Art Events

Attend the opening reception for Paul Branton’s LATCHKEY KID: AN INTERNAL PERSPECTIVE on Friday, January 17, from 6:00-9:00pm.

The South Side of Chicago is a precarious environment to navigate. This was true in the 70’s and remains true today. For those kids that were left alone to explore the South Side neighborhoods, this body of work speaks directly to them. The adult world colliding with adolescent minds; the conversations, sights, sounds and smells that shaped lives and influenced decisions. Branton attacks both canvas and paper to explore these memories and feelings. Comedians deal with trauma through laughter, while Paul Branton tackles these internal demons with vivid colors, unwavering truth and bits of humor. These drawings and paintings create a dialogue for healing.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening reception for Tom Eslinger’s exhibit LEFT TO MY OWN DEVICES on Friday, January 17, 6:00-9:00pm.

In his new electrifying series, Tom Eslinger dives deep into the colorful tapestry of human experience, drawing inspiration from a kaleidoscope of influences that span decades. Imagine the sensory overload of his childhood disco singles collection, the rebellious thrill of sneaking peeks at David Bowie and Sylvester's tantalizing late-night TV performances as a teen, and more recently, deep-diving in the vivid stories captured in the Gay New York of the 1970s and ‘80s Facebook Group.  

Eslinger’s art pulses with the rhythms of songs, capturing the essence of sexual exploration, awkward one-night stands, visibility and sexual identity. The show, aptly titled Left To My Own Devices after a Pet Shop Boys song, embodies a cheeky, flirty spirit that resonates with authenticity and daring. The show’s title artwork provocatively asks, “Left to my own devices, I probably would…” —challenging viewers to contemplate the boundaries of desire and being a little bit bad. Whether you’re an art enthusiast, a music lover, or someone who relishes in the richness of visual narratives, Eslinger’s work invites you into a world that is as naughty as it is honest.  

RSVP for the opening reception on Friday, January 17, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the link below: 

About Tom Eslinger 
Artist Tom Eslinger combines his experience as a giant of international advertising with his pop sensibilities to create pieces that engage, entertain and enthrall his collectors.     

Following a rockstar career as Global Creative Director for Saatchi & Saatchi as well as Burson Marsteller and five-time Cannes Lions Jurist (twice as Jury President), Tom creates one-of-a-kind artworks combining his lifetime obsessions with music, typography and stickers. Tom’s design work can be found in the Permanent Design Collection of New York’s Museum Of Modern Art as well as the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Design Collection.  

Tom studied at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD) and counts Charles Spencer Anderson and Scott Makela as his mentors and great influences. Tom maintains residences in Chicago and New York City. He is currently a Consulting Creative Director and a Professor of Communications at Columbia College. 

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Gagoh’s practice leads with a focus in photography, while spanning across music production, film, and printmaking. He has developed a signature visual and sonic language that captures the world around one with honesty and transparency. Gagoh exhibits photographic frames saturated by rich, opalescent colors, works that gaze back at the viewer, and compositions that state the obvious or encourage deeper investigation. 
 
David Ese Gagoh’s body of work addresses the documentation of one’s life as an artistic practice, emphasizing the differences and points of relation in human experience. Themes of religion, ritual, and relationships loom throughout the work, embodying the act of living in stripped portraits, intricately structured still lives, and tranquil visions of this earth we inhabit.  
Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event! 

Golden Hour at Epiphany: 

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm 

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule 

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue. 

Attend the opening reception for Steven Carrelli’s TEASER, TORMENTOR, AND SCRIM on Friday, January 24, from 6:00-9:00pm.

Teasers, tormentors and scrims are types of curtains used in the theater. They define the space of the stage, and they shape the illusions we see there. Like the theatrical curtains of this title, the curtains represented in these paintings play multiple roles. They act as a figure, a ground, a backdrop, a partition, a lush symbol of authority, a decoration, a convincing illusion, a dissolving ghost image, a remnant of the past, and a surface onto which we project our associations. Likewise, the paintings themselves shift perceptually between space and flat surface, appearing and disappearing, revealing and concealing.

