David Salkin Creative is a collaborative custom surface design studio that features a featuring a rotating series of thought-provoking presentations that delve into key artistic practices and significant moments in art history. Currently, it showcases Art In Chicago: 1995 – 2025 by Gareth Kaye, which explores the evolution of Chicago’s art scene through ephemera and interviews, offering an evolving narrative of the city’s contemporary art history. This program invites viewers to engage with and contribute to the ongoing dialogue about what defines and sustains art in Chicago. Throughout this presentation and long after its conclusion, Kaye will continue to interview subjects and include the recordings in this program with select interviews being subject to transcription and publication as part of his newsletter, Chicago Spleen. As a critic, he is obliged to pick favorites and to make value judgements, but he also acknowledges that the objects, opinions, and interviews he will be presenting only represent a fragment of Chicago’s past and current art world. As such, the project welcomes commentary on potentially overlooked or underexplored historical narratives and inclusions. This project is dedicated to the memory of Alan Longino, who knew plenty about art and even more about the people who truly love it. Image: David Salkin in his studio with textile samples and an installation by Artist Haynes Riley. Photo by Travis Roozee.

David Salkin Creative

Presenting: Art in Chicago: 1995 – 2025 by Gareth Kaye, which explores the evolution of Chicago’s art scene through ephemera and interviews, offering an evolving narrative of the city’s contemporary art history. This program invites viewers to engage with and contribute to the ongoing dialogue about what defines and sustains art in Chicago. <a href=https://www.instagram.com/chicagospleen/>@chicagospleen</a>&nbsp; And in these rough and farcical mirrors, the struggle to recognize a city.&nbsp; &nbsp;– Lisa Robertson In lieu of a studio practice, this presentation will foreground Kaye’s work as a critic and art historian researching the central thread that has united his work for the past ten years: who and what makes art in Chicago what it is? Presented as an ongoing rotation of select ephemera, public talks and transcribed interviews, Art In Chicago: 1995 – 2025 aims to assemble an itinerant chorus of Chicago’s contemporary art historical narrative.&nbsp; This project is dedicated to the memory of Alan Longino, who knew plenty about art and even more about the people who truly love it.

Art in Chicago 1995-2025

View(s) on/about/viewing:&nbsp;Historically, sculpture has required&nbsp;if not requested&nbsp;a more Formal Approach. Layers of language on material that summate to what is the work doing and why is it doing it? Stilted and cold with marginal if not infinitesimal levels humor has been the norm. Anonymous comparisons for names have not nor will they be spoken because here there is no need. We all have been taught better via our institutions of higher learner, respectively. As a viewer doubt is allowed even encouraged however, only through discourse. One could even venture to say that contemporary sculpture requires a discourse. As the maker contradiction is fine, perfection is not necessary but allowed. These are not rules or suggestion just a Formal Approach.&nbsp;Ari has made what I would refer to as a successful body of work. How is this you may ask?! Location, location, location! Ari keeps a foot in Chicago while moving the other foot briskly about in other spaces thus avoiding our local crab barrel politics. I view this work as a successful experiment that allows room for discussion, humor, and growth. There’s more than a possible duality here. Yet, I certainly hope there’s no labels but for some a label is necessary. And in all fairness labels aren’t a bad thing. But a label could cause these works to possibly forfeit their diplomacy or better yet their neutrality. They (the works) are free, open and jokey. They’re not mired in the Boys Club Culture that can dominate sculpture with an all but admirable willful ignorance. The work will leave you feeling roused from suspended animation and ushered into a world of light and minimal color where there’s enthusiasm sans it’s reference to academia. To put it plainly, despite their attempt…the works remain digestible and serious. The only question is: can you see yourself in them?&nbsp; -Esau McGhee&nbsp;Ari Norris (b. 1995, Muskegon, MI)&nbsp;is an artist primarily working in sculpture; utilizing a variety of processes and materials that generally result in the duplication of real-world objects that aim to explore the boundaries between the ordinary and the phenomenal. Norris received an MA from Northern Illinois University in 2021, and has exhibited solo shows in Chicago at David Salkin Creative, and the PLAN. Norris has been included in exhibitions West, Wester, Westest 4 at Left Field, guest curated by Ryan Travis Christian, Los Osos, CA, Introspective Dream Assembly, at Riverside Arts Center, guest curated by Esau McGhee, Riverside, IL, Shooting Pool with a Rope, at Baby Blue Gallery, Chicago, IL, the Midwest Sculpture Exhibition in Kokomo, IN, and other locations including Michigan, New York, Florida, Texas, and Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.Exhibit Opens Friday, April 12,&nbsp;5-8pm as part of <a href="https://www.gertie.co/aah">Art After Hours</a> during EXPO CHICAGOOpen hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in the 1709 Gallery Building (with DOCUMENT, Western Exhibitions, Volume Gallery, Paris London Hong Kong and Rhona Hoffman Gallery) in&nbsp;West Town, Chicago.

