her by her first name, (That’s Ms. Tharp to you!), attracts me with her declarations of discipline. I want to luxuriate in

{FOUR}

When I ask Delmore Lazar whether he thinks there is a difference between what it means to cooperate and what it means to collaborate, he answers swiftly and definitively: “Yes.” Collaboration, he tells me, is when “two people work together to go through something.”

Cooperation ensues when there is a “problem to solve.” I sit silent, mesmerized because his answer

{FIVE}

Together, my partner Corrine and I have figured out how to pay off nearly two hundred thousand dollars worth of debt inside of five years, but we were unable

her expertise and vision, be there to watch when she determines that another artist is creative, brilliant and, most importantly, willing to submit.

I wonder whether this is what it means to collaborate: to submit. Not only to another, but to yourself. To a schedule. To practice. To desire. To your own thoughts.

To all of your own thoughts so that they might find their way into and through the creative wondering and intellectual wanderings of another.

What if I submit to this thought: the name Twyla Tharp reminds me of the name Wyatt Earp. I experience collaborative energy in the way that the names bounce against each other, their vowelistic sensibilities clacking hard against single syllable surnames. If I imagine Earp as Tharp, Tharp in Earp, Wyatt seems to me we mightcould choreograph American history Twyla better!

reflects what I have been thinking. Almost exactly. His high-pitched voice contrasts with sophisticated syntax, rhythm and tone: “Yes, that’s it. It’s about whether you’re going to solve something instead of just doing it.” Yes, that’s right. So, when Delmore’s mother, Whitney Huber carries him piggyback she is indeed, “just doing it.”

to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture without nearly coming to blows.

{SIX}

{SEVEN}

Collaboration between Patti Smith and Arthur Rimbaud rises, stalks bodily functioning in veins and blood. These seers inspire the be-ers Alison Rhoades and Sabina Ott, they who be (and become) their art with bodies and hands and arms and thighs. They critique-cuddle in classrooms as each teaches other, uncertain as they are aroused when anyone proposes newness, down on only one knee.

Ah, this indeed an illumination of love most strange!

Orgiastic serendipity conceives a devilish host of students sired by our collective sweet sweat.

The 1926 pamphlet (Number 9 from The Little Red Library) How Class Collaboration Works, by Bertram D. Wolf causes me to wonder: Is this why we in the United States seem to elide the concepts of collaboration and cooperation? Is collaboration a communistic term and cooperation a capitalistic label and now, because we’d rather not be associated with communistic desire, propose cooperation as collaboration thereby erasing the solidarity suggested in the collective?

feel good about increased wages, no matter the source.

Wolf wants those reading to see through these tactics, to think about the workers in other countries at whose expense the “privileged few” share in the profits.

Then I read what Wolf writes and understand that he’s criticizing class collaboration as a ruse, a “bribe,” a way for capitalist interests to trick some workers into separating from the collective by accepting the fruits of “monopolists and imperialism,” creating an “aristocracy of workers,” a “privileged section working shorter hours and receiving better pay than the average worker.” Wolf asserts that class collaboration is the root of the evil, evidence of the insidious nature of capitalism and its ability to prey upon “unconscious” workers who would

We are here as purpose. You are in all.

I consider possible differences between the autoworker and the artist; one believing in the value of labor, the power of the union, the superiority of trade as the other believes in the value of vision, the power of creativity, the superiority of craft. I think about the fact that in the past three months I’ve seen multiple examples of businesses—most notably bars—sell their wares using the symbolism and language of communism. I wonder whether Wolf, and either of the other two men with whom he collaborated to author “Manifesto of the Left Wing National Conference,” would have considered my observations over beer at Revolution Brewery in Wicker Park, or sipping on “The Communist” in Andersonville.

The vigilance of the rhetoric tells me no. The human passion of the project tells me yes.

