Join us at the PS1 Northside gallery for a reception with artists Harper Folsom and Heather Steckler!

HOLD ON/LET GO is a participatory community art project and exhibition by Iowa City artists Heather Steckler and Harper Folsom. The project explores the intersection of memory, purpose, and the act of releasing the things we carry with us. What conditions make it okay to release control over physical possessions, and how does giving up that control allow us to have agency in other aspects of our lives?

Reclaimed & Recycled is a group exhibition featuring artworks by members of the Iowa Print Group (IPG), a member-based student organization at the University of Iowa. The exhibition highlights the vast range of IPG members' studio practices within printmaking and many differing conceptual and material interpretations of the show title, Reclaimed and Recycled, including artworks made from trash, salvaged materials and conceptual approaches of appropriation and reclamation.

Featured artists: Jake Burr • Emily Edwards • Jessica Chavez • Lya Finston • Mariceliz Pagan Gomez • Annie Klein • Veronica Leto • Lauren Krukowski • Sean Maxwell • Anna Miller • Al-Qawi Tazal Nanavati • Lilah Ward Shepherd • and more!

Iowa Print Group (IPG) is a member-based printmaking organization at the University of Iowa. The group was established in 1945 by Mauricio Lasansky and his students, including Miriam Schapiro. Today, IPG is led by student volunteers and represents undergraduate and graduate students. The group works collectively to provide access to professional resources, opportunities, and community. @uiowaprint

Join us for an opening reception as part of Iowa City’s Downtown Gallery Walk, 5-8pm

time now for ghosts is the exploration of traditional nature, centered spiritualities, and realities as they are interpreted through the practices of Black artists working with an afrofuturist lens and hand. This is an exploration of the future, as we return to our pasts. time now for ghosts looks into the intersections of time and relativity, to expand our understanding of when - what does it look like for our ghosts to come from the future? along with the presence of the Black body, the Black consciousness within the natural world. Whether that world is terrestrial or  beyond the cosmos.

time now for ghosts is a world of Black experiences concentrated into a living archive of sorts. These practices, and the works that culminate from them, are a living archive of the black body and the black consciousness within nature and beyond time. 

Artists Keren Alfred, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Liz Gre, Franchesca LaMarre, and Ashley Page come together to present a living library of our collective pasts.

Curated by Jamillah Hinson, Center for Afrofuturist Studies curatorial resident, in the Public Space One gallery.

UV Island

Technologies like machine learning programs have enabled computers to be creative through neural net algorithms. 3D printers are beginning to replicate the surface level detail long-relished by painters. As technologies like these continue to advance, it is important to reconsider what is human about painting.

Through the Automatic Painting series, I play with elements of computer-authored art while asserting the role of the human hand. I 3D scan an everyday object, and the computer generates images that represent a flattened out version of a 3D model of that object. Next, I meticulously paint these images to get a painting with machine aesthetic but painterly textures.

To further explore, the relationship between the computer’s artwork and the human made artwork I have created a virtual space mirroring our own. This introduces a symmetry line between the physical and virtual worlds.

Monuments

The Automatic Painting series is paired with another series of paintings steeped in observation, recording mundane spaces. These paintings feel empty one lingering on a threshold of a restroom, others on the detritus found in public spaces. In each of these paintings a real space is mimicked in paint. The ability of painting to simulate place is considered while being paired with a virtual scale model of the gallery that is an arguably more engrossing complete simulation.

Download the virtual gallery exhibition (for Windows or Mac) at: https://austincaskie.itch.io/public-space-one

Learn more about Austin: www.austincaskie.com

Julia J. Wolfe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Iowa City, IA.  She holds a M.A./M.F.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from Rhodes College, and she received a certificate from Brandeis University.  Her work has been exhibited nationally in numerous solo and group shows, including the Every Woman Biennial 2019 in New York City, "I'm Happy to Sit Here Beside You" at Western Illinois University, "Pitch In!" as Public Space One in Iowa City, and "Repurpose" at Core New Art Space in Denver, CO.  She is the current artist-in-residence at Public Space One in Iowa City and has completed artist residencies at New Pacific Studios in Vallejo, CA and at Burren College of Art in County Clare, Ireland. Her work was included in Studio Visit Magazine, Vol. 42 and will be included in the upcoming New American Paintings MFA Annual Issue #141.

Wolfe creates brightly-colored paintings, drawings, and installations based on observations of the public and private human experience. Drawing primarily from the American landscape, she layers imagery of mass-production with a childlike and whimsical aesthetic, playfully combining comedy and satire with a mishmash of weightier subjects. The work provides laughter, optimism, and inward-looking thought and/or critique. It is playground-esque and humorously innocent, yet simultaneously comments on our culture of consumption. Images of her work can be found at www.juliajwolfe.com.

THE GATEKEEPERS

An eco-mythological, multi-channel video and sound installation
By Zen Cohen made in collaboration with
Violeta Luna, Yunuen Rhi, Chiron Armand and Walker Fisher

on view through July 6

“Since 2015, I have been collaborating with performance artists who identify as gender-fluid, queer shamans, and ‘border crossers.’ These artists created visual performance personas based on the intersections of their own trans-cultural, political and spiritual identities. The culmination of this footage as an installation is an attempt to magnify and illuminate these personas. To create a mythology inhabited by new idols and archetypes wherein these personas, or gates, are seen as symbolic figures at the threshold between the human and non-human world.

In each projection, the performers appear enacting rituals that merge body and land juxtaposed with layers of visual and auditory symbols. In other moments, the performers directly confront the viewer, staring towards the fourth wall. Through this convergence of projection and viewer, my hope is to initiate a remembrance that Nature is not something outside the Self but inherently linked to persona.”

