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Welcome to our Backyard Artist Images Artist Writings Artist Bios Upcoming events/exhibitions/talks Credit list to all involved & special thanks
WELCOME TO OUR BACKYARD!
A somewhat rectangular, bright green patch neatly fenced in. A luxury of space that is realistically only used a third of the year (for some really great BBQs, to be fair). Taken for granted like many other lawns in the area, its primary function is to give the house a little bit of room from the neighbors. To create the illusion of privacy. These are cultural norms we have created for "lawns” and "yards,” regulated by codes that firmly attempt to direct popular opinion on how public and private space needs to be allocated and whom it should serve. These fenced spaces are occupied to prevent public use. NIMBY invites Chicago artists to activate our backyard in an exploration of public space, community experiences and urban ecology. Created in the Chicagoan tradition of alternative cultural spaces, more specifically the domestic like 6018 North and the Franklin, NIMBY is open as a platform. It is meant to be playful, organic and open to the elements. Some works are ephemeral while others might endure. We don’t necessarily know where it might go… so stop by when the NIMBY banner is hanging (rain or shine). – Margot Mache
Margot Mache margotmache.com Born in Chicago yet raised in the sprawl of suburbia, Margot has a longstanding interest in public space and community engagement. After studying Art History at Boston University – with a particular focus on architecture – she worked for a bout as a research fellow in the Catskills. Since returning to Chicago she has fulfilled different project capacities for the Association of Architecture Organizations and is the current Director of Mongerson Gallery where she has had the opportunity to develop exhibitions on 19th & 20th century American art. Interested in providing alternative artistic platforms (with much respect to other independent spaces in the city) she is the founder and curator of NIMBY.
FOUNDER & CUR ATOR OF NIMBY
ARTIST IMAGES
Jim Duignan Liz Ensz Linda Tegg Andrew Yang
Jim Duignan
Liz Ensz
Linda Tegg
Linda Tegg
Andrew Yang
ARTIST WRITINGS
Jim Duignan Liz Ensz Linda Tegg Zsofi Valyi-Nagy Andrew Yang
See Saw Jim Duignan
The see saw is a symbol of cooperation. This was an ancient vehicle to work out and to immediately establish principles and conditions for our lives alongside someone else. It was and remains a time machine, reminding us of when we could be mindful and present, when play was central to our lives.
The Value of Marginal Space Liz Ensz
In my youth, I spent many weekends with my 17-year elder brother Mark. He was a metal scrapper, creative genius of repair, and my absolute hero. In his roaring white truck we would cruise the alleys of Minneapolis and its northern suburbs and collect metal to cash in at the metal recycling center, North Star Steel. Witnessing this practice was key to my development as an artist, my understanding of material economics, and the value of public spaces and of the objects that occupy them. My brother taught me that any object outside of a fence is begging to be reclaimed and reactivated through a new relationship with a human being, and that value isn’t a fixed condition, but entirely slippery relative to location, quality, quantity, and most importantly – who’s judging. The vernacular of objects in public spaces has shifted drastically since industrialization, and again after WWII, in both scope and sheer abundance. 19th Century urban street trash primarily consisted of organic matter – coal ashes, bones and a few food scraps, dead animals and manure, and small amounts of other materials such as rope and metal. In most cases, there were self-organized local economies that communities depended on for collection and reuse around each of the materials. Scraps of a variety of materials were sorted and saved for trade or given to a poorer family to use.
The institution of systems of mass-production, mass-consumption, and mass-disposal led to a decrease in individuals with skills of material processing and hand-production of objects, and by extension, a loss of the once common knowledge of repair. A person like my brother could see value in an object that can no longer perform its original function. His knowledge of materials and how to manipulate them allowed him to see their value and gave him the ability to imagine the object or its component parts performing another function with some repair or reconfiguration. The possibility of repair or reuse has been designed out of many objects, and this shift toward designed disposability means that our relationships with objects is shorter than ever, just a brief diversion on their journey from the factory to the landfill, although this momentary engagement is the only acknowledgement of them. The common name for objects with no ownership in public space is "trash,� which primarily includes objects that are lost or displaced, in need of repair or otherwise unwanted. The most common objects with short lifespans are single-use containers, the sheer abundance and banality of them defies ownership or accountability of them after our brief encounter with them. Unwanted items and refuse are often the decor of public spaces, or private spaces that are not visibly claimed, occupied, or given enforced borders. Curiously, in a city, this often means that the public life we share with each other is set against a backdrop of this undesigned or uncontrollable phenomenon of marginal objects.
Trash (marginal objects) and acts of entropy are often visible in areas of the urban ecosystem where openings have been created through demolition, blight, abandonment, or simply a lack of specific designed purpose or enforced ownership. An empty lot or oddly shaped concrete embankment can turn into a dumping ground or a playground, a community garden or a fenced emptiness depending on the will of those engaging with the space. Alleys are an interesting site of debatable territory, both a no-man’s-land and an every-man’s-land. They are dynamic multiuse marginal public spaces that can serve as a site for marginal activity, but also for play, a leisurely stroll, material disposal and collection and other underground economies. Alleys are liminal sites of value transitions and transformations- where objects become trash. These marginal spaces and objects are highly dynamic due to a variety of human and non-human factors at play at all times. Elemental forces of nature are actants on all materials, altering and degrading themthis includes, sun, rain, wind, freeze-thaw cycles, animal activity, sedimentation, and seeds of new growth. In addition to the elements, users actively and passively stir the objects in the spaces by harvesting and depositing matter, and by freely changing the rules of engagement and culture of the site based on their presence or absence.
Sites of undesigned public space and undeveloped or unkept private space are also dynamic because the nature of the unvalued is that of infinite potential. These marginal spaces and their often marginal activity tend to exist unregulated or under a self-defined micro-culture of parameters determined by the users (which I find thrilling and important). In this sense, marginal spaces function as sites of absolute anarchic freedom. I see this ever-changing microcosmic self-organized activity, and negotiation of unregulated material economies as the most undervalued part about them.
Breathing Fat Linda Tegg
I’ve lost faith in fundamental processes. My news feed, perpetually populated by new scientific studies, destabilises my comprehension of the way things go. Fragmentary information doesn’t accumulate into understanding, but distrust in how we know. Misconceptions abound and corrections are forthcoming. Occasionally I’ll string a couple of articles together and test the ideas for myself. It’s an embarrassing process as it exposes gaps in my awareness, illuminating processes, often in my own body, that I haven’t quite grasped. When we burn fat, we exhale the mass into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and water.¹ Abstractly, I understand that this breath will manifest in the bodies of plants. I am curious to make this perceptible, so I grow wheat-berries from the supermarket (the seeds most convenient to me) into three terrariums. One hermetically sealed off from the exterior world. Another open to our shared atmosphere. The third in an environment of my exhaled breath. In this homespun experiment it is clear how my exhalations contribute to the form of the plant. The plants that have contributed to the fat on my body are unknown to me. The supermarkets I shop at abstract food from their source so effectively that it is difficult for me to visualize a Quinoa or Garbanzo bean plant. I doubt that a poppy could grow from the poppy seeds on the spice rack. I assume the seeds are genetically modified, processed, corporatized.
¹ R. Meerman, A. J. Brown. "When somebody loses weight, where does the fat go?” BMJ, 2014; 349 Dec16 (13)
Siloed and dormant grains are compliant. They’re traded and circulated according to our needs. We have co-evolved. Tales of migration, survival and piracy unfold as each bean variety reflects a human history. In this way they affirm our place in a world-for- us. The absurd act of breathing so purposefully with the wheat-berries re-oriented my relationship with the grain. I began to see the supermarket as a latent garden, a compression of biodiversity, a plant community. I was curious to see what life could be sparked from within the aisles. The unrealized plant within every grain and legume was a mystery so I attempted to grow the entire bulk section. To un-know these grains as food and understand them as plants, as beings with potential outside of human consumption. For months I have been growing these plants indoors, in galleries, in the studio, spaces I have access to. Grown in modular containers I continually arrange them in into formations that resemble hillsides and valleys. I think about the sense of human prosperity produced by images of rolling green hills. I’ve heard that imagery of greenery alone assists in the recovery of stress and mental fatigue in humans.² Indoors, I struggle to keep the plants alive. Light, soil, water and space are inadequate. I wonder if the seed wishes to become a plant, or if the stability of the silo is preferable. As the plants recede, the illusion of hills gives way to the ecology of the arrangement. The grid of the image’s construction is laid bare.
The plants apply pressure to the buildings they inhabit. They create an environment for insects and mould. Tensions between gnats and my studio neighbours has necessitated that I work within a large plastic enclosure – a bubble. A scaling up of the terrarium I breathed into a year earlier. Many of the plants in NIMBY were sprouted in the plastic enclosure and have spent most of their lives on display in a gallery. Looking back to the terrariums lined up on my windowsill it is clear that the least contained plants were the healthiest. With this move outdoors I hope that survival won’t be such a struggle and the plants can grow on without me.
