If you stopped by the Swimming Pool Project Space booth at NEXT, or if you were lucky enough to catch the landscape | portrait | still life exhibition curated by Philip von Zweck at Hungry Man, or even if you visit Swimming Pool Project Space’s Irving Park location this weekend for their mother’s day show (Mom’s and Mimosas), you may have run or will run into the work of Chicago photographer and SAIC photography professor Heidi Norton. I’d first encountered her work back in the Site Unspecific show at Dominican University’s O’Connor Gallery (mini reviewed here), and last week I was able to get down to visit her studio to toast some mimosas and see what she’s been up to since.

Heidi Norton

Norton’s work runs a few topics and that afternoon there were two main and somewhat separate projects up for viewing. The first was part of what I’d seen at the O’Connor – a series of east-coast travel photos pointing at and nearly recreating traditional photography forms. In one, a conch shell is displayed in front of a beach sunset. The initial cliche beauty masks some irregularities – the horizontal tangents flatten and clamp space, the window’s screen is erased by blown-out light only, and there’s a subtle Filipino manufacturing tag on the – oh, fake – conch itself. These kinds of subtle maneuvers played all through this body of work, with photos facing kitsch at a wrestler’s crouch.

Heidi Norton, Conch Shell and Sunrise

The main work, however, in progress and partially on display at NEXT, was a series of still life photography referred to as New Age Still Life and consisting of shelved photos having just as much to do with painting theory as anything else. The contraption Norton built to make these photos was impressive itself – a series of suspended Plexiglas plates onto which shelves and objects could be placed and shot overlapping in space. The compression of space by this method is so seamless that I would have been a long time in figuring her method outside of this visit.

For example, she’ll use this:

Heidi Norton

To create this:

Heidi Norton, Higher Self

Norton paints plants white to photograph them, and often rephotographs the same plants after they’ve either died from the suffocating white shell or are in the process of sloughing off the paint film like little postmodern parables. Other objects have been being plucked from the basement of her New Age-y parents and make a quiet first-person insertion into this otherwise more formal and critical looking work.

Heidi Norton

Heidi Norton

Its fun stuff. If you’re up for seeing some of the fresh new fruits of this studio labor, check out Heidi Norton this Sunday, May 9th from 1-5PM @ Swimming Pool Project Space, 2858 W. Montrose.

Next Friday the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will open its 2010 MFA Graduate Exhibition. Well timed to coincide with the Artropolis crowds and featuring over one hundred and twenty students completing the school’s MFA program, the event promises to deliver upwards of nine million dollars in tuition worth of art. Of that great big lot is a printer, painter and sculptor by the name of Matt Nichols, and while student workers patched and painted walls in the Sullivan Gallery a few floors above, Matt took me to catch a look at his studio.

Matt Nichols

If you’re in the Loop/loop, you may remember Nichol’s street level installation on Wabash last year, a floor-lit install of bright green felt columns and flush white pyramids built out of the walls. You might have also seen his solo show The Brink at Thrones Gallery, the gallery space ran by Easton Miller, who also sent me Matt’s way after our studio visit last month. Unlike Miller’s basement workshop, Nichol’s studio – one of the many new canvas-curtained cubes on that floor of the building- was about as institutionally placed as they come.

Matt Nichols

Once inside, however, the space got a little more complex. Nichols’ sculptures are naturally disruptive, and even when the content is focused elsewhere chances are a piece will have odd angles, height and scale shifts, and other geometric elements that complicate their environment. Surfaces switch between reflective chrome and gold and silver to dampened felt and matte latex paint, tape, and silkscreen ink.  There’s little middle ground – things are black and white or neon, meticulously fabricated or gloopy or chiseled in with claw hammers.

Matt Nichols

For all the formal fun, the content Nichols described was psychological, analogizing, and representative, which I found surprising more for its rarity in academic art than for any incongruity with the work. In the corner was placed a large trapezium, its surface white felt onto which THE WORRIERS had been fire stenciled with tape and a candle. In parts, the flame had etched through the felt, revealing a chrome surface underneath. Nichols spoke directly about the experience of worry, here subverting popular iconography (in this case, the re-typeset tag from The Warriors) for the subtle switch from fantasy to reality, employing the felt as a material connected to childhood experience and the chrome for adulthood, and the felt’s burning as analogy to the effects of worry slowly eroding the one and revealing the other.

