Version Fest 2008

Last night was the opening of Version Fest 2008, which kicked off the 10 day arts and culture festival. Tonight will be the opening of the main show "Dark Matter" at CPS1 and tomorrow come check out Rueben Kincaids Booth at the NFO-XPO. All of the information is at versionfest.org

Also check out the story behind the Dark Matter theme at WBEZ

Mike Rea Interview on Fecal Face Dot Com

Written by Ryan Christian

Throughout my formative days in school I eventually decided that almost everyone is pretty willy nilly in the wood shop. Maybe my generation has phobia of power tools to some extent or a larger ratio of us are mega sensitive to saw dust. It could have been a geographical concern, but I didn't think that the case either being that I was in rural Illinois. The tightest thing I had even seen made out of wood was maybe a big tree, or a really fancy birdhouse, or the structure of a swanky home being built. There wasn't anything interesting and wooden in my life.

Then back in 2006, I go to this Mike Rea guys opening at the Butcher Shop/ Dogmatic Gallery in Chicago. The space (a very large one) was jam packed with these, super elaborate, grandiose, all wooden sculptures. I had never been immediately engaged by work like that before upon entering a gallery, it was more like walking in to a theme park than an art show.

Since then he has continued to artistically push it to the limit and top himself over and over again. I even saw him eat a bacon cheddar burger pretzel dog once, that's ambition.

Check the rest out at Fecal Face Dot Com

HOW 2008 International Design Awards: Best of Show

Artist collective Seripop Wins Best of Show, Congratulations from Reuben!


Poster Children: Seripop

by Bryn Mooth

Ordinarily, the judges’ debate about which entry out of nearly 4,000 stands out as the Best of Show is intense but fairly short-lived. Every contender gets a fair shake, but there’s typically a quick consensus.

Not this year. Judges Nathan Hendricks, Debbie Millman and John Foster carried on a spirited discussion for about two hours, as they weighed which of the 10 Outstanding Achievement winners would score the top honor.

The project that finally emerged as Best of Show was noteworthy not just because of its magnitude (a series of 16 screen printed posters) but also because of its craftsmanship and style. The Montreal design shop Seripop created, illustrated and printed these gig posters for the underground music promotion company Blue Skies Turn Black. While the judges debated whether a no-creative-limits project for a risk-taking client and a narrow audience truly merited their votes, they agreed that the posters’ uniqueness stood out. “This is the culmination of everything that was good about the whole show,” says judge John Foster.

Check out the rest of the article at Howdesign.com

Artist Interview: By Jay Wolke

Jay Wolke: Is this whole thing your studio?

Philip Matesic: This is my studio. This semester I’ve converted it into a cafe for four hours a day, serving art students coffee and hopefully engaging them in this social exchange with me or with other coffee drinkers.

JW: Well, do you have anything like milk or creamer? As long as you’re in the business, I might as well really push you. Oh, the real thing! This is great, thank you.

PM: No problem.

JW: I guess I’m here to give you the once over, beat you around the mid-section a little bit. So what’s with this café? Are you going to become a restaurateur? I guess I’ll start with a silly question, why a café?

PM: I have started these projects within other communities since I’ve been in grad school. I did this project last semester with a street vender in Pilsen, where I had sewn this winter shelter for him. He sells tamales on 18th street, so I improvised this shelter for him as he waited for people to come by. For my second project, I placed electric outlet covers I made over free outlets in the city that I would find. I would go around testing random outlets around the city and leave these covers for people to find.

JW: So, you would tag these outlets with your outlet cozies.

PM: Exactly. People would think that they were CTA things until they got closer and they saw this comic like lightning bolts on the red covers.

JW: I was going to say, it looks a little like batman or a marvel comic kind of thing.

PM: So, I found a courtyard on Roosevelt and State Street right by the red line, and there were six working outlets and I was wondering what I would do. Then, I saw some people walking through and I asked them what they would want in the station, provided they could use the outlets. Over the next two weekends I asked everyone who walked through the courtyard and tallied the responses up. Then, for an afternoon I set up a cell phone charging station, the internet, music and food. I was taking this free electricity from the city and giving it to the people that lived there.

JW: It’s interesting how you describe it as free electricity. Which actually brings up an interesting question, because it in fact brings up this idea about the grid and its alternative uses. So how do you feel that your work brings up utility? What does that mean to you? Are you just this cultural squatter no matter where you are; is there a kind of unbounded nomadic utility in your work?

