You are one step closer to learning the truth

Deb Sokolow
You are one step closer to learning the truth (detail)
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City
141 foot-long drawing inked onto the walls
on view until June 14, 2008

Deb Sokolow, a California native and the granddaughter of a Chicago bookie, developed a curiosity for the city and its nefarious nature in her formative years. Also, at a young age, Sokolow was introduced to the vast universe of politics and intrigue while witnessing a suspicious briefcase exchange in a Washington, D.C. McDonald’s fast food restaurant in 1986 and while working as a congressional intern on Capitol Hill in 1991. A decade later, these interests would surface as subject matter for the paranoid, diagrammatic drawings she would begin to make as a graduate student at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. These days, Sokolow continues to live and make art in Chicago, but spends the majority of her time investigating the dark, gritty recesses of urban life, reading about the exploits of drug lords, and speculating on various conspiracy theories concerning individuals and occurrences within the world’s political landscape.

Excerpt from the Vonzweck Gallery exhibition, March 2008

The Fall

Robyn Voshardt / Sven Humphrey
The Fall, 2006, (3 min 43 sec), dvd video/sound, dim. variable

This meditative yet ominous footage came from a rural area in Nova Scotia that stands on the brink of over-development. A branch from a 150 year old apple tree is the focus of this extreme view of natural and metaphorical decay.

Voshardt/Humphrey website

How Some Rich People Died

Shawnee Barton
"How Some Rich People Died"
Bathtub video

Below are excerpts from Shawnee's artist statement and list of her least favorite things.

I am interested in contributing to the depletion of art-world-angst through the creation of humorous, clever, and/or lighthearted work. I like to have fun making art and I want my viewers to have fun experiencing the objects and images I create.

A list of my least favorite things
Tami
Ivory Soap
Black Jelly Beans
Cilantro
Ear aches
Snakes

Shawnee Barton website

Examination of the Over-Sensitive

Elizabeth Huey

"Examination of the Over-Sensitive"
48 x 96"

Elizabeth Huey gets her inspiration from:

Random google searches, church basements, mental illness and master paintings, machinery, colored waters, crazy rants from gutter bums, ancient psychological manuals and old dictionaries, at the dog run, in my bathtub, in my dreams, American and European history, clothing and costumes, muffled giggling, documentaries new music and the my warped ideas about the wilderness.

Got to love that!

Elizabeth Huey website

The Hyena and Other Men

Pieter Hugo

Mallam Galadima Ahmadu with Jamis, Nigeria
C-Print
2005

Pieter Hugo created the series The Hyena Men while traveling in Nigeria with a troupe of animal charmers and their collection of tenuously domesticated hyenas, monkeys and snakes. The portraits feature groupings of men and animals surrounded by the barren urban centers of northern Nigeria. Taken during quiet moments between the spectacles of street performances, the photographs depict a stillness that subverts the tense physicality of the animals and their trainers.

Excerpt from the Yossi Milo Gallery Press Release November 2007