Zen Cohen uses video, photography, installation and performance. Her practice explores the complexities of our ontological experience through creating works that merge ritual, mysticism, and technologies. She received her MFA in Art Studio at the University of California at Davis and her BFA in Media Art from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. Her work has been presented at the deYoung Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SFMOMA, SOMarts, The Lab, The Montalvo Center, ARTSpace New Haven in CT, Vanity Projects in NY and internationally at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in the Canary Islands. Additionally, she worked as video editor for Al Jazeera America and owned a media production studio in San Francisco, which produced short documentaries, music videos, photo shoots and graphic designs for artists and organizations. She recently relocated to Iowa City.

For more information:
www.zencohenprojects.com
Instagram: @zen_cohen
Facebook: @ZenCohenStudio

Public reception for alea adigweme’s project The Roslyn Forbes-Adigweme Memorial Library: an interactive reading room blurring the lines between public and private; celebration and mourning; and the temple, the stage, and the archive.

Join us for the opening reception of Claire Whitehurst and Kassandra Palmer’s exhibition: Folie a Deux

“The narrative potential that can be embedded within visual objects, such as paintings, drawings, and sculpture is what motivates this show and the work within it. These works aim to not only reveal the narrative of process, but the logical development of thought between two artists who are interesting in reading objects as they are created and found – and questioning the boundaries of wonder when assessing those objects. Folie à deux, or madness of two, refers to the psychological occurrence when two individuals transmit thoughts and visions back and forth to one another. This idea is something that we have talked often of together, and are interested in as a means to make images in collaboration with one another. This work explores the liminal space between physical and psychological relationships of sensibility and emotion, the archeological qualities within the surface of objects as mythology, and the possibility of story-telling through an object’s formal characteristics.”

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Claire Whitehurst is an artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa, where she is teaching and pursuing her MFA in Painting at the University of Iowa. She was born in Louisiana and raised in Mississippi, earning her BFA at the University of Mississippi and a Post Baccalaureate degree from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, PA. Her work can be found in private collections throughout the United States, and abroad in France and Germany. She has permanent public commissioned installations in Jackson Academy’s Performing Art Center in Jackson, Mississippi, and St. Jude’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Her work explores the possibility of narrative through an object’s formal qualities as well as questioning psychological relationships we have with images within our visual world. 

Kassandra Palmer was born in Fairfield, California and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin. She attended college at Santa Clara University where she graduated summa cum laude with a degree in physics, and she is a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s MFA program in Painting and Drawing.  Her making process is rooted in experimentation and is continuously upended by private experiences of isolation, faith, failure, and triumph; in her work she leaves room for the unexpected and listens for echoes that ring true but do not compute. Kassandra currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and at Carroll University.

A mysterious immersive & interactive environment for all ages, created by Kelly Moore and the goodhumans. Join us for the grand opening, a live Spooky House experience, during the downtown Iowa City Gallery Walk!

ABOUT SPOOKY HOUSE:
** The Story **
This installation documents a group of ladies calling themselves the Pocket Monster Guild from the late 1800s to mid 1900s. This eccentric, mysterious, and sometimes non‐human group seeks out, studies, cares for, and sometimes captures monsters of all sorts throughout our world, and others.

** The Incident **
Apparently, there was an otherworldly creature being housed and studied in the laboratory and recently it either escaped, or was let out, by one of the members. This creature, which just happened to possess inter‐dimensional abilities, in turn created a portal to another dimension. Ever since, life in the house is becoming more strange and spooky as the potential exposure to dimensional contamination increases.

an exhibition of work by mother artists and the children who share their studios

curated by Heidi McKay Casto

featuring: Jess Riva Cooper, Debbie Kupinsky, Emily Bowser, Mallory Wetherell, Cheryl Robinson, Lindsay Pichaske, Danielle Kimzey, Teresa Moralez, Andrea Kastner, Heidi Casto

Join us for refreshments donated by The Wedge and Hy-Vee and interactive activities to inspire collaboration and side by side creative practice, as well as live music by local mother/child(ren) groups:

Jean Littlejohn and her daughter, Claire Littlejohn, of Family Folk Machine
Aprille Clarke and her sons, Miles, Tobin & Callum Crall, of Family Folk Machine
Annie Savage of The Savage Hearts and her daughter, Iris Savage Webster
Joanna Sabha and her daughters, Alia & Neda Sabha, of Family Folk Machine
Katie Roche of Awful Purdies and her daughter, Stella Roche-Demarest of Family Folk Machine

Iowa City artist Jay Schleidt will present new work as part of PATV Underground (a Public/Public collaboration). Followed by a music show featuring Mustard-in-Law and Centana.

Reception 7-8p, music begins at 8!
at PATV Channel 18 (208 Lafayette St.)

Facebook event

Check Point: an Introduction to Child's Play
an exhibition by Chelsea A. Flowers

Chelsea A. Flowers' practice explores subversion to popular culture and how “otherness” is created, and social and cultural critique of her environment. She explores these ideas through comedic troupes, physical play, nostalgic memorabilia, and participatory performance. In her exhibit, Check Point: An Introduction to Child's Play, she will seek to answer the question, “Can we build communities through Play?” She has created a game that tests social, cultural, and emotional knowledge. By questioning “Did O.J. do it?” “What day did Beyonce turn Black?” “Can you walk like an Egyptian?” the game also wants to know if you can “list seven young men and/or women who were murdered by police in the past four years.” A Player will be challenged in various means. The game will ask them to be okay with not knowing an answer, and to feel even more comfortable with knowing how to ask for the answer. That’s the functionality of a community. We create our own communities based on what we share and how we care for one another. Participants will be able to show their care through play (verbal discussion), dance (intellectual conversation with one’s body) and investigation (openness to learning).