When the weather is cold—or in the case of the past six months, downright brutal—I am inside. Thankfully, springtime in Chicago is all the motivation I need to get off the couch and enjoy some of the events blossoming around the city—like the second annual Looptopia. While a good portion of my day was spent dodging strollers, when I reached the Around the Coyote Riverwalk Gallery, I found exactly what I was looking for: fresh, local artists who didn't interest the kiddies. Below, three of the emerging talents whose exciting new work jumped out at me as I grazed between the makeshift plywood walls—check out their Web sites and score an affordable piece now before these artists take off!

Ryan Scheidt
This nature-loving artist has an approach to his work that seems arbitrary, yet is completely conceptualized. Take the "Multiplicity Fields" collection. By using a lottery system and working on a grid, he creates paintings of shapes and colors that are randomly determined as he goes. Some of his newest work—3D sculptures he makes by fitting together colorful paper snowflakes—totally trumps anything you attempted back in grade school. Once you understand his processes, there is a new level of intrigue to his work as your eyes attempt to pick apart the rhyme and reason behind each piece. Eventually, you'll give up.

Sue Fox
Choosing between the positive and negative is as simple as choosing between good and evil—that is, if you can get that pesky devil off your shoulder. But Fox, a self-described claustrophobic, decided to push the traditional limits of positive and negative spaces. Her collection is an underwater collage of sea anemones and jellyfish at war over the canvas's foreground and background, yet there is a peaceful quality to her colorful arrangement of paper cutouts and drawings of squiggly-legged creatures of the deep.

Shawn Stucky
Stucky describes his screen prints as "unconscious," and understandably so. They seem to come from the depths of a drug-induced sleep, transferred from the world of dreams onto a single piece of paper. The focus of several works is personal—the intensity of these relationships presents itself through the lightening bolt-like streams of energy that reach across the prints. Even though the palette is limited to a few, muted colors, it packs a mean punch; you'd never guess that he's colorblind.

- Meghan Turner

Similar Topics:art, chicago, emerging artists, loop

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