Gallery opening night on Peoria

Since the school year started, one of my teacher's at NIU has been telling me to attend the opening night for a bunch of galleries on Peoria street out in Chicago. I was going to blow it off but two of my friends insisted I meet up with them so I was guilt tripped into it.

Turns out they give you free beer and food so it went from alright to amazing in a few seconds. Thought I'd update with some of the highlights of the few galleries I visited. As with most art shows and galleries I've been to, 90% of the art was pretentious bullshit with 10% of it being awesome pieces and exhibits. Seriously, one of the art exhibitions there was a video of a guy running around decripted parts of Chicago at night with a spiderman costume. More artist need to be punched in the face more often or something.

Anyways, here's some of the galleries I liked:

Walsh Gallery/ www.walshgallery.com

Featuring the work of Reena Saini Kallat. A lot of her pieces were very large in scale and actually look like she put some time and thought into the it. Most of them were centered around past conflicts between India and pakistan so the message was interesting as well. One of her more aweinspiring works was a series of portraits painted on collected stamps titled "Synonyms".
That's my friend Ryan next to one of the synonym's portait texting away, he spent most of the time in the galleries texting.
Don't give me the sad face Ryan, I don't care about your texting.

Peek art/ www.peekart.com

Ok, so this was probably my favorite gallery of the bunch. They had a lot of interesting artist and had a whole interactive website you could play around with in the gallery. They even had this nice little couch you could sit down on to watch a movie.



Their website is currently down and I can't figure out the artist who did these two pieces I really liked :[
When I figure out the name/website quits being gay as hell I'll see about updating this. None the less enjoy the pretty pictures. I'm a whore for that whole Japanese pop art look right now :3

Western Exhibitions/ www.westernexhibitions.com/

This gallery features a lot of former students and teachers from Northern Illinois Univeristy. Sadly other than Stan Shellabarger's peices most of the art was piss poor art scene bullshit :/ I also couldn't get any good pictures of Stan's works because it was so crowded so I just used the stock picture off the website.

Last year they featured Ben Stone, one of my favorite art teacher's at NIU, and his stuff is always borderline insane but well excuted. Hopefully he'll be in rotation for the gallery again, here's some of his stuff from last time.

That Calvin one makes me smile everytime I think about it.

Finally, Peter Miller Gallery/ www.petermillergallery.com

This gallery was featuring mainly just works of Laura Ball. She did these huge oil paintings mixed with stencils and other mediums that looked spectucular. They all focused on women and roles they play in society mixed with idealisms from fairy tale worlds riding pretty horses or something along those lines. There were a lot of fancy words I forgot but the paintings and drawings sure are purty :3

Also another artist featured was Caleb Weintraub. All of his peices were huge and full of bright colors with children wearing paper plates for mask. For size comparison my friend Steve decided to give a hand.

I think Steve had taken full advantage of the free drinks by this point.

All in all it was a pretty swell time and if you live in the Chicago area you should make it out for the open gallery nights. It's always an interesting experince. Next time I should drag along Josh (Mauvis) so we can do some hardcore hating on the usual 90% while enjoying the free goods :3