April 16, 2014

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ ARTS, CULTURE, & POLITICS ¬ THE GAMEST PAPER SOUTH OF ROOSEVELT ¬ SOUTHSIDEWEEKLY.COM ¬ FREE

Learn Hard, Play Hard Two South Side game developers are building a silver age for edugames

WASHINGTON PARK DEVELOPMENT PSALM ONE MODERN ANXIETY PROJECT ONWARD THE BEAST

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2 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

IN CHICAGO A week’s worth of developing stories, odd events, and signs of the times, culled from the desks, inboxes, and wandering eyes of the editors

SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is a newsprint magazine based out of the University of Chicago, for and about the South Side. The Weekly is distributed across the South Side each Wednesday of the academic year.

In fall 2013, the Weekly reformed itself as an independent, student-directed organization.

Previously, the paper was known as the Chicago Weekly.

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Deputy Editor

Bea Malsky Spencer Mcavoy John Gamino

Senior Editors Josh Kovensky, Harrison Smith

Politics Editor Osita Nwanevu Stage & Screen Meaghan Murphy Editor Music Editor Zach Goldhammer Visual Arts Editor Katryce Lassle Education Editor Bess Cohen Online Editor Sharon Lurye Contributing Editors Jake Bittle,

Emma Collins, Jack Nuelle, Rachel Schastok Editor-at-Large Hannah Nyhart Photo Editor Lydia Gorham Illustration Editor Isabel Ochoa Gold Layout Editor Emma Cervantes Senior Writers Ari Feldman, Emily Holland, Patrick Leow, Stephen Urchick Staff Writers Olivia Adams, Christian Belanger, Jon Brozdowski, Cindy Dapogny, Lauren Gurley,

Olivia Dorow Hovland, Olivia Markbreiter, Paige Pendarvis, Arman Sayani Senior Photographer Luke White Staff Photographers Camden Bauchner, Juliet Eldred, Stephanie Koch, Siddhesh Mukerji Staff Illustrators Ellie Mejia, Wei Yi Ow, Hanna Petroski, Maggie Sivit Editorial Intern

Zavier Celimene

Business Manager

Harry Backlund

5706 S. University Ave. Reynolds Club 018 Chicago, IL 60637 SouthSideWeekly.com Send tips, comments, or questions to: editor@southsideweekly.com For advertising inquiries, contact: (773)234-5388 advertising@southsideweekl

Cover from We Are Chicago, an upcoming game from Mike Block and Tony Thornton.

Cash Castle Under pressure (and presumably after more than a few obscenity-laden phone calls) from Rahm, the Department of Transportation has vowed to tighten the reins on how its money gets handled. This promise comes on the heels of a $700,000 embezzlement scam perpetrated, in a turn of events reminiscent of Kafka’s castle, by a “low-level clerk” in the CDOT. The clerk, one Antoinette Chenier, age 50, apparently opened a fake bank account under the name “OEMC Chenier,” —the OEMC standing for “Office of Emergency Management and Cleaning.”

Chenier, unfortunately, appears to be in for it: her case will likely be handled by city comptroller Dan Widawsky. Widawsky’s predecessor, as it happens, is set to pay $3.2 million in restitution for his role in an extensive money-laundering scheme.

Crime doesn’t pay, folks. At least, not forever.

May the Force be With Chicago Filmmaker George Lucas and his wife, Chicago native Mellody Hobson, have given millions of dollars to arts-education programs in the city. Now, because the plan for the Lucas Cultural Arts Museum didn’t work out in San Francisco, Chicago could be the future home of this collection of memorabilia and artwork from the Star Wars’ creator’s galaxy-spanning career.

The museum, which a Lucas spokesjedi says will be “the most interactive museum ever built,” is expected to cost $1 billion of Lucas’s fortune. Compare that to the Obama presidential library which, according to one estimate, will cost $500 million to create. As to Chicago housing the galactic federation archives, Mayor Emanuel has established a task force to submit a formal proposal for the museum. Do or do not, Chicago. There is no try.

Get Along Little Doggie The fields have grown fallow for the Midwest’s postwar cash crop. Following in Chicago’s footsteps, Cook County recently passed a ban on the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits from large-scale professional breeders—commonly known as “puppy mills”—a business that boomed in the wake of post-WWII crop failures.

Back then, the gormless and cornless gave up maize cultivation in favor of puppy and kitten cultivation, often raising them in close, unsanitary quarters. The new legislation means that suburban purveyors of small household pets will have to forgo animals harvested from these mass-breeding establishments for denizens of government shelters, rescue agencies, humane societies, and small federally licensed breeders. While the ban will eliminate large-scale breeders in Cook Country, the Internet remains fertile ground for the unregulated sale of domestic animals.

Losing Local Color Hyde Park lost more than just another brick in a wall last month; it lost a part of its cultural history. In order to make way for the pretentiously-named Vue53 mixed-use construction project on 53rd street, developers demolished the South Side’s last “permission wall,” a space where graffiti artists had been allowed to tag and paint freely since the early nineties. Such spaces give urban artists the room they need to express themselves without running on the wrong side of the law. In an interview with the Hyde Park Herald, one artist said that the wall’s destruction marked, “the end of an era.” In light of the wave of homogenization that’s hit north Hyde Park in recent years, another such oasis of originality is unlikely to spring up again. ¬

IN THIS ISSUE

washington park

a silver age for

smile with your mind

development

edugames

“With the Arts Incubator and Currency Exchange, the UofC is quietly spearheading a new wave of development in Washington Park.”

“This isn’t just a game.

This is not just some fun thing because we wanted to entertain people.”

“He likes best to do portraits of people with the zodiac signs Cancer or Virgo.”

black ink exchange

modern anxiety

“I’ve realized that what I’m most interested in is this ‘inexpensive luxury,’ this luxury of time.”

“I’m always a little nervous about things.”

harrison smith...4

isabel ochoa gold.........14

stephen urchick.................6

josh kovensky.....15

the beast

psalm one

“On opening day, the gallery was crowded with a diverse assortment of people, most of whom seemed unperturbed by the conceptual opacity of the piece.”

“I don’t even want a Bentley, I just want a tour bus.”

louder than a bomb

daniel clowes

kieran mcgonnell

“I always remember just that little couch and being very enthralled by the idea of a community of youth poets in Chicago.”

“So I asked him: ‘Do you miss its ugliness?’ ”

“The self-portrait is abstract and warped, and one can see that it is layers of paint made to compose a face.”

jake bittle................9

christian belanger.............12

emma collins.....11

jack nuelle.........16

isabel ochoa gold.........17

mark hassenfratz.........19

The Art of Development As the University of Chicago increases its holdings in Washington Park, a new café opens under Theaster Gates

BY HARRISON SMITH

I

n the next month—maybe a few weeks more, maybe a few less—Currency Exchange Cafe will open in Washington Park at the site of its namesake, the longclosed Write-on Currency Exchange. The café has high ceilings and beautiful wood floors, and its tables are tiled with white and blue ceramic, Talavera style. Most of its materials are repurposed. A set of doors in the basement were taken from the old Crispus Attucks Elementary building, in Bronzeville, and trim along the basement stairs is taken from the old Currency Exchange itself. This “reuse model,” as café director Eliza Myrie sometimes calls it, is typical of the café’s owner, the artist-planner Theaster Gates. At the Arts Incubator next door, Gates is the director of the University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life Initiative. Last month, the Incubator celebrated its one-year anniversary, and with the addition of Currency Exchange, the UofC is quietly spearheading a new wave of development along the neighborhood’s Garfield Boulevard corridor.

There’s currently very little commercial activity in the corridor, which runs between King Drive and the train tracks just west of the Dan Ryan. The same is true of Washington Park as a whole. According to a 2012 study by the Illinois Department of Public Health, the neighborhood has a commercial vacancy rate of twenty-six percent, the highest in the city. Going west from King Drive, KPC Discount Muffler, Jackson Hewitt Tax Service, 55th Express Maxwell Polish, Jardan Food & Liquor, and Harold’s Chicken are all closed on the south side of the street. Miss Lee’s, McDonald’s, and Ms. Biscuit, all a few blocks further west, are the only restaurants around.

But records show that in March, the UofC acquired 309-315 Garfield, where Jardan Liquor was located, for $1.1 mil4 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

juliet eldred

At Currency Exchange Cafe, soul food, Mexican, and Filipino cuisines will be incorporated into a menu that’s heavy on small plates. lion. That purchase is the latest in a series of Washington Park acquisitions that began with the purchase of the Incubator’s building, in July 2008. For the last six years, the UofC has steadily purchased properties through a private land trust and Lake Park Associates, a holding company for the University’s Commercial Real Estate Operations (CREO). From King Drive to Prairie Avenue, where the Incubator sits, the UofC now owns almost all of the land on the south side of Garfield. On

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

that strip, the only property not owned by the UofC is a city-owned parcel of vacant lots between the Jackson Hewitt and KPC auto shop, both of which are closed. Across the street, on the northwest corner of King and Garfield, the University owns the Citgo gas station and surrounding lots. It also owns almost all of the lots one block to the north, on the southeast corner of King and 54th. (The city owns one small lot on that block, 5413 South Calumet.)

The University has said little about

its plans for development in Washington Park. Currency Exchange, which Gates is running as a for-profit business on a lease from the school, has not been publicized.

When requests for comment were made to CREO and the UofC’s Office of Civic Engagement, which oversees University relationships with the greater South Side, a statement from University spokesperson Calmetta Coleman said that the café “will bring new retail activity to Garfield Boulevard” and will “complement” the Incubator.

