Ten x Ten 2017: Dual Practices
September 9th, 2017
Doors at 6pm. Music at 7pm
Ten x Ten prints will be on display in the Audible Gallery at ESS from September 9th-October 18th. Prints will be seen by appointment only. Please contact Adam Vida at adam@ess.org or leave a message at (773) 998-1069 to schedule a visit.
Presented by Spudnik Press, Homeroom, and Experimental Sound Studio
The fifth and most conceptually broad iteration of Ten x Ten, ‘Ten x Ten 2017: Dual Practices’ brings together 10 notable Chicago artists who have robust practices in both visual art and music. By considering questions about boundaries and location, Ten x Ten 2017 will investigate Chicago neighborhood identities, urban change, and comfort in space and place.
Five artist pairs have been collaborating over several months to each create a two-part work that includes a song or audio piece and an 18” x 18” screen print. The results of these partnerships will be released with a concert and gallery exhibition at Experimental Sound Studio on Saturday, September 9th. The artists will perform excerpts from their collaborations and display their prints as well as other work.
Artist interviews and previous Ten x Ten projects can be found at tenxtenchicago.com.
Artist Pair: Melina & Ambrosia
Melina Ausikaitis
Melina Ausikaitis is an artist and musician living in Chicago. She has exhibited and performed at such Chicago venues as Museum of Contemporary Art, Empty Bottle, Regards, The Hideout, and Comfort Station among others. Melina often collaborates with artists and organizations including the Hubbard Street dancer and choreographer Jonathan Fredrickson, curating at Chicago’s Rainbo Club, and performing with a handful of Chicago-based musical projects including the band Joan of Arc.
Ambrosia Bartošekulva
Ambrosia Bartošekulva, mastermind behind the gutteral-etheric sounds of wrtch, is an audiovisual artist currently based in Chicago. Twice institutionalized and likely still dreaming, their voice seems to rise up out of the depths of their belly and vomit forth. Even with this visceral intensity, you can sense the inner workings of Ambrosia’s mind. The name wrtch - which seems to describe their process and presence acutely - is in actuality an homage to their ancestry as Romani or Gypsy. Currently based in Chicago, they are pursuing a BFA at SAIC (expected 2018).
Artist pair: Mark and Deidre
Mark Booth
Mark Booth is an interdisciplinary artist, sound artist, writer, and musician. His is on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work in text, image, and sound explores the material qualities of language, as well as the ways that language functions (and does not function) to describe human experience. Having learned to read and navigate the world as dyslexic, Booth uses his work to make sense of his own disjointed experience with words and meaning. His art is simultaneously grandiose in scope (attempting and failing to describe the entire spectrum of human experience) and comically quotidian.
Deidre Huckabay
Deidre Huckabay is a Chicago-based performer, writer, photographer, and event producer. She is a flutist with degrees from the Eastman School of Music and Duquesne University. Her work reflects a solitary, interior world, drawing on a musical life that requires spending long hours alone and listening. As a flutist, she has extensively toured the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. Deidre performs with the Eastman BroadBand and Manual Cinema, and has recorded for Urtext and Bridge Records. She is co-owner of the experimental cassette tape label Parlour Tapes+ and a regular contributor to Cacophony Magazine.
Artist pair: Cathy and Damon
Cathy Hsiao
Cathy Hsiao was born in New York City and immigrated to Taiwan at the age of three and back to the US after graduating high school in Taichung, Taiwan. She holds a BA from the University of California Berkeley and a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her practice is rooted in a hybrid inquiry between material making and conceptual thinking as a way to construct a parallel consonance between inner cultural/emotional landscapes and larger natural and built environments. She references distinct practices from Asian textiles and the history of Western abstraction to craft entirely new vocabularies of migration and translocation. Using her body to reimagine other bodies as well as using other bodies to reinterpret her own, she builds and records indexes of her environment in order to feel her size. She is interested in amplifying the sound of sentiments and objects that have no socially recognized language.
