#1 (CRUSH): ARTISTS
Helvio Benicio
Helvio Benicio is a Brazilian artist from Sao Paulo. He is a visual artist with a degree in Photography from Paulista University, and is also a lyrical singer. He develops his artistical work based on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the psychoanalysis work of Jacques lacan and Joao Augusto Frayze-Pereira. His projects speak with the objects as seen by the eye from an overhead perspective, that which is very intimate, invisible and at the same time external, visible from a multidimensional view of the world. He works in photography, collage, and performance art. In the words of the artist, his works are purposefully left unfinished and polluted so that the spectator may, through his own world experience, fill in and organize the work within himself.
“My art is to walk, to exist, to launch myself into the world. Art is an attempt at completion. We are incomplete beings.
My artistic proposals are marked by a desire that is shown at the same time that it is hidden. Shaping this desire with materialities is a direct transitive approach to an unknown intimate place. Making art is a challenge. My work looks at me, while I look at it. It is by seduction that he and I make shapes. A song that feeds my body; harmonic relationship between my hands and matter. So, as I exist, I throw myself into the world. Art is an attempt at integrity. We are always incomplete beings.”
Teresita Carson Valdez
Teresita Carson Valdéz is a Mexican, Chicago-based artist working in film, video, photography, printmedia, fiber, sound and installation. She is director of the alternative project space INTERSECT, which aims to foster relationships with diverse communities and is invested in facilitating artistic and educational gestures propelled by empathy and generosity. Her experimental films have been shown at film festivals and curated film exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego. Recent venues presenting Carson’s work include Adds Donna Gallery, Mana Contemporary, Sullivan Galleries, Moving Image at ACRE, Spudnik Press Collective, Fulton Street Collective, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA Museum) and Ugly Gallery. She holds a Bachelors in Fine Arts from the School of the Art institute of Chicago.
My practice activates various media including fiber, film, video, performance, photography, printmaking, sound and installation. I draw inspiration from the dualities and dichotomies of migration, gendered histories, nationalism and culture. I make, unmake and remake. Site intervention, repetition, layering, fragmentation, abstraction and construction/deconstruction involving image manipulation are essential to my methodology. My autoethnographic work traces the migrations of people, objects and culture within feminist and not-belonging contexts. My aim is to draw attention to the complex entanglements across sites of indeterminacy in order to imagine more just approaches to world-building.
Jessica Christy
Jessica Christy is a printmaker, designer, and North Dakota native living in the Chicago area. She received her MFA from the University of North Dakota in 2011 and has since created works that challenge the status quo of human activity and the resulting impacts. Heavily influenced by her upbringing in the Dakota culture, Christy often weaves the Native experience into her pieces. Her work has shown both nationally and internationally; most recently, in a solo exhibition, Domestic Tides / Indigenous Mind, at Spudnik Press in Chicago, Illinois.
Christy's current work explores a move from the prairies of North Dakota to the urban environment of Chicago. The work considers a transplanted indigenous identity, one connected to place, in the midst of a culture shock . While exploring a new city, both foreign and known images are gathered : deer hair, parking signs, coyote tracks, municipal tickets, bird feathers, and corner store signs . Through self-applied cultural guilt and gender expectations, visuals emerge that suggest the storyteller’s voice is finally becoming comfortable in the 21st century metropolis.
Heidi Blunt
Heidi Blunt is a Wisconsin based artist and MFA candidate with The Vermont College of Fine Arts Visual Arts program. Heidi’s studio and research work encompass topics related to fat experience, embodiment, and resisting shame. Her work asks viewers to explore topics of self, objectification, celebration, nonconformity, excess, and the body by using joy, tenderness, kitsch, and the uncanny. By embracing the pandemic, Heidi has ventured into video based work while incorporating her interests in building environments, toys, clothing, fashion and sculpture. For the first time her body and voice enter her work in fantasy world scapes manifesting the strange inviting you to depart from the domestic and into the subversive. The kitchen hearth is where bodies at odds with normalcy find comfort, hairy she-beasts exchange some real talk about zoom meetings, and loaves of bread resist body shame and diet conformity with “carbitude.”
Hug your grandma again snug in the breadloaf puff of her upper arms in The Blubby Quarantine Cottage. The kitchen hearth is where bodies at odds with normalcy find comfort, hairy she-beasts exchange some real talk about zoom meetings, and loaves of bread resist body shame and diet conformity with “carbitude.” As my first venture into video based media, I found respite in the dark times of the pandemic to incorporate my love of building environments, soft sculptural fashion, and interactive toys while bringing my own body and voice into my work for the first time.
Dutes Miller
Dutes Miller’s collages, artists books and phallic sculptures examine the spaces where the artist’s inner life, queer subcultures and mass media intersect. Miller appropriates images from pornographic websites, magazines and his own imaginings to investigate alternative standards of beauty, visualizations of lust and desire found on the internet, and power dynamics in sexual relationships. Michelle Grabner wrote in ArtForum, “Miller’s mixed-media collages on paper incorporating penis figures striking silly states of repose and activity are enjoyable vignettes, demonstrating nimble material interplay.” Miller’s work is driven by an investigation of queer male sexuality through a tactile exploration of materials, most often plaster, resin and paint and also including fabric, feathers, horns and other found objects. From a conceptual standpoint, he is interested in the notion of an object that is penetrable (orifice) versus one which penetrates (phallus). Appearing to be in states of transition, his sculptures attempt to find the potential conflation of the two. Dutes Miller’s work has been written about on artforum.com, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post, the Chicago Reader, Time Out Chicago, New City, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller’s work has been included in exhibitions at several national venues including White Flag Projects in St. Louis and the Ukrainian Museum of Art in Chicago. His collaborative work with his husband Stan Shellabarger, as Miller & Shellabarger, won a 2008 Artadia Award and a 2007 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award and has been written about in Art in America, Artforum.com, Art & Auction, Frieze, Artnet, The Art Newspaper, Flash Art, and the Chicago Tribune. Miller received a BFA from Illinois State University. He is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and lives and works in Chicago.