WASHINGTON PARK Regarding specific plans for the school’s properties in the corridor, Coleman wrote, “The University hopes to continue to be a partner in the cultural growth of Washington Park and looks forward to working with the alderman and local community to explore options for other University-owned property on Garfield Boulevard.”

Though Coleman did not say what other developments might be in the works, Lee Bey, who manages strategic initiatives at the Incubator, says that Arts and Public Life has plans to “activate” a vacant lot on Garfield and Prairie, just west of the Incubator. Nothing has been confirmed, but Lee says the lot, which is currently owned by the city, may be home to an outdoor pavilion and function as a community space.

The UofC’s purchases, and its work at the Incubator, have not been well received by activists like Cecilia Butler, who serves as the president of the Washington Park Advisory Council, a resident organization that advocates for responsible development in the neighborhood. “They’ll buy everything that’s available,” says Butler, who feels that the UofC has not been transparent about its plans for Washington Park.

“We don’t need any conquerors. We need somebody that’s going to work with us. The truth is, every improvement—like to an old house—is a good improvement. But I consider them opportunists.”

Since the Incubator opened, it has been wary of portraying itself as an outpost of the UofC, plopped down one mile west of campus. “This won’t work if it’s superimposed on the community,” says Bey, a former journalist and architectural consultant who left WBEZ in January to join the Incubator. Change, he believes, must be incremental, and community partnerships are key. He sees the Incubator less as a “university space” than as a “community space,” one that’s able to leverage the resources of a large institution to make things happen. Doing so is, he thinks, part of the UofC’s greater mission. “We tend to think of a university as a large entity that might build stuff in neighborhoods,” he says, “but what a university really is, in a classic sense, is a place where people can come together from various disciplines and do their thing, and learn and exchange and have these moments with each other that outside of the university never would have happened.”

“If this is successful, this building becomes a place where people from all walks can come. It can be University students, it can be the guys who have lived in the neighborhood since 1955, it can be young people getting off the ‘L’ who say, ‘You

know, I usually get off at 87th, I usually get off downtown, but I’m going to get off early to see what this thing is.’ And it helps to stabilize and improve what comes next.

What the university will do here is only fifty percent of what’s exciting about it. You know, how will this shape those buildings across the street, those storefronts across the street?”

Right now, the storefront next door is papered up. Until a “We Are Hiring!” sign was taped up a few days ago, the only evidence that Currency Exchange Cafe was under construction has been a set of new, hanging ceiling lights, barely visible above the storefront’s paper screens when you stand on the other side of Garfield Boulevard. But the café has been moving toward its opening for around a year, says Eliza Myrie, and it’s just a few permits and tweaks away.

Like the Incubator, Currency Exchange is trying to avoid the sense that it is an outsider business, plopped down in the neighborhood. The space decided to take the name of the old Exchange because, Myrie says, it’s already known as the old Currency Exchange building, and “there’s only so many ways that you really need to impose yourself into a neighborhood.” The name, like the physical materials inside the café itself, is repurposed.

Also like the Incubator, Currency Exchange has a strong relationship with the arts. Myrie is an artist herself—from 201112 she was one of Arts and Public Life’s inaugural artists-in-residence, and she later began working directly with Theaster Gates. In the basement, a collection of around 150,000 slides of world art and architecture, donated by the Art Institute, will be available for public viewing. A computer terminal will be available for public use as well. And the café’s chef, Nicholas Jirasek, runs a catering company that pairs food with art events. (He prefers the title “food artist.” “Chef,” he says, is “so overused.”) Here, he’s come up with a small menu that will blend soul food, Mexican, and Filipino cuisines, and feature a blueplate special—priced under $10—with rotating rices, grains, and beans.

Currency Exchange, Myrie reiterates, is designed to fill various needs in the larger community, one that includes Washington Park residents, UofC students, and anyone who steps off the Green Line platform across the street. It’s also a community that includes a long row of University-owned properties—storefronts and lots that are, for now, boarded up and vacant. APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 5

Learn Hard, Play Hard Two South Side game developers are building a silver age for edugames

BY STEPHEN URCHICK

mike block and tony thornton

I

’m in a Hyde Park Starbucks, hunched over the laptop of game developer Rob Lockhart, trying hard to read the world as computer code. On the screen is a bird’s-eye map of rocky grassland carved up into a hexagonal grid. On one of the grid’s tiles, a pointy-haired wizard sits patiently atop her oversize magical lizard. This is Lockhart’s Codemancer, an educational video game that teaches programming skills by presenting them as magic. Codemancer proudly proclaims itself an “edugame,” and works to teach a specific, recognizable topic. It’s a product of Chicago’s growing independent game-making movement, and belongs to a vanguard of titles attempting reclaim edugaming’s misunderstood role in the industry at large.

6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

Lockhart tutors me from across the table. “You have to chain a few things to get to this target,” he says. “You have to think from her perspective.” He gestures to a panel on the right side of the screen.

In it are recessed tiles, each with etched symbols: one to move the wizard and her mount forward, one to turn them left, one to turn them right. She won’t move with the standard WASD keys; I have to drag and drop these tiles and sequence them into a command for her mount.

Lockhart claims that the game’s magical runes are all roughly one-to-one with the commands of a programming language like Python. To transition to a real programming language, players would just have to substitute his symbols for letters,

numbers, and other characters. “If we can teach you how to play this game, and this game is about programming, then we’ve taught you how to program, essentially,” he says.

Practically every action in the game’s world is governed by special runic configurations. To encourage elaborate spell casting, Lockhart incorporates magic-canceling areas, and intends to provide imperfect information about the game’s world. Players will have to write longer spells to carry them through zones where they can’t cast; “if-then” conditionals will help them when ambushed by enemies.

On the screen, my wizard and her scaly companion wait for me as I tinker with basic forward movement. I start drag-

ging the runes onto the panel’s surface, talking myself through the steps: “So go forward one, turn that way, go forward once—again. Then she needs to straighten out.” I look up at Lockhart. “That would get me where I want to go?”

I want to land on a wooden bull’s-eye, obstructed by several boulders. My onscreen wizarding instructor reminds me that I need to make the move in one spell, with one pattern. I don’t want to flunk. I’m hesitant to cast the spell.

“Try it out,” Lockhart says. “Mistakes are allowed.”

L

ockhart is the head of Important Little Games, an independent studio he founded last June. He lives

EDUGAMES in Hyde Park and works out of a shared space—the Indie City Co-op, in North Center—with several other Chicago-area game developers. Educational games are Lockhart’s specialty. He first encountered edugames as a plot point in Neal Stephenson’s science-fiction novel The Diamond Age, while he was working at Wolfram Alpha, the operator of the question-answering website of the same name. Captivated by the idea of a “singular game that teaches everything,” he jumped ship for Toy Studio—a mobile and social game developer based in Chicago—to cut his teeth on game design. Lockhart volunteered at CICS ChicagoQuest, a design- and technology-focused charter school, with teachers he describes as “in the trenches” of educational game development. (“I really envy them,” he says. “They make a ton—they make, like, two educational games a week, sometimes!”)

The more Lockhart worked, the more he was convinced that games were the right way to go. “I think it would be a good life goal to make a small contribution toward a world in which there are so many educational games, in every topic, at every level, that a player can basically self-select their way through an entire education if they’re so inclined,” he says.

Lockhart recognizes that he has his work cut out for him. Edugames suffered a boom and bust through the mid- to late-nineties, and they’re still recovering.

Earlier titles like The Oregon Trail and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? still draw nostalgic sighs. Their cachet among players, developers, and critics points to a golden age of edugames, before publishers began pushing titles by preying on a common parental worry: their children’s educational deficiencies in an increasingly competitive world. The genre’s quality took a nosedive when player performance and improvement metrics became selling points—edugames didn’t have to be fun, or even effective. “If you put a kid in front of a boring educational game,” Lockhart says, “and they’re still not doing well in school, then—for a parent in this mindset—this is just further proof that they need to get more software.

It becomes a positive-feedback situation.”

Lockhart believes that for a while, edugames were treated like games based on movies, which have traditionally been low-stakes, quick-money obligations for larger studios trying to stay in the black.

“If game developers think that educational games aren’t that good, and they’re forced to make them, they’re not going to give them enough time or money to make them

good.”

Today, the genre’s riddled with holes: many academic subjects lack quality games.

Codemancer deploys the young-adult fiction tropes of a series like His Dark Materials or The Never Ending Story to help bring broader audiences to tougher topics. “People have a lot of sympathy toward this idea of magic as a metaphor for the increased powers of adulthood,” Lockhart says. Whenever he’s asked about the target audience for “Codemancer,” he answers with his own question: “Who’s the audience for Harry Potter?”

Lockhart remains excited by the possibility that edugames will eventually become the province of the flourishing independent games movement. He points to professor-developers like Jesse Schell, who defined an entire genre of “transformational games” and opened his own studio to

when mom commands you to steer clear of a well-meaning but law-defying friend.

Not knowing what to tell gang members when they argue that you belong to the neighborhood and have an almost patriotic duty to defend it. Each choice demands its own measure of everyday heroism.

We Are Chicago, places players in the shoes of Aaron, a teenager about to graduate from an Englewood high school. With only two or three months of work left to go, We Are Chicago hopes to provide what newspapers, broadcasters, and documentaries properly can’t: a first-person perspective of life on the South Side.

