Just off Irving Park Road in North Center, on one of those lonesome industrial strips where the bricks and mortar blend effortlessly with the overcast Chicago afternoon, there is a building you cannot enter, you are not invited to visit and you would probably not go to anyway. Literally and metaphorically. It is a petri dish of tasteful avant-garde, a former photo album factory downsized and divvied into so many artisan studios that it has become a microcosm of 21st-century Chicago hipsterdom. In one corner, you find the independent CHIRP Radio; down the hall, a few concert and event poster-makers; on a different floor, the adventurous Third Coast Percussion, and the Grammy-winning chamber music ensemble eighth blackbird.
Then there’s the design duo Sonnenzimmer.
Sonnenzimmer is expansive but takes up little space, accessible but so hard to pin down that the best way to describe the work of Nick Butcher and Nadine Nakanishi is this way: They make stuff. Distinctive stuff. Fine art. Wearable art. Screen-print posters. Improvisational music. Gallery catalogs. CD packaging for Swiss record labels. Poetry magazine covers. Abstracted stuff that somehow finds a way to be practical and decorative but smart. Really, if Butcher and Nakanishi had been married longer, or left their 30s behind by now, one way to characterize Sonnenzimmer would be to just call them an old married couple.
Nadine: “We break up every month.”
Nick: “Then go, ‘No, we’re artists…. We like each other.'”
Nadine: “We are married, Nick.”
Nick: “And before we got married we had a big fight, and I told you to go to London to visit your sister —”
Nadine: “So we’re going to do this now?”
Nick: “Kick me if you want me to stop.”
Nadine: “No, no, go ahead.”
If you know Sonnenzimmer — the German name (meaning “sunroom”) that Nick and Nadine adopted for their practice around 2006 — an exchange like that, followed by deep sighs and a glance of tenderness, is not too rare to witness. Fred Sasaki, art director for Poetry magazine, said: “They argue the whole time in front of you and it gets like, ‘Whoa, I shouldn’t be here,’ then you notice it’s not ugly, it’s just them pushing, challenging each other the way they want to challenge people they work with.” He described a Chicago Reader redesign meeting they’d all been invited to in which Nadine was the only one in the room to brush past politeness and offer ideas. During Expo Chicago last fall, “they convinced me to have them make hand-screened carrying cases for the posters they were making for us. An extravagant gesture. And pretty ephemeral, considering the cases wouldn’t last. But it made an impact,” Sasaki said. “I talk to people who think Nick and Nadine are highfalutin, but you look to them for a bravery and rigor all at once — for something special.”
Something unclassifiable.
One morning while I was at the Sonnenzimmer studio, Nick called up a video sent over from Northwestern University. They were asked to create a poster for a biology symposium. Otherworldly swirls, an ocean of alien pods — though actually an animation of cell activity — glided across the monitor. Not long ago they were taking commissions from Andrew Bird and The National, and behind them sat a book they designed for the U.S. Soccer Federation. Now they were discussing thoughtful ways to artfully show cell structure. But this, Nadine exclaimed, is their branding problem! They’re beloved, yet nobody knows how to explain them.
A little more than a year ago, after a decade as a couple, Nick and Nadine got married in the basement of the Cook County Building. His family was in Tennessee, her mother in Switzerland. “We wanted to make it an official family thing,” Nick said, “to show our parents we’re committed, (that) they don’t have to worry.” Which is an odd concern. The past couple of years have been good to Sonnenzimmer. Their client base (the Mies van der Rohe Society, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Newberry library, singer Neko Case) has grown wide and eclectic. They were creating catalogs for art shows, including catalogs for each new exhibit at the influential Wicker Park gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey. And though they made their reputation in graphic design and concert posters, they were receiving invitations now to speak at art schools around the country. Moreover, they were being collected. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired works. Chicago magazine, saying that their posters “blur the line between paintings and prints,” named them “the best artist to collect now.”
Here’s how Nick and Nadine celebrated:
They didn’t move out of their small apartment in North Center, but did move their studio from the tiny Roscoe Village coach house where they worked for years to their tiny current space in North Center. Also, Nadine bought a loom, on which they created abstract quilts, several of which can be seen through April 11 at the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College, where Sonnenzimmer has a show with Montreal art duo Seripop.
“Who the (expletive) buys a loom to design with?” asked Jay Ryan, the somewhat ubiquitous Chicago concert poster-maker for whom Nick interned when he was starting out. “I can’t afford a loom! Is the loom the new art-world status symbol? I suppose they would know, right? Anyone paying attention to graphic design in Chicago has tremendous respect for those two, though it does go from head-scratching to awe.”
