From the curator:

In the spring of 2024 I began compiling notes for a workshop for painters on line. It began with my reading of poet Jennifer Moxley’s book of poems The Line, published by Post-Apollo, a poetry press run by Simone Fattal. Fattal was born in Damascus, Syria and grew up in Lebanon. She studied philosophy at Beirut’s École des lettres and the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1969 she returned to Beirut and began creating paintings and sculptures in a small live-in studio. In 1980, Fattal relocated to Sausalito, California with Etel Adnan. 

In 1982 Fattal started the press, for which Adnan drew the covers. The title poem of The Line begins thus, “True faith does not need the state to enforce it. It makes neither hope, nor a shroud. You will walk out of the visible and learn to accept the darkness. You will find the line. It extends backwards eternally into the past and forward into the future.” 

Unlike most of Moxley’s poetry, of which I am a devoted reader, the poems in this book do not have line breaks, in poetic terms; enjambment. Instead, they are printed as paragraphs: one per page, and follow the line as a temporal and philosophical structure. The blurb for the book describes her exploration of the space between sleep and wakefulness, which is discernible in many of the poems, and both states of conscious and unconscious mind are present and metaphorical in the poems, staying personal and zooming out into larger socio-economic frameworks. 

I read Moxley for the intimate companionship her style offers, through description of friendships, romances, meals, trips to the beach or the grocery store, as she traces the contours of the neoliberal disaster capitalism we inhabit, but at a local, sometimes gut-wrenching scale. Her presence as a contemporary poet is calibrated; while not completely opting-out of internet-based sociality (deemed by younger folk as pure self-promotion, but for us gen-Xers, often more of a distressing hokey-pokey) she maintains a website which is stimulating in content but formally soothing in shades of warm reddish-brown and taupe. The font is Georgia I think. Nothing blinks or flashes, and no cookie warnings appear. Occasionally she posts a piece of ephemera, envelopes addressed to her home in Maine from Kevin Killian, a photograph of a collapsing giraffe toy “whom I shall call ‘Wobbly.’” 

For this project I screwed up my courage and wrote her a fan-letter requesting an anachronistic treasure: a recording by her of a few poems from The Line onto a cassette to be played in the space of this exhibit. There are recordings of her reading to small groups of students on youtube and one on Penn Sound that I find especially pleasing. Her voice has a sweetness and a bite to it, a feminine tone not sacrificed in favor of “sounding smart” despite her crazy smarts. To my surprise, she was completely game for the challenge, and promptly sent me a cassette with two readings of the whole book on one cassette: one on each side, with a few minutes of silence recorded as a buffer – her own composition, which she did not explain to me, but which I interpreted as a gentle nod to the margins on a page. I found a suitable vintage cassette player, innocuous for its time, and anomalous in ours.

The painters I chose are both quite dear to me, and both are or were, tenured faculty at SAIC. I attended the School from 2004-2007 for the post-bacc and then my MFA, and worked with Susanne Doremus while I was a student, and she was the chair of the Painting and Drawing department, at that time ensconced in an office behind an office (the entry office for the administrative assistant, and the back office for the Chair) on the 15th floor of the Michigan building, with huge windows overlooking the museum and the lake.

Susanne was my advisor for at least one semester, and then offered me my first class teaching painting at the school upon graduation. I, along with my then girlfriend Dana DeGiulio, would go to her condo near the Greek Town/West Loop area for dinner sometimes, and we visited her studio more than thrice, each a momentous and riveting experience, conducted in Susanne’s casual, loopy and quixotic style. She asked questions and waited for the answer, and grinned slyly as we attempted to impress her. We loved her and she seemed to love us. I gave her a painting that she had expressed appreciation for, and she hung it in her living room and then in her studio, where it was always present when I visited, even after moving to the East Coast seven years after my graduation. 

Susanne is a painter in the long loose tradition of gestural abstraction, although her work was always more idea-driven and indirect than that school. I remember her telling me about New York painters like Bill Jensen, or French painters like Jean Fautrier, and each time it was a revelation. Her spatial attention was wide and capacious, and her perspective was honed. Once, she revealed that she drew while watching her cat wander through the house. It’s the sort of one liner that for painters should be a mic drop but since we are by and large slow, stubborn learners, it is a lesson I am still waiting to absorb. Marion Milner, the mid-century British psychoanalyst on whose classic text, On Not Being Able To Paint, I wrote a few years ago, and who discovered a distinction between what she termed, “narrow and wide attention.” While narrow attention is focused and goal-oriented, and for example,  involves manipulating or using a tool, it is also self-obsessed, and can feel like being locked in a tower. On the other hand wide attention is open to flickerings and flutterings at the periphery, is spacious and reveals the ground of experience, a calming mind-state, and joy. Susanne is a painter of line, whether observing the cloverleaf of freeways near her home, or the meanderings of her cat, or virtuosic cartoons of New Yorker style women preparing to dive into a painting. But Susanne’s line is not a net, a maze, a trap or a kite-string. It is a thing you want to follow through digression, pursue by getting lost.