{EIGHT}

Art As Collaboration: :Collaboration As Art The NAMES Project Exquisite Corpse

Christos and Jean-Claude Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell

The “sixth man” Guerilla Girls Amish barn raisings

Act-Up Live Aid Fluxus performers and their audience

Merce Cunningham and John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg Happenings quilting

Paris puppet theater and the children in the front rows marching bands

dance troops of all kinds

float making Renaissance workshops Pyramids Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Gilbert and George

The Bernadette Corporation Art + Language

Group Material Temporary Services

(Space for you to list your own examples)

{NINE}

The idea that women are better collaborators than men, it seems to me, might be supported by the observation that feminism finds more success in its form than its content. Put another way, feminism as content (suffrage, abortion, ERA, human/women’s rights) is far less powerful an idea than feminism as form (collaboration, multi-vocality, multiplicity, cooperation) principally because so many different causes now readily employ feminist practices while feminist issues remain socially, historically, and contextually relative, bound by political pressure and power.

But such an observation has to be erroneous because Industry of the Ordinary answers my emailed question regarding the difference between cooperation and collaboration this way:

{TEN}

For the past three mornings we have awakened to a swarm of flying ants covering the inside of the back window screen in our kitchen. Corrine sprays them with bleach water and wipes up the tiny black carcasses with paper towel and suddenly I want to ask Alanis Morissette (as she appeared in her role as God in the film Dogma):

There is undoubtedly a need for cooperation between collaborators – an acceptance of the other’s benevolence (not to mention malevolence) towards the project and you. This is an act of faith, or at least trust. But there is also a need for resistance. A balance has to be struck in order that the Third Mind doesn’t become flabby and self-absorbed. It’s like a marriage where sex and affection are replaced by respect and ambition.

It’s dangerous.

Because there’s the cultural assumption (yet absolutely no indication of such prejudice here) that marriage refers only to a relationship between a man and a woman. Because in any collaboration there is no such assumption. Because making such an assumption would be dangerous, indeed.

"Is it ironic that cell phone signals, (the means by which Twitter helped facilitate the recent Egyptian Revolution), are to blame for interfering with the buzzing of bees, (causing them to they leave the hive at the wrong time, never return and ultimately die), or does it just suck?"

{ELEVEN}

{TWELVE}

{THIRTEEN}

It is the between. The between of children and parents, teachers and students, colleagues and co-workers, visual artists and designers, writers and editors, visionaries and vixens, women and men, capitalists and communists, modernists and postmodernists, sculptors and scrappers, creatives and crafters. It is between time and space, story and truth. Between Jim Zimpel

and George Zimpel, between Petra Probstner, Miklos P. Simon, and Gyorgy Orban, between Evan Ward, Glenn Wexler, and Mary Martin.

Depending upon the light, it’s difficult to tell whether Jasmine’s hair is ash blonde, chestnut brown, or one of these two colors dappled grey. She sits facing the window, knees pulled tight to her chest, bare feet just visible below the hem of an apple-blossom colored organza skirt. Head bent over old continent maps and star charts, one hand holding a magnifying glass, the other presciently poised, fingertips light on parchment, palm arched in wonder, she seems intent on discovery.

I ask questions and Lisa Kaftori and Joan Giroux— the other two members of Compassionate Action Enterprises—do most of the talking. They speak about potential, about perspective, about their shared belief:

that the world can change in positive ways. They regard Jasmine a fabulous collaborator and I am both puzzled and hypnotized as she never speaks but still seems to consistently and consciously respond in the affirmative.

I stand up and leave when I realize that all I really want now is to see Jasmine naked.

All of which reminds me of something else Twyla says: “In the end, all collaborations are love stories.”

This exhibition, I offer, is this kind of end. Off ended.

Off handed. Often.

Between you and me, I’m pretty sure we’re going to need something stronger than an atomic powered microscope or a Hubble telescope to see it.

Before I go, I place my business card on the table in front of her. Ring finger on the paper rectangle, she slides it back toward me. “You can get ahold of me via telegraph or telepathy,” she says, voice clear and certain.

She’d like to hear from you, too.

Fin.

Works Cited Tharp, Twyla, with Jesse Kornbluth. The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together.

New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.

Wolf, Bertram D. How Class Collaboration Works. Chicago: The Daily Worker Publishing Company, 1926.

COMPASSIONATE ACTION ENTERPRISES The Jasmine series began in 2007 with the installation and performative work jasmine in winter, followed by the installations jasmine at the castle and to see, without reproach in 2009.

In the fall of 2000, artists Lisa Kaftori and Joan Giroux met in Japan at an international symposium for the arts, the environment and education. That meeting inspired

The kits exhibited in navigating ways were developed for the character Jasmine, an elusive, knowing being, and a conduit for interactive engagement. An astute, creative observer, Jasmine pertains to parallel realities and her experience spans the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. She has been witness to innovation and change as well as periods of emotional and psychological defeat. She remembers deep snow and bitter winters, predictable seasons, a time before the ozone layer was compromised. She worries about rising water levels and wonders who will remain on high ground. She sees poetry and senses music in everything. Jasmine understands silence. She is an interspecies communicator. She has conversations with stones. Jasmine knows the potential of interstices, thresholds—liminal places and states of consciousness.

the founding of Compassionate Action Enterprises, a collaborative creating and promoting art and interaction geared toward environmental ethics, social, political and cultural activism. Using an interdisciplinary team approach, CAE promotes art and activities emphasizing the Earth as humanity’s physical, spiritual and metaphorical common ground. CAE uses art strategies to raise awareness, cultivate connections, encourage understanding and advocate respect for the uniqueness of individuals and the strength of collective cooperation. CAE seeks to raise

The Jasmine navigational kits aid in positioning one’s self in both physical and metaphorical space to encourage new ways of seeing and perceiving. Each device in the kit carries out a singular function for its user: the compass, to identify position, location and destination; the teleidoscope, to focus attention on one’s immediate environs; the magnifying lens, to closely examine; the kaleidoscope, to unify fragments into a whole; and the chain, to measure from point to point. As a symbol of physical and spiritual repair, a large glass mending needle is also included.

awareness and cultivate understanding by developing creative art strategies that address specific issues challenging the future sustainability of our world.

CAE has performed actions in the United States, Europe, Israel and Asia, working with communities and with humble gestures to bring art into the everyday. Lisa Kaftori is a conceptual artist who creates site-specific sculpture and multimedia installations, performances and ecological art. Joan Giroux is an artist, activist and educator who makes multimedia objects, installations and performances.

Both Kaftori and Giroux have exhibited and performed internationally and engaged the public in an interactive participatory way in their work. With CAE, they weave together their individual visions with audience visions.

Compassionate Action Enterprises to see, without reproach, 2009 Photo by Thom O’Connor

LAURA DAVIS PAUL MELVIN HOPKIN A colleague was stressing out about fabricating a complicated custom bracket for a collector who had bought a large piece of her work and wanted to hang it from a sloped ceiling. As she was complaining, I realized that I was more interested in the collectors decorating ideas than the sculpture itself — with the new bracket the piece became site specific. This is what people do. They display. They decorate. This very human impulse is where my fascination with objects comes from — the making of culture and the organizing or decorating of it (and with it). What are the differences between retail display and domestic display? How do the relationships between the objects “sell” the viewer on them? Decorative objects are the jewelry of our home.

I am interested in things that exist out of a social and emotional necessity for ornamental expression. These things are often imbued with sentimentality and personal narrative, thus these objects always had a fragile relationship to art objects. The mantel is where art, design and craft intersect. By collaborating with Paul Melvin Hopkin, this intersection becomes further complicated by his role as curator/decorator. As a producer of these discreet objects I accept that my control over their meaning stops where contextualization begins. Together we seek a truer kind of domestic image full of its complicated contradictions of internalized strife and desperation to meet societal expectations.

Laura Davis is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation that deals with psychological relationships to objects. She holds a MFA from the University of Chicago and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. She has shown nationally at Spaces, Cleveland, Ohio; Gallery 400, Chicago; Evanston Art Center, Evanston, Illinois; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and the Dairy Center for the Arts in Denver, Colorado. Davis has taught in the Art and Design Department at Columbia College Chicago since 2007.

Paul Melvin Hopkin is an artist and curator who works with a wide variety of mediums and approaches in both practices. He received his BFA from Brigham Young University in Ceramics and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was awarded a fellowship for Skowhegan School of Painting and Drawing. He taught foundations courses at the School of the Art Institute from 2000 through 2010.

