FLATFILEgalleries hosts THE FIRST CHICAGO SCULPTURE INTERNATIONAL BIENNALE, featuring the work of 33 Chicago Sculpture International Member Sculptors. The group was chosen from over 80 unmarked submissions by a jury consisting of Paul Klein, Director of the new Chicago Art Foundation, Michal Raz-Russo, a private curator, and noted art writer/critics Polly Ullrich and James Yood. This marks the first exhibition of its kind ever to be held in a private gallery. Michael Klein, Director of Sculpture Center International, is thrilled that the young CSI, which is the first local chapter in the United States to be established, is able to gather local as well as national and even international sculptors into its membership, and hopes other cities will follow suit, establishing similar chapters. There are currently 140 members in the organization, which is less than a year old. All of the Biennale participants are CSI members from the Chicago area with the exception of Wolfgang Buttress, from the UK, Richard Heinrich and Gunnar Theel from New York, and Mark Warwick, who is from Pennsylvania.

The 2006 Biennale will be curated by FLATFILEgalleries’ director Susan Aurinko, who conceived the show. The Biennale which will include sculpture from small pieces and maquettes to full-sized work, in the gallery’s large main space and project room, which will hold a video sculpture installation by Joan Truckenbrod and a variable-sized installation by Lacey Pipher.

The sculptors chosen blindly by the jury for the exhibition are, alphabetically, Nikki Anderson, Mike Baur, Nicole Beck, Wolfgang Buttress, Barbara Cooper, Jan Dean, Bob Emser, Ron Gard, Michele Goldstrom, Carol Hammerman, Donna Hapac, Richard Heinrich, Linda Jarmon, Terrence Karpowicz, Robert J Krawczyk, Evan Lewis, John Z Mason, Dennis Lee Mitchell, Brian Monaghan, Bruce Nieme, David Noguchi, Jason Peot, Jan Petry, Lacey Pipher, Tom Scarff, Eric Steele, Jozef Sumichrast, Gunnar Theel, Barry Tinsley, Joan Truckenbrod, Charles VanGilder, Mark Warwick, and Bruce White. A 16 page catalogue is being published.

In The Library, we will feature a group of new paintings by gallery artist Anna Jaap. Jaap, who lives and works in Nashville, Tennesee, is known for her small jewel-like canvases that although basically abstract, contain botanical and graphic, almost cartoon-like elements.

Also featured is SUBTLE, the curatorial debut of FLATFILE’s Associate Director, Aaron Ott. The show will feature the photographic works of Richard Koenig, Liz Cockrum, Gail Kaplan and Aaron Kleidon.

Richard Koenig’s latest series supplies us with cunningly made photographic records of an ambivalent reality using his own highly refined technique of photographing various elements of a space. Richard reproduces these elements as carefully distorted paper prints and reintroduces them back into their environment, presenting us with intriguing spatial riddles. At the point where “depiction meets deception,” the viewer is forced to mold this ambiguous space into their own concept of what is real and what is construct. Richard Koening currently teaches photography at Kalamazoo College, in Michigan, and was a finalist in both the Santa Fe Prize in Photography (2003), and Australia’s Roche Contemporary Art Prize (2001). He has shown in numerous exhibitions, including a one-person show at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago, in the summer of 2003 and several shows at FLATFILE.

Liz Cockrum turns her camera towards Kane County, about 45 miles west of Chicago. In this rural landscape, she provides us with deeply penetrating and thoughtful work on a lifestyle fading in the wake of suburban sprawl. Supplying us with tightly composed, quiet images, she presents moments that are both broad in their sense of humanity and refined in their sense of individuality. The nature of the hushed pictures captured by Ms. Cockrum are sublime in the sense that they feel more like the moments in-between the moments.

Gail Kaplan’s series creates incarnations of interior spaces through her photographs of maquette size rooms. Her images are as much about the nature of light as the structures that it inhabits. Both the intensity of color, and the simple power of light force upon us a sense of scale far beyond the delicacy of their original creation. Kaplan’s dreamlike point of view creates illusions of such depth and quiet beauty that our perception of relative space shifts towards what the composition tells us is true, keeping the viewer engaged in an elusive middle-ground.

Aaron Kleidon documents Cairo, Illinois by stringing together enlargements from eleven 4x5 negatives, stretching more than 80 inches long, This haunting image shows the mostly abandoned Southern Illinois city that was once a center for river and rail traffic in the nation. A city with steady population decline since 1920, this is an unwavering look at a true American ghost town. With no inhabitants present in the photograph, the viewer is left to comb through the finely textured and detailed image for signs of life. The emptiness grabs hold with the meditative weight of silence.