² M. van den Berg, J. Maas, R. Muller, A. Braun, W. Kaandorp, R.van Lien, M. van Poppel, W. van
Mechelen, A. van den Berg "Autonomic Nervous System Responses to Viewing Green and Built Settings: Differentiating Between Sympathetic and Parasympathetic Activity” Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2015 Dec12 (12)
Species List #9356 Small Red Chilli Beans / #7694 Extra Large Fava Beans / #5254 Black Beans (Turtle Beans) / #9554 Pinto Beans / #5285 Mung Beans #7696 Flageolet Beans / #7751 Pigeon Beans / #7696 Black Garbanzo Beans / #9508 Wild Rice / #5305 Soy Beans #5281 Baby Lima Beans #9561 Fava Beans / #5266 Chickpeas (Garbanzo Beans) / #5272 Dark Red Kidney Beans / #5287 Navy Beans / #7771 Steuben Yellow Eye Beans / #7762 Scarlett Runner Beans / #5259 Cannellini Beans (White Kidney Beans) / #5245 Adzuki Beans / #5268 Great Northern Beans #7474 32 Bean & 8-Vegetable Soup/Chili / #9414 Countrywild Brown Rice Blend / #6217 Olde World Pilaf / #6737 Lundberg’s Wild Blend / #7746 Mayacoba Beans (Canary Beans) / #7699 Jacob’s Cattle Trout Beans / #6489 Christmas Lima Beans / #8476 Tiger Eye Beans #7693 European Soldier Beans / #7723 Petite Golden Lentils / #9441 French Green Lentils / #7592 Brown Lentils / #7722 Petite Crimson Lentils / #9442 Black Lentils / #7720 Ivory White Lentils / #5280 Red Lentils #9439 Large Green Lentils / #7742 Giant Peruvian Lima Beans #5256 Black-eyed Peas / #8285 Raw Pumpkin Seeds (Pepitas) / #5885 Yellow Popcorn / #2355 Heirloom Popcorn Kernels / #7811 Black Barley #5866 Kamut Berries / #5821 Buckwheat Groats / #8446 Kasha #8444 Freekeh / #5812 Barley (Pearled) / #8032 Hard Red Winter Wheat Berries / #9280 Wheat Berries (Soft White Pastry) / #5899 Spelt Berries / #5897 Rye Berries (Whole) / #9434 Brown Flaxseed / #1249 Golden Flax Seeds #3412 Onions / #3399 Garlic / #9902 Yellow Mustard Seed / #1590 Cardamom Pods / #8445 Caraway Seed / #8455 Coriander Seed / #1644 Fenugreek Seed / #2381 Sesame Seeds #6684 Brown Flax Seed / #3638 Poppy Seeds / #6918 Juniper Berries #8462 Fennell Seed / #8454 Cloves / #2897 Annatto Seed / #1849 Peppermill Blend / #8481 Whole Nutmeg / #8882 Allspice Whole
Start Small Zsofi Valyi-Nagy
Start small: miniaturized futures, a model home on borrowed landscapes.
That dreaded brown lawn. Lovely, crackly, brown, beat up. It’s dirty, Daddy, it’s brown, it’s not clean. How are you supposed to avoid it? You’ve got a lot of things stacked against you if you want to keep your lawn clean, Ginger. All these water restrictions and the cost of spraying chemicals. How d’ya fight it? Crystal Beach. Palm Harbor. Good morning, Ginger. This swirling bucket is pumpin’ some extraordinary stuff onto Frank Minuto’s grass. Instant lawn. The kids, when they come home, they’re gonna think I re-sodded. Paint your lawn, plant a palm. Green Lawn Magic. It’s safe around pets, around kids. Can a palm and a lawn coexist? Whose landscape is this, Ginger? You saw the brown lawn a second ago and, uh, welcome to a green world! When you got so many houses for sale, don’t you want your house to stand out from all the others? Lovely, crackly, brown, beat up. Make sure he’s not accidentally spray-painting a tree or something he wasn’t expecting to. I’m glad you addressed that issue. Are you taking care of the neighbor’s house, too? Every time I see you, Grant, you’ve got green on your face. Haha! Yeah, it gets on your duds.
A diorama: vegetation borrowed, resisting. The kids won’t even notice. It’s safe around pets. Your plants are dying. Get ready to cut back on watering because a first time offense will cost you almost two hundred bucks. We are live with some answers on getting that oh-so- green lawn we all want without having to pick up a hose.