Laura Davis

He has shown nationally with solo exhibitions at Bona Fide and Bodybuilder and Sportsman in Chicago. In 2009 he established a sole proprietor curatorial project, slow, which has maintained a constant exhibition calendar featuring emerging and mid-career artists.

(left) Laura Davis and Paul Melvin Hopkin Poul Norreklit Argues Only One Side of the Story, 2011 Rosewood and chrome table, pine, aluminum charcoal, steel, rhinestone necklaces, campfire wood, driftwood Photo by Cheng-Yung Kuo

(right) Laura Davis and Paul Melvin Hopkin Fritz Haller Has an Answer for Everything, 2011 Metal USM Haller cart, chain, ceramic, lead, altered book, glass spray foam, paint, steel, brass, earplugs, Nautilus shell, seed beads Photo by Cheng-Yung Kuo

WHITNEY HUBER DELMORE LAZAR Will you carry me? addresses aspects of collaboration, cooperation and co-dependence in the mother/son relationship, focusing specifically on the symbolic role that piggy-back rides, carrying, and being carried has played and continues to play between myself and my now tenyear-old son, Delmore. Video and sound elements present performative carrying actions as well as dialogues generated throughout the development of the work.

Whitney Huber is a spatial and performance artist with a broad background in visual fields, visual thinking and teaching. She received her BFA in Drawing/Painting/ Sculpture from the University of Missouri, an MFA in Sculpture/Art History and an MA in Film History/Theory from Ohio University. She has written on point of view,

While the initial concept and plans regarding formats and choice of media were mine, Delmore and I began this work with no predetermined outcome. We discussed and shared choices regarding the performance — setting, duration, framing, destination — as well as the editing, revising, and presentation of the video and sound elements in the gallery.

dream sequences and gender in cinema. She teaches a variety of courses in studio art/design, art history/theory and interdisciplinary creative practice at Columbia College Chicago. Huber’s work addresses perception, point of view, iconography of gender roles, self-presentation,

The sound elements present our dialogues generated throughout this process. We have combed our respective memories of piggy-backs and carrying as far back as we can both remember, discussed our process of creating the work, and explored larger questions about the nature of collaboration, cooperation, and co-dependence between all mothers and their children, and between the two of us specifically.

interpersonal relationships, social issues, and abuse of power through sculptural objects, costume, installation, single channel video and performative video. Her work has been shown at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, the Columbus Museum of Art, Rosewood Center for the Arts in Dayton, the College of New Rochelle, and Co-Prosperity

Sensitivity to Delmore’s wishes for self-presentation and a respect for any concerns about selfexposure were carefully maintained. The potential for Delmore’s attitude and thinking about this work to change in the near future is also embraced and incorporated. As such, the process of collaboration for this work continues beyond the current exhibition.

Sphere in Chicago.

Delmore Lazar is a highly verbal, creatively gifted thinker and artist who aspires to be an inventor, if not a baseball player. The son of an artist and a creative writer, he has

Will you carry me? continues a line of investigation running through my work that engages autobiography, performance to camera, and interpersonal relationships.

a seemingly endless supply of creative energy. He is particularly attuned to dogs and cats, plays piano, and is nearly an expert on all things Pokemon. He will begin middle

Whitney Huber

Whitney Huber and Delmore Lazar Whitney and Delmore in 2002 Photo courtesy of the artists

school in the fall. This is Lazar’s first professional exhibition.

INDUSTRY OF THE ORDINARY The Narcissism Chair (I Am Beautiful)

Industry of the Ordinary are a collaborative composed of two Art and Design Department faculty members, Adam

Industry of the Ordinary has constructed a Narcissism Chamber in which is placed a single, comfortable chair. Seated, viewers listen to a song, crafted in the Country and Western style, dedicated to narcissism. During the rendition, a live video image of the occupant projects onto the wall inside the chamber. We are interested in the construction of the chamber to appear as a curtained-off area of the kind that one might find in a hospital examining room. For the central element of the piece we are working with two musicians, Elisabeth Blair and Nick Pichet, who set to music a text that they developed which addresses clinical symptoms of narcissistic behavior.

