Focus 4 exhibition: Moses; Raphael; Veara; Wakins

The Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery’s Focus 4 runs from June 1 through September 24, 2010, and presents solo shows by Jacqueline Moses, Judith Raphael, Kevin Veara, and Mel Watkin.

RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST IS FRIDAY, JUNE 11th, 2010 FROM 5pm to 7 pm.

Jacqueline Moses, of Chicago, is best known as a painter of landscapes that focus on transitions. Globalization Affects World Reactions investigates the space between our environment (earth) and realms of imagination where objects, such as houses, are displaced to float above distant and exotic lands. Her sculptural Reliquaries-Positive Alternatives integrates wood, organ pipes, slides of her artwork, and light to create memorials that reflect environmental concerns.

Judith Raphael creates a modern day coming-of-age story through portraits and narrative paintings of young women posed on the cusp of adolescence. Her subjects, fascinating, dignified, and poetic, are “feminine foot soldiers in the process of becoming women in a complex world.” They inhabit interior landscapes of uncertainty that are filtered through an airy brightness and clarity. Judith Raphael is from Chicago.

Kevin Veara draws and paints birds of the Sangamon River Valley, near Springfield, Illinois, that are found in the steep, forested banks and flood plains of the Sangamon River. His array of avian life, native and migratory, are often pictured as encircled by menacingly sharp-leaved plants that remind us of human complicity in climate change, habitat fragmentation, invasive species, and genetic modification.  

Mel Watkin’s works-on-paper, Mapworks, 2001--2009, are created on out-of-date, road maps which are altered as she paints and draws onto them. Roads become rivers or are clogged with flowering vines. Coastlines are flooded, inland seas re-hydrated. Erosion, water, plant life, and fungi replace humanity as determining forces. They represent the past and future. Natural forms are based on flora and fauna surrounding her farmhouse in rural southern Illinois.

The Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery is located at 100 W. Randolph, 2-100. Hours are 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., Monday through Friday, closed state holidays. For information, call 312-814-5322 or visit www.museum.state.il.us/ismsites/chicago