Spring Show 2013: Jarmo Koponen and Alex Cohen

Lula Cafe is pleased to to present work by Jarmo Koponen and Alex Cohen for the Spring show, opening March 5th, 6-9.

Jarmo Koponen is a photographer and painter, native to Finland and currently living in Minneapolis.  Lula is presenting a series of landscapes and abstract architectural forms. The images are quiet and contemplative, with an underlying, subtle tension. Kaponen's work has been shown internationally. This is his first exhibition in Chicago.

Alex Cohen's work could hardly be more different. Cohen is a painter and ceramicist born and raised in Chicago whose work is colorful, playful, warm and loose. Lula is presenting a selection of his portraits. His subjects are straightforward and close at hand including his friends and family, icons of hip hop and skateboarding and at least one influential sitcom from the 1980s. For more information and a price list contact andersbrekhus@gmail.com or mfairb@gmail.com.

Winter Show 2012-13: Fraser Taylor: Diagrams and Seams

For its Winter show Lula Café is pleased to present the work of Fraser Taylor. In his exhibition, titled Diagrams and Seams, Taylor presents a combination of monotypes, and stencils on paper and large scale multi-media paintings using deconstructed garments and other subtly integrated found objects layered with thickly applied, almost charred or clotted black and white paint. The near monumental canvases are at once minimal and packed with subtle variations in texture, and familiar objects are made strange. Fraser Taylor was born in Britain. He was a founding member of the London based fiber-arts collective The Cloth. He currently lives in Chicago and teaches at the School of the Art Institute. His work has been exhibited internationally. A reception will be held at Lula, December 4th, from 6-9pm

Fall Show: David Uthus and Kim Winderman

Lula's Fall show opens August 14, 6-9. The show features Kim Winderman and David Uthus two photographers working with landscape in very different ways.

David Uthus lives in Chicago, a transplant from St. Louis. In these pieces his tool is what is always close at hand – the camera in his cell phone. The subjects of his pictures are the quiet, unnoticed ironies and puzzlements of the urban landscape photographed in passing: an unexpected pattern of tire tracks in the slush... a concrete parking block that has found its way to the top of a snow pile... a simple, bright rectangle of light under a restroom stall door. At first glance some of his pictures seem so plain that a viewer could reasonably wonder if there's been some mistake, that there's almost nothing there at all. But his subjects rise slowly to the surface. Viewed together, patterns emerge, a sense of the photographer's careful, thoughtful and slightly absurd view of the lowly and the discarded objects of the city emerges.

L.A. photographer Kim Winderman's tools couldn't be more different. She shoots film, medium format, requiring a bit more planning in capturing her pictures and the work at Lula is black and white, but she too is asking us to pause and look at things our gaze might ordinarily pass over. Winderman has an incredible eye for intricate abstraction in natural forms. Slow and quiet, her pictures feel heavy with the play of light and darkness in more than just a visual sense. She says her work is about "Singling out moments...slowly and thoughtfully." Uthus might say the same thing about his.

The show opens at Lula August 14th with a reception from 6-9. Appetizers and cash bar. Come say hi.

Karolina Gnatowski
We Have To Believe We Are Magic
May 2 - August 13 2012 -- Opening Reception, Tuesday May 22 from 6-9pm

Eye Lets
11.5' x 6.5'
yarns, findings

For our summer show we are exhibiting the work of Karolina Gnatowski. Karolina creates physically rich, bodily works that operate through a psychedelic lens turning textures, colors and woven structures into wall hung protagonists and other strange characters.  Working  against the backdrop of craft traditions like the Bauhaus, Gnatowski confronts these ideals through surface embellishment and the addition of pop culture iconography from the 1960s and 70s. By playing with combinations of imagery, affects and handicraft sensibilities from these great utopian failures she assesses available values and meanings in the contemporary landscape. 

Please join us for the opening reception and a chance to meet Karolina on Tuesday, April 17, 6-9 pm. Lula will provide hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar featuring drink specials.

Daisy Chain
   40"x50"
   yarns, glitter, fabric, gloves, brooch, findings

Little Clown
6'x7'
yarns, ring with eyeball

Winter Show 2012

The winter show at Lula comes from our friend Aron Packer at Packer Schopf Gallery. 

Aron has a great eye and represents some amazing contemporary artists and outsider artists so we were really excited to pick through his collection.  To dig through his stock room is a unique experience. We uncovered delights that reflect Aron’s longstanding interest in outsider work such as the Cowboy Drawings of Harry Young as well as the very contemporary and highly crafted work of Renee McGinnis.

McGinnis' epic paintings can be seen in the dining room. The dilapidated structures she paints are surrounded by topiary gardens of a misdirected beauty, suggesting man’s desire to control nature. 