Brooks and Mathew Wilson. They have worked together for eight years. Through sculpture, text, photography, video, and performance, Industry of the Ordinary are dedicated to an exploration and celebration of the customary, the everyday, and the usual. Their emphasis is on challenging pejorative notions of the ordinary and, in doing so, moving beyond the quotidian. In the course of their activities, they often extend this collaboration to engage with other artists and creative individuals.

Industry of the Ordinary Two and Four Heads, 2011 Photo documentation of performances Duration variable

SABINA OTT ALISON RHOADES Mummer Mummer Love Love is an investigation of how identity (particularly the identity of an artist) forms itself through a historicity of artistic artifacts. Seduced, shaken, ripped apart, and made whole by the work of philosophers, poets, composers, painters and our teachers, we learn who we are and how to make our work from what they have left for us. The author is not dead and not singular, but composed of multiple bodies, languages, and artistic influences that conflate and form something the world has never seen. Artists collaborate with history while creating history.

Sabina Ott is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator living in Oak Park, IL. She has exhibited internationally and her work is in numerous museums and public collections. She creates paintings, sculptures, videos and installations that engage notions of pleasure and play.

She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is a professor in the Art and Design Department of Columbia College Chicago.

Embracing this notion of multiplicity, we explore teaching and learning as a collaborative act that includes and extends beyond the traditional teacher student relationship. We met in 2005 when we both came to Columbia College Chicago — Sabina as a professor and Alison her student. Our “collaboration” has evolved over the years.

Alison Rhoades is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working in Chicago, IL. Through painting, sculpture, video, and performance, her work investigates the themes of desire, sexuality, and romanticism. She received her MFA

In Mummer Mummer Love Love, we focus on inspiration as another aspect of the student teacher relationship. When Patti Smith was a teenager, she stole a book of Rimbaud’s poems from a bookstore. He became her muse, guiding her through the darkest times in her life, and the subject of much of her own writing. Mummer Love, a poem written much later in her life, is an homage to Rimbaud the poet, but also a testament to our fascination with the artistic persona. This piece employs Mummer Love as a field of formal and conceptual investigations.

We insert ourselves into the relationship between Patti Smith and Rimbaud, adding ourselves to their trajectory.

(left) Sabina Ott beautiful beautiful beautiful beautiful, 2011 Pigment print, styrofoam, spray enamel, canvas, oil, mirror and spider plant 44 x 44 inches Photo courtesy of the artist

(right) Alison Rhoades Portrait of the I, 2009 Wood, fabric, video camera, red lipstick, apples canvas, television, scissors, leather whip, vanity mirror Performers: Alison Rhoades, Marissa Perel, Archana Kumar, Emily Smith Performance dimensions variable Photo courtesy of the artist

from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Columbia College Chicago. Rhoades’ work has been included in exhibitions nationally and internationally, throughout Chicago and China. She currently teaches video production and media literacy at Community TV Network.

PETRA PROBSTNER MIKLOS P. SIMON GYORGY ORBAN

Petra Probstner currently holds a position of Assistant Professor in Interior Architecture at Columbia College Chicago. She received her MA in Architecture at the WestHungarian University and her BA in interior Design at the Glasgow School of Art. She has worked as an architect and designer in her native Kecskemet, as well as Glasgow, London, Buffalo and Chicago, focusing on experimental spatial design both in built projects as well as award

Ballasy Könyv Ház (The Book House) is a laboratory project that seeks to understand the new marketplace for the written word, the artifacts of books as products, and the impact of the digital format change on the role of the book house/bookstore as the public space for the exchange of goods. The book house was traditionally the marketplace for the goods to be exchanged, purchased, and shared — where the book was the good and the bookseller was the provider — a system that provided an equal balance between supply by the writers and demand by the readers with the book house as the industry broker between.

winning competition entries. Her main interest lies with exploring and manipulating the human experience in the built environment.

Chicago-based artist/designer Miklos P. Simon is a Hungarian-American, an artist and educator born in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary. After four years in the School of the Arts at Pecs (Associate in Ceramic Design and

There are many ways to experience reading materials, yet what must occur first is an exchange, a transference, of the written word to the reader. The roles of the writer and the reader have not changed nor have they decreased, yet the role of the book and the book house/bookstore as the intermediary for the exchange has become obsolete.

