Janet Pines Bender and Iris Goldstein are giving slide lectures (for Artist Week and Artist Month) which explores innovative topics such as strategies for escaping the rectangle. Plaster relief sculpture and painted torn paper works are on display. slide talks: Wed. Oct 9, 6 pm for the State of Illinois and Sun. Oct. 20 2 pm for the City of Chicago.

“Scenes for Crusoe”: Digital video and audio

Video shorts from a bog in South Central Texas that is subject to flash flooding, so it’s deemed “unsuitable for habitation,” depicts a kind of read-only landscape. The artist lives nearby on a small hill and makes art in collaboration with local flora and fauna.

“Art ‘n Play.”

Toylend, a Lekotek program, provides a toy lending library to families with children with disabilities, training parents and professionals regarding play skills, toy and computer adaptation, inclusive playgroups and special events. Individual and family play sessions focus on play education and increasing the child’s functional skills and development, which develop as a result of play. Artwork in a variety of media that has been created during art ‘n play sessions with the children and their families is being showcased.

“Bedtime Stories,” works on paper

The artist’s works on paper address the fragility of memory and its tenuous translation into language. Reliquary 1-21 and What Was Beautiful 1-119 are excerpts from an installation-in-progress titled, An Imagined Survival/A Conjured Identity. Hand-stitching, collage and paint are the media employed in these large-scale works.

“New Moves”: mixed media paintings

The artist’s exhibitions and trips to Berlin, Japan, and Thailand, combined with art residencies at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, NY and Haguro-Machi, Japan have been major influences on her recent oeuvre. Current paintings on canvas and torn papers combine her personal use of Zen calligraphic meditations with her history as a “process painter” while retaining a consistent involvement with layers of memory, mark making, as well as images of flight, dance, and movement.

“Inner Spaces: Carvings, Constructions & Collages”: mixed media

The artwork by Magrisso has been motivated by a desire to express his ever-changing inner vision that is both psychological and spiritual, personal and universal. Highly symbolic, yet at the same time using actual objects and photographs of real objects, the work expresses the mystery at the heart of reality. As a practicing physician who survived a heart attack, death is often a theme and has served as an inspiration for his work.

New paintings

Featuring figurative oil paintings that offer a fresh interpretation of women in a modern, urban culture, Hinebrook’s current body of work observes the interaction of the female form within industrial environments. Hinebrook integrates modern technology using traditional mediums and formats by incorporating photographic elements using ink dye-transfer techniques with a loose application of paint that develops an interplay of abstraction and representation. She makes an overall statement about the co-existence of two contrasting elements in both the content of her work and the technique.

“Variations”: plaster relief wall sculptures

The biomorphic shapes of Goldstein’s new work reflect her reactions to the light and color and shapes of the landscape of the Maine coast where she works in her studio each summer. Goldstein conceives of these pieces as an installation of related formal ideas about the interactions of the natural and the artificial, the organic and the geometric, and the mass and its surface.