 

Along with the macro approach in the epic scenes of broken ships, McGinnis also takes a micro approach as she dissects and magnifies the life found in the lush green topiaries. In her Unified Field Theory work McGinnis places the viewer directly over a circular symmetry of insects. When you see these precise paintings you’ll wonder if you are seeing a close up of an atom or the universe itself.

 

On display in the bar is the The Harry Young collection as well as works by L.C. Spooner. The former includes a number of handmade figures on cardboard that were found in a large wooden box with "Harry Young, 38 Inkerman, St. Thomas, ON" scratched on the inside. The box originally included over 350 cardboard figures of cowboys, lawmen and horses. The vast majority are hand drawn, though here are a handful of figures that have faces collaged from newspaper ads for cowboy movies. The box also contains a number of other miscellaneous items, including a wearable Marshall's badge and a small, handwritten book of "laws," which establishes rules for cowboy life, morality and justice.

The second artist in the bar, L.C. Spooner, was an inventor of the practical and the fantastic.  His artistic production, created between 1911 and 1934, blueprints for machines and everyday life objects based on the principle of self-propulsion (self-propelled motors, self-propelled trash cans, self-propelled scales, self-propelled finger-lifter, etc.). The triumphs of industrial development in the beginning of the 20th century were, without any doubt, the source of inspiration for those who have been called "crazy inventors". L.C. Spooner signed his drawings "L.C. Spooner Inventor". 

 

The Winter show will be up until April 20 with a reception to be held on April 17, 6-9.

 Ceremonial Portrait - Girl

Ceremonial Portrait - Boy

Todd Baxter

Owl Scouts: Lost in the Woods series

October 1, 2011 - January 17, 2012

Closing Receptions, January 10, 2012 from 6-9pm

Lula is pleased to be showing a selection of Todd Baxter’s latest series titled “The Owl Scouts: Lost in the Woods.” The series portrays a fictional narrative about two co-ed scouts who get lost deep in the woods on a scouting trip. On their journey they encounter a series of challenges (a flashlight fallen into an owl burrow, a dangerous river crossing, a tornado, and an encounter with a bear) that test their survival skills.
                                           
This stunning collection of large format photos was created over the course of three years. Prior to photography, Baxter worked in painting and collage, both of which have influenced his approach to making photographic art. Baxter’s photographs involve digital collage of elements from different photos into a single frame, creating spectacular, unified images that are at once fantastical, and convincingly real.  Baxter was inspired by Victorian portraiture, classic children’s novels, Native American imagery, and taxidermy.

To construct the elaborate world of the Owl Scouts, Baxter used the help of a team of Chicago artists including, Ander Nilsen, Debbie Carlos, and Marjorie Bailey.  With their help, Baxter refined the narrative, and was able to realize his vision to create a detailed design for the scouts’ uniforms, right down to hand-embroidered Owl Scout patches.  

Challenge 2: River Crossing - Drowning

                                                 
Although we are not able to present the entire series of the photographs for this show, the photos on display reveal critical moments of the series and will leave you begging for more.

These photos are sold in a variety of sizes. For pricing or more information please contact curators Anders Nilsen, ndrs@hotmail_dot_com or Marianne Fairbanks, mfairb@gmail_dot_com

For the closing reception Lula will provide hors d'oeuvres and a cash bar featuring drink specials.

Amy Honchell: Soft Infrastructure

Reception: Tuesday, August 23, 2011  6-9pm

Exhibition: July 13-October 3, 2011

Here at Lula we are excited to get the chance to have a solo show featuring the new work Amy Honchell titled Soft Infrastructure.  This work reveals a soft landscape—created from layers of cloth that are stitched into strata—supporting traces of failed (hard) architecture—dilapidated mining structures, hunting blinds, and communication towers. The improbable, rickety structures stand in opposition to the soft landscape that provides support to them.

Blind, Muscle Memory (detail), 2011

Topology, sewing, and elements of mapping underscore the parallels between the structures and functions of the human body, architecture, and the landscape. Honchell invites viewers to cross unseen boundaries and discover new territories while exploring the sense of touch in a visual way. 

The work in Soft Infrastructure explores memory, navigation, and landscape. Honchell was raised in a section of northeastern Pennsylvania known at the Endless Mountains. The small coal mining towns along the mountains in this area are not particularly notable but traveling through them shaped her. The bends and turns of the roads and rivers are etched into her memory as physical sensations, stories, and imagined adventures. 

Signaling Point (Red Tower), 2010-11

Her work embodies the idea that drawing is an extension of touch, the hand. Whatever the medium for drawing—pen, thread, wire—Honchell thinks about the haptic gestures made and recorded on, in, and through a surface. For the past year she has been engaged in studio investigations of drawing in this vein that that attempt to invert notions of soft and hard, fixed and malleable, structure and collapse.

Rickety Structure X, 2010