John Preus is the son of Lutheran missionaries and the first Preus male in six generations who isn’t a pastor. If that makes him the family maverick, he still hasn’t lost his reverence for the past. In the age of suburban developments that he says “look like they fell out of a spaceship and into a field,” Preus prefers old materials with evidence of prior lives. “I like seeing how nature and human hands affect material over time,” he says. “I often think about the life span of materials and their morphology.”
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Preus is among a growing number of Chicago artists who harvest their supplies from dilapidated houses and junkyards, finding their art in other people’s trash. He’s both a fine artist and—through his company, Dilettante Studios—a cabinetmaker who builds bookshelves from maple flooring, doors from industrial glass windows, tables from salvaged doors, and jungle gyms from discarded writing desks. “I have a hard time making something for no reason,” he says. “I live back and forth between a pragmatic solution and an aesthetic one.”
Next month, he’ll reconstitute and revise The World as Text for the opening of the Southside Hub of Production—a yearlong series of happenings, art shows, conversations, and dinners at the First Unitarian Church’s Fenn House in Hyde Park. He plans to recycle the desks from the Columbia show into a jungle gym and bar.
Grand opening Sat 10/1, 4 PM “until late,” Fenn House, 5638 S. Woodlawn, southsidehub.org.