“You hear news all the time, but it doesn’t actually explain what’s happening,” says Michael Block, the game’s lead developer. “A game really forces you to be in that situation—it’s a medium that allows the

“A game really forces you to be in that situation— it’s a medium that allows the person who’s playing to have those experiences in an indirect way.” produce them. Lockhart cites the fraternization between MIT’s Education Arcade and GAMBIT Game Lab—what he calls “the indie-game feeder team.”

“I think that this wave of edugames is really promising,” he says. “We’ve learned a lot about how to make games in general.”

H

ard-hitting, decisive moments remain a hallmark of role-playing video games. The challenges posed by We Are Chicago, an upcoming adventure game set in Englewood, aims to match those realm-saving choices, blow for blow. Not knowing how to respond at the dinner table when gunshots ring out in the distance. Not knowing who to side with

person who’s playing to have those experiences in an indirect way.”

Block has teamed up with Tony Thornton, a writer and long-time Englewood resident, to try to do the topic justice. They both freely admit they’re an odd couple.

Block is twenty-six and from Wisconsin.

Thornton is fifty-nine and can remember what the neighborhood was like in the seventies, when he says gangs stopped brawling and started shooting. The two artists are bent on using interactivity to reproduce the experience of daily life in a hard place.

“I hope that people will play the game,” says Thornton, “and have that experience of, ‘Wow. Oh, wow. That’s why that’s like that!’ ”

Block says he’s drawing on the storytelling model established by The Walking Dead, a video game series developed by Telltale Games where players wander the zombie apocalypse, participating in the survivors’ dramas and travails. In We Are Chicago, players have the freedom to explore a meticulously rendered Englewood at will.

But the game still remains narrative-driven and tightly curated. Aaron has to navigate a web of relationships—balancing friends, his mother, a younger sister, and a pack of relatives. The goal is to preserve those bonds until he reaches graduation. Block and Thornton are out to say that in many places on the South Side, succeeding socially is often easier said than done.

“Should I tell the police about my friends? Or should I talk about these things to my mother? How will she react?” Block asks. “There are some situations where you could anger a friend enough that they stop talking to you.”

Minigames will set the mood for certain sections of We Are Chicago. “The goal that we have with minigames,” says Block, “is to get people to feel what the character would feel in that situation.” Block cites recent indie release Cart Life for these mechanics. He explains with the example of a cash-register minigame. If the character is performing monotonous money changing, players should also be performing a similarly demanding but boring task in-game.

The relationship needn’t be strictly oneto-one, but should approximate the task’s oppressiveness.

“It’s forming a bigger connection with the character,” says Block. He goes on to explain Aaron’s thinking at that moment: “Hey, this job is really tedious, but I need to help pay for groceries, and to help pay for school. Because if I don’t—we don’t eat.”

Block emphasizes that We Are Chicago will do work that’s still unusual for the medium. “This isn’t just a game. This is not just some fun thing because we wanted to entertain people.”

Thornton picks up the thought: “It’s a learning experience.”

B

lock and Thornton talk about making We Are Chicago into something more than “just a game.” They’re striving for an anthropological document.

Players will have to converse with an entire community and get to know in order to manage their likes and dislikes. “My challenge,” Thornton says, “is to be true to those characters.”

Thornton brings his writing and life experience to Block’s game-making prac-

APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

EDUGAMES

tice. The kind of language that the character Aaron uses, for instance, isn’t insignificant. “I went through this as a child,” Thornton recalls. He and his brother “spoke the King’s English in our home. But when I was in the street, I had to learn to speak the dialect that didn’t set me apart.”

He’s made sure that distinctions like these find their way into his script. Something as small as forgetting to say grace before a family meal has large implications in the game. “There’s a facet of humanity right there that is completely missed!”

Throughout the development process, Block worked with Thornton to make sure the game was as accurate as possible. “I had originally placed you and your younger sister in the same bedroom. And Tony brought up that that wasn’t an accurate situation,” he says. “If it’s not accurate, and we need to change something, and that takes time—we need to change it!”

Accuracy became more important as Thornton realized that We Are Chicago wasn’t just for people “outside of the experience.” He now believes he has to meet the scrutiny of Englewood itself. He uses the example of writing a word on your hand and holding it so close to your face that you can’t read it; We Are Chicago could provide necessary perspective.

“I would like to see even the people who live in—who languish under—this set of circumstances also come to the game, and see something clearly that they hadn’t seen before,” he says. “I don’t want them to look and say that ‘I’d never say that! I’d never do that!’ I want it to be so real that they would see themselves in it and, maybe, see themselves clearly.”

luke white

rob lockhart

I

ask Rob Lockhart if he thinks that Block’s We Are Chicago qualifies as an edugame. He calls it a “persuasive game,” a concept first proposed by Ian Bogost, a professor and game critic.

“Certain parts about the life of somebody in a low-income area on the South Side of Chicago are...not fun,” says Lockhart. “One of the interesting things about a persuasive game is that you can selectively make parts of it not fun. Purposely.”

Lockhart describes We Are Chicago in the terms of its procedural rhetoric: the messages that developers communicate through the types of play they leverage.

Because “Codemancer,” despite making the demands of a challenging computer science class, needs to win itself an audi-

rob lockhart

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¬ APRIL 16, 2014

ence, it has to also be enjoyable, and offer fun opportunities for play.

We Are Chicago can ironically disrupt that preconception and force players to ask, in Lockhart’s words, “This is not fun—why is this not fun?” He believes that introducing the unpleasant into a game environment can be powerful.

“That knowledge of teaching has bled into the educational game space. That’s a good thing,” says Lockhart. “It’s a difference between the last golden age of educational games and then a dark age.”

He laughs. “And now we’re in the silver age, I think.”

Although We Are Chicago lacks panels of interlocking code tiles, it still aims to teach players about a system—a site-specific package of social norms and frustrating conditions that the nightly news can’t fully capture. Games can approximate experience, in the way that the practice of magic in Codemancer provides an analogy to Python.

Block acknowledges that the game’s story is not “particularly happy.” Aaron’s graduation represents a net good, and there are positive moments—“because everybody has positive experiences in their lives,” he explains. But Block admits that he walks a thin line between alienating his players and stressing to them that people are “working very hard, and being very active in trying to remedy these problems, and get out of the situation that they’re in.”

“But it’s just not always possible, and it’s not easy,” he says.

At the end of the day, Block believes that there’s nothing you can read or watch that can do the same vital work as video games. We Are Chicago intends to teach an ambitious crash course in the messy games people play—not because they want to, but because they have to: with parts of their community, their employers, even their loved ones.

I put the same question to Block and Thornton: Do they think of their project as an educational game? Block feels that edugames carry too much of a particular stereotype for him. He shifts his weight and thinks.

“I don’t necessarily see this as teaching skill. It’s more about expanding your understanding of the world and of your understanding of people—” “Well, if that’s not education,” interrupts Thornton, “then what is?” ¬

VISUAL ART

Looking In, Looking Out Project Onward’s “Smile With Your Mind” at Bridgeport Art Center

BY JAKE BITTLE

W

hen I f irst met Blake Lenoir, he was hesitant to speak to me. After I introduced myself, he looked at me for a long time before tersely telling me his own name, age, and background. Our initial conversation was marked by long pauses and short answers.

But when I asked Blake about his artwork, which he was standing next to at the time, he suddenly became eloquent. Without the slightest pause or stutter, he explained to me why he prefers painting animals to painting human beings.

“Nature inspires me a lot, because I want to explore life beyond mankind,” said Blake. “I want to f ind whatever life exists on this earth other than man.”

One by one, Blake took me through each of his paintings. Some of them were small studies of animals like birds or squirrels, drawn in thick, vivid strokes. Others were large, absorbing woodland scenes brimming with all sorts of colorful wildlife.

“I want to explore the beauty, the abilities, and all sorts of stuff that makes earth great,” he explained.

Blake is one of several artists whose work is being featured in the “Smile With Your Mind: Autobiographies of Autism” gallery at the Bridgeport Art Center. The gallery has been produced and hosted by Project Onward, a Chicago-based organization dedicated to promoting and assisting artists with mental or developmental disabilities.

“We started as a branch of Gallery 37, which is an art program for public high school students,” said Rob Lentz, executive director of Project Onward.

“The time came when some of those artists became too old to participate in Gallery 37, which meant they were coming out of the school system and

entering adulthood. For this particular group of people, we wanted to come up with a way for them to continue making art at the level they were used to.

We didn’t have any grand ambitions, but it’s become something much bigger.”

The organization has been around for a decade now. “Smile With Your Mind,” one of the program’s biggest gallery showings to date, highlights the work of specif ic autistic artists within

with broad, whimsical faces. The faces are out of proportion, but only slightly: the eyes are always big and round, but the heads bulge or get squished in just-noticeable ways.

David Holt f ilters the world of celebrity and pop culture through small portraits painted on cardboard. He prefers to do what he calls “obituaries.” These include Steve Jobs, Philip Seymour Hoffman (“So brief, so brilliant,” is painted on the portrait) and

“I’ve been working on art here for the past couple of years, developing here, in this program. It became a part of me because my life before then, and even until now, I’m just now getting into some structure. I was trying to deal with the lack of structure in my life.”

Pedro Basantes, artist

the program. The purpose of the subtitle “Autobiographies of Autism,” said Lentz, is to help viewers understand that for the artists in Project Onward, art is often a way to express and manifest their inner worlds.

“Getting [one of our artist’s] work all together is sort of like an autobiography,” said Lentz. “It’s a f irst-person account of the things they’re going through and the way they see the world. Art-making is a very clear way to express things they wouldn’t normally be able to express.”

