How To Exit A Photograph

By Jaime Calder

For you, reader, David Horvitz will learn to brew green tea. He will study in Japan, honing his craft with the most erudite instructors until he has—for you—perfected this ancient art. Once perfected, he will seek out a Buddhist monk in the mountains of Japan and share with them his newly learned skill within the confines of his or her temple. Finally, after tea, he will scour the temple for the most perfect thing, which he will send to you. All of this—just for you! And it will only run you $1,412.

Quirky, prolific, and just a little bit odd, David Horvitz is a creator of “small distractions that interrupt you from your everyday routine.” Presently pursuing his MFA at the Milton Avery School at Bard College, his work is largely based in the Internet, where he creates expansive photography collections and Web sites imploring readers to contribute monetarily so that he might complete any number of tasks (like that little trip to Japan). Read the rest of this entry »

Jodie Mack

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The mystique of an appealing product has everything to do with denying its disposability and reproducibility. So, while the admirable handicraft of the unique artworks in “Post-scarcity” at 65Grand would seem to resist the economic connotations of curator Thea Liberty Nichols’ exhibition title, a common thread in all three pieces is a hypnotic anonymity of sorts, evoking the siren beauty of the commodity. Read the rest of this entry »

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On a quest to discover whether Chicago’s green spaces can “yield the same meaning, as say, Walden Pond did for Henry David Thoreau,” Bill Guy took off with his camera around the city shooting color photos of parks, beaches and swathes of grass alongside railroad tracks. To his credit, Guy did not abstract snippets of “nature” from the surroundings of “civilization,” but placed the former ruthlessly within their context of concrete and metal, producing images that might be scenes from Thoreau’s worst nightmares–snowboarders cavorting or sprawled on slushy hills, waders disporting themselves in the lake and amblers pressing their noses through chain-link fences to take in slices of unkempt vegetation squeezed by skyscrapers. Guy is guided by Thoreau’s dictum that “in wilderness is the salvation of the world.” It is up to the viewer to decide if Guy leaves any wilderness in the picture, and if the sights that we see every day beckon us toward salvation. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 2 at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon

Garage installation. Photo by Cole Pierce.

When artists run out of things to make art about—that’s the day I’ll no longer have a job writing about art. The moment of mutually assured destruction came close to fruition last Saturday evening in a collaborative exhibition by Chelsea Culp and Ben Foch. The venue was Vega Estates, literally a garage and a basement serving as temporary sites for art. The freestanding two-car garage contained a perfectly flat white wall ringing its interior. Perhaps two or three feet in height, the wall reached neither the floor nor the ceiling, but floated around the perimeter like an elegant Minimal sculpture. The unfinished basement, moldering and dark, featured a museum-quality vitrine, or display case, ominously lit in a corner. The case contained several faux-primitive voodoo doll-like items. Read the rest of this entry »

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Those with a taste for post-apocalyptic landscapes and lovers of our sweet home will find no better treat upon which to feast their eyes than this show containing thirty-three lucid yet dreamy, light-rose-brown albumen-silver prints shot and developed by an unknown and keenly sensitive photographer a month after the devastating Chicago fire of 1871. The ruins of breweries, gas works, churches, palatial homes, stores and all other edifices that grace a great modern city are placed before us shot with an eye attuned to the conventions of the travel photographers of the time who captured the monumental remains of ancient civilizations with a sense of lost magnificence. We have all heard about the fire, but here we are given a glimpse of the shell of a vibrant city that existed before the one in which we now live. Be prepared to experience deep meditative sentiments of haunting beauty that the artists of another age—continuous with yet incredibly distant from ours—knew how to evoke. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 23 at City Gallery, in the Water Tower, 806 N. Michigan.

Kayce Bayer

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Kayce Bayer and Kristin Miller Hopkins’ show at the ARC is titled “Home Page,” and the work sensitively embodies modes of habitation as it uncannily performs the kinds of interactivity and embedded layering that characterize a tricked-out website. Bayer and Hopkins are clearly engaged in conversation, and their pieces are strongly complementary. Bayer’s delicate diorama-like boxes of interior and exterior spaces are animated by a series of gears/automata that make virtual rainfalls and moving clouds, with an especially beautiful snowing machine. These pieces are presented with small drawings of homes and landscapes, and with a stop-animation video of her weather systems to create a multimedia system that’s richly embodied if borderline-precious. Read the rest of this entry »

Dutes Miller could pass for a young AA Bronson. If you’ve met either, you know I’m not just talking about their beards—although at face value their look-alike beards, cascading and unfettered, bespeak a similar naturalness and charm. Bronson helped found General Idea but disbanded the group after its two other members died of AIDS fifteen years ago. During its run, General Idea gave a public face to the then-taboo gay lifestyle. Now, forty years after Stonewall, and after increased assimilation, what is the most beneficial image for the gay art movement?

The beard, worn like a badge, persists. Yes, it may be just a fashion, but it also signifies solidarity and self-made freedom. Ever image-conscious, gays who sport a beard of a certain length knowingly join a rank. A beard seems to say: my body is unconstrained, and my inhibitions are not secret. For his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Dutes Miller presents forthright and honest images of the body—the gay man’s body—from beard to balls. Miller’s husband and sometimes collaborator Stan Shellabarger (they had an exhibition together in 2007) also makes body-centric art, often in ritualistic endurance performances. Together, they make dual-portrait keepsakes, and in Basel they dug two graves joined by an underground tunnel through which they held hands. Such bittersweet gestures straightforwardly engage Bronson’s art practice—the way he tempers things with preemptive morning, his flair for banal male nudity, often combining political and emotional pitches. In fact, Bronson had an exhibition of his late work in 2001 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago, just as Miller and Shellabarger were settling into their new home in the city.

