White Bird, curated by Hudson of New York ’s Feature Inc. Gallery, analyzes the relationship between science, spirituality, and the body. The exhibition includes recent work by New York artists Nancy Becker, David Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli, Chicago artist Tom Friedman, and the art collective (Art)n. The media used ranges from wood and paint to laundry detergent and PHSColograms™. (PHSColograms™, a trademark of (Art)n laboratory, are three-dimensional, computer-generated images on photographic film. They are created by the (Art)n laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology and UIC ’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory.)

Featuring a single work by each artist, and lighting only the artworks in an otherwise dark gallery, Hudson ’s curation is sparse, dramatic, and melancholy. The dynamism of the works lie in their shifting loyalties alternately to science and to spirituality, to the temporal and the eternal, to the physical and the metaphysical, to the body and the beyond. Friedman ’s piece, a snow angel traced on the gallery floor in a pile of white laundry detergent, speaks of both a sublime ephemerality and banal material experience, and comments on the natures of cleanliness and purity. (Art)n ’s Space and Time Visualization is a moving three-dimensional mandala that, like Friedman ’s empty snow angel, elicits a kinesthetic response. David Shaw ’s Stacked Ladders, too, is caught up in the tension of an erotic object ’s physicality and is a gesture of yearning for the divine.

CURATOR BIOGRAPHY

Hudson is a curator and art dealer who has served as director and owner of Feature Inc. Gallery since 1984. Feature opened on April Fool’s Day 1984, in a second-floor space at 340 West Huron St., Chicago. The first show exhibited in the front gallery was Richard Prince’s rephotographed fashion photos. In August 1988, the gallery moved to New York City and opened in October at 484 Broome St. There, Hudson focused on Midwest and West Coast artists, in addition to those living in New York who had been disregarded by the New York galleries. Feature constantly maintains two or more exhibition spaces, so that several exhibitions can be presented simultaneously. Hudson has also independently curated a number of shows.

(Art)n, Nancy Becker, Tom Friedman, David Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli

White Bird is supported by the University of Illinois Chicago School of Art and Design’s College of Architecture, Art, and Urban Planning.

This exhibition is also partly funded by the Illinois Arts Council.