Ari Norris: Just Dust

David Salkin Creative presents a chronicle of the feminist independent publication movement through a selection of historic small-circulation&nbsp;periodicals and supporting literature.&nbsp;Material&nbsp;sampling is centered in the&nbsp;radical ethos of Berkeley,&nbsp;circa 1971,&nbsp;meeting place of the counterculture, women's liberation, human rights, and civil rights movements.&nbsp;Exhibit Opens Friday, January 5th,&nbsp;5-8pm and continues though&nbsp;April 5th. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in the 1709 Gallery Building (with DOCUMENT, Western Exhibitions, Volume Gallery, Paris London Hong Kong and Rhona Hoffman Gallery) in&nbsp;West Town, Chicago. &nbsp;

Winter Reading Room: The Rise of the Feminist Independent Press

David Salkin Creative presents a&nbsp;selection&nbsp;of sketches,&nbsp;exercises, and artworks for&nbsp;surface patterns, textile&nbsp;compositions and prototypical cities.&nbsp;99% of the studio's creative output is produced through the computer, using programs like Photoshop and Illustrator as&nbsp;primary design tools. This installation presents&nbsp;part of the man-made&nbsp;1% –drawings on paper–&nbsp;at the right moment to reflect on&nbsp;the studio's recent output, taking inventory as a means of more clearly understanding the foundations of the design&nbsp;practice&nbsp;and to help formulate what wants/needs to come next. &nbsp;The studio's domain&nbsp;expands into the exhibition&nbsp;space, temporarily interrupting&nbsp;the&nbsp;enriching&nbsp;collaborations&nbsp;of diverse practices that have dealt&nbsp;with pressing issues and new ways of working, and voices that reverberate the time they are in.Exhibit Opens Friday, November 3rd,&nbsp;5-8pm and continues though&nbsp;December. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in the 1709 Gallery Building (with DOCUMENT, Western Exhibitions, Volume Gallery, Paris London Hong Kong and Rhona Hoffman Gallery) in&nbsp;West Town, Chicago.

Drawings

Image Bank&nbsp;(1970-1978) was a project founded by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov (Mr. Peanut) and Gary Lee-Nova as a non-hierarchical, decentralized network and archive of artists, images, and ideas –freely exchanged through the international postal system– that operated outside the&nbsp;existing environment of galleries and museums. Image Bank collaborated closely with the trio General Idea (Toronto), and other like-minded networkers including Robert&nbsp;Filliou,&nbsp;Ant Farm, and Ray Johnson’s&nbsp;New York Correspondence School,&nbsp;who were optimistic in forming their own art-world ecologies.&nbsp;This network of user-generated content, which fostered queer, costumed, campy, and ironic personas, provided a model for the connected-but-impersonal mediascape that serves as the primary distribution medium for many artists today. In 1971, Morris and Trasov invited artists to sent postcards for the&nbsp;The Image Bank Postcard Show,&nbsp;curated by Alvin&nbsp;Balkind,&nbsp;at the Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, to celebrate to 100th anniversary of the picture postcard. Joseph Beuys, George Brecht, Sol Lewitt, Lucy Lippard, Yvonne Rainer, and Ed Ruscha were among the many participants.&nbsp;Image Bank’s archive (renamed the Morris/Trasov Archive) is permanently housed at the&nbsp;Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the&nbsp;University of British Columbia.