Damon Locks
Damon Locks is a Chicago based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician, and deejay. He attended The Art Institute in Chicago where he received his BFA in Fine Arts. Recently, he has been lending his artistic and/or teaching talents to organizations such as Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project, Art Reach, the Center for Urban Pedagogy, and at UIC. He is a recent recipient of the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts and the 2016 MAKER Grant. He also recently completed a music residency at The New Quorum in New Orleans and begins an Artist Studio Residency at the Hyde Park Art Center in April. He has been operating as an Artist Mentor in the Chicago Artist Coalition program FIELD/WORK. Damon has performed internationally throughout Brazil and Japan and at festivals in Sant'Anna Arresi, 2011 & 2013 (Italy), Lisbon, 2009 (Portugal), Saalfelden, 2012 (Austria).
Artist pair: Lou and Joseph
Lou Mallozzi
Lou Mallozzi is a Chicago-based artist known primarily for his work in sound, often with a focus on dismembering and reconstituting language, gesture, and signification. His work includes performances, installations, music works, recordings, and radio works. In addition, he has a visual art practice that includes drawing and other media. In addition to his solo works, Mallozzi often collaborates with artists, filmmakers and musicians. He is on the faculty of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is co-founder and former executive director of Experimental Sound Studio.
Joseph Clayton Mills
Joseph Clayton Mills is a musician, artist, and writer who lives and works in Chicago. His text-based paintings, assemblages, and sound installations have been exhibited in Chicago, New York, and Europe and his work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker. He is the author of the short-story collection Zyxt, and in 2012 published Nabokrossvords, a translation of early Russian crosswords by Vladimir Nabokov. He is an active participant in the improvised and experimental music community in Chicago and his recordings have appeared on numerous labels, including Another Timbre, FSS, and Entr’acte. In 2013, in conjunction with Noé Cuéllar, he launched Suppedaneum, a label focused on releasing scores and their realizations.
Artist pair: Allen and Sadie
Allen Moore
Allen Moore is and Black American visual and experimental sound artist born and raised in the small village of Robbins IL, just south of Chicago. Allen has a Bachelors of Arts from Chicago State University, a Masters in Arts for Governors State University and a Masters of Fine Arts from Northern Illinois University. His work converses with the signifiers of African American culture and popular culture; bringing to view the underlying themes of racial, emotional and socio-economical, conditions.
Sadie Woods, photo by Eve Rivera
Chicago native Sadie Woods has held dj residencies throughout Chicago for over a decade and performed for art institutions and tastemakers alike. Her practice includes sound art and design, deejay performance, exhibition making, and collaborations within communities of difference. She's been a participant of Ecole du Magain’s International Curatorial Program and editor of “Harald Seemann Individual Methodology” project; resident artist of the Hyde Park Art Center Program; Resident Artist at ACRE; Artist-In-Residence at Nichols Tower Homan Square; Sponsored Artist at High Concept Labs; Resident Curator of Chicago Artists Coalition's HATCH Projects; and Collaborator of Independent Curators International Dakar Intensive. Sadie is the recipient of the Bemis Center for the Arts Artist Residency; sound designer for Brujos Web Series; Curator-In-Residence at Art + Public Life Arts Incubator with La Keisha Leek; Resident Curator for Terrain-HATCH Projects; resident DJ at Boleo at The Kimpton Gray Hotel; and Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
About the presenting organizations
Spudnik Press provides facilities and services available to artists who need a place to create or exhibit their original artwork, especially those who cannot obtain access to traditional printmaking facilities and exhibition spaces because of financial or other limitations. In addition, Spudnik provides education in printmaking practices though uniting professional artists with a diverse community of emerging artists, established artists, youth, and adults.
Homeroom Chicago designs artistic projects and programs with two core values: conversation and collaboration. We build programming structures with artists, audiences, curators and venues to create and artistic dialogue with shared and far-reaching impact.
Ten x Ten is made possible by sponsors Circle Salon, Cushing Co., Illinois Arts Council and Temperance Beer Co.
