"Whatever the mind can conceive and believe - the mind can achieve!" - African Proverb

In the world today, many countries are divided with invisible borders, making it difficult for citizens to move and travel. Ethnic groups living in the same country, descend from different tribes and speak different languages, making understanding difficult.

Believing that awareness of the present is incomplete without knowledge of the past, Artists without Borders travels on a ship of inspiration to past and present Africa. Communicating with few words, African elders use proverbs, symbols, signs and motifs to get their messages across. Our journey moves through Ghana, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, South Africa and Cameroon, combining their traditions, heritages, cultures and ways of life to create a new perspective and perception of Africa!

Mixed media works are about coincidences and fortune! Precise plans and searching for something particular is ineffective - in Africa items and objects will find their way to you and you are obliged to bring out their beauty, giving them a new sense and meaning! From a collection of American waste, as well as traditional art-making materials, we have embodied these African principles.

Student Artist
Zach Stuckmann, Cary
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Caroline Culbertson, Crystal Lake
Nichole Gallagher, McHenry
Sydney Hellgeth, Huntley
Kailey Kornhauser, Cary
Selena Lester, Crystal Lake
Melissa Marciniec, Lake in the Hills
Chris Moore, Cary
Sarah Oswalt, Cary
Lauren Plebanski, McHenry
Jessica Stowe, Harvard
Melissa Youngblood, McHenry

At the turn of the 17th century, cabinets of curiosity were the rage in Europe. Curators of these wunderkammern lacked standardized systems of classification and instead developed imaginative ways to explain the significance of their bizarre acquisitions. As interpretive exhibits, the collections were often mystifying, if not marvelous to contemplate.

Kammer 21C is a 21st-century adaptation of the wunderkammer in the sense that it favors personal meaning over academic quantification as a method of interpretation. But rather than collect exotic physical specimens and artifacts, K21C participants captured digital images and sounds from local sources, including field trips, interviews and found objects, as well as contributions from other groups in the Blue Sky Project. They then arranged their data according to personal significance. Nostalgia, abstraction, poetic expression, and communal legend influenced this creative process. They shared media files to develop meaningful contexts between otherwise loosely related sounds and images. The result is an interpretive display that instills a sense of wonder with a familiar place.

K21C participants bestow curatorship of this virtual wunderkammer to Involvement Advocacy with the hopes that it will someday house a growing collection of images, music, and video by other Blue Sky Project artists.

Student Artist
Robin McGuire, Spring Grove
Columbia College, BFA 2008

Emily Newbold, McHenry
Alyssa Secreto, Huntley
James Tomaso, Woodstock
Jacob Wiegman, Cary

This installation embodies our physical and psychological explorations of the every day architecture of home. To begin, each member of our group created a diorama reflective of their personality and inner experience. Using these dioramas as a springboard, we contemplated the nature of the space we would create together. Through a series of brainstorming sessions, we established the essential material and conceptual characteristics of our built environment titled, Unavailable.

In the space of this installation there exists both disorder and the promise of order. There is a sense of disorientation and frustration as one finds that the features and furnishings of the room are strangely oriented and an absent phone rings repeatedly. This experience is then countered by alternate experiences of the space provided by the miniature dioramas. Though everything is in its proper place and the ringing phone seems within reach, it is, in reality, inaccessible. You are unavailable to take the call or, rather, the call is unavailable for you to take.

Student Artist
Katreena Dyrek, Crystal Lake
Harold Washington College

Nicole Blasi, Woodstock
Jennifer Cortes, Woodstock
Ana Patricia Cortes, Woodstock
Angel Cress, Lake in the Hills
Lindsay Doran, McHenry
Karly Free, Woodstock
Anna Gontkovic, Lake in the Hills
Morgan Ondo, Woodstock
Ayrre Rogers, Fox River Grove

Place, gender, fantasy and the media affect cultural expectations and dictate much of the relationship one has to their own expressive options. The rules that govern our lives, defined by social, political and spiritual belief systems, enforce restrictive discipline of the body. Through exchange between the artist and youths in McHenry County, the group has embarked on a poetic exploration of the forms by which the body seeks physical and spiritual refuge.

Several different sites were chosen in which to initiate investigations: a college classroom, a gymnasium, theatre space and a local wildlife park. In each we generated intuitive responses to these environments, projecting and enacting various types of play and fantasy.

Over time, these performative gestures and behaviors undercut the restrictions imposed by assumed protocols and made nuanced references to ritual, violence, mainstream media and cultural myth. Through filming and editing, the group has interwoven these intimate performances to create a series of narrative threads.

Student Artist
Stephen Jensen, Antioch
Columbia College, BFA 2008

Nicholas Banas, Cary
Crystal Carbajal, Crystal Lake
Kelly Kretchmar, Cary
Ann Treadwell, Crystal Lake

Our performance is the culmination of an intensive summer of deep listening, sonic explorations, improvisation and composing workshops, roundtable dialogues, and a good measure of manual labor (building instruments, creating sets, and performing).

Many of our discussions have revolved around the question, ”How will you choose to live?” We explored social inequality, personal and collective agency and the role of artists in maintaining or challenging the status quo.

"Mythearthical: Tales of A Blue Sky" explores these by examining different perspectives on the creation and purpose of the world. The 20-minute piece weaves together the prophetic Hopi creation legend with commentary from other storytellers: fragments of religious texts, Dr. Seuss’ "The Lorax", global statistics from a "science guy" as well as our own short story about the impact of consumerism on the planet. It includes original music by Poesique and excerpts of Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres” arranged for wineglasses.

The performance showcases the writing, composing, performing, and improvising talents of the ten members of Poesique, each of whom designed and plays one, to three, of the twenty-some built and found instruments in the production.These inventions include: water bowls, a glass bottle xylophone, a plucked-rattle crank-glass "thingamajig", a junkyard metal xylophone, an umbrella bell-shaker, a hand-drum, several "junk" percussion instruments, and an Egyptian lute, the Shamisen. Traditional instruments employed include guitars, violin, bass clarinet and voices.

[Special thanks to the staff of The Raue Center for the Performing Arts, for their generosity and assistance hosting our live recording session. Thanks to Chris Tumbin, sound engineer, for mixing and recording. Recorded live at the Raue Center, Crystal Lake, IL, August 5, 2008.]

Student Artist
Susanne Anderson, Spring Grove
University of Illinois, Chicago

Jason Bachler, Ringwood
Cali Beeson, Harvard
Ursula "Charlie" Charles, Harvard
Sebastian "Seb" Gonzales, Crystal Lake
Roma Jensen, Crystal Lake
Huaira Martinez, Woodstock
Airin Virgilio, Lake in the Hills
Gabri Zmich, Cary