Sign Language Juan Angel Chavez (Chicago, IL) Michael Genovese (Chicago, IL)
UTSA Downtown Art Gallery July 17 - August 25, 2008 Opening reception and artist talk: Thursday, July 17, 5:30-7:30pm
Unit B (Gallery) July 18 - September 5, 2008 Opening reception: Friday, July 18, 6:30-10pm
Unit B (Gallery) and the UTSA Downtown Art Gallery are please to present Sign Language featuring new works by Chicago-based artists Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese. The artists’ works will be exhibited at both galleries during Contemporary Art Month—see dates and times below.
Sign Language is a complete, complex language that employs signs made with the hands. --National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders
Juan Angel Chavez and Michael Genovese are non-degree holding artists and old friends that started making their art on the streets of Chicago doing “non-permission” collaborative works—creating a graffiti-like Sign Language. Forming their ideas from what they know on the streets—albeit signs, found materials, street vendors—the personalities and pasts these objects and people hold are the true stimulus for their works. While each have their own individual artistic style and perspective; they both generate their inspiration by experiencing what’s in front of them—the everyday and it’s history.
Juan Angel Chavez is a multi-media artist whose work is political, not in the sense that he’s pushing a statement, but by the act of obtaining and reconstructing the things he finds. He goes to places most people generally avoid to collect his art supplies—post-industrial and pre-gentrification areas of cities where deterioration grows—gathering objects with personality and history that describe our cultural makeup. In the studio, these objects are assembled with other found histories to form languages of the has and has been that comment on the now. These works are realized in large-scale sculptures, tableaux’s, collages, installations, and public works that observe the natural and the manmade.
Michael Genovese is a sign painter and he believes that traditional sign painting is a living language, much like graffiti, and that hand-painted signs are a world apart from the printed signs that so often clutter city streets. As a service, he likes to give back. He’ll paint signs on local street vendors food carts in exchange for a hot dog or a fruit cup—a politically conscious and kind gesture. In his recent body of works these old school sign-making traditions have come to fruition in large hand-painted festive signs; and in aluminum engravings that allow the viewers to leave behind some street-like history by engraving words and/or drawings directly on the surface of the aluminum panel—“legal” graffiti—providing the here and now language to future viewers in future places.
Juan Angel Chavez was born in La Junta, Chihuahua, Mexico in 1971 and currently lives and works in Chicago. He studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited recently in Spanish Castle at Bucket Rider Gallery, Chicago, IL (2007-08); Fusiform at Rhys Gallery, Boston, MA (2007); 12 x 12 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2003); as well as the Mexican Fine Art Center Museum and Hyde Park Art Center both in Chicago, IL. His public commissions can be seen at The Toman Branch Library, Chicago, IL; The Whipple Home in Lake Forest, IL; The Chicago Park District; Chicago Transit Authority; and other locations throughout the city of Chicago.
Michael Genovese was born in Chicago, IL in 1976 where he currently lives and works. His recent solo shows include, Just Cause It’s Legal Doesn’t Make It Right at Jack the Pelican, Brooklyn, NY (2008); We All We Got at Packer Schopf, Chicago, IL (2008); and Cabesa de Gato at Norse Projects, Copenhagen, Denmark (2005). His recent group exhibitions include, Dark Matter at Co-Prosperity, Version 8-Chicago, IL (2008); Fusiform at Rhys Gallery, Boston, MA (2007); and Somewhere Over the Rainbow at the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2006). Genovese recently completed residencies at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2008); the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL (2008); and at Co-Habitat in Monterrey, Mexico (2007). His public collaborations can be seen in Chicago, IL; Milwaukee, WI; and Boston, MA to name a few.
UTSA Downtown Art Gallery July 17 – August 25, 2008 Opening reception and artists’ talk: Thursday, July 17, 5:30-7:30pm
Unit B (Gallery) July 18 – September 5, 2008 Opening reception: Friday, July 18, 6:30-10pm Gallery hours: Saturdays, 1-5pm and by appointment