What they are likely responding to is the pair’s unselfconscious, almost peaceful ability to blend the formality of graphic design — the practical side of posters and books and so forth — with the airiness of fine art and abstraction: muted pastoral colors and shapes intersecting with rigid typography.
To put it another way: You look at their work, admire its beauty, and then, maybe, you see its purpose.
Or, simpler still, it’s art.
“They are hard to explain,” Ryan said, “because I think, in a way, they’re closer to a movement and school of thinking about design. They work all hours, all days, they make living sacrifices so they can create what they want. I do wish more people knew about them, but they will, because, look, I draw cute animals over and over, but they’re the ones, at least in poster-making, pushing boundaries. Of everyone making posters in Chicago, they’re the ones in textbooks in 100 years.”
On paper, Nick and Nadine — and really, NickandNadine, which is what everyone calls them, would have been a better handle than “Sonnenzimmer” — exist in two worlds, contradictory and complementary. Both look like quintessential hipsters, in orange pants and full-length checkerboard coats and clear eyeglass frames. Nick has a fixed smile and wiry frame and bald head; Nadine is often slightly hunched, with a quizzical air. She is ethereal, excited and blunt; he is alternately chill and a little impatient. Nick comes from Tennessee and studied graphic design at Middle Tennessee State University; Nadine comes from Switzerland and studied typography in Zurich (which is to say, a hard-core typography background). His parents made quilts and build hot rods; her mother worked in the import-export business, took Nadine around the world to experience indigenous art, while her father had a billboard company and developed scanners for large-format printing.
Nick was drawn to “how you produce things,” to the means of production. But, once in Chicago, he also made a name for himself as an experimental musician and, aesthetically, veered toward a more painterly outlook. Nadine, who “grew up around a lot of my father’s crazy Japanese-artist friends,” was somewhat more punk, but once in Chicago, she gravitated to the handmade, Americana side of art more interested in functionality.
“I think because of who we are, we took the reins at some point to decide what we wanted to be,” Nadine said. “We decided that if (a client) is going to spend money on design but they want a dummy to dictate to, they should do it themselves. So, in a way, we had to prove we should exist. And exist in two worlds — the practical world and the art world. The thing is, that’s how artists see themselves now, not as any one thing.”
Besides, what would you say that you made for a living when you just created a beguiling, wall-ready poster — dotted like a field of M&M’s, and ornamented with what appears to be lush sculptured pieces of half-eaten fruit — for a Northwestern forum on “representation theory, integrable systems and quantum field theory”?
Said Dan Sinker, who hired Nadine in 2003 after she moved to Chicago to work on his now-defunct Punk Planet magazine (and is best known as the fingers behind the infamous @MayorEmanuel twitter feed): “It’s been interesting to watch their sphere of influence widen, go from the cloistered world of concert posters to fine art. But in a way, because they are such different personalities, they had to combine into a style that doesn’t feel like either of them. That’s how I suppose you go about creating a visual language of your own.”
On the opening night of their show at Columbia — which, as Nick explained, “consists of five art prints, two records spinning, two immersive soundtracks to listen to on headphones, three quilts and two wearable pieces” — I watched a gallery browser read the instructions on a wall label and say to his companion, “No way!” Before the companion could reply, the man slid on a large, irregularly shaped quilt he’d grabbed off the wall, put his head through the hole in the center and let the art drape over him like a watercolored poncho.
Then he put on headphones (provided by Sonnenzimmer) and strolled around with a gigantic smile.
The show — which also includes an art book Sonnenzimmer produced and gave an impenetrable title, “The Impossibility of Language of Construction” (they have a weakness for art-speak) — was intended as avant-garde theater, Nick said. And certainly it felt that way, yet it also didn’t feel pretentious.
It felt warm.
Sonnenzimmer has been down the gallery-exhibition road before. In 2010, Nick and Nadine were invited to a Columbia group show of contemporary artists, placed alongside more established figures such as Cody Hudson, Archer Prewitt and Maya Hayuk. For a 2011 show of Chicago designers at the Museum of Contemporary Art, they moved their screen press into a gallery and operated a satellite office out of the museum for one week. Zoe Ryan, chair of the architecture and design department at the Art Institute, said she became familiar with Nick and Nadine because the museum “is interested in identifying important emerging careers, and they had come very recommended by the (design) community.” Ryan was interested in the direction of graphic design in Chicago — Nadine was a driving force in the creation of the Chicago Printers Guild trade organization in 2009 — but “I don’t think Nick and Nadine are sure where they are headed.”