These works take Hans Holbein's 1533 painting The Ambassadors as a model through which to explore the uncertain nature of perception and the visual rhetoric of representation. The Ambassadors is a double portrait of two men sent as diplomats by King Francis I of France to King Henry VIII of England, probably in the hope of convincing Henry not to divorce and leave the Roman Catholic Church. Holbein's painting is a tour de force of Sixteenth Century Northern European realistic representation whose extraordinary attention to observable details suggests great faith in the truthfulness of sight, while the inclusion of a prominent and spatially ambiguous anamorphic image complicates the painting's visual illusion and injects a note of doubt into this statement of faith.

Carrelli’s paintings here are part of a larger series titled Profane Mimesis. They mimic and reinterpret their source, employing a combination of selective imitation and alteration of Holbein's painting to give form to the tensions between sight and vision: between what we see and what we believe it must mean. They are not religious paintings, and neither is Holbein’s. Indeed, the title Profane Mimesis might even suggest that the act of imitation is kind of desecration. However, these paintings do express a dialectic of faith and doubt in the power of images: a combination of love and mistrust of sight. Shown here, in what was once the sacristy of the Episcopal Church of the Epiphany, these paintings have the opportunity to echo and converse with this elegant and rhetorically seductive environment.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening reception for Ginny Krueger’s TRANSCENDENTAL GARDEN on Friday, January 24, from 6:00-9:00pm.

Since childhood, the flora of the natural world has delighted Ginny Krueger, and this serves as a springboard for her Transcendental Garden exhibit. The forms, color, and textures propose an invented world, and the physicality of materials lends to a multi-dimensional experience that engage the senses, while evoking the multifaceted layers of life.

Krueger’s works are partially or entirely created using the encaustic medium – wax, resin, and pigment in a molten form, applied to wood and further cured through fire. Working with fire is alchemical, fugitive, mesmerizing, and unpredictable, which Krueger views as a moment-by-moment adventure and a process that is infinite in fluidity and possibility. Her works are also treasure troves of fabric, ceramic, paper and other materials. With the encaustic medium serving as the grip, Krueger arranges the materials into fanciful amalgams, or unlikely gardens that that depart from the expected, and convey something entirely new in depth and complexity. 

The earth and its bounty have claim on Krueger. She is driven to make art that is elemental and evocative, where each painting is a medley, a melded place, where both the gritty and sublime combine. Each offering in the exhibit is an invitation into a transcendental world of beauty, whimsy, and mystery.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening reception for John Behnke’s FALSE GUIDES on Friday, January 24, from 6:00-9:00pm.

False Guides presents frozen moments from three interlocking stories of striving, deception, and perdition. John Behnke uses a rich mix of materials - colored pencils, alcohol markers, acrylics, oils, glaze, and glitter - layered to build scenes of hallucinogenic detail and vivid color. Behnke is known for his radiant, open skies, but scenes in False Guides play in a different register, taking us to realms of dust and shadow. In “The Wanderers” series, we follow a tribe of animated mannequins that populate an abandoned mall in Minnesota. They grope through the merchandise that remains in the ruins, seeking some semblance of an identity. Other works take us to different corners of Behnke’s re-imagined America - Texas and California. In both, cults fueled by promises of transcendence descend into orgies of self-destruction. “All these series are based on people being led in strange ways that warp an individual’s perspective and ultimately cause one’s demise,” the artist says.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening reception for Lindsay Olson’s exhibit MANUFACTURED RIVER on Friday, March 28, 6:00-9:00pm.

