Studio City

Karen Reimer's compositions of needlework on canvases of fabric bring a medium once relegated to the realm of sentimental folk art into the contemporary discussion of conceptual work. Her laboriously embroidered re-creations of discarded Laffy Taffy wrappers and credit-card-bill envelopes examine the idea of value: forging an object of worth from an inconsequential original. Similarly, in a conceptual twist, the work itself seeks to heighten the value of craft to that of fine art. Later works of embroidered newspaper broadsheets, which left out whole columns in the artist's translation, examine the idea that the withholding of information can change value and meaning considerably. Her projects have been seen at venues such as the Hyde Park Art Center, the Maryland Institute of Art, the DePaul University Art Museum, and the Kohler Arts Center. "I want to make things that are not easily classified, to radically slow down the process of recognition and naming," she has said in an artist's statement, "in order to study how meaning and identity are constructed, and to notice and question the cultural assumptions and values underlying those understandings."

Reimer is represented by the Monique Meloche Gallery.

After a stint as a digital imaging technician for Disney, Ken Fandell returned to his native Chicago to teach photography at the School of the Art Institute. It's no accident Fandell's chosen medium allows the represented image to be manipulated easily-his work shows a continually shifting perspective on how things appear and how they really are. For a recent exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Fandell offered images of a cerulean blue sky streaked with clouds. On closer examination, the compositions reveal birds, planes, even a full moon in the dark-images the artist collected over time and fused into one celestial dome. "Photography is a way of obliterating time and space," says Fandell, who is currently working on a piece that will use satellite photographs to map a trail from his West Town studio to the gallery that will show the work in Missoula, Montana. New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, and the LaSalle Bank Collection have all snapped up his pieces. And considering Fandell's fidelity to imaging media, it seems only natural that a little outfit called Microsoft also owns his work.

Fandell is represented by the Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery.