I have a showing of my artwork at Roots and Culture Gallery this Saturday, 7-10PM. Details are below. You can see the images I’ll be displaying here

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“Malleable Sky”: work by Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Maria Perkovic
Curated by Elizabeth Chodos

featuring work by Noah Berlatsky in the project room

Opening December 1, 2007 7pm- 10pm
at Roots & Culture
1034 n Milwaukee Ave. Chicago, IL 60622

Through Dec. 22nd

How do we remember the places we’ve been? How does our memory play
into the way we imagine the future, and dream of new places? How does
a location, real or imaginary, become a specific place with its own
qualities, abnormalities and idiosyncrasies? Malleable Sky is an
exhibition of work by Lisa Rybovich Cralle and Maria Perkovic that
explores where the boundaries between our internal and external lives
blur and looks at how these two realms can be indistinguishable and
mutually influential.

Cralle’s work explores the problems of recreating a specific place,
her home-state Florida, using various media including collage,
painting and drawing. Her work uses general source material like
pictures of beaches, men in bathing suits, boats and hurricane-sized
clouds, to create a vivid portrait of where she grew up. Cralle’s
collages manage to emphasize a particular place while
de-contextualizing it, showing how memory can be both specific and
placeless, blurring reality and fantasy.

Perkovic’s work de-emphasizes the specific and the real. She builds
and photographs environments made from paper that resemble the modern
city, with its towering buildings designed for speed and efficiency.
While these images are not of any real location they indicate a
particular logic that is specific to a place and time. Unlike Cralle’s
collages with their abundant use of color, Perkovic’s photographs are
various shades of gray. The lack of color in these photographs empties
them from a connection to the real world, and insists on placing them
in an imaginary, desolate, and at times comical, modern utopia.

Using various techniques, these artists show how chance imagery,
fantasy, theory, and memory all influence our understanding and
apprehension of the world. Their work shows how relative experience
can be, and how something as seemingly specific and real as sky is
malleable in our imagination and memory.

The works displayed by Noah Berlatsky were created in response to the
Flaming Fire Illustrated Bible, an online collaborative project
dedicated to illustrating every single verse in the Bible. To this
ambitious effort, Noah has brought a deep lack of religious faith and
an utter inability to create representational drawings. The result is
a series of black and white abstractions which comment, more or less
obscurely, on more or less randomly selected verses. The series is
about mystery, distance, effort and community — trying to respond in
a meaningful way, with limited resources, to a text which is and is
not my own.

Beer made possible by Grolsch.

Programming development at Roots & Culture is partially funded by a
City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs
Community Arts Assistance Program Grant.

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Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center
1034 n Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60622
773-235-8874
www.rootsandculturecac.org
hours: Thurs. & Fri 4:30p-7p, Sat 12p-6p