Vancouver, 1971: The Image Bank Postcard Show

Oblique Perspective&nbsp;opens and runs parallel to a memorial show at Corbett vs. Dempsey titled&nbsp;<a href="https://www.chicagogallerynews.com/events/thomas-h-kapsalis-nine-decades">Nine Decades</a>, which highlights a single Kapsalis work from each of the decades stretching from 1949 to 2020. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Thomas H. Kapsalis (1925-2022) enjoyed one of the longest running careers in the history of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he was a beloved teacher for more than 50 years.&nbsp; Himself an alum of SAIC, Kapsalis studied with landmark figures such as art historian Kathleen Blackshear and printmaker Vera Berdich.&nbsp; In 1943, the young painter and sculptor graduated from SAIC and was drafted into the U.S. Army less than a year later.&nbsp; As a member of the 106th&nbsp;Infantry,&nbsp;422nd Regiment of the Army, Kapsalis was captured and injured during the Battle of the Bulge; a POW until the end of the war, he then returned to Chicago and entered graduate school at SAIC, taking a few classes at a time.&nbsp; In 1953, he was awarded a Fulbright to travel back to Germany, where he spent a year studying with painter Willi Baumeister.&nbsp;&nbsp; When he landed back in Chicago, Kapsalis became regular faculty at his alma mater, and he eventually went on to teach an astounding number of prospective artists, including most of the future Imagists and many artists from other enclaves with different outlooks than theirs or his.&nbsp; As an artist, Kapsalis was committed to modernism and specifically the mission of abstract art.&nbsp; His teaching, however, was uncommonly inclusive, and among the classes he taught was life drawing, where he proceeded from the kinds of core principles he learned from artist-teachers like Constantine Pougialis, Edmund Giesbert, and Paul Wieghardt.&nbsp; Kapsalis was old school and vanguard, a gentleman professor who was indeed gentle and an abstract thinker who encouraged his students to imagine outside the box.&nbsp; Jim Dempsey, who studied life-drawing multiple times with Kapsalis in the early 1990s, recalls the professor as a calm presence who might hang back until you were struggling and then force you to see the problem differently by turning your composition 90-degrees, even if it was representational.&nbsp; "It was like going to the gym," says Dempsey.&nbsp; "I repeated his class to keep those muscles toned, even though I wasn't the least bit interested in being a figure painter." &nbsp; During his&nbsp;five-decade stint as a teacher at SAIC, Kapsalis created various unique teaching tools, including charts and graphs that introduced basic compositional ideas and color principles.&nbsp; Among these are a small group of color chart paintings that he made at the end of the Vietnam war.&nbsp; After his wartime experience in WWII, Kapsalis had taken a stance against the conflict, and his subtle act of resistance was to eliminate color entirely from his work.&nbsp; As the U.S. started pulling out of Vietnam, he made a series of canvases that superimposed text – names of colors – on top of rectangles of different colors.&nbsp; The exhibition&nbsp;Oblique Perspective&nbsp;will present two of these remarkable paintings, which Kapsalis used as a way of introducing complex color relationships to his students.&nbsp; The show also includes other handmade teaching materials created in the 1960s and '70s, as well as many other pieces of teaching ephemera, such as his individual note cards on decades of students, books of recommendation letters, and even teaching materials he'd copied from his beloved teacher Ms. Blackshear, all drawn from his archives, which, true to Kapsalis's form, were fastidious and complete. – John Corbett&nbsp;Exhibit Opens Friday, June 23 5-8pm and continues though&nbsp;Summer. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message <a href="https://www.instagram.com/davidsalkin/">@DavidSalkin</a> on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in West Town, Chicago.

Thomas H. Kapsalis: Oblique Perspective

David Salkin Creative presents an installation of recent sculptures and architecturally-responsive works by artist and gallerist&nbsp;Haynes Riley.Haynes Riley (b. 1984 North Little Rock, Arkansas) is an artist, curator, designer, and founder of Good Weather. Selected solo exhibitions include An attitude you can wear at TOPS (Memphis), Grand Opening at Brittany (Vallejo, California), and Always at The Hills Esthetic Center (Chicago). He has participated in two-person and group exhibitions at Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills), Sediment (Richmond), Threewalls (Chicago), and The Luminary (St. Louis), among others. Riley has organized exhibitions through various platforms, including&nbsp;<a href="https://davidsalkin.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=b83013cfe9ea00735256a75c3&amp;id=a526a7b88c&amp;e=77f1031618">friendsh.jp</a>, The Bedfellow’s Club, Girl/Boy Gallery (which he founded while participating in the Ox-Bow School of Art Fall Artist Residency), and independently. He has an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and studied at The Mountain School of Arts (MSA^). Riley lives and works between Chicago, Illinois and North Little Rock, Arkansas.Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in West Town, Chicago.