PM: I think that’s a really good read on the work, because a big component to all the work is mobility and being nomadic. I think that squatting is a good term because squatting is a short-term, ephemeral action, and my projects are very much like that. It’s all about me in these different locations I find myself, deploying something to engage people in conversation or to utilize some language or resource.

JW: So then have you ever stuck yourself as an open user into a system when it was a closed? Has that ever happened to you?

PM: It hasn’t happened to me yet. I feel that I’m trying to take these open systems and make them more open. I’m not this artist who says, I want to have a giant inflatable stage in this courtyard and play my kazoo as a performance for the public to watch. I feel that would be a breach for security and to the people who use the courtyard. I felt that my project had to be more democratic.

JW: So then what is your definition of transgression and how does it play into your work? And why is it so important to be transgressive as an artist?

PM: I’ve thought a lot about that during the trajectory in making these urban interventions. One of my first projects I made were tents that fit under these modernist sculptures that would blend in with the pieces. I would find a piece I liked, take its measurements, build the piece in studio and then set it up under these sculptures. For a few hours, as people would walk by, they would not even notice the tents. I feel that my work is slowly transitioning away from being transgressive and moving more towards opening a dialogue between people.

JW: So then what exactly do you want your viewer to experience? It’s one thing to express a personal need as an artist to truly create something but it’s another thing to create something that has an impact on a community or a viewer. Transgression, in a way, is designed to provoke and in a particular way to shock and take risks and it places unexpected artifacts into conventional environments. So ultimately moving away from transgression, what are you trying to communicate with all this communication?

PM: My work still has an element of transgression, it’s just not as aggressive as some artists currently making work. I’m trying to make projects in a nicer way to hopefully engage the viewer and allow them to feel comfortable while interacting with the piece. This can operate in two ways, first there needs to be an element to provoke curiosity that hopefully allows a person to come up to me during a performance and engage in some form of a social exchange. Or it makes the viewer feel uncomfortable in which they walk away, not thinking too much of the work.

JW: So anyway you look at it, it’s a provocation and in that sense your work is as much about creating a social exchange as it is about creating a particular artifact.

PM: Sure, that’s largely a part of the projects. As I make them I look forward to that social exchange, from its idea to its design, to the deployment, and the potential that the social exchange that could happen. Then, finally how to bring it back to an art audience, because I feel a lot of the social exchanges that occur are really magical moments that happen with the people I am working within the different communities. This is a way of translating a project so that it can have the same effect on a person in a gallery environment.

JW: So this suggests the idea of how things and places are more a catalyst for other things and less of an end in and of itself. So I see all of these maps in your studio and looking at these abstractions somehow lend themselves to the meaning of these places. It reminds me of the term, “psychogeography” and how you are emotionally moving about these places.

PM: I do have these emotional connections to the locations where I do my performances. I bought this t-shirt a while ago that said Lake Zurich (Illinois) and my girlfriend is from Zurich, Switzerland. I ended up wearing it for a few weeks and people kept asking me if that’s where I went to school . I then realized it was only 45 minutes north of Chicago. So then I started doing research and found out that this utopian thinker named Seth Paine founded Lake Zurich in 1836. Upon visiting the town, it turned out to be this rich suburb with BMW’s and huge Mc-mansions. I tried to think how the town was still connected to this utopian thinker. I later found out that the grade school was called the Seth Paine Elementary. I thought that it was very radical that they kept the name of the utopian founder. So I ended up doing this utopian workshop in one of the classes where I dressed up as Seth Paine, told the kids about his life story and had each kid draw their own utopia and explain the pictures. During the entire workshop, I was dressed as Seth Paine. In doing that project I was trying to bring the community closer to its location through teaching and enacting a part of their radical history.

JW: Your work has this wonderful stream of idealism running through it. You advocate a kind of utopian thinking on the part of everyone you engage with, from plugging into public utility outlets; the idea that we should all benefit from the fortunes around us. How is all that idealism working out for you? Do you have faith in your work to change the world or is it a comment on the lack of communication or the loss of idealism in the world?

PM: I think that art is a radical gesture, but small. I became interested in art because I like how certain projects can have an impact on myself and change me perspective for a moment time and maybe have an impact on a few other people. I’m not trying to be overly critical about things, but have an optimism about these alternate types of thinking.

JW: So now were do you go from here after graduate school? I’m sure Chicago played a certain roll in your life, but where do you go from here?

PM: My girlfriend lives I Zurich, Switzerland and I really don’t know if I’m going to stay in Chicago and keep working within this art community or move and continue my nomadic art practice in Europe. Did you know what you were going to do after grad school?