Cameron Martin was hired as tenured faculty at SAIC only a couple of years ago. He is new to the Chicago scene. I met him when he was a guest artist for final reviews in Painting and Printmaking at Yale back in 2015 when I was new to New York. Maybe Munro Galloway, my colleague at the time, introduced us, I’m not sure. Maybe we talked in the tiny Indian Buffet restaurant on Crown street at lunch that day, I don’t remember. I do remember he was collegial and warm, and that he’d gone to Brown for undergrad, as had Munro. They both had a certain semiotic flair and a gen-X vibe I found surprisingly familiar, considering we’d never met. 

Eventually Michelle Grabner invited Cameron Martin, Fox Hysen and me to do a show in Milwaukee, at the recently relocated (Oak Park, Illinois) Suburban gallery. Martin and Fox and I had a hell of a time in Milwaukee, giddily laughing together at a socialist brew-pub and getting along famously. At that time I remember visiting Martin’s studio and looking at his new paintings which he introduced to me through the lens of a fresh new project he was embarking upon, based on a set of rules he’d just generated, in order to shift his practice away from a project attuned to landscape photography and the Pictures Generation. The new work was, like the painting in this show, pattern-based, hard-edged abstraction, reminiscent of 1980’s Italian design group Memphis, new wave music, and Dutch Wax textiles. The paintings were consistent in size, 20 x 16 inches, like most of Thomas Nozkowski’s work, and I remember thinking of Tomma Abts, and feeling uneasy about the absence of facture. They are extremely smooth paintings; misted, troweled and occasionally brushed, manifesting, as Martin has put it, an “asymptotic disposition towards language, [and] also to appropriation.” Line is not traced on a ground in Martin’s work, it is embedded, off registration, algorithmic, procedural. Line as the index of gesture or dumb presence, as the ghost of subjectivity, haunts Martin’s paintings, but remains elusive. Martin continues to find compelling color relations and striking associative vectors, and there is a swinging tempo in his work’s pop anachronism. Not exactly comforting, not entirely unnerving.

The Line workshop was a success with multiple groups of students; undergraduates in Basic Drawing at Yale, summer courses co-taught with Michelle Grabner and Brad Killiam. The workshops took place while walking, the group walks a little ways; on campus, through woods, up a thousand steps toward the beach at Lake Michigan, and stops along the path to read a poem and discuss the analogical, metaphorical, symbolic connections, entanglements, boundaries and attention-directing potentials of line. Vague and wide open, but focused and specific, experiential and semiotic, the workshop was fun. We concluded in one iteration on the beach, with the chapter from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, called, of course, The Line. Forgive me for quoting at length from this chapter, so beloved by painters and poets alike:

Before lowering the boat for the chase, the upper end of the line is taken aft from the tub, and passing round the loggerhead there, is again carried forward the entire length of the boat, resting crosswise upon the loom or handle of every man’s oar, so that it jogs against his wrist in rowing; and also passing between the men, as they alternately sit at the opposite gunwales, to the leaded chocks or grooves in the extreme pointed prow of the boat, where a wooden pin or skewer the size of a common squill, prevents it from slipping out. From the chocks it hangs in a slight festoon over the bows, and is then passed inside the boat again; and some ten or twenty fathoms (called box-line) being coiled upon the box in the bows, it continues its way to the gunwale still a little further aft, and is then attached to the short-warp- the rope which is immediately connected with the harpoon; but previous to that connexion, the short-warp goes through sundry mystifications too tedious to detail.

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit- strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish?- Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whaleboat, when thus hung in hangman’s nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

There are so many metaphors for the sticky groupyness of humans, post-humans, peoples, tribes, families. Sometimes we speak about communities or networks or histories, timelines, discourses, nations, borders and relations. Line is a gargantuan, capacious form, encompassing us all. Tonight I fear the mad captain, chasing his fictional whale.

The first exhibition Line, curated by Molly Zuckerman-Hartung opens March 25th from 4-7PM. Line features work by Cameron Martin and Susanne Doremus in conversation with poet Jennifer Moxley, whose book The Line acts as the resonator for the exhibition. Guests are invited to spend time with each other and the art in a tête-à-tête by artist Julia Klein selected by curator-of-chair, Kelly Kaczynski.