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of George Zuniga, whose studies of cats and dogs are rendered

Koko Taylor. By memorializing these and dozens of other famous people who are signif icant to him, Holt has created a body of work that serves as both a pop-culture library and a personal history. He likes to do portraits of people with the zodiac signs Cancer or Virgo best, and this, perhaps, is why his portrait of Nelson Mandela is so large, and so irresistible.

In addition to highlighting certain autistic artists, “Smile With Your Mind” gave Project Onward’s other artists an opportunity to showcase their work. The entire fourth f loor of the Bridgeport Art Center was full of artists who each had some unique way

of viewing the world.

Take, for example, John Behnke and Andrew Hall, two talented men who employ minute details in vastly different ways. Behnke’s paintings are surrealistic and dream-like, and in many cases indescribable: they feature colorful skies, complicated latticeworks, and enormous blue trees. Behnke described his complicated landscapes as arising from his own inner fears and discomforts. Pointing to a dark hillside scene, he explained how painting such a dreamscape in minute detail helped him conquer a traumatic experience of getting lost in the dark while camping.

Hall’s work, on the other hand, is strikingly, almost obsessively realistic: with just a pen, he recreates urban landmarks in unbelievable detail.

His renderings of a church in Garf ield Park and the Chicago Public Library are so perfect that they seemed, on f irst glance, to be altered or f iltered photographs. When I f irst talked to Hall, he had just sold a piece to an elderly couple. As they walked away, he gave me a f ist bump and proceeded to tell me how he had also been commissioned to create an art installation for the 47th Street Red Line station.

Many of the artists in attendance were emphatic that Project Onward had been an invaluable help to them.

“I’ve been working on art here for the past couple of years, developing here, in this program,” said Pedro Basantes, another artist, said. “It became a part of me because my life before then, and even until now, I’m just now getting into some structure. I was trying to deal with the lack of structure in my life.”

Basantes imbues his paintings of Chicago landmarks with what he senses is the “feeling” of the buildings, at-

APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

elijah alvarado

Ricky Willis, an artist with Project Onward, explains his work to gallerygoers on opening night. tempting to bring spirit and emotion to an inanimate object. He, too, was initially hesitant to introduce himself to me, but on the subject of his art he was verbose and enthusiastic. Pointing at his enormous painting of the John Hancock Center against a deep red sky, Basantes said, “I see tranquility, and a sort of expanse, of just...being alone.

I’d say, loneliness. I do believe there’s emotions behind these objects.”

Basantes, who around his fellow Project Onward members was friendly and warm, did not seem to feel loneliness while he displayed his work that

10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

night. This, it seemed, was the most wonderful thing about Project Onward: not that it gave disabled artists the chance to show their work to the public, but that it gave them the chance to share the act of creation with each other, and gave them the opportunity to express themselves in a way they might never have otherwise done.

The importance of expression was clearest in the work of Louis DeMarco, one of the gallery’s headliners. Much of DeMarco’s work consisted of inspirational phrases painted over cloudy backgrounds. These phrases, arranged

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

in the same way they are on DeMarco’s bedroom wall, seemed to open a window into his thoughts and ideas.

“NEVER BE NEGATIVE ABOUT MUSIC,” one said. “KEEP TRYING, YOU’LL GET IT RIGHT.” “NOBODY IS DOUBTING YOUR SPIRITS.” “SMILE WITH YOUR MIND.” DeMarco’s biggest piece, however, was probably the most telling: “SOME THINGS NEED TO REMAIN A MYSTERY.” The biggest mystery, of course, is what life is actually like for DeMarco and the other artists in Project Onward. This will always remain a

mystery, but the work of these artists is enough to afford us a glimpse into what the world is really like for them. And sometimes, a glimpse can be illuminating enough. ¬

“Smile With Your Mind: Autobiographies of Autism” Project Onward, 1200 W. 35th St. 4th f loor. Through May 24. Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm; third Friday of each month, 11am-9pm.

(773)940-2992. projectonward.org

VISUAL ART

The Belly of “The Beast” John Preus herds community into HPAC

T

here is a giant steer inside the Hyde Park Art Center. Its hulking shape sits curled up in one corner of the room, filling it, and its curved spine grazes the second-floor balcony. It peers with subdued curiosity at entering visitors, its head resting languidly above its haunches. A patchwork of speckled gray carpet padding forms its hide, while a tangled skeleton of blonde plywood planks supports it from within.

But this big, inert mass is not a carcass; the steer is undeniably alive. Children dart in and out of openings in its sides, and the sounds of music and chatter that escape from its belly set it alight with energy from within.

This piece is aptly dubbed “The Beast.”

It is the work of artist John Preus, who led the design and construction of the Dorchester Projects, Archive House and works as the lead fabricator for Theaster Gates. He built “The Beast”—after two years of rumination and ten days of construction—as a community space, looking to historical notions of the steer as something that can be alternately unifying and destructive.

“The initial interest and relation was thinking about sacrifice,” he said, “and that developed into thoughts about all the different ways in which beasts show up in our mythology, about big things that can consume us or take over the world.”

“The Beast” literally consumes its viewers. People can enter its hollow stomach to chat and sip wine beneath a canopy of plywood-and-foam viscera, or climb a set of wooden stairs to explore its throat.

During the unveiling, John Preus’s experimental band played from a corner of the creature’s interior, filling the space with the otherworldly sounds of such inventions as an “amplified bedpost” and a “headboard tongue drum.”

Like these found-object instruments, much of the material that composes “The Beast” is salvaged. Preus found its carpet padding skin in a dumpster near a high-rise that was being rehabilitated, and the smattering of chairs and tables housed within the piece are relics from closed Chicago public schools.

By using these found objects, and by funding the construction of “The Beast” through a Kickstarter campaign, Preus

BY EMMA COLLINS

courtesy of john preus

deliberately engages with his audience and community through his artwork. This is the central aim of “The Beast.” Its most concrete goal is to promote a community-centric idea of art, in which art pieces catalyze interactions between varied groups of people and foster collective experience.

In short, “The Beast” is important not because it is conceptually complex, but because it is an alluring novelty. On opening day, the gallery drew a diverse crowd, most of whom seemed unperturbed by the conceptual opacity of the piece.

“It’s just a really cool design. I liked the idea of it, I liked that it was so crafty.

I’ve never seen something that’s so big and also so interactive. It’s a totally multifunctional art piece,” said Larry, a self-identified “sometimes-artist.”

“It’s a different perspective and scale

than most pieces of art,” noted Ken, a friend of Preus. “I don’t quite get what it’s trying to say,” added his son Soren, “but its impressive at first glance.”

Jada, an elementary school student attending the unveiling with her mother, explained her prior speculation about the piece: “Last week when we came here, my mom said ‘What do you think it’s going to be when there’s the grand opening?’…I said it was going to be a bull, and I guessed right! My mom thought it was going to be an elephant because it had tusks, but I knew it was going to be a bull because the tusks looked like bull’s horns.”

Other viewers, too, expressed a mix of gleeful awe and confusion toward the piece.

They were satisfied simply to experience the absurd creature, to delight in its strangeness.

That they did this together, as a community,

was all that was necessary to make the piece a resounding success.

In the coming weeks, “The Beast” will further engage with the community by hosting a variety of events, including youth art workshops, storytelling competitions, small-scale theatrical performances, and lectures. It may seem contradictory that an ostensibly sinister beast could be home to such festivities, but that’s the point. It isn’t strange that “The Beast” is a success; it’s successful because it’s strange. John Preus, “The Beast.” Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through August 10.

Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

Psalm One (a.k.a. Hologram Kizzie) The Chicago MC on her travels and the evolution of her sound

BY CHRISTIAN BELANGER

M

C Psalm One, born Cristalle Bowen, was raised in Englewood.

After receiving a scholarship to study chemistry at UIC, Bowen earned her degree and began working professionally as a chemist before releasing her first hip-hop album, Bio:Chemistry, for the legendary Minneapolis-based hip-hop label, Rhymesayers Entertainment. As Psalm One, Bowen soon earned acclaim as the “first lady of Rhymesayers,” inspiring a new generation of MCs in the underground hip-hop scene. She’s released a new album, Hug Life, for local Chicago label Bonafyde Media. The South Side Weekly sat down with Bowen at her home in Ukrainian Village to discuss her recent travels, her new album and sound, and the new generation of Englewood MCs. You just finished the Hug Life project about two months ago. Can you talk about that album and the meaning behind the title?

Well, a hug is a mutually beneficial action. A proper hug benefits both parties, so that is kind of how I’m looking at what my music is, it’s gonna benefit both of us, not just me. I think a lot of rappers have a one-sided kind of music. You’ll put your headphones on and listen to it, and it’ll be basically a rapper saying that you’re broke as fuck and aren’t cool enough to hang out with him. But for me, I don’t want to have any parts of that, I want everything to be cool for everyone. That’s kind of the physical part of it.

kari wei

12 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

The acronym is Help Us Grow, so when you purchase Hug Life, you’re basically helping us grow our business, helping us grow our label, helping us put out better videos, helping us grow life. I mean, we don’t live posh or anything, but we’ve got

some Netflix going.

After releasing some of your earlier records on Rhymesayers, you’re putting out Hug Life on Bonafyde Media in Chicago. How did that transition come about?

Bonafyde’s been showing me love and support for years now.