Intentionally, perhaps.
In January, Sonnenzimmer released a retrospective book named “Didactics,” which, remarkably, includes a set of recipes, intended to be used by the reader to replicate, in spirit, each of the works in the book. The instructions for one poster begin: “1. Place nine wet tea bags in a grid on a piece of paper.” The guidelines for another instruct: “1. Grab a record cover. 2. Choose three colors of paint that reflect the music for you.” The intention being that transparency should have a place in art, that an artist is sometimes obligated to acknowledge that arbitrariness and chance are always factors when creating anything new.
Said writer Joe Meno, who met Nick and Nadine when he was an editor at Punk Planet: “The fascinating thing about that book is artists never want to be asked how they did something, but Nick and Nadine want that conversation. It’s one of the reasons you don’t need an art degree to love them. They show empathy, and they’re not creating works with a big financial reward in mind. But that’s what makes them formidable.”
Nick and Nadine met in 2003, when Jay Ryan’s Bird Machine print shop (where Nick interned) and Sinker’s Punk Planet (where Nadine interned) shared a large workspace in Ravenswood. Not long after, at one of Nick’s experimental music performances in Humboldt Park, they met a former printer who offered them about $20,000 worth of ancient screen-press equipment for $1,500 and a few of Nick’s paintings. Friends set them up with a quaint little coach house off Belmont Avenue (with a sunroom), and Jay Ryan suggested them to some of his clients (Andrew Bird, Kelly Hogan). “And I think the first piece we had done outside of ourselves,” Nick said, “the first piece to show the push and pull of our color and typography ideas, it felt better than anything we could do individually.” The Empty Bottle became a regular client, and then others.
Soon, they had a reputation.
For beautiful, albeit difficult, works — concert posters so artful that, in a practical sense, it was often hard to say who was playing or where or when. They had started out making posters that incorporated animals, easy-to-get information. Gradually the type got smaller, the words more fractured, discernible images giving way to abstractions. Jay Ryan, whose own poster aesthetic veers to the sweet and accessible, points out that psychedelic poster artists of the ’60s were also criticized for incomprehensibility, that sometimes it’s the audience that’s not ready for what’s next. But Nick is not so sure: “The pushback from venues was always about type. So we accommodated.”
Nadine: “No, we didn’t.”
Nick: “Well, we made the type bigger, the client got what they wanted. But we were more interested in the visual impact than the advertising. I’m not sure we’ve been the most communicative, informationwise.”
Nadine: “Yeah, but we’re not quitting posters, we’re just putting more of a price tag on the ones we do.”
And that, as Zoe Ryan points out, has been wise: “They’ve been shrewd, to work only with those organizations and artists that will allow them to do the layered, stunning work that they should be doing.” But sometimes, being creatively picky means living on the cheap, so Nick is going for his Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute, with an eye on teaching (at a higher-paying scale) should their practice collapse.
Nadine: “We’re practical. But we’re hillbillies, figuring how we can stay independent in these here parts.”
Nick: “We’ve had more museum and institutional support at this point than individual collectors.”
Nadine: “And our work may not even appreciate!”
Nick: “Nadine, you’re an artist — say it will appreciate!”
Nadine: “OK, sorry, it will appreciate, it will appreciate.”
Their studio in North Center is an industrial stone box, the kind of space into which a dozen Soviet dissidents would have been squeezed. There is a work table, a bookshelf, computers, a very small darkroom (which would have been “the hole”) and a large screen printer. On a recent weekday, Nick walked across the room and turned on a compressor to start the printer. The sound was reminiscent of rocks going through a lawn mower. Then the squeegee worked its horrible shhh-shhh-shhh squish of rubber against the screen, pushing paint down. “This is where art meets hands,” Nick said over the sound. “And this” — he picked up a cardboard CD case he was making, intricately layering in colors — “this, you will never find in a gallery.”
The room was an argument for the tactile, for the act of creating stuff, any stuff.
Nadine looked at the printer, then said, off-handedly: “We should jack the prices for our work! Create an artificial air of authority! Yes! But then, Nick thinks it’s more important people have our stuff in their houses than in galleries. But there’s the question: Where is the point that you’ve made it anymore? Is it necessary to be in a gallery to make it? Or is determining the work you want to make, and then making it the way you want, making it? Isn’t that being an artist? But I think we’re graphic designers. Who knows? Don’t ask us!”
cborrelli@tribpub.com
Twitter @borrelli