Symptoms of (de)extinction Andrew Yang
The symptoms are everywhere, although who would recognize them? Lacking fever or obvious rash, the landscape looks very much as it usually does, just more so: Some buildings where perhaps there were woods; fewer birds or insects of certain kinds, but who is counting. Time is long, life is short, and things are many, so it isn’t easy to feel convinced that we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction on the history of our planet. A blinding flash of light in the sky, shattering boom, and deep impact - that is another story. That is the story of a crater its meteorite, the story of a sudden event. 66-million years ago over 50% of all life on the planet went extinct because of an 11-mile wide meteorite that struck the Earth off the coast of what is now the Yucatán peninsula along the Gulf of Mexico. That impact left a impression: a hole, the Chicxulub crater, that is some 60 to 100 miles wide and created by a force equivalent of one billion atomic bombs set off simultaneously. Once I visited the around the Mexican city of Merida to see the Chichén Itzá ruins – did the Maya know they built their temples inside the crater of a cataclysmic impact? The symptoms are everywhere, that’s why they are so hard to see. In the so-called Anthropocene there is a lot of doom and gloom. It’s the slow violence, not the instantaneous, that we are so worried (or not worried) about. But what if a large an enormous rock were to strike today, one of those over 10,000 "near Earth objects” whose orbits pass so very
close to us? It might be symptomatic of planetary scale extinction, but certainly a kind of de-extinction as well. New forms emerge where the old ones disappeared. At this moment scientists are undertaking a new study and drilling into the Chicxulub crater to learn more about what happened after the last big hit. They want to know if that crater became a unique "cradle of life” in which new species emerged in the shallow seascape it created in the impact’s wake. Early, early on meteorites carried (and still carry) amino acids and other organic molecules essential for the formation of life to Earth, and no doubt to other planets as well. What’s more, almost all the water on our planet - ocean to iceberg - is thought to have been carried on meteorites onto this rocky place we’ve come to call mom, mother Earth. Alas, not just the ingredients, but the aqueous medium of life itself has come by way of violent, extra-terrestrial couriers. Not in my backyard – one hopes (!) – but really, it has already happened. Collision and revision; getting dug out of a hole or getting buried in one; it’s OK, there might not be much of a difference.
ARTIST BIOS
Jim Duignan Liz Ensz Nick Lippert Kelly Reaves Linda Tegg Zsofi Valyi-Nagy Andrew Yang
Jim Duignan jim-duignan.org stockyardinstitute.org Jim Duignan is an artist and teacher who was born and raised in Chicago, he received his BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Duignan has been a faculty member at DePaul University since 1992. Recent publications include, Building a Gang-Proof Suit: An Artistic and Pedagogical Framework, for the Chicago Social Practice History Series, (Eds.) Mary Jane Jacob and Kate Zeller, published University of Chicago Press (2015) and No Longer Interested for the Blade of Grass Foundation (2014). Major exhibitions include the Chicago Cultural Center, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland, Interference Archive, Brooklyn, NYC, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, Kochi-Muziris Biennial, India and the Hull House Museum. Jim Duignan founded the Stockyard Institute as an artist project and small community institute for studio work, community radio and radical pedagogy in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of south Chicago and has continued, since 1995, to orchestrate a range of works and ideas deep inside Chicago communities.
Liz Ensz cargocollective.com/lizensz themonumentquilt.org visitorcenterartistcamp.com Liz Ensz was born in Minnesota to a resourceful family of penny-savers, metal scrappers, and curators of cast-offs. She received her MFA in Fiber & Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work investigates the mass-cultural investment in disposability and the human desire to imagine permanence through emblems, monuments, and commemoration. Ensz has exhibited her textiles and sculpture nationwide, and is engaged in community projects including The Monument Quilt in Baltimore and The Sustainable Practices Symposium at The Visitor Center Artist Camp in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Nick Lippert nicklippert.tumblr.com Nick Lippert grew up on a skateboard near a cornfield outside of Peoria, IL. Boyhood boredom drew him to adrenaline packed activities like thrashing at punk shows and abusing hot rods and motorcycles, but his fascination with design led him to the Art Institutes in Chicago where he studied Interior Design while working as a bicycle courier. Since then, his interests and the diverse skill sets he’s acquired in the real world have developed into a furniture and interiors company, owned and operated solely by him, which focuses on sophisticated, masculine modernism with adrenaline-inducing details.