Molly Zuckerman-Hartung is a painter and writer from Olympia, Washington. She went to Evergreen, was a riot grrrl and worked in used bookstores and bars until her thirties, when she attended the School of the Art Institute for graduate school, and until autumn of 2025 she was living and working in Norfolk, Connecticut. There she was making bricolage wall-objects out of scraps and offcuts leftover from renovations on a large funky house. Her attention was opened to composting, depth psychology, differance, climate change, permaculture, New England furniture, rural transfer stations, daily rhythm, the effects of soul lag on humans, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, and the color of sunlight through smoke from fires 3,000 miles away. She moved to Los Angeles in fall of 2025, and now she lives in the armpit of the 10, the main East-West freeway. Beginning with Fredric Jameson’s 1980s idea of “cognitive mapping,” a code term for class consciousness, and dog play in theory and reality, she is thinking through place, space and mark-making in tighter, more contained painting language. She is the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and a nomination in 2025 for the Joan Mitchell. She had a mid-career survey show at The Blaffer Museum in Houston, TX, accompanied by a monograph, and participated in exhibitions at The MCA in Chicago, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the 2014 Whitney Biennial, as well as many galleries. She is a frequent lecturer at schools across the country, including, Hunter College at CUNY, Rutgers, The University of Ohio, Cranbrook, University of Alabama, the SAIC Low Residency Program, and Cornell College. Zuckerman-Hartung is represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago, and is Associate Professor in the Department of Art at UCLA.

Poet Jennifer Moxley was born and raised in San Diego. She studied at the University of California, San Diego; the University of Rhode Island, where she completed her BA; and Brown University, where she earned an MFA.

Moxley’s poems combine lyric and innovative looks at daily life while interrogating societal comfort. Reviewing Clampdown for the Nation, poet Ange Mlinko noted, “Moxley’s ethical anxieties emanate from a central unease, unease at home, and ripple out to touch nation, earth and cosmos. But . . . Moxley does not sublimate her psychology and social perspective.”

Moxley is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Imagination Verses (1996), Often Capital (2005), The Line (2007), Clampdown (2009) and Druthers (2018). She has also written a memoir, The Middle Room (2007) and a book of essays, There Are Things We Live Among (2012).

Her poem “Behind the Orbits” was included by Robert Creeley in The Best American Poetry (2002). In 2005 she was granted the Lynda Hull Poetry Award from Denver Quarterly. Her 2014 book, The Open Secret, was awarded the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams award and was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize.

Moxley’s poems have been included in the anthologies Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004); American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009), and Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (2013).

A translator from the French, Moxley has translated Jacqueline Risset’s collection of poetry, The Translation Begins (1996), and essays, Sleep’s Powers (2008), as well as Anne Portugal’s Absolute bob (2010).

Since 2001, she has taught poetry and poetics at the University of Maine.

For decades, Susanne Doremus has imported working strategies from gestural painting, blind drawing, schematics, performance driven music and dance, and applied those moves to the way she processes and records her primary concerns. Pulling from the observed and the viscerally felt, she uses line and mark to articulate the experiences that feel most relevant and necessary. Those experiences may be as literal as the ongoing construction of the expressway seen from her studio window; or they may build from tracings of shapes, marks or lines from previous paintings; or potential may arise from a thoughtless studio accident or a spill on the canvas. The way Susanne Doremus brings it all to bear reflects how the mapping and excavating of a conceptualized sensation is fundamental to her practice. She received her BA from Elmira College in Elmira, NY and her MFA from University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, and has been the subject of various solo and two-person exhibitions, including at One Illinois Center, Chicago, IL (1980); University Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL (2002); and Sarah Moody Gallery, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL (2014). She has also participated in many group exhibitions, including Chicago/Chicago, Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH (1980); Art in Chicago: 1945-1995, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (1996); Chicago Imagists; In Context, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI (2011); and Surrealism and War, National Veterans’ Art Museum, Chicago, IL (2015). Doremus taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago for almost forty years, and currently lives in Chicago, IL.

Cameron Martin’s paintings feature overlapping and undulating forms in varying transparencies, patterns, and geometries, producing visual phenomena that tap into histories of non-objective art and present-day digital interfaces. Using a vivid chromatic palette, Martin employs techniques that intentionally complicate the distinction between the handmade and the mechanical, working from the foundation of abstraction towards the possibilities of representation. Martin received his BA from Brown University in Art/Semiotics and continued his studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has exhibited at venues including the Whitney Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle), Columbus Museum of Art, and City Gallery (Wellington, New Zealand). His work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; The Seattle Art Museum; The Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Martin is a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock Krasner Award, and the Artists at Giverny Fellowship and Residency. His work is represented by Sikkema Malloy Jenkins, New York. He is F. H. Sellers Professor in Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For Line, curator-of-the-chair, Kelly Kaczynski chose to invite Julia Klein. Julia Klein is an artist and publisher. In addition to exhibiting her work, she occasionally writes and collaborates on design for performance. Since 2009 Klein has run Soberscove Press, which publishes books about art and culture that often foreground archival materials, process, and collaboration.