Gallery 901
March 5, 2025
Kayla Alpers
Innocent Curiostiy
Opening Reception March 1 | 5pm - 8pm
On Display March 2025
Innocent Curiosity is a collection of mixed media artworks that aim to highlight the freedom of creation. Each piece is a mess of colors, textures and other items typically not used in canvas paintings. My past few years of art making have been accompanied by many different artists in different jobs, internships and opportunities. New artists, older adults and kids are often self-conscious in their belief that they are artists especially as they use materials for the first time. Creating and collaborating with artists much older and younger than me has been my greatest inspiration as a growing artist. Creating within a community allowed me space and freedom to do things differently. Innocent Curiosity acknowledges that there is no incorrect way to use materials or to make art. Everything is art supplies, even mistakes and old, abandoned art can become new again.
April & May
Frederick Nitsch
The Nervous Circus
Opening Reception April 5, 2025 | 5-7 pm
On Display April 5 - May 3, 2025
Frederick Nitsch (b. 1984) is a collage artist and abstract painter. "The Nervous Circus" is his first solo show since 2020, and will feature painted and mixed media work made in the past year. Frederick is an artist with Project Onward studio in Bridgeport. Through the accumulation of layers, Nitsch builds complex tones and ethereal textures. They’re bounded in sharp-edged shapes, the whole ensemble often varnished for a brilliant sheen. Many works also incorporate fragments that the artist has cut from vintage magazines and recontextualized. Nitsch is drawn to black and white photos of faded grandeur and staccato snatches of text, the phrases often deployed as provocative riddles. Nitsch describes his work as a kind of process art: “It’s like I’m doing an exquisite corpse with myself.” A defector from the world of academic philosophy, Nitsch originally made art to escape thinking, but now believes he can use art to do thinking. Nitsch currently lives in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood with his cats Wendy and Wally. He was a founding member of Chicago’s cooperatively run Agitator Gallery.
