Year: 2010

Molly Shanahan is Artistic Director of Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak, a Chicago-based company she founded in 1994 to support her research in choreography, performance and collaboration.

 

Through her career, Molly has developed a distinctively fluid vocabulary with a singular purpose: to find and express the most unbridled of inner impulses. She continues to deepen and hone her singular approach to movement and the body, which feeds her multi-modal collaborations and the public performance of her solo and ensemble dances. Shanahan’s “trademark organicism,” equal parts movement laboratory, curiosity think-tank and spiritual practice, proceeds from getting lost in the wilderness of matter, imagery and psyche, and creating a pathway of memory and relationship to find the way home. Shanahan’s recent projects emphasize the capacity to be emotionally and kinetically raw in performance of both improvised and composed dances. The series tapped into the profound alchemical phenomenon of the audience/performer relationship.

Shanahan is the recipient of two National Performance Network Creation Fund Awards, a Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and an Illinois Arts Council fellowship for choreography, among others. Her critically-acclaimed evening-length solo My Name is a Blackbird was listed as one of the “top ten dance moments of the decade” by TimeOut Chicago. Shanahan was included in New City’s 2010 feature “The Players, 50 people who really perform for Chicago: “discarding the rules of modern dance, Shanahan creates gorgeous organic phrases by observing motion at an atomic level.” She is a member of the Dance Program faculty at Northwestern University, teaches at the Lou Conte Dance Studio and conducts workshops and teaching residencies in Chicago and nationally. An anchor arts partner at Berger Park and permanent artist-in-residence at High Concept Laboratories (both, Chicago), Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak is a Pentacle Roster Artist, represented by Ivan Sygoda.

Shanahan is a native of Canada, maintains dual citizenship, and has been based in Chicago since 1994.

Born in 1954 in Poland, Rogala studied music in Krakow before getting an MFA in painting at Krakow’s Academy of Fine Arts. He came to the United States in 1979, where he earned an MFA from the Chicago Art Institute. He later received a Ph.D. from the University of Wales, with a dissertation on interactive public art.

 

Chicago-based Rogala is most famous for his interactive installations and video theater pieces. The Chicago Tribune praised his work as “an exhilarating interweaving of video, performance, and numerous other media.” At Chicago’s Goodman Theater, Rogala presented Nature Is Leaving Us (1989), a music theater piece that featured a video wall of 48 television monitors. Electronic Garden/NatuRealization, an outdoor interactive installation project was installed in 1996 in Chicago’s Washington Square Park, and Divided We Stand, described as an “interactive media symphony” followed in 1997 at the Chicago Museum for Contemporary Art. Miroslaw Rogala’s artwork has been exhibited in more than 40 countries and is included in permanent collections all over the world.

Rogala’s most recent work has involved an ongoing engagement with landscape and still life images transformed through the use of Ford Oxaal’s computer software MEV/Minds-Eye-View. Transformed Garden puts into book format images and artworks that will be incorporated into an interactive website www.transformedgarden.com.

He is currently preparing, in association with the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan, a proposal and libretto for a multimedia interactive opera, DEL+ALT+CTRL.

A frequent collaborator with other artists, Rogala has worked with Merce Cunningham, filmmaker and installation artist Carolee Schneemann, Ed Paschke, and theater directors Michael Maggio (“Sunday in the Park with George”) and Byrne Piven. Rogala’s collaboration with Piven, a video version of the witches’ scenes used in a 1989 production of Macbeth: The Witches Scenes, has been shown in schools worldwide.

Rogala has been chair of the Department of CGIM/Computer Graphics and Interactive Media at Pratt Institute; director and the one of founding fathers of the PIMA/Performance and Integrated Media Arts at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, and has taught at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College. He was one of the founding fathers of the first MFA Electronic Arts Degree at iEAR Studio, Integrated Electronic Arts at Renssellaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York. He is currently directs the Graduate Program and Digital Arts Center for KSI/Knowledge Systems Institute in Skokie and Chicago

While an art student in the 1970’s, Terrence Karpowicz was influenced by the theories and practices of Minimalism and Conceptualism which dominated the art world at the moment.

 

Between college and graduate school, Karpowicz was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes scholarship to the United Kingdom to serve as apprentice to the sole millwright for the government’s Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Terry learned the ancient techniques and craftsmanship of watermill and windmill construction and preservation. As a result of these influences and experiences, his aesthetic is rooted in craftsmanship while being informed by the sublime nature of minimal forms and the layering of history and ideas.

Karpowicz continues to practice the craft of wood-working and joinery and am especially drawn to the interactions of wind, water, sunlight, and gravity on natural materials. His work is defined by the tension at the point of contact, or joint, and the act of creating this tension. By joining irregular, organic materials (such as wood limbs and granite shards) to machine-tooled geometric shapes of steel, Terry creates sculpture with actual or implied kinetic relationships among the elements and between the sculpture and its environment.

The ways in which disparate materials interact with each other define Karpowicz’ life and his relationship with the world. Oak and granite nesting in congruent harmony, stainless steel orbs spinning within walnut ellipses, granite shards twisting against armatures of steel – these elements are held together through his commitment to materials, history and craftsmanship.

Karpowicz earned his BA at Albion College in Michigan, and his MFA from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. His work is included in the permanent collections of several museums in the Midwest, and he has earned many public commissions, as well as exhibited with galleries across the United States.

James Ginsburg founded Cedille Records in 1989 while a law student at the University of Chicago. At the end of 1993, he founded The Chicago Classical Recording Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that now owns and operates Cedille.

 

The creation of the Foundation allowed Cedille Records to greatly expand the scope of its recording activity to include all genres of classical music (including opera) while continuing and codifying its mission of promoting the work of Chicago’s finest classical musicians.

Mr. Ginsburg previously worked for Nonesuch Records in New York and reviewed numerous recordings for the American Record Guide. He personally directs Cedille Records’ recording sessions, working closely with artists and engineers to maintain the label’s outstanding reputation for musical and sonic excellence. Mr. Ginsburg has produced over 100 recordings for Cedille and other labels.

In 2009, the Chicago Tribune named Mr. Ginsburg a “Chicagoan of the Year” in the Arts.