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Getting the Balance Right paint, print and photography in the South Loop
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Ongoing through Saturday, October 31st, at Framing Mode & Gallery, is the exhibit “Getting the Balance Right” featuring the pinhole photographs of Dana Day, mixed media paintings of Basia Toczydlowska, and mono-prints of Marci Rubin. The gallery, which doubles as an upscale custom frame shop by day, hosted the well-appointed opening reception last weekend, featuring a range of vegan hors d’ourves and local beer and wine for sampling while viewing the works displayed along the long gallery wall.
Dana Day has worked with a simple home made pinhole camera for eleven years, once a Hershey cocoa box, lined now with black medical tape to keep the light and reflections out. Her playful sepia toned works document abandoned spaces, adventurous excursions in the nude and costume in such wildernesses as La Push and the Olympic Penninsula, on the Pacific Coast in Washington State. Occasionally exploring other camera formats, such as the 35mm. work “Doll,” which uses a camera designed for 60mm, she embraces the resulting tension marks and incorporates them into the overall composition. Whether at home in Chicago, or hiking and adventuring in random landscapes, Day’s work is playful and sensual.
Basia Toczydlowska co-opts the male aesthetic of abstract expressionism and merges a use of recycled canvas with the lyrical mark making of Maya Lin’s topographical studies. Inspired by the Carpathian mountains of her origin in Poland, and skiing and climbing in Telluride, Colorado, these energetic and vividly colored series, including “Thrills #1-5” and “Spills #1-5” seem bounded by their medium size square canvases. One expects the dripped and swirled colors of acrylic, oil, ink and other found medium material to continue to slide from their supports or to leap from the canvas. Basia prefers the flexibility of her chosen materials, their adaptability lending to multiple workings on the canvas. In addition to painting for the last ten years, Basia also teaches 900 students in the Visual Arts through the Chicago Public School District.
Marci Rubin works in printmaking from fresh fruits and vegetables. Her highly contrastive works in black ink pigment in crisp rows document the fruit’s rapid decay to softness and mush. Working with the dried prints, she often adds a burst of ink color in the segments or centers, further referencing her subject’s original state. These primarily circular or oval print forms are often arranged in full pages, long rows or single dimunitive prints. Their titles refer to the medical dictionary, a source of inspiration for Rubin, as her work dwells on the idea of body and it’s processes. Just inside the gallery on an easel is a newly released work, created from a kiwi fruit, titled “ Muscae Volitanes” which appears to be a pupil of the eye, shifting through various exposures to light. The term muscae volitanes refers to the condition of seeing spots, or “flies” before the eye, a result of “the presence of remnants of embryonic structures floating within the vitreous humour. They appear like floating spots on a bright uniform background.” (quote from: Millodot: Dictionary of Optometry and Visual Science, 7th edition. © 2009 Butterworth-Heinemann)
The gallery is located at 1526 S. Wabash Street, Chicago, IL 60605.
For more information about the gallery: www.framingmode.com or 312-566-0027
For more information about Marci Rubin: http://www.marcirubinart.com/
For more information about Basia Toczydlowska: http://thingsihavemade.com/home.html
For more information about Dana Day: http://www.danadayphoto.com/
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