JW: No, I still don’t know what I’m going to do! When you leave school you lose that safety net, you may have to shout louder when you get out. Your work deals very much with risk and as your life becomes more risky, it will be interesting to see if you’re willing to incorporate as much risk in your art as in your life. I hope you will.

I Wish to Communicate With You.

Reuben Kincaid on Location:

Outside television producers Telefantasy Studios





We’re standing around outside a Bestwestern coffee shop in Hollywood, just off the 101 freeway drinking coffee while we wait for our table. I’m here with the producers from Telefantasy Studios to talk with them about their new project “Multinauts,” their student grant program “Hondas for poor kids,” and some of the driving forces behind their production trio. The group consists of Riley Swift, Christine Adolph, and Jennifer Juniper Stratford (JJ) who have given us such classics as TV.2525, Willow Don’t Cry, the Dungeon Majesty series and the inspiration behind the “We're Rollin',They're Hatin'” theme of version 7.

As we are called to our table we spot Rebecca Romijn Stamos (minus the Stamos) and Jerry O’Connell (detective from Crossing Jordan) enjoying a morning Coke float. It’s great to be in LA and I’m glad that Telefantasy had the time to meet with me. The team has been working day and night on the production of “Multinauts”, which will premiere its first episode at the next Version Fest in April. The three of them are outside television producers, which means they don’t have the luxury of a writers’ strike and have to work straight through to make the spring deadline.




The new series Multinauts is a multi-dimensional time-traveler show that JJ says, “is a straight up adventure show.” It has three characters from different dimensions and time periods that join together to fight the corporate villain “Oysters Rockefeller.” The show will be shifting from Telefantasy’s traditional public access production style to a new television network aesthetic and will be more along the lines of their music video “Willow Don’t Cry”. The time and place for the premiere has not been set, but make sure you bring your Dungeon Majesty Fan Club card to get reserve seating and member gifts.

The original series Dungeon Majesty has given telefantasy studios the most critical acclaim and has put them on the map in the LA television community. The idea for the series started back in April 2004 while the three were playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons (Riley’s the Dungeon Master) and decided to make a show about the game. The show isn’t them just playing a game of D&D, but it’s an adventure series with detailed models, special effects, blue screens and improvisational acting(the best kind). The series currently consists of six twenty-five minute episodes and ten shorts that explore the many different aspects of D&D. The production value has increased every episode, but is still deeply rooted in a public access aesthetic. Each show leaves you wanting to make your own detailed outfit of your D&D character to wear to your next match, so watch! It’s on the “tube”.

As we finish our meal and settle up the bill, we walk towards our trusty Honda in the lot and grab one more glance at Rebecca Romijn’s perfect ponytail. Til’ next time, it’s Aron Gent signing off for Reuben Kincaid on location.


Check out more at www.dungeonmajesty.com and make sure to take your card with you!

Marie Harten Interview

Interview of Marie Harten by Adam Brooks
Her show "Ghostfuck" opens Dec. 14th from 7-11 pm
at Reuben Kincaid Project Space

Adam Brooks: So lets start from the beginning of the project because I’m assuming that this quite elaborate structure with the sheets, the boxes, and questionnaire all came a little after you were thinking how this project would work. If you could start on sharing your motivations in the beginning and how it has developed into something more conceptually structured.

Marie Harten: I think it started in my moving to Chicago and this new situation away from my boyfriend, family and friends. This new apartment and these things that were left in my room and how these people used these shorts and shirts and cloths (Objects she embroidered on). Why they left them in my room and why they didn’t want to have them. That was kind of the starting point. Then it just came to me, I saw my figure alone in a sexual way. I think it deals with problems that I had with my boyfriend at home. I have this feeling that sex is a way to get in contact with people and for me it was a way to get in contact with my new surroundings. So I had sex with these things that were left behind by embroidering my sexual figure on them. I started to try and feel what was left behind and where I am now.

AB: So in one way you are colonizing the space that you are in.

MH: Yeah that’s so true, I feel that I went from a little area such as myself and then my room and finally the rest of the apartment as I conquered the space around me. I went though the apartment leaving my figure behind on the objects as my tracks on the path I took.

AB: For most of the figures it is very unclear that they are sexual positions. How did you go about cataloging the positions that became the embroidered image and does your memory lead you to recreate these positions? And last do you mind that there are many readings for what the figure is doing?

MH: I just thought about which positions I like to do while having sex. It comes from memory and me recreating these positions, then photographing myself. I had to edit out some of the pictures because I didn’t want them to become pornographic and didn’t want people going crazy over a young woman in a sexual position. I want to show a personal thing of me and the personal side of having sex, you know what I mean?