Haynes Riley: An attitude that cares

Collage is the language of desire, a method of communicating an image that is unrealizable in a single plane of vision. The medium relies on a crisis of representation—images cut and pasted on top of one another, the edges of each layer remaining visible upon a disrupted surface. In place of the smooth skin of a photograph, a collage pictures what cannot be recorded in reality. The harmony or discordance of the image is modulated by either accommodating or exploiting like and unlike things.For architect Mies van der Rohe, the preparatory photomontages he created to illustrate the interiors of his spaces following his move to America in the 1930s departed from his aspirations for absolute frontality and flatness. While this process of envisioning the utility of buildings belongs to standard architectural practice, Mies’ collages possessed the influences of the Dada, Constructivist, and De Stijl movements. Among his large-scale compositions, Mies’ design principles unfolded against the aesthetic ethos of Modernism: windows looked out upon fragments of landscape inspired by the experimental films of fellow Chicago émigré László Moholy-Nagy, paintings by avant-garde artists such as Paul Klee and Georges Braque were enlarged to the scale of walls that divided space. Art both infiltrated and inflected Mies’ environments. His collages revealed the genesis of his architecture through the potential of the stage.In artist Assaf Evron’s Collages for Mies van der Rohe (2019–ongoing), a myriad of the Mies’ buildings in and around Chicago have been the subject of his large-scale installations. Exhibited upon the McCormick House, now part of the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Esplanade Apartments on Lakeshore Drive, and S.R. Crown Hall at IIT, each of Evron’s interventions have transformed the architect’s iconic structures through an adapted gesture of photomontage in tangible space. Across each intervention, Mies’ buildings become the support for new, monumental collages in service of Evron’s conceptual project. Wrapping the glass of the buildings’ façades with various friezes of geological sites photographed by the artist—from the Dead Sea to the Vermillion Cliffs in Arizona—the vertical constructions of Mies’ modernist dwellings are imbued with the speculative reflections of other landscapes and other times. In each iteration, the core tenet of Mies’ architecture—transparency—is negated. Windows become a surface you see onto, not through.The tactile experience of Evron’s installations imparts the ghost of a landscape. We see the mirage of a mountain where one would expect to see skyscrapers in the dark mirror of glass, or measure how the blue of the sky either merges or splits with that of the imposed image. The materiality of the artist’s photographs, prehistoric formations and sediments of earth and sand, allude to the very construction of architecture’s raw materials—sand exposed to fire becomes glass, mines formed to excavate metal alter the landscape. Challenging assumptions of place, each installation imparts the visual and physical experience of collage on a grand scale. In the works on paper Evron made in preparation for these installations, on view as part of this exhibition, we imagine their impact on a more intimate scale.Just as mountains and skyscrapers possess the effect of frontality, in Evron’s Collages for Mies van der Rohe, a formal parallel is drawn between what is here and what is elsewhere. Mies fled Germany to arrive in Chicago in 1937. Evron, born in Israel, came to the city in 2010. Both in concept and in installation, collage acts as a metaphor for other articulations of displacement and co-existence: amid periods of time, perspectives, and the migration of bodies upon different geographies. —Stephanie Cristello&nbsp;Assaf Evron: Collages for Mies van der Rohe follows the artist’s installations at the McCormick House (February 16–April 14, 2019), the Esplanade Apartments (September 17–October 1, 2019), and S.R. Crown Hall (August–December 2022). In alignment with the exhibition at David Salkin Creative, the fourth chapter in Evron’s photographic installations will intervene on Mies’ historic glass-boxed travertine marble staircase within the Arts Club of Chicago from January 17–February 23, 2023. The exhibition precedes the forthcoming installation at the Edith Farnsworth House in 2024.&nbsp;Assaf Evron&nbsp;is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Looking at moments along the histories of modernism Evron questions the construction of individual and collective identities, immigration (of people, ideas, images) and the representations of democracy.His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally as The Museum for Contemporary Art in Chicago, Crystal Bridges Museum for American Art and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem among others.&nbsp; Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches.&nbsp;Exhibit Opens Friday, January 6th and continues though April 22, 2022. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in West Town, Chicago.&nbsp;

