ABOUT THE SHOW

Oh Fall! Oh College Football! Oh Civil War Re-enactments! Oh Leafpiles on Fire! Oh BEER! Your pals at BEN RUSSELL cordially invite you to join them as they pour a cold one out in honor of summer already-past - a fond farewell to those bygone days of thigh-chafed lakefront volleyball, getting drunk in Millenium Park, hiding from Millenium Park Segway cops and buying far too many heirloom tomatoes at the farmer's market. Just pour out a dribble though - there's no sense in wasting good BEER on the past (especially homebrew*), so send the rest down your own gullet in honor of Art and the Present!

With all of the liquid courage that we can shotgun without a stomach pump, BEN RUSSELL is

proud to raise a glass/can in the form of our Fall (Bottle) Opener, the aptly titled BEN RUSSELL: BEER. With a blurry eye to the besotted history of BEER's role in culture, critical thinking and image/object-making, we've tied our three sheets to the wind and brewed up a concoction that is certain to plaster and pickle even the most devout art-world teetotaler. From the BEER-based work of Tom Marioni, the conceptual pioneer who made The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art in 1970, to the terrifying quick-glimpse-BEER-hubris of ex-President Bush (in Pavel Medvedev's G8 video screed, The Unseen); from Jacob C Hammes' meaty sculptures of an alcoholic's most necessary organs to the post-feminist performance blotto-TV-spectacle of Chelsea Culp; and from the homebrewed concoctions* of beer-art practitioners Joe Grimm and Dennis Hodges to the sloshed, soused, and sozzled 13' wall painting produced in situ during a 5-day bender by Chicago resident Justin B Williams - BEN RUSSELL: BEER is artist-run cultural inebriation at its most intoxicating (9.7% abv)!

Sure, you know your limit, but this is the sort of drinking competition for which you won't need a designated driver - and unless you get crocked from knocking back too much homebrew*, you won't need to chew on that dried-root tuber of bitter vetch to get rid of your hangover in the morning. Cheers!

*Emergent Property: Lemon (Organic Wild Ambiguous Sour Feeling), Flower Plower, and Saint Ordinary will be available at the opening, while supplies last. Donations accepted.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

CHELSEA CULP is an interdisciplinary performance, sculpture, and installation artist who lives and works in Chicago. Her art practice is influenced by experience in the contrasting work environments of both construction sites and night clubs. Much of her art addresses the performance of gender via garment, movement, and speech, and the collapse of performance when a universal and timeless human experience breaks through artifice. This break is often expressed by abstracting symbols (and materials) from a recognizable and oppressive syntax. Her performances and sculptures are often made collaboratively, involving concepts or people from outside of the art community.

JACOB C. HAMMES is a multimedia artist living and working in Chicago. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and currently works at the Hyde Park Art Center. Hammes grew up in rural Iowa and knows how to skin a raccoon. He has exhibited extensively throughout the Midwest and both nationally and internationally.

TOM MARIONI is a sculptor and conceptual artist who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and has lived in San Francisco since 1959. In 1970 Marioni founded the Museum of Conceptual Art (MOCA) in San Francisco and installed his legendary piece The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art at the Oakland Museum. Marioni wrote Beer, Art and Philosophy, a memoir, in 2004, and in 2010 his work will be featured in an exhibition at the University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art.

PAVEL MEDVEDEV is an acclaimed Russian documentary filmmaker who was born in 1963 in Orenburg, Russia. A director at the St.Petersburg Documentary Film Studio since 2000, for the past decade he has been depicting facets of post-Soviet life through taut cinematography, incisive observation, and deft montage. Dealing with rural post-Soviet life, Hydrogen bomb fallout, and the G8's "business of politics", Medvedev's films and videos have screened widely and have garnered top prizes internationally.

JUSTIN B WILLIAMS is an incredibly handsome 24-year-old multidisciplinary artist. Lately, he has been smoking pot and writing a lot of poetry. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally - USA, Canada, London, Copenhagen, Athens Greece, Victoria Australia, and probably some other places too. He founded the experimental, temporary, nomadic, and important art space CHURCH PORCH with artist Thomas Roach in 2009. So far there have been no exhibitions to date, but keep your eyes peeled.

JOE GRIMM is a Chicago-based artist working in sound, performance and fermentable liquid media. His work promotes dialogue and interpersonal communication along the intoxication/flavor/aroma axis. At BEN RUSSELL: BEER he will present a new piece entitled Emergent Property: Lemon (Organic Wild Ambiguous Sour Feeling), in an edition of 50 bottles with hand-drawn caps.

DENNIS HODGES is a Chicago-born fermentationist and recovering artist who, in collaboration with fungus-collective Saccharomyces cerevisiae, will present two new zymurgic excursions for BEN RUSSELL's drinking pleasure: Flower Plower, an American IPA designed to showcase the flavors and aromas of an individual hop variety (Simcoe), and Saint Ordinary, a session-strength Standard Bitter in the English tradition.