For the cover story of the Autumn 2015 I interviewed Chrysanne Stathacos on her 17 year long epic The Aura Project. You can check out the whole issue online here. “All the Colors We Cannot See” starts on page 15 of the digital version.
I made my audio debut in June 2016 with a contribution to the Bay Areas #1 arts and culture podcast, Congratulations Pine Tree. Listen to the full episode here.
Here is a lo-resolution version of my latest article for The Picture Professional. I had the pleasure of interviewing and analyzing Allison Janae Hamilton’s series Kingdom of the Marvelous.
Allison Halter: I come from a funny performative background — I was a synchronized swimmer as a child, and competed for about seven years. But in undergrad, I considered myself a photographer, and most of the work I made and was interested in was photographic. … It was still a sort of roundabout path: I was a radical cheerleader, I was in a band, I had several dance troupes, but all of those experiences really shaped the kind of performance artist I am today, and gave me a pretty awesome and specific skill set, most especially with regards to audience.
Gil Riley is an MFA painting candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the Fall of 2011 she was featured in a group show, “My Ghost at Home,” which was titled after one of her paintings at SAIC’s Parallax Gallery. The show featured work by Riley and two of her MFA candidate peers, Josh Dihle and Brian Rush. Riley’s figures have an intense pathos. Her paintings begin as paint drips or pours that she then organizes into lyrically emotive characters, combining elements of chance and deliberate mark making. During a studio visit Riley discusses painting, boobs and the artistic drive.
The artist as “anti-hero” is a modern concept. Think Jackson Pollock in his bookless studio, chain-smoking, and degrading a sacred canvas with plasters of paint and shoe prints — an encounter that is the direct inversion of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam.” According to an interview with curator Josh Dihle on the Student Union Gallery’s website, “Anti-Heroic” was the working title of the group show at Parallax Gallery in September. The name ultimately chosen for the exhibition was “My Ghost at Home,” but the aesthetic hedonism remains.
“Peanut Gallery is full of sex, drugs and rock and roll—doused in Old Style and stuck in a bright white cube. With a scorpion.” Co-founder of Peanut Gallery and SAIC Alum Kelly Reaves offered this description to F Newsmagazine’s Mia DiMeo in 2011 when the gallery was housed in an artist studio in Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Arts Building. The gallery recently moved to a more accessible storefront in Humboldt Park. Additionally, it was named Best New Gallery of the Future by New City in December of 2011. With the publicity and new location the gallery is busier than ever and working to adapt to the needs of its new community.