Stickney, Illinois interviewing personnel, attending seminars and reading deeply, Lindsay Olson learned the science behind what engineers do to treat human wastewater. Returning to the studio, she used an assortment of elegant fibers, embroidery and stitching techniques to create richly colored textiles that help explain how water can be endlessly recycled if we care for it properly. Wastewater treatment has been the most successful public health initiative in the history of human beings and Olson’s Manufactured River brings awareness to its importance to the future of clean water.

Located subgrade in the undercroft of the historic former Church of the Epiphany, the brick and timbered Catacombs Gallery alludes to spaces where wastewater flows and atmospherically lends as a backdrop for the exhibit. Experientially for visitors, the exhibit will additionally present a choreographed sound installation composed by music engineer and producer Jon Smith, recorded in part, on site at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the opening reception for Jonathan Franklin’s THE YELLOW GUITAR on Friday, March 28, from 6:00-9:00pm.

Musical instruments can often be seen as objects of exquisite complexity and beauty. Aesthetically, they are beautiful objects in themselves, but it is when they are played that instruments become mesmerizing and transformative. Inspired by the vivid colors and playful motifs in Henri Matisse’s 1939 painting La Musique (The Music), Jonathan Franklin’s exhibition The Yellow Guitar pays homage to Matisse’s masterwork, while presenting a whimsical array of musical instruments and performers in perfect harmony with Epiphany Center for the Arts’ historic Sanctuary space and intimate music venue.

For Franklin, the guitar has always represented something accessible and romantic. Unlike a piano, the guitar is portable, and its six strings open to a world of acoustic and vocal possibilities. He credits Elvis Presley and the Beatles for sparking his first inclination to play the guitar. As a teenager, Franklin belonged to a group called The Insex, which was the best (and only) American rock band between Calcutta and Bangkok. Since those halcyon days from decades ago, his love for music in all its shapes and forms has never ebbed.

In this series of paintings, the characters showcase a variety of instruments, from guitars to drums, violins, and saxophones, among others. All that is left for the viewer is to imagine the music.

Make sure to RSVP for this amazing event!

Golden Hour at Epiphany:

Stop by Epiphany for Golden Hour beforehand for free live music, drinks and lite bites in the Café Bar! Doors open at 5pm with 1/2 priced bottles of wine and other specials until 7:00pm

Golden Hour Menu + Music Schedule

Please note that outside food or beverages are not permitted in the venue.

Attend the Opening Reception for Helen Geglio and Anders Zanichkowsky’s exhibit GUARDIAN THREADS on Friday, March 28, from 6:00-9:00pm.

Guardian Threads brings together the evocative works of Helen Geglio and Anders Zanichkowsky, highlighting deep themes of comfort, protection, and peace woven into their textiles to mark the passage of time. 

A selection of work from Helen Geglio's various textile series delve into narratives of memory, motherhood, and resilience, using repurposed materials to craft intricate pieces that protect and honor life journeys and the stories of women. Her Amulet Bundles are meditations on motherhood. Worries and fears for our children are bundled up and tied, held tightly inside protective layers of cloth. Anxiety Shields ward off the circular thoughts of sleepless nights when the world seems on end. Geglio’s Wisdom Cloaks pay tribute to the accumulated knowledge, experience and maturity of women, while honoring the resilience and wisdom of women through the ages.

Anders Zanichkowsky's burial blankets offer a distinctive sense of comfort and peace. Long before they’re used as a burial shroud, these memento mori are meant to serve as a blanket, bedspread, wall hanging, altar piece, or shawl that gathers the essence of personal memories over time. The handwoven shrouds, crafted from natural fibers, then provide a gentle, protective cocoon that honors the departed while supporting eco-friendly burial practices. As these blankets transition from everyday use to their final, sacred purpose, they embody a seamless journey from life to death, offering profound solace and tranquility to both the living and the departed.

Together, within Epiphany Center for the Arts’ most intimate gallery, Geglio and Zanichkowsky’s works invite viewers to reflect on the comforting and protective qualities of textiles, the peace they bring both in life and death, and the enduring legacies woven into the fabric of our lives.