Spaces
Floor Length and Tux (FLAT)
2009-present
My wife Catie Olson and I are using our apartment for this series of single-evening exhibitions. We're taking the opportunity to spend more time with a smaller number of artists at a time, with more face-to-face contact and planning sessions, than our other organizational projects.
COMA
(California Occidental Museum of Art)
2006-2008
This was a 2-year run of apartments shows that I co-organized with Annika Seitz. Artists were generally selected from our circle of peers, or from frequent visitors, and shows were rarely given a theme beforehand. COMA was less a tool for curating than for galvanizing the artist network around us.
Curatorial Projects
FBI (Feline Behavioral Institute)
2007/2009
This started as a mini-exhibit within a COMA 15 group show, and developed into a more robust exhibition at Swimming Pool, as part of their DOGCAT event. The show was an opportunity for us to meditate upon (and beyond) our cat-fanaticism.
Dusty Bunnyfield vs. Molotovia Cottontail
2009
This exhibition was originally offered to me as a solo show, but after 2 weeks I required gallerist Lucia Fabio to edit and reorganize the show, and insert her own new work. After 4 weeks, we organized a single-weekend exhibition, including ourselves and nine other artists (who also happened to run domestic artspaces), requiring that works somehow make a logical progression from the first two stages.
Liv Ullmann, Anaerobic Digestion, Post-Psychiatry
2008
This was a component of the Associate Degree in Science that Catie Olson and I put together in St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago. I gathered artists to apply themselves to the title Liv Ullmann, Anaerobic Digestion, Post-Psychiatry (a cursory assessment of the work I was contributing) while Catie hosted Spiderbug screenings.
DFP
DFP-F°, 2005DFP-1/Q, 2004
These were exhibitions I curated at 1/Quarterly (Chicago) and Fahrenheit (Kansas City), daring some peers to apply themselves sincerely to goddess-art. My interest in this theme was stimulated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, when reading about the Divine Feminine Principle suddenly lacked revulsion.
For the Fahrenheit exhibit, I invited Kansas City artists to take an "ambassadorial" stance to the show, rather than knuckle under the proposed theme.
Den Nya Framtidsvetenskapen
2004
The English translation of the title, The New Science Fiction, was positioned as the banner of the exhibit, but among the artists I had discussed a show about gardening and domestic tending. The intention wasn't so much to lure viewers to ponder a relationship between the two themes, but to create a situation for the artists where overtly bizzare gestures could possibly risk striking a sour note, as if trying too hard to force this relationship. This took place at the Lisa Boyle Gallery.
Softcore Pornography
2001
I was offered exhibition space at the Century 900 Gallery (Chicago) with three weeks to prepare, so I hurriedly gathered a group exhibition together under the Softcore Pornography title (a cursory assessment of my own planned work). The exhibition was a mixed-bag of actively curated artworks and open facilitation where artists could apply themselves to the title in any obscure way they saw fit (the latter then became my preferred mode of curating).
Organic Produce/Compound Fracture
2000/2001
These exhibitions were both organized around the theme of "guts". Organic Produce took place at the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago) -- which had very little in the way of organic material on display. The Compound Fracture exhibition was held at the Hyde Park Art Center with the same artist roster, and since it was no longer nested in a medical environment, the "guts" theme was relaxed: artists simply had to springboard somehow from the Organic Produce works.