Matt Nichols

The jumps never felt stretched, but it did feel strange to read into work in this way. Instead of using any traditional psychological mythology, Nichols makes his statements through the structure of the art itself, in a way co-opting the language of superficial art analysis/salesmanship and forcing those often inappropriate literalisms onto his viewer. Something like stepping backwards into complexity. Rather than letting a viewer look at a reflective object only as a reflective object and considering its formal utility in a piece, Nichols pushes the mirror’s illusion/escape content by hiding soft work behind it.

Matt Nichols

Rather than letting an elevated and bubbly spray-gold cube just read comfortably as a mock exaltation of minimalism, he references it as a figurative work. Because it looks like a dude, I guess. With a gold cube for a head. Matt tells me its the same height as the tallest man alive.

Matt Nichols

Matt Nichols

Check out these and more from Matt Nichols at the 2010 MFA Graduate Exhibition, which opens Friday, April 30th from 8-10PM @ The Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State Street, 7th floor.

Last Wednesday I buzzed in and up to Easton Miller‘s Ukrainian Village apartment to check out some of his newest work. I’d first seen his paintings in the Fever Dream show up at Roots & Culture, and was pointed his way for a studio visit by Jacob Goudreault, fellow Fever Dream participant and the last artist who’s studio I’d visited. Up the stairs I was greeted by a pair of french bulldogs and a righteous art collection, with (among others) Joel Dean‘s A Red Summer of Love over the couch and Dom Garritano’s One Half-Hour After Sunset in the kitchen, both pieces having once hung at Thrones Gallery, the West Loop space Miller ran from September 2008 to May 2009.

Like Goudreault, Miller is a recent SAIC graduate and part of the emerging group of Chicago artists working on hybridizing painting and sculpture. To Miller, materials matter just as much for their unique structural phenomena as for their interactivity with paint, and the products in his studio looked like an appropriate mix of Home Depot and Utrecht with pond sealer beside raw pigment. Miller talked about all his tools and their uses with equal familiarity, describing in strings of rubbery polys and prenes the arduous kitchen floor processes for rendering the plastic paint for Blue Ribbon (state fair)’s weaved cake crust,  or the painter’s nightmare of covering every interior detail in the foaming shit curls of Decisions.

Downstairs, in a clamp-lit section of his building’s basement appropriated by Miller and friends as extra studio space, Miller showed me some of the pieces he’s preparing for False Anatomies, coming up later this month at LVL3. The two I saw were pretty freaky – big pahoehoe surfaces of some kind of insulation foam, fuzzy with layered shades of black or brown flock, one with three embedded half-closed blood eyes, the other with a caldera socket built to fit a taxidermy eyeball. Though somewhere less than finished, they’re cool to see, hard not to touch, and part of a rapidly evolving body of paintings.  As long as the toxicity of his materials or airborne flock doesn’t pick him off, it’ll be interesting to see where Miller’s work goes to next.

You can Easton Miller‘s work later this month in False Anatomies, opening Saturday, March 20th @ LVL3, or until March 27th in Fever Dream @ Roots & Culture.

I know for a fact that there are brilliant studios with white walls and painted ceilings, glowing with LED panels and humming with tastefully sourceless, low-volume public radio; but for young artists plodding through unfunded gap between undergrad and graduate school, sometimes the studio is wherever you can find it. This week Chicago painter and photographer Jacob Goudreault (acceptably mis-pronounced good-row) invited me to his studio in the western suburb of Winfield, tucked in a tiny and mostly unfinished corner in the basement of his parent’s nice big house. As we went downstairs he gestured to the rest of the basement, sparse and freshly occupied by a pool table and a few boxes. “I used to have this whole space before we put the carpet in.”

Jacob Goudreault

As the most hyper-provisional of the city’s sculptural painters fascinated with shitty materials and gross surfaces, Goudreault’s dim studio makes sense. He points out some of the paints he’s been using, Craftsmart acrylics in aisle ten pinks and greens. A few of his small paintings show the neon paint almost shattered on the surface, a result of the temperature shift between his car and his studio. Bottle caps serve as hanging devices, staple gunned to the back of the scrap-wood blocks he stretches paper and fabric and second hand cashmere over. The work was clever and reveled in its rough edges, a play off of materials and grunge that make me wonder whether the lights were low on purpose.

Jacob Goudreault

Jacob Goudreault

While Goudreault keeps another studio in the West Loop and works on occasion up at the Poor Farm estate, much of his smaller and recent paintings he’s known for are made here in the Winfield space. If you’re looking to see that new work, you’re in luck: most of the paintings are downtown or close to it, currently installed in the Fever Dream group show at Roots and Culture or getting ready for the upcoming Vibrator at Knock Knock Gallery.