I actually lived in San Francisco for two years, and when I came back to Chicago, the climate had changed. I released Frequent Flyer in 2006, so coming back home in like 2009 having not really released anything, people thought I was dead or something. I was actually really involved in the pre-blown up dubstep scene. Spending time in San Francisco, and making so much of that dubstep, taught me how to navigate sounds. I find that EDM and trap are very, very busy-sounding, up-tempo, dance-y music.

Not every rapper can rap over it. There’s really nuances that happen in the beat,

MUSIC and you really have to understand when to go hard, when to fall back, and those are just skill sets that come with wisdom and training and experience. I’ve always been an MC who trains to rap on different cadences and different tempos. I’m very much a student of voice and rhythm.

A lot of those [EDM-influenced sounds] show up now in Hug Life. But basically I made this music and gave it to Rhymesayers, and they were kind of like, “What the hell is this?”

They didn’t know what to do with the sound.

Rhymesayers is very traditional, very sincere, kind of that blue-collar sound. The sound that I was presenting was definitely not something they could have done anything with successfully without changing a bunch of things.

I think it’s stayed the same, and I think you know what the same is. We’re not appreciated as much as men are, period.

I didn’t have anyone to look up to either.

When I was in school, I found Jean Grae on a whim. My whole world was blown.

Every time I run into Jean Grae, I tell her, “You never read that letter I wrote you in college.” I wrote her a straight-up letter and emailed it to her because I found her contact. She never got it, but she was the only one I actually looked up to because she was doing it and wasn’t this super overtly sexual act. She was just rapping about life and shit. To me that was really cool. Sometimes I really feel like quitting

“A hug is a mutually beneficial action. A proper hug benefits both parties, so that is kind of how I’m looking at what my music is.”

Half of the songs on Hug Life are songs that Rhymesayers rejected and that I sat on for a long time. Then I realized that just because they don’t know what to do with this music doesn’t mean the world won’t know what to do. There was a point where I was ashamed that I wasn’t putting out the music that they were looking for.

What the fuck do I have to be ashamed for? They have a certain thing they’re looking for, I wasn’t doing that. So what?

There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and I had a pretty bossed-up contract that stated I can do other things. I wasn’t locked down by Rhymesayers, but I was locked down mentally by what being on Rhymesayers meant. I had to come up from that, and that’s a huge part of what Hug Life is about.

Do you think the role of women in hiphop has changed recently? How do you feel about female hip-hop fans still not having many figures to look up to onstage?

and I know that I can’t because I do stuff not just for the kids, but I think that I really am a voice that isn’t represented. Not only being a woman, but just the kind of woman that I am.

You don’t hear a ton of women’s stories.

I’m not the most complex person, but I do have a lot of different experiences, so I try to keep that in my music, because I never know who’s listening and there may be some little kid or young man or woman who’s never heard that before and I’m providing it.

For girls who were in the position you were growing up, what would you want them to take out of your experience?

I would want them to know the older you are, the more offended you’re gonna get. If you’re bringing yourself up to be a respectable member of society, as a woman, as you get older and older you’re going to be more and more offended by the dumb rap

Annotated Track Picks COMPILED BY ZACH GOLDHAMMER

As Psalm One transitions into her Hologram Kizzie persona and continues to push toward a new innovative soundscapes, we took some time to pick a few of our favorite tracks from Psalm’s vast back catalogue of albums, mixtapes, and guest features.

1. “A Girl Named You” - Bio: Chemistry II: Esters and Essays (Birthwrite Records, 2004) Two standout tracks from Psalm One’s debut release for Birthwrite Records—a record label managed by Chicago-area producer, Overflo—cemented Psalm’s reputation as a supremely talented lyricist. The opening track, “A Girl Named You” establishes the biographical tone hinted at in the album’s title. Rhyming over an irresistibly bubbly bassline, Psalm initially relates the story of a ten-year-old girl struggling to find a place for spiritual feeling within the organized religious structures of church life. Yet despite the difficulty and complexity of the religious themes, the lyrics never come off as preachy, as Psalm flows melodically over soulful, laid-back claps.

2. “Macaroni and Cheese” - Death of a Frequent Flyer (Rhymesayers Entertainment, 2006) The sixth track from Psalm One’s first album for Rhymesayers remains one of her most popular releases. The song’s long afterlife has been helped by a 2013 video made at Nazareth Academy on the invitation of a student filmmaker, DJ Rybski, who reached out to Psalm over Twitter. Its intro includes a dedication to Deborah’s Place, the largest women’s homeless shelter in the city of Chicago, where Psalm has served as a volunteer. The video’s story picked up a fair amount of press from the Tribune, the Reader and other publications, but independent of the hype the song itself remains a classic. Psalm doesn’t just turn one of the strangest brags in hip-hop (“make a mean bowl of Macaroni and Cheese”) into an anthemic hook, she also complements the line with a searing electric guitar riff finely chopped up by Overflo and filled with shout-outs to three sides of the city. This a song only Psalm could make.

3. CunninLynguists ft. Psalm One & Blu - “The Morning” (Self-released, 2014) Anthony Fantano (from music review vlog “The Needle Drop”) rightfully called out this track for being one of the standouts from the critically acclaimed hip-hop crew, The Cunninglinguists’ latest mixtape. The verse is one of the rawest sonic kiss-off letters to an ex-lover ever recorded. Responding to the call of the ghostly vocal sample whispering “hear I’m standing naked,” Psalm jumps right into the track with the ad-lib “me too” and transforms the song’s initial drawling, narcotized vibe into a full-speed attack that both lashes out at Psalm’s rhetorical partner—the one she claims, “I told I loved / more than music / I was lying”—and critiques her own “angry lover lecture.” With lines like “you calm me with your presence / when you leave me I get reckless / so I’m retching / so hopefully I’m throwing up all these catch-22’s / how could you win when I’m losing me, fool” a careful listener is left in awe not only of Psalm’s metaphorical skill but also her ability to portray an extremely emotional state that fluctuates between love and hate.

APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

MUSIC

shit. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have merit, it just means that you have to work harder to find the good stuff. I don’t want to give up on hip-hop, as much as I want to sometimes. Don’t lose your love for the music.

brand of music, always an awareness of society and a reverence for good and evil, whereas I feel like a lot of the drill music is just, “I do this, my homies do this, we’ll fucking kill you, I’ll kill you,” and it’s great.

You studied chemistry in college. How did that side of your education intersect with your career as a rapper?

If Chief Keef had so much fun in the hood, and it was such a great thing, why do you live out in the ‘burbs now? You have to ask more questions about where these kids are coming from, but when do we cross the line for being responsible and continuing the cycle? There’s only a couple of ways out, but education is a way out, and I’m living proof. People don’t want to do that, it’s easier to skip school and go sell drugs, but is that really easier? I don’t think so.

I’d always wanted to be a scientist since I was six years old. Then I got a scholarship to U of I, and it was a really tough, kind of heartbreaking major, but I became a chemist for a little while, and then I became a rapper. It’s pretty cool, because now doing the stuff I do with the kids, all that education comes back to that.

When I was living in San Francisco, I was randomly tutoring kids in chemistry for extra money, and I was tutoring this one kid in chemistry, and he was like, “Holy shit, are you Psalm One?” And I was like, “What the fuck?” It was like all my worlds are colliding. Education isn’t something that’s touted in rap—educational raps, that sounds corny as hell. I’ve done a couple of raps for schools that are big hits, and kids and teachers remember them. I’m really trying to keep that intersection going, because that’s the kind of stuff that’ll really last way longer than I will.

How do you feel like your work with Rhymeschool and your promotion of the Hug Life mentality relates to someone like Chief Keef or the other drill rappers in Chicago?

I mean, if you’re smart enough to understand the difference between fantasy rap and reality rap. Someone like Chief Keef is perfectly fine to listen to, but if you’re an impressionable youth and you think that Chief Keef is cool, that’s the real issue. I’m not just talking to little black kids or whatever, I’m talking about everybody who doesn’t have the wherewithal to understand that this shit isn’t cool at all.

There’s some drill music I can jam to.

Some of my favorite rappers are street rappers, but usually there’s always been a sort of cautionary tale that goes with that

14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

At Rhymeschool, we were doing raps with these kids, and last summer they all sounded like Chief Keef. And I have to encourage them, but I just wanted to ask them to find someone else to like, but that’s the influence. They’ve grown out of it now, but that’s because Chief Keef isn’t on the radio as much anymore.

In some ways it’s got to be nicer for you to have a smaller, sort of steadier career than to rise to huge fame and then quickly drop down to obscurity again.

I guess. I read a review where someone said, “Psalm One has enjoyed the perks of having a career that’s been at a low boil for years.” It’s better than a simmer, [but] I also think that I’ve been a source of inspiration for a lot of rappers, male or female.

But my goal is not to be this source of inspiration for everyone, not to enjoy the fruits of more success. I work really hard, so it does get frustrating sometimes when you see what the trends are and what is making the most money. But it never was about money to begin with. Chemistry wasn’t too shabby, those checks were good, so if it were about the money I would never have quit my job as a chemist. I don’t even want a Bentley, I just want a tour bus. I want to be able to put out my music when I want, how I want, and not have anybody to answer to. Additional reporting contributed

by Kari Wei.

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

Ink Better Spilled Black Ink Book Exchange prepares to launch at the Incubator

BY ISABEL OCHOA GOLD

S

avannah Wood sifts through crates and crates of books, trying to create a library featuring the works of black authors. She’s surrounded by pots and pots of plants.