Kelly Reaves kellyreaves.com Kelly Reaves grew up in condos on the west coast of Florida. As a mostly-only child, she spent most of her time drawing and building sand cities on the beach. In 2003 she moved to Chicago and got a BFA and an MA in New Arts Journalism from SAIC. Her thesis profiled the founders of a local arts organizations and charted the trajectory of artist-run spaces in Chicago. While writing her thesis, she was creating her own cooperative artist-run studio and exhibition project, Peanut Gallery, which operated for four years out of Humboldt Park. Her artistic practice these days focuses on aging and death, but looks sexier than it sounds. Since retiring from bartending, she makes ends meet as an art handler, sprinkled with freelance art writing. Her favorite activity is laying in patches of sunlight.
Linda Tegg lindategg.com Linda Tegg explores the contingent viewing conditions through which we orient ourselves in the world. She was the Samstag Scholar of 2014, The Georges Mora Foundation Fellow of 2012 and has been the recipient of numerous Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Victoria Grants. She has degrees from The University of Melbourne and RMIT University. Recent Solo exhibitions include; cameratrap, Fresh Window Gallery, Brooklyn, 2016; Grasslands, The State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, 2014; Choir, Westspace, Melbourne 2014; Coexistence, MARSO Galleria, Mexico City, 2012. Selected group exhibitions include; Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening, Sector 2337, Chicago, 2105; Don’t Talk to Strangers, Random Institute, Brooklyn, 2014 and NEW13, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2013.
Zsofi Valyi-Nagy zsofivalyinagy.com Zsofi Valyi-Nagy is a ~multihyphenate~ who lives and works just across the McDonald’s parking lot from NIMBY. Her artwork employs projection and nontraditional media to explore perception and memory. As a member of the new media and performance collective Robot Rauschenberg, Zsofi will show new work at Comfort Station here in Logan Square this August. Come fall, she will return to the University of Chicago––where she studied visual arts and linguistics as an undergrad––to pursue a PhD in art history, hoping to focus on art and technology in the Cold War, particularly women artists’ use of holography.
Andrew Yang www.andrewyang.net Andrew Yang is a transdisciplinary artist, scholar, and natural historian exploring the ever-changing matrix of theories, things, and creatures. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, Chicago to Kassel, including recent work for the14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), HKW in Berlin, as well as an upcoming solo show at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. His writing & research appear in journals spanning biology, art, and philosophy, including Biological Theory, Gastronomica, Leonardo, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Philosophy of Science. He holds a PhD in Biology and MFA in Visual Arts and is currently an Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.
UPCOMING EVENTS/EXHIBITIONS/ TA L K S
NIMBY June 4th – NIMBY opening 1-4 pm July 23rd – Liz Ensz metal casting at NIMBY 3pm ELSEWHERE July – Andrew Yang Geomagic, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM July 8th – Liz Ensz Iron Ore Cannot Be Educated Into Gold opening at the Sub-Mission July 26th – Andrew Yang BMO Harris Bank Chicago Works: Andrew Yang, MCA Chicago, Chicago, IL August 5th – Jim Duignan, Andrew Yang (with Christa Donner) Poor and Needy, The Poor Farm, Manawa, WI August 6th – Zsofi Valyi-Nagy Big Huge and Exciting, Comfort Station, Chicago, IL August 14th – Andrew Yang Getting Your Eyes On: Art/Biology Connections (talk), Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA.
CREDIT LIST TO ALL I N V O LV E D & S P E C I A L THANKS
Margot Mache Andrea De La Torre Marcey & Greg Riley Levi Frerichs Tara O’Dell Flo Katzenbach Casey Fee Scott Renfro Jim Duignan Liz Ensz Nick Lippert Kelly Reaves Linda Tegg Zsofi Valyi-Nagy Andrew Yang
Andrea De La Torre cargocollective.com/andreadelatorre Andrea De La Torre is mostly a graphic designer, sometimes a photographer, and always an avid traveler. She is originally from Tucson, but has had the opportunity to live in Mexico City, Paris, London and currently Chicago. Andrea received her BFA with a focus in Visual Communications at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and completed a Graphic Design Program at Central Saint Martins in London. Apart from working as a UX designer and freelancing on the side, she uses her design and artistic background to collaborate with others on self-initiated projects. She enjoys designing to bring people together, to create awareness of the moment, and to generate memorable experiences. Andrea focuses on brand identity, user experience, social and experiential design. ZINE & LOGO DESIGN
see you later,
thanks for stopping by.
SUMMER HOURS Open rain or shine when the nimby banner is up. Running through the summer – Monday to Sunday
SUMMER 2016
SUMMER 2016