This faculty exhibition at A+D Gallery is an opportunity for full-time faculty members in the Department of Art and Design at Columbia College Chicago to respond the college’s campus-wide initiative, Critical Encounters.  The theme for 2008-2009 is Human/Nature.  This exhibition will examine the relationships and tensions between humankind and the natural world.  Human/Nature will consider how factors such as the culture, wealth, geography, and history of societies have influenced humanity’s stewardship, exploitation, understanding, and artistic representations of the natural environment.  Featuring Chicago-based artists working in various media in fine art and design.

Off the Beaten Road will present a 21st century take on the innovative ways of communication and dissemination in American life put forth by the Beats and encapsulated in Jack Kerouac’s seminal novel, On the Road. Through sound, installation, performance, video and fine art, Off the Beaten Road will take the audience on a journey through stories both personal and public, mundane and sublime. Artists include Greg Stimac, Diana Guerrero-Macia, Jeff Gabel, and Dylan Strzynski (image credit), among others.

Criteria explores the ethics and politics that embody contemporary notions of sustainability.   Through a variety of media that will gather artworks and unconventional design approaches, this exhibition will examine the utopia behind efforts to modify and push late capitalist consumption patterns as well as address the current contradictions between industrial and natural landscapes. Criteria will juxtapose critical and disenchanted views with poetic and symbolic discourses.   Using art as a lens through which our unsustainable systems of production and consumption can be evaluated from an ethical perspective.   The work in the exhibition will pierce skepticism and challenge our preconceived notions on environmental and social trends.

Image credit: Armin Linke, Mexico City, 1999, C-print

This exhibition is intended to be a part of the 2009 Southern Graphics Council conference, a celebration of printmaking.  While both Hammond (image credit) and Chagoya are know primarily as painters, their work is all media reflects printmakers’ predilection for appropriation, adaptation, juxtaposition, and pastiche.  Both artists draw upon the modes of thinking and working inherent in printmaking as well as its history of social and political commentary.