Montgomery Perry Smith

Could you tell me about yourself and your history in Chicago?

I came to Chicago from Dallas, TX in 2004 to get my BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  I originally planned on studying drawing and painting, but quickly moved to the Fiber and Material Studies department. When I graduated in 2008, I started to get involved with the Harold Arts Residency and have worked closely with them since.

Montgomery Perry Smith

You use a lot of found materials in your work – decorative flowers, glass domes, furniture parts, etc. Where do you hunt for these, and what attracts you to certain items? Do you generally set off knowing what you’re looking for, or do the pieces follow the objects you find?

I find most of my materials at thrift and craft stores. Sometimes I’ll have a specific object to find when I’m making a piece, but a couple pieces have been inspired by the random items I come across. These objects tend to be strange yet familiar, and carry their own loaded history.

Montgomery Perry Smith

Your pieces can be really confrontational, and some (like Soul Searcher or Bottom Feeder) sort of loom in space in a freaky way, but the materials you use and the internal parts also invite up-close interaction. How do you want viewers to engage with your work?

I want viewers to get up close and explore my pieces. Many of them have hidden pockets and crevices that require further inspection.  I like these different layers of exploring; there will always be the photographed image of the piece, but the viewer needs to have their face up in it to fully engage it.

Montgomery Perry Smith, oh honey baby (detail)

Could you describe a piece you’re working on now?

I’m finishing up a piece for the “pit worship” show right now. It has a baby blue pallet and a lot of lace and daisies. It’s very celebratory but sickening at the same time.

Montgomery Perry Smith

If you’d like to see more of Montgomery Perry Smith, check out his new show Pit Worship opening this Saturday, September 11th from 7-11 PM @ Johalla Projects, 1561 N Milwaukee Ave.

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.

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.

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.