Sculpture), and one-year additional study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, he earned a BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA in Sculpture from the University of Notre Dame. Simon is part-time faculty in the Art and Design Department

Our project sets out to use a real life dilemma — how can we still have a physical place, a public marketplace, to browse, read, communicate, and share the impact of reading in a public and in-person experience? Ballasy Könyv Ház is also a laboratory to re-design a book house/book store in downtown Budapest to explore the different ways one can receive/gather/ experience/interact with written information. In our three-person collaboration we bring the industry (Orban), the artistic (Simon), and the design perspective (Probstner) to each problem.

and academic advisor in the Columbia College Chicago Advising Center. He is the recipient of many awards and grants and continues to participate in numerous national, international, group, and solo exhibitions.

Gyorgy Orban is the owner/director of the Raday Konyves Haz in Budapest, Hungary. For over three decades

By breaking down the reading experience into possible “scenarios” the team is determined to find distilled solutions for each type of experience-possibility explored. As these “scenarios” can serve as a set of components from which institutions such as book stores, cafes, public establishments can exist as a marketplace to keep the public interested and involved in reading and experiencing the written word in a shared space.

he has been an industry leader for both private and national cultural institutions for book culture. In 1991, he became the founding member of Balassy Kiado (Book Publishing Company) and ten years later he founded his own inclusive book house. His exhibition record centers on book and book culture while his publishing focuses

Key elements that informed our team are the questions of private versus public experience involving written material, the written material as product, the book house/book store as a space for exhibition and public discourse, and, conversely, the book house/book store as a place for communal private reading. We further venture in considering different types of audiences and the varied intentions of the written word to reconcile the perspectives of our presented designs. During this exhibition the team will present a few of the explored scenarios with sketches, models and full scale mock-ups.

on contemporary literature, particularly Hungarian and Eastern European literature. Since the opening of his center, he has investigated the promotion of reading and its future post-digital revolution as well as the original format of the book as an art object. He is a media commentator and recipient of many awards and cultural distinctions for his work and expertise.

Petra Probstner, Miklos P. Simon, and Gyorgy Orban Anonymous Title unknown (Borders Bookstore: Uptown, Chicago)

EVAN WARD MARY MARTIN GLENN WEXLER Plyforms

Evan Ward / Industrial Designer Having worked in the varying worlds of design including

Our collaborative work stems from banter between the industrial designer, the architecture, and the artist. Industrial designers often work in cross-disciplinary teams, perfecting the design of a product that will be produced in mass production — there is great pressure to ‘get it right’.

Architects work with dozens to hundreds of people to make a single building happen. For both, it can take years to see results of the creative process, and often the results are diminished by economic constraints. Conversely, the artist tends to work alone — more rapidly producing a limited number of unique pieces — in complete control of the results.

corporate product development (Steelcase), product development consulting (Sundberg-Ferar), and design/ manufacturing (IgniteUSA), Ward now runs a boutique design firm called Make 26 where he consults, collaborates, and develops his own products. Ward also teaches product design at as an adjunct at Columbia College Chicago.

Mary Martin / Architect

Designers and architects are often left longing for the immediacy and control of craft, while artists have begun to explore the possibilities of technology and replication. As instigators, we are encouraging further collaboration between disciplines. We seek new directions in the way a product, structure, or work of art can be conceived and expressed.

Having studied at the experimental School of Architecture Umbau in Staunton, Virginia, and Vienna, Austria, Martin received her MA in Architecture at the University of Michigan. She currently designs and develops both residential and commercial buildings at Myefski Architects

As a team consisting of an architect, an artist, and a designer, we are exploring ways in which everyday functional objects can be connected to architectural space and the natural world.

Can the reductive use of technology, materials, forms and images found in architecture, design, and art be combined to achieve a different result?

in Evanston.

Glenn Wexler / Artist Wexler has spent more than twenty years balancing a career as a visual artist, and a career working with

To achieve a purified functionality and expression of materials, we embrace the processes and technologies used by all three disciplines. Our goal is to incorporate elements of hand craftsmanship while opening possibilities for limited production. Subsequently, each piece has its own imperfections and personality.

designers, artists and curators on exhibitions as an on-site graphics/signage installer for The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago. This combined experience has shaped the methods, skills, and aesthetics applied to his artwork.

