Liz Nofziger and Big Red & Shiny in Chicago!

"CORE" is on view through April 20 at The Glass Curtain Gallery at Columbia College, Chicago.

"In many ways, Core is a breakthrough show for Nofziger. The Glass Curtain Gallery has been providing her with more support than she’s ever gotten for any previous shows and much more support than she expected. Core is entirely carpentry dependent and Columbia College has provided a team of not only students devoted to the gallery, but a staff of preparators who have helped Nofziger build a meticulous installation that has fundamentally transformed the 2200 square foot layout of the space (incidentally the same size as the Boston Center for the Arts’s Mills Gallery). Nofziger isn’t a neophyte in the art world—she has been showing work for a decade now—however, after she moved to Boston from her native Kentucky in 2002 to begin an MFA at MassArt (2004), her career began to change scale.

After several well received solo shows over the last two and a half years following her graduation from MassArt, (her C.V. lists 10, including her thesis show, up to the present) Nofziger sought to be an Artist in Research (AIR) at the Berwick Research Institute. She spent her time in AIR program planning for her show at the Glass Curtain Gallery, essentially in an R&D phase of the project, and unlike all other AIR’s, had no work to show at the end of her spell at the Berwick. She hoped to extrapolate from her research at the Berwick an installation at The Glass Curtain, and completed the AIR program essentially with a set of architectural plans...

READ THE FULL ARTICLE ABOUT LIZ in this issue of BIG RED & SHINY

Announcing The 2007 AIR Artists!

After a year of learning the ropes, Rosie Branson Gill and Bonnie Bastien have taken the reins at the AIR Program. The artists have been chosen and the 2007 season is ready to get underway.

Here is the line-up for 2007!
April-June

Jon Taylor is interested in exploring clothing as an adaptive interface to the outside world. His work is a witty commentary on social norms, and especially those of blind consumerism. Taylor often creates characters who he outfits with clothing or structures that are an augmentation of the body and blend aspects of fashion, packaging and architecture. He then documents the character in situations that parody real events, highlighting and exaggerating the oddities of human behavior. At the Berwick he will be working towards a performance of a character he will create during his residency.

July-August

Maura Jasper wonders how the elderly experience our world of rapid change. Uncomfortable with these changes herself, she began to notice that in our culture of technology and youth, the elderly are often invisible, or barely present. Using technology and weather as her focus points, Jasper will use her Berwick residency to further develop "Weather You Remember", an online collection of weather reports delivered by senior citizens, as they recall and comment on the weather of their homes. This portraiture project attempts to capture and preserve moments and memories of a world we may or may not still inhabit.

September-November

Matthew Shanley wants us to get our hands dirty in the numbers! He will use his Berwick residency to develop "Our Knowledge Mashups", a tool for organizing and displaying data that combines numerical information from different sources and create an elegant visual display of the results. What relationships are hidden in numbers? Shanley believes there are many and that exploratory combinations of previously unmixed fields allow for the possibility to be inspired.