Chicago Tribune

By Alan Artner | Tribune critic
April 25, 2008

As late as a decade ago, when the big contemporary art exposition was at Navy Pier, all showplaces in town saw an increase in visitors, as those who went to the fair also explored galleries. In the last two years, however, Art Chicago and its satellites have seemed to leave time for only better-known venues, so this week, with people from out of town in for Artropolis, we focus on four Illinois artists who may be seen only at newer spaces in each of the city's chief art "districts"— West Loop Gate, Pilsen and River North. They are reminders that there's still no substitute for the gallery experience.

Kim Curtis is a painter who works in Champaign-Urbana, suggesting rather than transcribing elements of the rural landscape. Her strength lies in creating forms that one might pass in an automobile on the way to somewhere else. The forms are abstract, but when caught in peripheral vision in dusky light, they trigger responses to what we know of, say, ponds or shipyards in cold seasons, thus becoming believable places without being literal or illustrative.

As with the great Midwestern photographer Art Sinsabaugh, Curtis has an affinity for horizontals many times wider than they are high. The ones on view at Kasia Kay Art Projects are the most extreme of any in her three exhibitions at the gallery and also are the most persuasive in handling. I prefer the uninterrupted 6-foot spans of "Longest Race," "Long Fall" and "Long Fall II," but the artist has cast several other pieces as triptychs that specifically deal with visual disruption, and these, too, are successful. The variety of the pronounced horizontals, which suggest panoramic landscapes viewed from a long way off, is somewhat lost whenever the artist moves in closer or seeks the stability of a square format. She is more a poet in CinemaScope.

At 1044 W. Fulton Market. 312-492-8828.

For full review click here 

Alan Artner, Tribune Art Critic
Published May 11, 2007



Kim Curtis' paintings at Kasia Kay Art Projects are, as they were a year ago, landscapes that have had their underlying abstract elements uncovered. Form, light and color are paramount in them, but they are not without atmosphere and, apparently a new concern, the instantaneous summing up of a scene that takes place as we drive through a landscape, identifying things only as we move past, by our peripheral vision.

I especially like "Ink and Shadows," which seems a perception received in a flash of something akin to one of the great glass-and-steel arches of a 19th Century European railroad station filled with, say, the bustle and steam of a painting by J.M.W. Turner. None of this is, of course, literal; it's more like an echo or evocation of a scene caught on the wing and frozen while fleeting.

As before, the best pieces are small, long and only a couple of inches high. They are streaks of landscape in which just enough remains of the topographical elements to escape being abstract swipes. There the visible world is reduced to essentials, and the effect is persuasive.

The quality of light in a number of the best pictures is wintry, and capturing that remains her forte, though Curtis produces dusky scenes in more than one season. The larger pictures still do not register on me as powerfully as the smaller, but a scene around a pond in which color patches are tightly interlocked, shows a benefit in having been cast as a triptych.

At 1044 W. Fulton Market, 312-492-8828.

By Alan G. Artner
Tribune Art Critic
Published April 14, 2006

Kim Curtis’ paintings at Kasia Kay Art Projects are all landscapes in which the artist has uncovered and made prominent the underlying abstract elements. Presumably inspired by natural settings caught in different seasons and at different times of day, the paintings are less actual transcriptions than evocations of places through form, light and color.

The best of them are small, as Curtis has a talent for creating tightly circumscribed, densely packed panels. The larger canvases are to my eye less successful, though they sometimes also have the deep glowing colors of stained glass and in a single instance--the one titled “Almost Spring"--suggests the unseen growth process more than what is already visible above ground.

The light in many of the pictures is the fiery red of dusk that used to illuminate most of the Wisconsin north-woods paintings by Tom Uttech. However, Curtis--who also lives and works in the heartland, Urbana--uses it less to give her scenes drama than to take the chill off the spare wintry landscapes that seem to be both her preference and forte.

Among the highlights is a group of panels one or two feet wide but only three inches high. Here she has pared down landscapes to their irreducible essentials, and the asceticism is most persuasive. Each and every mark is necessary to the abstract compositions, which still have not lost any of their atmosphere or ability to function as poetic evocations.

Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery through April 22
At 1044 W. Fulton Market, 312-492-8828.
http://www.kasiakayartprojects.com

"Atmospheric”

Atmospheric, the inaugural exhibition at the new Fulton Market location of Kasia Kay Art Projects, is an eclectic collection of work from new and established artists in Kay’s stable. On display are cinematic photographs by husband-and-wife artists Sheila and Nick Pye, lavish, abstracted landscapes by Kim Curtis, and Disneyfied, pastel-hued bird sculptures by Sandra Bermudez. Tucked into an alcove in the back of the gallery space is The Block Where I Grew Up, an elegant photographic installation by Kristin Anderson that lovingly chronicles her memories of each house in her small-town Michigan neighborhood. (AM)

Neuarmy
ART

“Atmospheric”

Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery, through Sat 11.

Time Out Chicago Issue 54: Mar 9–Mar 16, 2006

Kim Curtis paints from her studio in Urbana, taking, as her statement goes, “her cues from nature.” But her landscape pieces are more than a little removed from what her neighbors probably see when they look out of their windows.

The burnt industrial look of Prairie Harbor, for instance, imagines a postapocalyptic world where rust and metal have replaced moss and wood as natural elements. With heavy strokes of oil paint, Curtis delivers an abstract but succinct vision of places that appear to have settled back into the cycle of life after a healthy dose of destruction. Not all of her work, however, is so grim. Some of her paintings are rather bright and hopeful, like a large diptych titled Prairie Spring; its tall skies the color of buttermilk and farm equipment resting on the ground give it a gentle air.

Similarly striking are two large photographic works by husband and wife Nick and Shelia Pye. Serving as their own models, the pair sit together on a shitty mattress in a run-down room with peeling wallpaper. In The Lovers II, they are dressed up, holding hands warmly. In Dream of Color, stripped down to their underwear, they look rigid and less comfortable, though their moods remain a mystery. In both pieces, their faces are obscured by violent, smeared blobs of color.

Other notables include inventive digital prints (some of them painted-on) by Judith Page, miniature purses made of cast resin by Marion Wilson, and a curious digital collage by Sandra Bermudez that looks like an olive branch made up of a repeating image of a woman’s hand and arm.

These atmospheric works are part of the aptly titled group show that serves as the inaugural exhibition of Kasia Kay’s new location.—Josh Tyson

Copyright ©2006 Time Out Chicago