Art Bliss in Pilsen
Apt. 1R
1722 S. Des Plaines St.
www.apt1r.com
Smitten by APT. 1R 
By Laura Thompson
"Yikes!" I thought as I sent out an email to all (all!) SAIC students and faculty, soliciting information for F's May Noteworthy section. Just how many replies will bombard my inbox faster than I can read them? Dozens, surely ‹ at least! The real answer? Six. Six! So sad to hear that out of about 2,000 full and part-time students, only six of us have anything going on, whether it be
exhibiting work, holding a performance, making a zine or playing with a band. Okay, perhaps the forecast is not as dismal as it might seem; some people don't check email, some are too busy to respond, it's the end of the semester and we're all so very, very tired ‹ maybe?
Well, while the bulk of us are exhausted, sick of trudging through pages of reading, typing our fingers to the bone and/or making art 'til the small hours of the morning, the student-run Apartment 1R Gallery earnestly keeps moving forward, chin up, bright, shiny, eager, promising. It's refreshing, inspiring, and maybe a little guilt-inducing too. We all should be so active and involved.
Launched in September as part of the Pilsen Art Walk, APT. 1R is staffed by Van Harrison, Marc LeBlanc, Ryan Scheidt and Madeline Nusser (all except Scheidt attend SAIC). Harrison has sacrificed a good half of his living space at 1722 S. Desplaines St. to a surprisingly professional gallery space dedicated to showing work by emerging artists, including students. Harrison has taken this last semester off to devote his full attention to the business of running the small gallery. "I think this is an invaluable lesson to learn how to exhibit [artwork]," said Harrison. "It's something they don't teach you at SAIC."
Harrison and staff may be novices, but they're playing like professionals. Shows at APT. 1R lack little of the usual exhibition "shebang," and include distributed promotional postcards (often in glossy color), a press release sent to newspapers, a Friday evening opening, a month-long show duration, and an archived spot on the gallery website. Perhaps the only disadvantage to exhibiting at APT. 1R is the meager gallery hours: Saturdays, noon until 4 p.m.
Location too might dismay some artists and attendees, but hopefully not for long, since more galleries are cropping up in Pilsen every month. APT. 1R is only one of the galleries to recently surface in the area, along with Gallery Six Four Five, 7/3 Split, and Unit B Gallery all joining the company of older spaces like Dogmatic Gallery and Drive Thru. Altogether, the scene is fairly new, wholly dedicated and certainly worthy of drawing larger crowds down south. To accommodate their target
audience ‹ those gallery-goers who are generally more interested in the alternative spaces in the West Loop Gate than the upmarket River North ‹ the Pilsen group aims to hold their openings on the second Friday of each month (rather than competing with the West Loop on the first Fridays). With a remarkably supportive community of neighbors and landlords and a growing influx of local artists, Pilsen seems likely to be the newest hotbed for edgy, interesting work. Oftentimes, the advantage of showing in such smaller galleries is the room for experimentating and taking chances. Grassroots galleries are frequently able to boast the distinction of having shown groundbreaking work early on. "This is where the culture is," Harrison affirms. "It gets rooted here and then transplanted to the blue chips like Vedanta."
You might wonder if Harrison drags his furniture out of the closet and sets up a makeshift living room in the space when nobody's around, making sure not to bump into the art, but he doesn't.
"We charred the sofa," he said. The gallery remains just that, a gallery silent and untouched except during its open hours. Given this factor, APT. 1R automatically transcends the category of "apartment gallery," too many of which hold shows for a week, a weekend or (most often) one night, and force artwork to compete with the apartment-dweller's crap (refrigerator magnets, posters, books, food, trash). The idea of living at APT. 1R seems almost eerie, with all that silent white space in the next room.
The staff has taken impressive steps to make the space suitable for art exhibitions by moving walls, painting, blocking out windows and making the doorway smaller. Harrison confesses a desire for the space to be a timeless, white "void" of sorts, where viewers are focused entirely on their relationship to a piece. All in all, this has never been and never will be your average apartment gallery. (One attendant was wowed merely by APT. 1R's use of actual track lighting, instead of resorting, as do most apartment spaces, to hardware store clip-ons.) And while the space is much nicer than you might expect, it's still more comfortable and personable than a "professional" space.
Indeed, much to their benefit, the APT. 1R staff is also quite approachable and rather charming. As Harrison and LeBlanc prepared the space for the opening of POWER, the gallery's most recent show (their fifth so far), which featured new sculpture by LeBlanc himself, they discussed their plans for the space with enough enthusiasm, ambition and knowledge to probably stick around for awhile.
Visit www.apt1r.com for information and merchandise galore (seriously).
These images are from Marc LeBlanc's show POWER, which included sculptures that served to examine the social, cultural, and historical implications of the gallery/museum and the relationship between art and non-art objects within that power structure.
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