(left) Evan Ward, Mary Martin, Glenn Wexler Small Vase, 2011 Vase hand-constructed from CNC milled European Birch plywood sections, with poured hot wax inserts and black negative space vessel, wax finish

(top right) Evan Ward, Mary Martin, Glenn Wexler Medium Vase, 2011 Vase hand-constructed from CNC milled European Birch plywood sections, with hand-silkscreened insert and black negative space vessel, wax finish

(bottom right) Evan Ward, Mary Martin, Glenn Wexler Plystool, 2011 Stool hand-constructed from CNC milled European Birch plywood sections with black negative space insert, wax finish

JIM ZIMPEL My work is prodding, and honoring, and also interrogating. My work is about love and the process of getting to know someone. My work is sadness and loss; as the making, experience, and the product acknowledge a lot of history that cannot be changed. In my early twenties, I decided to truly reconnect with my father, to learn about him and the family whose name I share but do not know. I have most recently focused my efforts on George Zimpel, my grandfather, and understand in doing so I use him to access my father. George is an object, subject, and conversation piece for my father and me. I idealize George, and as my relationship opens up with my father, George becomes more and more human; the longer I spend with George, the more human my father becomes. In Hug, for example, a handcrafted, well-used and grease-covered knife block my grandfather fabricated is embraced by the object/extension I created to stand-in for myself. The acquisition of this sentimental object from my grandfather (the knife block he made holds the knives he was given by his deceased best friend), the careful study and reproduction of his fabrication techniques, and his reaction to seeing the interaction between our objects are all part of the work.

Jim Zimpel was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He attended the School of the Art Institute and received his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He will receive his MFA in Sculpture from Bard College Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2011. As a part-time faculty member in the Art and Design Department, Zimpel teaches the workshops Frame and Stretcher, Scale Model Fabrication, and Display Structures for Your Work in addition to courses in 2-D Design, Fundamentals of 3-D Design, and Synthetic Materials for Casting and Fabrication.

Jim Zimpel Hug, 2010 Oak, pine, knives

Gallery Mission The Averill and Bernard Leviton A + D Gallery is part of the Art + Design Department at Columbia College Chicago. The gallery’s mission is to present professional exhibitions and educational programming that encompasses the broadest possible definition of visual art and design. This is a direct reflection of the pedagogical diversity of the Art + Design Department and the vast array of ideas, media, and techniques explored by artists today. The gallery presents emerging and established artists whose work reflects any of the disciplines taught in the department including Fine Arts, Interior Architecture, Illustration, Advertising, Art Direction, Product Design, Graphic Design, and Art History.

Acknowledgements Many thanks to our 2010-2011 A+D Gallery advisory board for their contributions throughout the year and their dedication to this exhibition: Ivan Brunetti, Elizabeth BurkeDain, Julianna Cuevas, Michelle Grabner, Kevin Henry, David Jones, Neysa Page-Leiberman, Amy Mooney, and Richard Zeid. Thanks to Jay Wolke, Chair of the Art + Design Department, and Eliza Nichols, Dean of The School of Fine and Performing Arts, for their support of this project.

The gallery’s primary focus is on process and the development of ideas into art. Exhibitions at A + D Gallery promote understanding of the artistic process by exhibiting works in progress side-by-side with finished pieces; these can be preliminary drafts and sketches, notes and other generative materials an artist may use to process ideas into finished artwork.

Gallery Staff Jennifer Murray, Director, A+D Gallery Julianna Cuevas, Assistant Director, A+D Gallery Megan Ross, Preparator, A+D Gallery

This exhibition is sponsored by the Art + Design Department and The School of Fine and Performing Arts at Columbia College Chicago. This exhibition is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

printed on paper with 10% Post Consumer Content.

Averill And Bernard Leviton A+D Gallery 619 South Wabash Avenue Chicago, ILlinois 60605 312 369 8687 colum.edu/adgallery

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11am – 5pm thursday 11am – 8pm