Diane Christiansen and Shoshanna Utchenik, "Notes to Nonself," 2011. Installation view. Courtesy the artists and the Hyde Park Art Center.

My series “Briefing Room,” an ongoing collection of artist portraits in interview form, appears periodically at Chicago online magazine Gaper’s Block. For this installment, I visit Chicago artist Diane Christiansen in her Wicker Park studio. Her exhibition “Enough Space in the Head to Breathe” runs at Chicago’s Kasia Kay Projects Gallery through November 26.

BY MICHAEL WORKMAN

Diane Christiansen has been working as an artist in Chicago for decades, with an evolving body of work that incorporates drawing, painting, music, video, animation and more. Most recently, her collaboration with Slovenian artist Shoshanna Utchenik has yielded an intense and sprawling body of interconnected drawing, painting and sculptural work conceived as a totalizing installation for an exhibition last year, “Notes to Nonself,” at the Hyde Park Art Center. Christiansen’s works displays a wide array of evocative imagery, stunning for its sheer degree of inventiveness and ability to incorporate the internal logic of her own personal experiences into visual motifs that recur throughout. The Octopus of Attachment, her recurring Cocoon Girl character (which recalls fellow Chicagoan Archer Prewitt’s Sof’ Boy character comics), all add to a lush, illustrious imagined world of sacred ritual and psychic attacks from the so-called “reality” that confronts us daily. Briefing Room recently visited Christiansen in her Wicker Park studio to get a handle on it all in advance of the opening of her newest show at Kasia Kay Projects Gallery (information on the show and image credits appear at the end of the interview, please scroll down for these details).

Let’s start off by talking about your collaboration with Shoshanna Utchenik, how that evolved and developed.

She would say to me, that she thought I had figured out how to be an artist and a mother and she desperately needed a connection because she was out in the middle of nowhere. She asked if I’d do some therapy sessions with her. You know where Slovenia is, it’s out in the middle of nowhere. It’s beautiful but it truly is not near anything else. So we did a few sessions and I said, I don’t really want to be doing this. Because I think you’re my friend and I think you should be making art. I think that’s the antidote here. And so we started sending each other back and forth little notes. They’re everywhere. This is one of the first notes, this blue blob and she sent me back this map of these little different parts of one’s mind, because we were both reading the same Buddhist texts at the time. I’m a Buddhist and she was interested in Buddhism. So, that was one of the first notes but they became like…we’d only touch them once. CONTINUE READING

Tags: diane christiansen, hyde park art center, kasia kay gallery, Shoshanna Utchenik