Michael Workman

If there's an art-world power that rivals the gallery system in Chicago, it's the studio system. There are easily ten times as many artists' studios as galleries, inhabited by men and women producing paintings, sculptures, drawings and video. Everything imaginable--in abandoned warehouses, converted storefronts, lofts, industrial buildings--sweating it out over the summer months, shivering in the winter. Many of these are the focus of walking tours organized for Chicago Artists' Month: Ravenswood Studios, Lill Street Art Center, the Flat Iron and Fine Arts buildings, Acme. Too many to mention. Yet since the majority of the year these studios remain closed to the public to provide their tenants time to produce, Chicago studios remain a vast, invisible resource. And it's a resource, in fact, that never stops growing. Adding to the wealth of artists' workspace, recently open at 1815-25 West Division Street, are The Splat Flats.

On a night with cold-snapping wind, a crowd is assembled out front of the old L. Miller Lumber Yard building, smoking cigarettes, chatting. Tellingly, this is mostly a youngish crowd, with plenty of canned beer in sight. After some nudging and elbowing, I make my way past them and up the narrow flight of stairs (the flats themselves are situated on the second floor above the hardware store below). It's a tight fit everywhere, a fact that visitors will notice quickly about The Splat Flats: the hallways resemble the hardened arteries of a cheeseburger-addicted 90-year-old chain-smoker. Each of the rooms has been repainted and restored to basic functionality from their previous state of disrepair. Prior to their current incarnation, these rooms were flophouse spaces for the homeless.

Among the current tenants are twenty-eight artists, including almost all the members of the Chicago art collective Garden Fresh, such as Holly Holmes, Jeremiah Ketner and Andrew Rigsby. Each has a smallish room stacked with art supplies as they all do, and work available for purchase hangs on the walls. In Rigsby's studio, the Venetian blinds are drawn, behind which, hanging in the window, is a flag hung by the previous tenant, a homeless man who died in the space. "I get a deal on the rent," explains Rigsby, "since the family of the man who died in this room asked if the flag could be kept in the window. I said I would," and he does. Another tenant, Kathryn Rodrigues, is exhibiting her MSAE thesis work from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, one of the most interesting exhibitions in the two buildings. Her mix of photography is almost documentary in its cultural anthropological investigation of human hands, torsos and legs. Coupled with Google maps and mapping woodcuts, this show plays her conceptual investigation of sociocultural space very close to the contemporary vest.

There are two floors connected by another set of winding stairs that lead to a section of the building that was previously used as attic space, with smaller rooms. While somewhat claustrophobic, it's assuaged by the fact that each of the studios here has its own window looking out over a bustling and busy Division Street. Artists populate each of these upstairs rooms as well. It's much like walking through a busy dorm in-season, each studio offering a glimpse into the individual worlds of artists who span the range of minimal to maximal, with some studios heaped high with canvases and others, like that of Jason C. Meyer, whose space offers an experiment in installation art. His room is strewn with black extension cords, all bunched together into several main electrical junction boxes, ending in white light-bulb sockets, much like Christmas lights. These reflect across the glass of his windows and play against the light from the street. It's an interesting attempt to address the light pollution of the urban night. Walking into his space has a sacral effect, in fact, his lights spread out across the floor, arranged in patterns on squat floor pedestals and dangled from a black rod running the length of the room. People passing in the hall are locked in shadow, excluded by the dome of light cast from within the room by its momentary visitors. In this space, unlike those of his colleagues, you have the sense that this new studio building could somehow reach out from the confines of its four walls into the street beyond, to influence in its own small way the direction of Chicago's art culture.

(2005-10-18)

Also by Michael Workman

Chicago Artist
Before co-founding Pilsen's Vespine Gallery, artist Shawn Sheehy was searching for his voice
(2005-10-11)

Eye Exam
In the midst of Chicago Artist's Month, it's worth turning away from the artist for a moment in order to train our attention on those who constitute art's system of critical reception. Specifically, those who write the first draft of an artwork's history
(2005-10-04)

Chicago Artist
Matthew Ivan Cherry grew up in Arizona and did his undergraduate work at Northern Arizona University
(2005-10-04)

Chicago Artist
Tony Fitzpatrick has almost come to define what it means to be a working artist in Chicago
(2005-09-27)

Eye Exam
(2005-09-20)

Eye Exam
(2005-09-13)

Is River North Dead?
(2005-09-06)

Eye Exam
(2005-09-06)

Fall Forward: Art and Museums
(2005-08-31)

Tip of the Week
(2005-08-30)

Eye Exam
(2005-08-30)

Eye Exam
(2005-08-23)

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