Miller’s solo exhibition is a bit different than the collaborative efforts with his husband. For one thing, he uses paint (Shellabarger doesn’t), and his themes are hardcore gay rather than domestic. Miller admits there’s a good amount of “decorum” in his collaborative art, but the current show is laced with glossy porn, shit smears, a meat hook—dangerous sort of imagery, but real. “Sex is messy,” says Dutes. This is more Bruce LaBruce than AA Bronson, although if it weren’t for either trailblazer, would Miller be as candid as he is in this show? The images are celebratory: a cock is the body of a muscled wrestler, arms pumping in triumph; paint flows expressively like an ejaculation; there’s a pulpit in the middle of the gallery; one picture, titled “Smell It,” features a bouquet of anal flowers.

Thirty-six collages made from porn are hung in a grid on one gallery wall. The cut-up technique, like a good Picasso nude from his surrealist phase, over-saturates the bodies with sex. Assholes, like flying discs, populate one scene. Another compounds flesh on flesh, hair on hair, cocks on faces. One guy is remade to sport four dicks, but Miller also deforms his face, giving the fantasy a dark twist. Appropriating porn into one’s art may just be a way of prolonging masturbation. Miller’s gay scrap-booking technique is shared by another Western Exhibitions gallery artist, John Parot. Both ask viewers to see desire as distinct from shame. (Jason Foumberg)

Dutes Miller shows at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria, through August 1.

Peter Barrett

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Peter Barrett and Sarah Hicks are neatly paired in Thomas Robertello Gallery’s “Taxonomies.” Barrett’s drawings—a kind of genomic take on classic Op-art—suck you into a depthless vortex of optic play, while Hicks’ sculptures spit you back out into three dimensions, recasting Barrett’s building-block compositions into an assembly line for mutant domestic objects.

Barrett’s four and six-sided acrylic and pencil drawings are comprised of tiny individual components, each of which, like DNA, contains the code for the overall composition. Countless tiny squares or triangles shaded in hues of varying density coalesce into larger pulsating cubes, pyramids, and whirling masses—often all three at once. Strangely, these optical tricks aren’t as palpable in person as they are online, where the hidden dimensionality of Barrett’s work quite literally leaps out at you. Although Barrett’s work sometimes veers too closely in the direction of novelty wrapping paper, at its best it maintains a low-level visual hum that verges on the synaesthetic.

Sarah Hicks

Hicks’ ceramic sculptures favor the rounded forms of contemporary “blob” architecture and product design made famous by Greg Lynn and Karim Rashid, respectively. Working from molds of mass-produced household items, Hicks rearticulates the disparate parts, chop-shop style, and assembles them into vaguely familiar yet ultimately unidentifiable objects with pimpled surfaces and bulbous protuberances. Many of Hicks’ small-scaled works are displayed on a mirrored table, revealing their normally hidden undersides.

Hicks’ objects also mirror the concerns of Barrett’s drawings: whereas Barrett creates the illusion of depth through forceful alignments of repeated geometric forms, Hicks extends her sculptures’ physical volume into the realm of images. Both artists’ decision to revisit classic representational issues of depth and illusion makes sense, given that so much of what we now think of as space—be it social, architectural, urban or domestic—is designed and takes place on flat computer screens. (Claudine Isé)

Through August 1st at Thomas Robertello Gallery, 939 West Randolph Street

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Disaster, whether natural or human-made, is at the heart of the large group exhibition “Second Stories.” Curators Brian Gillham and Rachel Kalom bring together artists working in a variety of media that generally reflect America’s newfound frugality, hence oil on canvas takes a backseat to work made from materials such as cardboard, packing tape and found objects. Taking satirical aim at luxuries and commodities (including art), Vijay Paniker’s ceramics update wine and cheese parties for the current recession: a tube of easy cheese and a box of wine. We’re not giving up these luxuries; we’re just giving up good taste. Deb Sokolow’s work panders to fear-mongering. Her “CIA Failed Assassination Attempt #3” recounts one of the CIA’s unsuccessful attempts at assassinating Fidel Castro by paying $150,000 to an agent of the Mob to arrange the hit. She humorously concludes, “The CIA should’ve gotten their money back on this one.” Sokolow combines obvious cover-ups, effacing and slightly menacing dark shapes to convey both what we don’t know and the little we do about what the CIA exactly does or has done. Though some of the work on view in “Second Stories” is passable, the art brought together reflects our current uncertainty, but as Paniker indicates, we’re not really that worried. (Abraham Ritchie)

Through August 20 at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, 325 W. Huron

Jean Sousa, "Morphology V," 2008, digital print

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Distinctive approaches to quiet beauty characterize the six sensitive photographers whom curator Susan Aurinko, director of the late and lamented Flatfile Galleries, has chosen to make her present statement on life. Sarah Hadley’s misty sepia studies of Venetian canals, Morgan Barrie’s small cloudy black-and-white images of landscapes disturbed by human feet or indistinct figures, and Jerry Cargill’s softly focused black-and-white images of earth and sky show the varied possibilities of pictorialist impressionism. Hal Kaye’s sharply etched and silhouetted shot of birds on power lines, Paul Flaggman’s brilliantly illuminated black-and-white takes of accessible urban spaces, and Jean Sousa’s sepia-toned, finely delineated and deeply textured studies of vegetal details seek meditative peace on the opposite path. Each masterful and bearing an individualized sensibility, the six artists taken together are surprisingly complementary. None shoves the others aside; look at Cargill’s image of a wind farm, majestic in the fog, and you will see technology brought to aesthetic heel. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 15 at Mars Gallery, 1139 W. Fulton Market