Wood is sitting in the Archive House portion of the Dorchester Projects, a formerly-abandoned residence on Dorchester Avenue refurbished to hold a collection of 14,000 books and 60,000 art slides. She works with Theaster Gates’s non-profit Rebuild Foundation, for the library he has commissioned. Today, she’s been joined by the Chicago campaign Group General Economic Exchange (GEEE), which promotes “post-retail neighborly exchange”— in this case, brought potted plants for patrons to trade.

“Here I am, sorting through all these books, and here I am, watching people exchange all these plants,” Wood says.

“Subconsciously, I think these two ideas merged.”

It was while working in the Archive House that Wood first conceived of her project, the Black Ink Book Exchange, which she describes as “not quite a library, not quite a bookstore,” featuring donated books written by or about people of the African diaspora. The book exchange will have its inaugural book swap this Friday in the Washington Park Arts Incubator.

“I joke that this is a sort of [a] selfish project to begin with—really, I just wished I could have greater access to these books,” laughs Wood. “But then I thought that there would also be a wider audience who also would want to have access.”

Wood quickly found this wider audience when she created an Indiegogo campaign in late January. She sent the campaign to family and friends, asking for money for administrative costs. But she also asked, as an alternative, for patrons to instead donate “books that have influenced

them significantly…or just really good books.”

And the really good books came flowing, even from enthusiastic strangers.

“People told other people, circles expanded, I started getting emails, and things just really picked up,” Wood says.

Currently, the book exchange consists of a collection of more than seven hundred books. But soon the collection will morph, as patrons will replace the original books with favorites of their own. Wood wants to maintain the books’ original theme, and she wants people to be thoughtful about what books they bring in to exchange, but she has also decided not to actively curate the growing collection. She’s eager to see what books end up becoming most important to the community. “I’m not going to put my own judgments on their books; I want to honor them.” This summer, the book exchange will also host three workshops at the Incubator, centering on the themes of reading, writing, and making.

Wood likes to spend time with the books in the growing collection. She savors their tangibility. She likes to stop and feel their texture. She admires particularly beautiful covers, which she sometimes documents on her blog.

“I’ve realized that what I’m most interested in is this ‘inexpensive luxury,’ this luxury of time,” said Wood. “Allow yourself a moment of quiet, if you want; make something, if you want; make an hour for yourself. These are luxuries, but they are luxuries I want to encourage people to take advantage of.”

Black Ink Book Exchange. Opens at the Washington Park Arts Incubator, 301 E. Garfield Blvd. Friday, April 18, 6pm-8pm. blackinkbe.com

Disquiet Riot

FILM

Filmmakers panic at the Chicago Art Department

BY JOSH KOVENSKY

T

he anxious folks down at the Chicago Art Department (CAD) in Pilsen chose to channel their fear and trembling into something productive this past Friday. The result was “Modern Anxiety,” an exhibition featuring the filmic musings of local artists on their, and our, existential unease.

Jessica Myers, a resident artist at the CAD, curated the show and exhibited two pieces within it. Myers brims with excitement at the prospect of disturbing people with her work. She found inspiration for the show in everyday life; “I started thinking about anxiety as one of the orienting factors of the human condition,” she said.

“I think it’s a level that people can relate on.”

Myers curated the show to force visitors to experience anxiety, whether or not they normally have to deal with it. “I’m trying to make people uncomfortable with the installation,” she said.

The films were projected both from the center of the gallery space and from the walls across the room, making it nearly impossible to walk around without blocking one of the movies or getting in the way of other spectators. “People don’t know where to stand, where to orient themselves,” said Myers. “They constantly feel like they’re in someone else’s way.”

At first the effect comes off as a little bit cheap, but over time a certain unease begins to take hold. There is no good place to stand, and the only things to look at are unsettling meditations on the emptiness and stress of modern life.

It is the audio performance, however, that may have sent gallery-goers over the edge. A background track, fraught enough to send David Lynch into a catatonic breakdown, plays over the installation. On a stage above the whole spectacle, guitarists take turns sparring with spectators’ psyches by plucking discordant cords and marrow-synthesizing riffs. “I’m always a little nervous about things,” explained Ian Sutherland, one of the musicians.

The ruminations on disquiet in “Modern Anxiety” ran the gamut from abstract

courtesy of the chicago art department

art-house hand-wringers to more concrete mediations on American culture. One featured artist, Lori Felker, woke herself up at three in the morning to film herself speaking about her dreams. The twist is that Felker appears on a CNN-like news set, with a ticker below. As she narrates whatever transpired beyond her mortal coil, images on the screen reflect her dream.

“I love when newscasters show their real personalities,” she said. “I recorded those after the Haitian earthquake, so I would read a ton of news until it seeped into my dreams, so what I’m saying is totally based in reality.”

The effect is unsettling—dream interpretations of the deaths of thousands filter into the spectator’s consciousness. Felker works as an assistant professor at UIC, where she teaches Myers. Myers curates

Felker. Fittingly, to access her work, you have to walk through a knot of structural anxiety, ducking behind the exhibition’s bar to make it to the pile of televisions and sound systems that constitute Felker’s installation.

Another film, “Spider” by Melissa Myser, deals with the artist’s anxiety about death. The film features a close shot of a spindling crochet, created by Myser’s grandmother before her recent death. “It’s me trying to describe how she spins these stories and made these worlds, and how sad it was for her to be gone,” Myser said.

Close up, the thread whips and turns furiously, a textile having a panic attack.

Knowing that the thread’s maker has since died deepens the scene’s unsettling energy.

Generally, the focus on dissonance can seem like a cop-out. Although the

effect really does get under your skin, any kind of error or incongruity can be chalked up to the overall intent of “anxiety.” Beyond that, while the exhibition’s staging certainly does induce anxiety—social and physical—it can feel a little bit forced, and like a distraction from the work itself.

But that kind of dissonance, and the gallery’s perverse will to accept it in all its forms, drags the viewer towards anxiety’s quiet nature. Anxiety doesn’t come from intense focus—it is more consuming and disorienting than that. For some it means an electric overload in the heart, for others a quiet lump in the throat that stops speech, and for others a jittering leg or shaking hand betraying deeper internal chaos. And for Myers and the other folks at CAD, the anxiety won’t go away. ¬

APRIL 16, 2014 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

SPOKEN WORD

Poetry in the Gray City Team InVerse competes in Louder Than a Bomb

BY JACK NUELLE

I

f you hear me, say, ‘Hey oh!’ ” Dominique Chestand shouts, singsong, from the lip of the stage at the Metro in Wrigleyville. The audience, still filing in, delivers the requested exchange. “You are my family!” Chestand continues.

“This is my living room!”

She says this to keep the tone comfortable, to keep the space welcoming, in spite of the words about to be spouted into it.

In a hushed corner of the otherwise booming venue, a group of students gathered to prime those very words. It was the semifinal of the 2014 Louder Than a Bomb (LTAB) slam poetry competition, and members of team InVerse, from the University of Chicago Lab Schools, stood face to face, practicing a group piece.

Suddenly, Chestand called for a representative from each team.

All five current members of InVerse are girls. Their poems are about the struggles of interracial relationships, mental health, and balancing maternal relationships with growing up. They came here for themselves.

Three years ago, a group of Lab School girls showed up without a coach to an all-coaches meeting held at Young Chicago Authors (YCA) in Wicker Park.

There was no formal program at the Lab School at the time. However, they had already acquired all the funding and faculty representation they needed by their own efforts. The girls—led by current senior Leah Barber and former Lab School student Stefania Gomez, who now attends Brown—were looking to mount the final hurdle: finding themselves a coach.

Nina Coomes, a former LTAB participant and a student at the University of Chicago at the time, heard about the Lab School girls’ bold appearance at the YCA meeting from her high school coach, Nora Flanagan. Coomes coached the girls on her own until she pulled in 16 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ APRIL 16, 2014

Natalie Richardson, also a UofC student, this past year.

“I had no intention of coaching,” Coomes said, “but I think they have a really unique team. There’s just something so amazing to me about a group of young people deciding to do something regardless of whether or not they have the structure or the means to do it. It just really worked out.”

Leah Barber, a senior, was part of that group that went to Wicker Park. “I remember it was just this couch and this upstairs apartment,” she says. “And there were people from Whitney Young, people from a bunch of different high schools and they all had like really interesting

names, like code names for each other, and YCA has since grown to be this really powerhouse organization, but I always remember just that little couch and being very enthralled by the idea of a community of youth poets in Chicago.”

Homegrown and self-run, InVerse made slam poetry a creative outlet for the students at the Lab School, a bridge for the arts amid the academics so prominent at the school. The girls had, quite suddenly, built a podium for poetics of their own—one from which they could add their voices to the accelerating trend of slam in Chicago.

L

jack nuelle

ike much of the slam poetry in the competition, the girls’ poems fall mainly on the side of personal struggle, with expositions on societal ills and the larger racial tensions and violence scarring Chicago’s streets.

But slam poetry for Team InVerse is also an exercise in balance. The elite private school has connections to wealth and privilege that almost no other Chicago high school does (Mayor Emanuel sends his kids there). The girls have to balance freedom of expression with an understanding of privilege, community with competition.

Senior Maddy Anderson said, “We’re conscious of our privilege to the extent

COMIX that weren’t not going to get up and do a poem about something that they [other schools] don’t have.”

The team started as a way for high school students to share their voice with Chicago, to join a wide-ranging urban youth community. It’s since become a defining part of these girls’ lives.