I am interested in representing queer desire and the embodiment of sex magic. My work is the result of my material and conceptual play. I am building an iconography of queer fetish objects. Erotic possibilities are exaggerated, multiplied, and mutated into a myriad of forms. They refuse to be confined to the binary, they are both the fucked and the fucker.
Alonzo Pantoja
Alonzo Pantoja was born in Chicago, IL and currently lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.
Pantoja is a queer, brown artist and educator - he recently earned his MFA in Fiber and Installation at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And in 2016, he completed a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the Peck School of the Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During his undergraduate studies he did international coursework in Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Almere, Netherlands. As well as Painting and Drawing, and Art History at Santa Reparata International School of Art in Florence, Italy.
My work is an embodiment of queerness and comfort - addressing orientation, impermanence as a way to interpret how we as queers navigate and shape spaces. My approach to developing work is by making handweavings as a point of reflection for the comfort and discomfort in my life as a queer body. Most of the weavings are rainbows. Rainbows to me symbolize so many things such as the queer community, hope, a journey, a spectrum to name a few. The rainbow in my work acknowledges queerness or an attempt to. The rainbow is stability, it keeps me grounded; its mere presence anchors a space for me. The weavings on wire are studies that organize texture and color for me. They are more for me than they are for the viewer.
Ian Rogers
Ian Rogers was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and currently lives and works in Portimao, Portugal. He studied BA Fine Art at Wimbledon School of Art, London. Working initially with paint on canvas, paper, photography and print-making, Ian has been experimenting with the possibilities of computer generated digital image making since the advent of the personal computer. He taught Fine Art Practice for 15 years in London. Ian has exhibited in Den Haag in The Netherlands, London, Liverpool in The United Kingdom, New York, Cape Town, South Africa and Portimao. His work explores the fragile politics of men, often cruel, mirthless and with the narrow bombast of ideology, the desperate clinging to contradictory certainties in the face of a chaotic and overwhelming present.
Since the death of my mother in 2014, I came to the realization that life is very short and that I needed to produce some form of creative “outpouring” every day and if I am lucky maybe more.
Since all my work, contemporary at the time, was burnt in a warehouse fire in London while I was moving home I gave up the process of making images that are durable and flammable and instead resorted to digital image making. From 1996 to the present day I endeavour to apply the digital marks as one would a blunt stick in sand.
The digital world is amazing and complicated and I know nothing about it, other than, the tools that I use have been designed by others and their tricks are their tricks, seductive tricks, coy and enticing slights of hands that could pull me into a spiral of pirouettes of meaningless and mirthless virtuosity.
The work lies somewhere in the space between the tags on Instagram; from “#postcardfromkafka” through to the more poignant “#lastitaliangarden”. The work seeks to depict a world that I am familiar with; that of very clever but often, very stupid men; myself included. The frailty of the body, the emptiness of the bombast, the grimness of the ideology, the manic displeasure of the pleasure of flesh.
There is little that is black and white in the ideas that I pursue or the images that I depict, but rather bright, bold, crude and nuanced pathways that seek to negotiate the world as I observe it. The work often asks me to be inquiring and for inquisitive, doubting souls to embrace the equality of difference, to take pleasure in doubt and rejoice in being wrong.
Then I realize how wrong I am and have to start again …….with my note taking on the politics of my tiny existence and what colour socks to wear. Then there is the width of the universe to deal with. Poetry of Stuff.
The Twinkie Artist
I'm the Twinkie Artist and I have been based in NYC for eight years. I combine my love of food into satirical over-the-top videos that make the viewer generally uncomfortable and intrigued. My goal is to create a visual and sensory experience that explores sex, love, and passion through eating.
I also have a YouTube Channel, which is less creative and more of an entree into ASMR. You can follow me on Instagram: @thetwinkieartist_
The Twinkie Artist was born out of my love of food and desire to combine food and sex. Eating has been a fascination of mine for as long as I can remember. The most vivid memories from my childhood revolve around food – the feelings evoked from specific foods are visceral and powerful, especially when they’re juxtaposed with music. My work reflects deep-seeded associations I have from childhood related to food, with a decidedly adult twist.
I believe that food is as much a visual experience as it is an oral experience – it can be a very sensual experience, but is also one of the most basic animal needs and downright messy. Instead of elevating sex and food into something venerated or mystical, I pare them down to their messy essence and allow the viewer to make their own interpretations.
Anders Zanichkowsky
I am an artist, activist, and writer from the Midwest. I moved to Chicago in 2019 after finishing my MFA in printmaking at UW-Madison. My work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at the NeON Digital Arts Festival in Dundee, Scotland, the Salamanca Arts Center in Tasmania, Australia, and the Wisconsin Film Festival. In 2016 I was an artist in residence with The Arctic Circle program in the international territory of Svalbard, and I am currently working as an artist for the Chicago Parks District as part of the Cultural Asset Mapping Project.
I make art about queer longing, untimely death, and imaginary places.
I have no primary medium. I make things I do not understand. I look at things for a very long time.
I like it best when you just had to be there. I am interested in showing up. I am interested in you.