AB: Then how do you know what is authentic and not just a stereotypical sexual position?

MH: It was more of a feeling and remembering during the recreation of the positions that made them feel authentic, not the pictures themselves. It’s like a review of my sex life and which positions I’ve grown to like.

AB: So then they became triggers back to the memory of pleasure, which is kind of an elusive thing anyways. They say we can’t remember pain, because if we could remember what pain was like, then life would become unbearable. We could also say that we can’t remember pleasure unless we are involved in it at that particular time. How truthful are these images and do they depend on your memory of that position giving you the best feeling? With the work being so much about you, how important is the audience?

MH: I thought about the positions more for me and I didn’t care if they were sexual or not. At the start of the project I would have the photos hanging in my studio and my friends would come over and say wow, what is that, that’s very sexual, please embroider that on my shorts, I would really like to have it. After that I decided to make them more abstract and in having them abstract I am trying to make them less sexual and more personal in a way, but then with the title of the work being Ghostfuck, I bring it to this feeling of sexual aloneness.

AB: Then with them being more abstract you leave room for multiple readings. Your comment about people wanting them on their shorts, have you ever thought of making it into a commission where you embroider them and their favorite positions on clothes?

MH: That’s not what I want. I don’t want to make a fashion line that the guys can be proud of the naked figure. We already have that in the culture, it’s funny, but that’s not my thing. When I embroidered the shorts and the shirt I went through both sides so its not functional anymore.

AB: Now if you could tell me about the second part of the project and how the kit came about?

MH: Throughout the whole thing I was thinking about relationships. I am kind of disappointed with relationships right now….. or with guys. I was wondering how people live their relationships and how important is sex and if people still feel lonely even if they are in a relationship? It was a form of conquest and me forcing myself into relationships by having them sleep on my sheets.

AB: How important is it what happened on the sheets? Because in the instructions you leave it open to the couples with what they do with the sheets. Then when you got the sheets back did you examine the sheets at all and how much residue is left on the sheets in regards to how it is presented?

MH: I bought them used at a thrift store, but I had a feeling that it wasn’t strong enough for me. So I tried to make it more intense by having a couple use them. I had to be careful in working with the couples. I didn’t want to come off as a pervert wanting to embroider their dirty sheets, it was more of an energy thing.

AD: You can’t say you are only interested in the energy thing, I think you are also interested in what they left behind, whether it be a stain, hairs or even their smell. It is all wrapped up together in being an element of the work. If we were to be in a television show, we would be in a lab and there would be the good looking forensic criminologist finding all of the evidence to prove that they did use the sheets the night before someone was killed. And that is what the viewer is going to be looking for whether it is there or not.

MH: I’m not interested in the stains, but when I started embroidering I knew which couple had which sheet and I really thought about each couple and their relationship. I read the surveys and had my own thoughts on the sheets, because one would be very smoky and another many hairs and one smelled like incense, it was very intense. I didn’t find anything dramatic, but these little things reminded me of the couple.

AB: Why didn’t you take the couples favorite positions and put them on the sheets? Why did you put your own?

MH: I didn’t want that, the project is about me as a woman entering into their relationship and reflecting upon my relationships.

AB: There’s something peculiar about you being in their relationships, even if it’s not about infidelity or a love triangle. Part of it is with the sexual charge and dynamic of the three of you, what do you think about that? And how important is it that you know these people and that their not from a random post on Craig’s list?

MH: I Think that would be a totally different project if I didn’t know the people at all. It was very personal for me while I was embroidering the sheets and thinking about the couples and how I personally felt about them. It wouldn’t be the same with strangers, and I think it’s more intense when I know the people.

AB: How did you pair the sheets with your favorite positions?

MH: I paid more attention to the patterns and the colors of the sheets and imagined where I would find them. One of them is very pail with light pastel flowers on them and I imagined them being on my grandmothers bed with the sexual positions embroidered on them. Those types of things went through my mind when I was thinking about the sheets and which positions. It’s a weird combination but I had fun with that.

AB: Well that certainly brings up a more taboo area like geriatric sex. Old people having sex, which we are not suppose to ever think about. But I’m sure you could find it on the Internet and that someone certainly subscribes to it as a turn on. Thanks, now I can never imagine sleeping on sheets with flowers next to my head.

MH: Sorry….. I really paid attention to the patterns and spent hours picking out the perfect sheets at the thrift store. I picked up one that was very grey with stripes and imagined this math student with those tiny glasses and all he has in his life is math and then there’s this woman, breaking into his life on the sheets, and making out, and stuff like that. Breaking rules, something like that I like too.