Liza Edwards-Levine, a freshman in her first year on the team, speaks to this idea. For her slam is first and foremost “a way of sharing really intimate things about myself in really personal safe closed spaces and being in this super-big, diverse viewing community.”

The act of writing itself also is im-

BY ISABEL OCHOA GOLD

portant. “Any time that you’re able to forge a connection in any kind of way through your art, especially an art that’s so typically closeted,” Barber says, “that’s just a really important thing, especially for youth.”

A

t the Metro, the members of Team InVerse sit close beside one another, fingertips meeting in unison to snap their approval for each competing poet. Team Inverse ends up coming in third, which effectively disqualifies them from advancing further in the competition. There was disappointment, and some questioning of the judge’s

calls. But, “it’s kind of like a saying in LTAB that the competition is a trick or an illusion or ruse,” Barber says, smiling.

On stage, Chestand echoed something similar, “Ready to hear who won this bout?” she bursts out to affirmation from the crowd. “That’s a trick!” She quickly follows up: “Everybody won this bout!”

It’s a sentiment largely shared by the other girls as well. “The competition was no means why I joined LTAB,” Hsee says.

Though she later adds: “But it’s definitely a part of how we practice.”

Says Edwards-Levin: “I have friends who do sports teams and I do want to feel like that this is just as legitimate as that is,

and I think that there is something about that competition aspect that can be motivational and bring some excitement and togetherness to the act of making poetry.” In short, the competition seems necessary. It adds an element of excitement.

But it’s not everything.

Chestand comes back onto the stage and the audience dies down. She surveys the crowd for a moment, and then brings it home. “You haven’t written your first poem,” she says calmly, “until you’ve told your first truth.” ¬

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ARTS CALENDAR VISUAL ARTS Fixation

Combining traditional wall-hangs with prints and digital media, the new exhibition “Fixation” going up at the Zhou B Art Center hopes to hone in on those (titular) titillations in our lives. Curators Sergio Gomez and Didi Menendez have tracked down twenty-four artists and seventeen poets to contribute to their obsessive project.

“Fixation” intends to creep into each artist’s personal preoccupations. It seeks to tease out the ineradicable ideas and clingy concepts driving these artists to the canvas, pushing them to the paper. Resist the urge to suppress those elusive longings. Act on this blurb’s suggestion.

Zhou Brothers Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St. Second floor gallery. April 18-May 11. Monday-Saturday,10am-5pm.

(773)523-0200. zhoubartcenter.com (Stephen Urchick)

The Art of Influence

This fine art exhibition has been curated to feature works of art that—subtly, rather than blatantly—allude to criminal acts that often are accepted and go unpunished around the world, including “honor killing, child marriage, acid attacks, bride burning and more.” Immortalized in artwork, these acts—and the surprising absence of consequences for those who commit them—speak volumes. “The Art of Influence: Breaking Criminal Tradition” promises to amplify the content and spark discourse about the perversion and pervasiveness of unpunished crimes. Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. April 18-May 18. Monday-Friday, 9am-9pm; Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 1pm-4pm. (773)4453838. beverlyartcenter.org (Katryce Lassle)

Judy Hoffman leads a discussion on the “Chicago style” of documentary filmmaking. A core founder of Kartemquin films, Judy Hoffman currently sits on their board of directors and has worked on a wide array of PBS series and feature films. Her credits include Daley: The Last Boss and several Ken Burns documentaries including Jazz and Frank Lloyd Wright. As CNN’s eight-part series Chicagoland winds up, questions of storytelling ethics, documentary styles, and Chicago heroes and villains are bound to linger. Gray Center Lab. 929 E. 60th St. April 17, 4:30pm. (773)834-1936. chicagostudies.uchicago.edu (Meaghan Murphy)

Redmoon

Building on its own tradition of Spectacle theater, Redmoon presents its 2014 show, “Bellboys, Bears and Baggage.” Taking the show indoors this time, Redmoon will transform its massive Pilsen warehouse into a dazzling theatrical world filled with image, dance, music, and one-of-a-kind “encounter scenes.” Conceived by Executive Art Director Jim Lasko and Blake Montgomery, the Spectacle is designed to let audiences wander through the space throughout the night, caught up in Redmoon’s world of revelry and absurdity. The entire experience, based loosely off of elements in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, is sparked by that famously enigmatic stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

Redmoon Theater, 2120 S. Jefferson St. May 18-June 8.

Thursday, 7pm-9pm; Friday-Saturday, 7pm-11pm; Sunday, 6pm-8pm. Audiences enter every half hour. $15-$30.

(312)850-8440. redmoon.org (Meaghan Murphy)

Hyde Park Community Players Present The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet

Artist Ross Sawyers built and subsequently photographed scale replicas of unfinished model homes, (in) complete with holes in the walls and plastic in the windows. The photographs presented in “Model Pictures,” his first major Chicago solo show, highlight current housing and economic crises by way of images of these unfinished and empty new houses. Haunting and uncanny, the model–model homes bridge the surreal and the (unfortunately) real. Unlike life-sized abandoned model homes, though, Sawyer’s models are swiftly destroyed after their insides are documented. Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through June 13. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm.

(773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org (Katryce Lassle)

In fair Hyde Park, where we lay our scene, the Hyde Park Community Players, in collaboration with the UChicago Classical Entertainment Society, will recount the tale of Romeo and Juliet. After an opening weekend at the Experimental Station, the Players will bring the play that we all read in ninth grade and the characters that we all associate with Leo and Claire to life at Ida Noyes Hall.

Directed by Paul Baker and Corinna Christman, with fight choreography by UofC student Eric Shoemaker, this rendition of Shakespeare’s iconic story of starcross’d lovers is not to be missed. For never was a story of more woe, than that of anyone who does not go. The Cloister Club Room at Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th Street.

April 19-April 27.Saturday, 7:30pm; Sunday, 3pm. $10. hydeparkcommunityplayers.org (Bess Cohen)

Imaging/Imagining

Let’s Get Working

Model Pictures

One of three parts of UofC’s “Imaging/Imagining” exhibition, the Smart Museum presents “Imaging/Imagining: The Body as Art.” Curated by UofC physicians, the exhibition explores anatomical representations as art. Selections from a wide range of places and times come together in an exploration of anatomical accuracy and artistic imagination. Parts two and three are the Regenstein Library’s Special Collections show, “Imaging/Imagining: The Body as Text,” and Crerar Library’s show, “Imaging/Imagining: The Body as Data.” Smart Museum of Art, 5550 S. Greenwood Ave. Through June 22.

Tuesday-Wednesday, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Sunday, 10am-5pm. (773)702-0200. smartmuseum.uchicago.edu (Katryce Lassle)

Round Trip Ticket

Ugly Step Sister Art Gallery here presents a two-part exhibition featuring works by Kieran McGonnell, McGonnell’s work has taken the art world by storm, gaining an underground following in Chicago, New York, Ireland, and the further reaches of the galaxy. Three years ago, the artist’s life was cut tragically short. Ugly Step Sister Art Gallery has curated a three-month-long retrospective of the late artist’s works: the current installment features his early paintings, while the next will showcase his later and more widely known works. “Round Trip Ticket” highlights McGonnell’s signature use of serious subjects, oil and watercolor, and vibrant use of color, in order to preserve his legacy. See review on page 19. Ugly Step Sister Art Gallery. 1750 S. Union Ave. Through July 6.

Saturday-Sunday, noon-6pm. Other hours by appointment.

Second installment opening reception Friday, May 9, 6pm10pm. (312)927-7546. uglystepsisterartgallery.com (Mark Hassenfratz)

STAGE & SCREEN Judy Hoffman

Documentary filmmaker, producer, and UofC professor

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¬ APRIL 16, 2014

Studs Terkel, Chicago’s greatest listener, is getting a threeday festival at the UofC—just a few blocks away from its Law School where, he once said in an interview, he spent “the most bleak yet fascinating” years of his life. Terkel, who passed away in 2008 at age ninety-six, was born in New York but spent most of his life giving voice to the lives of ordinary Chicagoans. Instead of practicing law, he worked in radio, where he developed a candid style of interviewing that he would use in oral histories like Division Street, which chronicled 1960s Chicago, and Working, in which—as the book’s subtitle declares—“People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.”

A celebration of Terkel’s life and legacy, the festival will include film screenings, panel discussions, musical performances, and art installations. Confirmed guests include NPR host Ira Glass and journalist Alex Kotlowitz. Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. May 9-11. (773)7022787. studs.uchicago.edu (Harrison Smith)

Saviour?

On the heels of journalist and playwright Esther Armah’s exclamatory “Entitled!” comes a question. Her play “Saviour?,” which makes its Chicago debut at eta Creative Arts Foundation, revolves around a white liberal anti-racism activist who hires a black lawyer to represent him in a case of reverse discrimination. He claims that the nonprofit he worked for promoted a black woman to CEO instead of him due to her race. The dialogue—and, at times, discord—between these two characters explores questions of white privilege and liberal hypocrisy, and works to uproot the notion of a “post-racial” society. “Saviour?” provides a sharp, honest, and timely look at issues of race in America, and is sure to spark a discourse that will extend far beyond the theater’s four walls. eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. Chicago Ave. Through May 11. Friday-Saturday, 8pm; Sunday, 3pm. $30 general admission, $15 for students and seniors. (773)752-3955. etacreativearts.org (Emma Collins)

MUSIC

KID SISTER (with Syd Tha Kid)

Illinois native Melisa Young got her start in 2005 by spitting bars at parties hosted by DJ duo Flosstradamus— one of whom happened to be her older brother. Dubbing herself MC Kid Sister, it was only a matter of time before Jake Young’s little sibling started tearing up the music game entirely on her own. After earning shout-outs from a number of music magazines, in 2007 she eventually released her first single “Pro Nails,” featuring her mentor Kanye West. Later that year, she dropped her critically acclaimed debut album, Ultraviolet. Kid Sister is currently hard at work crafting her sophomore record. With production boosts from DJ A-Trak, Scoop DeVille, and The Neptunes, her sound boasts a rawness that is true to the pillars of the hip-hop genre: a rare and welcome respite from the club-oriented stylings of current mainstream music. Catch Kid Sister, Odd Future and the Internet’s Syd Tha Kid, Angel Davanport, and Mr. E at Reggies this Friday for a night of hip-hop born, raised, and booming right here in Illinois. Reggies Rock Club, 2109 S. State St. Friday, April 18.

