Hello... Here's press for our next show.  Hi res images available by
request. The connection between Rezman and Ringquist is clear..... with the
hair drawings vs embroidery/fiber, and we get some great male energy in our
downstairs space with Veara... Who also happens to be a well known tattoo
artist downstate. Lots of connections here.  Please review and or list.
Press also attached.

Press Release: Event Date, Friday, May 13th, 5­8 PM. Contact: Aron Packer
312.226.8984

Monica Rezman            Woolgathering                  drawing, photography

Monica Rezman explores how women adorn themselves and the extent to which
they are willing to go.  As a child she was fascinated watching her mother
transform herself in the mornings and evenings through the use of makeup and
hairpieces. In this new body of work Rezman explores the process involved in
the making of the hairpieces and their use, using both drawing and
photograph as her mediums.  Wool Gathering sums up the two bodies of work.
The charcoal drawings represent female hairpieces that become layered with
line and mass and tend to get larger and more expressive the more they are
worked on. She works at bringing out the subtlety of the object, trying to
change its inherent characteristics. What once was hair becomes a still
life, landscape, or a host of other shapes.

Also included are photographs from inside a hair factory Rezman recently
visited in India that buys the hair from a religious temple. Shaving the
head is an age-old Hindu ritual. Babies are shaved for good luck.  Adults
allow themselves to be shaved to thank the gods. It's a ritual about the
abandonment of vanity in the quest for blessing and thankfulness. Hair
represents the difference between male and female, between beauty and
ugliness, and hair protects and conceals. Those who sacrifice their hair are
giving the gods a piece of themselves.  On the factory floor, women wearing
white aprons and masks sit in front of mountains of dark hair arranged on
the floor, sorting the hair by color tone. Other women sit on low blue
stools and at tables that look like small children's' desks pulling bundles
of hair across something that looks like a bed of nails. It is the daily
repetition of this women's work that Rezman captures in her photographs.
Rezman is struck at how powerful the reaction is to these images: how
something so human and part of us can provoke such an extreme response,
ranging from the grotesque to the sublime.

Rebecca Ringquist    Red Sky at Night      fiber

Ringquistıs work tells love stories and creates veiled, fractured narratives
full of double entendre.  She is inspired of late by the fictional
relocation story of the Swiss Family Robinson as well as her own
cross-country move to Brooklyn. She alternates between hand embroidery and
machine stitching, and the harsh difference between the rates of speed with
which she works conveys a complicated message.  Although the machine
stitching is in itself very labor intensive, it also carries with it a sense
of violence and aggression, reflecting the tangled messy nature of
relationships.  On a large wall piece, the thick orange flames, which lick
up at the bed suggestively, are quite different from the sweet daisy imagery
that lies beneath.  Ringquistıs work is at times careful, contrasted with
moments of fast machine-stitched frenzy, expressing implicit and explicit
intensities, and alternating between innocence and recklessness.

Kevin Veara       Miasma       painting

Kevin Veara is fascinated with the density of life in the natural world.
There is an elemental aspect to nature that recalls the primordial soup from
which all life springs. Nature teems with abundance and beauty, but there is
fierceness and danger as well.  Miasma represents this for Veara.  A miasma
is a harmful atmosphere and he wants to demonstrate that we are certainly on
the brink. His paintings focus on birds and plants of the Sangamon River
Valley, near Springfield, Illinois, that are found in the steep, forested
banks and flood plains of the Sangamon River. His array of avian life,
native and migratory, are often pictured as encircled by menacingly
sharp-leaved plants that remind us of human complicity in climate change,
habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and genetic modification.

Monica Rezman           Woolgathering               drawing, photography

Rebecca Ringquist       Red Sky at Night            fiber

Kevin Veara                Miasma                         painting

Artistsı Reception:
Friday, May 13, 5PM ­ 8PM

Exhibition dates:  
May 13 ­ June 18, 2011

Gallery Hours:     
Tues. ­ Sat. 11:00AM ­ 5:30PM

-- 
Aron Packer
Packer Schopf Gallery
942 W. Lake
Chicago, IL 60607
312.226.8984

http://www.packergallery.com