Opening reception 3.23.13 – 6-9PM
Stephanie Cristello & Mika Horibuchi
3.23.13–4.7.13

CHICAGO, IL. Alcatraz Chicago is very excited to present the work of Chicago-based artists Stephanie Cristello and Mika Horibuchi. Their latest group of paintings flirt, fumble, and occasionally fondle the idea of Classical references to appropriated images, and their anxious relationship to painting. Through means of direct painting techniques, pattern, text, and self-declared iconography, Bad Graphics gives a gracious nod to our insincere, artificial, and unoriginal image-based world. Deception and displacement are both indicative of the work – the attempt never becomes the real thing. Much like a hologram on a playing card, the object falters, never truly reading as the three-dimensional thing it imitates. Yet in the deception there is sincerity: the hologram never claims to be anything other than itself, just as the paintings never claim to be anything other than paintings. The willingness of painting to give as much or as little as it wants speaks to the idea of access, as a binary form of both a screen and a gate – something you can simultaneously look through and pass through, an interchange between painting, space, and image.

Founded in April of 2012, Alcatraz Chicago is an artist run space directed by Andrea Chiu and Alec Hatcher. Alcatraz is located at 1000 N. Halsted, Chicago IL 60642 and can be visited by appointment. For more info please visit alcatrazchicago.info or email us at alcatrazchicago@gmail.com

March 2–20
Preview Reception: March 1, 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th floor

Surface Fiction is an exhibition that will feature two installation-specific painters working in similarly illusionistic styles that question what it means to read an image. Placing emphasis on the surface of the painting, both formally and in terms of content, the compositions make use of the possibilities paint has to depict a surface and simulated image. Mika Horibuchi’s paintings replicate environments built out of cut paper, painted as still lives and interiors. The loss of information, inherent in the process of representation, results in spaces that viewers can enter, but ultimately remain artificial and inaccessible. Visual and formal echoes throughout the installation of the work act as a trompe l’oeil similarly present in Stephanie
Cristello’s paintings. Attempting to “undo” sentimentality by forcing romantic symbols into contradictory circumstances, Cristello’s surfaces are painted as simulations of the original they imitate. Pulling from
Greek Classical symmetry and attention to composition, Modernist abstraction, and a language of painterly stylistic devices such as genre and trope as a modus operandi, Cristello and Horibuchi make use of stylistic reflections in painting and literature as they relate to their respective practices – as if peering into a hall of mirrors.

Mika Horibuchi: Slightly Better Than Reality
Thursday, November 8th through Sunday, November 20th, 2012
Opening reception: Thursday, November 8th from 6:00 to 9:00pm
GAGOSIAN'T GALLERY

Gagosian’t Gallery is excited to present the exhibition of sculptor and painter, Mika Horibuchi. Slightly Better Than Reality explores the space between fiction and hyper-reality.

A cadence of visual cues materialized in painting and installation creates an assemblage of artificial and real information that forms a complex unitary whole.
By accentuating and confusing familiar space, the notion of what is real, fake, a copy or a representation is examined.

This body of work emerges from a relationship of separate modes of representation supplemented by photography, memory, painterly incident and mechanism. These pieces have been appropriated from installations that depict artificial interior spaces that have then been painted to look real. Familiar perspective becomes subtly distorted. The work imitates, confuses, and echoes itself with a notion of doubling that blurs the distinction between original and copy.

Mika Horibuchi lives and works in Chicago, IL, where she is completing her BFA degree in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
GAGOSIANT.com

Gagosian’t Gallery
60 East Monroe #3708 T: 949.436.5493
Chicago, Illinois 60603 By appointment only

Curated by the SUGs Directors
Featuring the works of Mika Horibuchi, Ben Regozin, Ben
Thorp Brown, Daniel Davidowitz, and Jeremiah Jones.
LeRoy Neiman Center Gallery | 37 S Wabash
May 7 – 25, 2012

Fiction is a system that can expose the reality of a subject, sometimes shaping our understanding in an even more actualized form than documentary allows. The works included in the inaugural two-part
exhibition, which will take place consecutively in the new LeRoy Neiman Center Gallery, Act I: Absence Makes It Real and Act II: Fiction Brings It Closer, testify to this possibility through pieces that examine the relationship between artificial narratives and the hyper-reality of their material context.

Through both a re-creation and an absence of the factual, the pieces included in Act I: Absence Makes It Real, may bring us to a realization that is closer to the subject at hand. By reframing, distorting scale, or removing facts, these artists have highlighted how negligent our eyes have become at recognizing the mediation inherent within the worldly systems they employ.

Act II: Fiction Brings It Closer will run from June 7–27, 2012