Assaf Evron: Collages for Mies van der Rohe

In December of 2019, the Pantone Color Institute “Color of the Year” was announced: ‘Classic Blue,’ a choice according to the marketing campaign that evoked a “calm confidence, connection, and a sense of thoughtful stability as we embark on our next decade.” The public naming contest underscores the quintessentially American drive to name, and therefore own, every possible avenue of commodification—the capital conquest of colors included. Thinly disguised as a culturally sensitive, predictive zeitgeist, the hollow ambitions for commerce that lie at the heart of the self-selected competition presents an apt metaphor for the year of 2020 in the United States. Classic Blue: The President on twitter; Classic Blue: cops murdering Black people; Classic Blue: mass graves; Classic Blue: fine people on both sides; Classic Blue: I Can’t Breathe; Classic Blue: face mask culture wars; Classic Blue: “Blue Lives Matter”; Classic Blue: shattered glass; Classic Blue: insurrection. &nbsp;In Chicago-based artist Aron Gent’s (b. 1985) series of recent works on paper, each made over the last year and a half, the unstable and fluid dimensions of politics and time in a year of lockdown and unrest take shape in images that contain references to the Trump administration and the COVID-19 pandemic. Installed in a four by twelve grid along the length of the wall of David Salkin Creative, as well as a diptych, the fifty works on view feature agitprop style text, glyphs, and the iconography of clip art against swirling backdrops made of Epson UltraChrome ink. Reminiscent of the moiré patterns found in the thin-film interference of an oil spill, Gent’s approach to color and form yields to the inherent absorption of commercial-grade printer ink upon watercolor paper. At times, pigments dissipate one another in soft gradients, at others single tones are blocked against negative space like Simon Hantaï pliages. The fluidity and coagulation of colors is also affected by the wetness of the paper before the application of ink—like tie dye (more boundless) vs. ice dye (more exact) processes used for clothing—with various of the images patterned by crystals of salt residue after being steeped in the ocean.While the images contain signals of leisure—such as the access to saltwater from the artist’s trip to Florida, or certain aesthetics shared with the Summer of Love and children’s birthday parties—Gent’s method for creating the works is necessarily itinerant to his full-time positions as a printer and contemporary art dealer. The relationship to labor, evidenced in the choice of Gent’s materials themselves, is one that more closely resembles that of a snapshot photographer. They function like records of everyday life, captured in the interstices. In place of simply sending the picture to print, Gent’s hand dips, sprays, brushes, and blots the ink onto the paper, before often passing the same sheet of paper once dry through the machine itself to inscribe the image. Like double exposures, the works carry their message and medium in two steps.In one of the images, a series of four repetitions of the lowercase ‘covid’ dissolves into captcha font against a desaturated RGB background that appears like the drips that form upon a car window when it rains. In a selection of other works, handless clocks occupy the center of the composition. Time and dates bleed into one another; days of the week become superfluous and collapsed. A pair of eyes stare out or wink from fields of green hues like envy. Three letter Q shapes nest into one another like Russian dolls, as if isolating within themselves. In three of the compositions, a superimposed Pantone square acts as a window; it holds no single color, but an amalgam of inks whose hues are entirely subjective. Amid the pressure to name, market, and sell all experience—even the intangible, like color—Gent’s versions remain disobedient. &nbsp;—Stephanie Cristello&nbsp;Aron Gent Untitled, 2021. Epson UltraChrome ink on paper. 11.25 x 15 inches.Aron Gent (Born 1985) is an artist, gallerist and professional print maker residing in Chicago, IL. He received a degree from Columbia College Chicago and has&nbsp;been a lecturer and educator at the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee institute of Art and Design, the Hyde Park Art Center and Columbia College Chicago.&nbsp;Gent is a co-proprietor of Paris London Hong Kong and founder of the printing/exhibition space DOCUMENT. He serves on the board of the New Art Dealers&nbsp;Association(NADA), the Society for Contemporary Art(SCA)&nbsp;and is a founding/current board member of the ACRE Residency Program.&nbsp;Exhibit Opens Saturday, September 18 and continues though October 30th. Open hours are generally Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm, by appointment. Email or direct message @DavidSalkin on Instagram for more information, and to make an appointment for this show and the other shows at the 1709 W Chicago Avenue gallery building. David Salkin Creative is a custom surface and textile-design studio that hosts a diverse exhibition program, located in West Town, Chicago.&nbsp;&nbsp;

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