Mike Baur’s sculpture begins with used or waste industrial materials that he gathers himself or purchases from local businesses. Starting with salvaged I-beams, old machine parts, rusted scraps and blocks of steel, stone and plastic collected from across greater Chicago, he shapes and molds these materials into forms that challenge the constraints of their utilitarian origins and unites them into a single, sculptural, organic whole.

Everything Lost. Everything Gathered. This collection of mixed media on paper is a distillation of landscape, desire and memory. Exuberant scrawls painted with shards of the land, itself. Poetic evocations grounded in nature and emotion.

Charlee Swanson’s wall sculptures feature his Burned and Broken Series and American Landscape Series. Using glass, steel, wood and canvas, Swanson destroys the meaning of these materials by breaking, burning, scarring and rusting them. These intimate, complex reliefs create a volume of space, light and shadow, and add an unexpected, fluid dimension to otherwise static objects.

Ward Schumaker’s small paintings-on-wood derive from memory, dreams, and literary sources. Often employing texts, these new works eschew the gestural brush strokes employed in previous paintings, relying instead on crude, hand-cut stencils (of shapes and/or words), cut-paper, and sanded grounds; some include photographic transfers. The goal at times is to take the viewer to a place of quietude; in others, a place of discomfort––but always the important thing is that the viewer feel something.