Doors at 8:30pm. $12-$15. 18+. (312)949-0120. reggieslive. com (Kari Wei)

Soul Reunion

Take the hippest trip in Chicago on April 19 when Hyde Park Records hosts the first Soul Reunion event of the year.

The event, coinciding with Record Store Day, will feature DJs from Hyde Park’s own WHPK show “The Dustie’s Party” spinning records all day, as well as several live performances from local musical acts. Music will range from the early sixties to the mid eighties, and while soul will be the focus, selections will also run from blues to funk to dance.

There will be free food offered as well as CD giveaways and special deals and prices. And, for a half hour in the early evening, there might even be a Soul Train-inspired line dance. Hyde Park Records, 1377 E. 53rd St. Saturday, April 19, 1pm-10pm. (773)288-6588. hydeparkrecords.com (Jack Nuelle)

Frankie Cosmos

Lo-fi sunny dream pop in a living room? Nineteen-yearold Frankie Cosmos will feel perfectly at home and so should you. On Saturday April 12, Cosmos—whose self-titled debut has been gobbled up by indie music reviewers since its release in January—brings her frank, jangly, confessionals about the small joys, terrors, and tragedies of growing up to Alpha Delta in Hyde Park.

Cosmos, the daughter of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates, provides a unique, youthful perspective, her murky vocals sitting on top of chiming guitars and an insistent three piece drum set. Hosted by 88.5 FM WHPK, Cosmos will be joined by fellow indie-pop artists The Lemons and Richard Album, both from Chicago. Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity House, 5747 S. University Ave. Saturday, April 19, 9pm. Free. 18+. (773)702-8424. (Jack Nuelle)

Simply Elton

Forty-four years ago in 1970, Elton John crossed the pond for his first international tour in support of his second eponymous album, during which he played such venues as Los Angeles’s Troubadour Club and Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre. Even if you weren’t around for the singer’s exuberant and famously extravagant performances of the

all-too-distant seventies, consider this opportunity: Elton John tribute and one-man cover band, Simply Elton, will be bringing classic Elton John back with the first of a pentad of “intimate solo performances” on April 27. Simply Elton is the musical project of classically trained jazz pianist and accompanist Brian Harris, who incidentally (or not so incidentally) looks and sounds a whole lot like the original. For this concert, he’ll be covering John’s self-titled 1970 album, which happens to include some of John’s and lyricist Bernie Taupin’s finer, though underrated, songs, and helped establish the singer’s penchant for bluesy, gospel-inspired piano ditties. Reggies, 2109 S. State St. Sunday, April 27, 7pm. Doors at 6pm. $5. 21+. (312)9490120. reggieslive.com (Jamison Pfeifer)

The Five Elements Project: Water

In celebration of the Chinese Fine Arts Society’s thirtieth anniversary, the Logan Arts Center is hosting “Water,” the first segment of the Five Elements Project. Curated

by Chicago Symphony Orchestra violinist and the Chinese Fine Arts Society’s artist-in-residence Qing Hou, the concert will showcase traditional and contemporary works invoking the element of aqueous natural phenomena. Featuring both traditionally Western instruments like piano, flute, and clarinet, as well as culturally revered Chinese instruments like the pipa, a metallic four-string zither, and the lyrical and fretless erhu, the concert will showcase works by composers Chen Yi, Lei Liang, Bright Sheng, and Liu Wenjin, as well as the world premiere of Huang Ruo’s “Phrases of the Stream.” Logan Center Performance Hall, 915 E. 60th St. Sunday, April 27, 3pm. arts.uchicago.edu. (773)702-2787 (James Kogan)

Brand Nubian

This Memorial Day weekend, one of the most influential hip-hop groups of the 1990s is reuniting at The Shrine.

Its been twenty years since Brand Nubian first released their debut album, One For All, which many critics have praised as being one of the best hip-hop albums of the period. Along with several like-minded hip-hop groups including the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Black Sheep, and A Tribe Called Quest, Brand Nubian became one of the original members of the New York-based Native Tongues collective. As members of the collective, they also helped pioneer the use of the jazz samples and Afrocentric, Nation of Islam-influenced lyricisms which would soon come to define the sound of East Coast alternative hip-hop. The three MCs (Grand Puba, Sadat X [Formerly Derek X], and Lord Jamar) have been pursuing solo careers for the past decade or so. Now, however, they’re holding a reunion concert here in Chicago. This show will probably be a) awesome, b) politically charged, c) nostalgic, and d) free. That’s right: according to The Shrine’s website, the show is free if you “RSVP before 11pm.” So hop on it and get that deal while you still can.

The Shrine, 2109 S. Wabash Ave. Friday, May 23, 9pm.

(312) 753-5700. theshrinechicago.com (Jake Bittle)

WHPK Rock Charts WHPK 88.5 FM is a nonprofit community radio station at the University of Chicago. Once a week the station’s music directors collect a book of playlist logs from their Rock-format DJs, tally up the plays of albums added within the last few months, and rank them according to popularity that week.

Compiled by Rachel Schastok and Charlie Rock Artist / Album / Record Label 1. TacocaT / NVM / Hardly Art 2. The Cunts / Apocalyptic Garage Rock (1978-Onward) / Disturbing 3. Eagulls / Eagulls / Partisan 4. Frankie Cosmos / Zentropy / Double Double Whammy 5. One Star Closer / Another Shape Of Purity / Self-Released 6. YYU / “Kiss As We Walk” / “When We Are Old” / RAMP 7. The People’s Temple / Musical Garden / HoZac 8. OK Sara / Mutt Tracks / Athletic Tapes 9. White Suns / Totem / The Flenser 10. Pure X / Angel / Fat Possum 11. Radar Eyes / Positive Feedback / HoZac 12. Cherry Glazerr / Haxel Princess / Burger 13. Eating Out / Burn / Suicide Squeeze 14. Today’s Hits / Sex Boys / Randy 15. Various Artists / Killed By Deathrock Vol. 1 / Sacred Bones

VISUAL ARTS

courtesy of ugly step sister art gallery

Unbroken Circle Ugly Step Sister remembers Kieran McGonnell with “Round Trip Ticket”

Y

BY MARK HASSENFRATZ

ou can’t talk about Kieran McGonnell without mentioning color. Every painting of his is bursting with vibrancy, producing a kind of crazed energy in the work. McGonnell’s use of watercolor blending technique resembles the style of the famous stained glass art of his native Ireland.

McGonnell was born in Cork, and came to the United States to study studio art and art history at Hunter College, in Manhattan. His career was enormously successful, but cut short due to complications from a tragic head injury he suffered in a fall. McGonnell died in 2011. The retrospective “Round Trip Ticket,” at Pilsen’s Ugly Step Sister Art Gallery, explores the vast array of work he assembled over his twenty-year career.

The retrospective’s title piece was rendered in oil, depicting two koi fish swimming in concentric circles. The koi, depicted in white with red splotches, contrast sharply with the black background. The circles etched into the paint suggest perpetual rotation in a stationary medium. In a statement, McGonnell said that this piece reflects his own attitude about life. The koi fish “continue to circle and orbit the earth, never to come into contact with one another. Th is is a life-affi rming painting that reflects my spirit of optimism,” he wrote.

One of the pieces most indicative of McGonnell’s Irish roots is the watercolor “Celtic Heads.” A dozen disembodied heads stare blankly at the viewer. Although they all have the same basic structure, each

differs in shape and color.

The watercolor “Yellow Diver” is another standout. Composed of only bright yellows and blues, the work portrays a vaguely human figure diving. The brilliance of this piece lies in its blend of colors, its mix of blue and yellow, showing the impact of the diver breaking through the water’s surface. The work has an immense sense of action for such a stationary medium; the breaking of the water is almost violent.

At the gallery, a self-portrait of the artist hangs next to a portrait of his partner, Gregg Driben, in what curator Andrew Ek calls a “double portrait.” The self-portrait is abstract and warped, with layers of paint made to compose a face. The portrait of Driben, on the other hand, is near-photorealistic, creating an interesting contrast in how McGonnell viewed himself and the person closest to him.

The retrospective displays not just a man’s work, but also a man’s life. “Kieran was serious, silly, very intense, animated all in one bundle and I think his work reflects that,” said Driben at the exhibition’s opening night. “His legacy isn’t up to me...but by having his art out in the world, I think it makes a connection with people. Hopefully something great will come of it.” In any event, McGonnell lives on. Kieran McGonnell, “Round Trip Ticket.”

Ugly Step Sister Art Gallery, 1750 S. Union Ave. Through July 6. Saturdays-Sundays, noon-6pm. (312)927-7546. uglystepsisterartgallery.com

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