Richard Rezac

There’s a trend practiced by some of Chicago’s established and regarded sculptors that, while not new, resurges every few years like a scheduled comet passing overhead, illuminating the heaps of unsorted recyclables that calls itself “contemporary sculpture,” for a brief flashing reminder that we can trust our eyes, not just our minds. In short, formalist tendencies persist. City of grime and grit and gut this is not. This city was built on beauty, so it’s no surprise that spirituality or mysticism or whatever unnamable eternal thing creeps in from time to time.

Christine Tarkowski (born 1967), Susan Giles (born 1967), and Richard Rezac (born 1952) all stoke a formalist eroticism, as their sculptures pierce right through to the core of perceptual understanding, without having to busy the mind. There’s an ease of access partly provided by familiar materials—cherry wood, polished and rustic cast metals, cardboard and tape—but each also favors architectonic forms: Giles plays with minarets and crenellations, Tarkowski breaks and re-circuits parking-garage ramps and the geodesic dome, and Rezac’s sculptures evoke knobs, nooks and floorboards. There’s a logic to each construction but the direct response is pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

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As part of his broader study of “industrialized space” in the era of globalization, photographer and installation artist Mark Curran honed in on the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Research complex in Leixlip, Ireland that has since been closed down as the multinational technology giant went in search of cheaper labor. If we did not know the back story, we would look at Curran’s unframed, large-format photographic documentary portraits of the factory’s workers—tacked on the gallery’s walls—not as commentaries on the depredations of corporate capitalism, but as reflections on how individuals have become trapped in a technological environment, in which, in this case, they are wrapped in sterile white gowns, gloves and caps in order to protect the environment from them. Curran’s subjects, in frontal poses, jar through their juxtaposition of all-too-human faces and the inhuman workplace that other human beings have created. Curran’s anti-capitalist critique and the critique of technology that his images betray operate somewhat at cross-purposes, yet both have their truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 19 at the DePaul University Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore

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“Expect the Unexpected,” a survey of paintings and works on paper by the late Hollis Sigler (1948-2001), organized by the Rockford Art Museum, is now on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Adroitly curated Patty Rhea, the volume of works by Sigler helps reveal their lasting value.

A Chicagoan by way of graduate school, Sigler was one of the founding members of the feminist art collective and alternative gallery Artemisia (1973-2003). She found critical success in the early 1980s, and showed at the 1981 Whitney Biennial. The current retrospective contains twenty years of her work.

The lack of irony in Sigler’s work instantly identifies her as part of a previous generation. Domestic scenes heightened with symbolic narratives pulse with energy in van Gogh-esque staccato brushstrokes, dots and dashes. Shallow, warped spaces and cartoon-like representations betray Sigler’s heavy reliance on the traditions of outsider art, complete with apocalyptic imagery and populist religious overtones. These tropes are employed to an emotional end, repurposed to address the nature of feminine and queer desire. “Desire Released,” from 1983, shows a woman backlit by the moon as she dances in an earthen valley that is subtly erotic. Much of Sigler’s work focuses on the liberation of desire, whether just beyond the valley, outside of a window or rising to heaven.

Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, which recurred in 1991. She created the “Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers” series in response. An artist who makes work specifically about the cancer experience may face marginalization in the survivor story genre, but Sigler’s art transcends such easy shelving. The current retrospective reveals Sigler’s intense engagement with culture. While she certainly positioned herself as a passionate advocate for women’s health issues, her painted legacy suggests a larger project of self-actualization. (Dan Gunn)

Hollis Sigler shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 W. Washington, through April 4.

Ninna Berger, "Venus in Clothes," 2010

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Do you remember “USA for Africa”? What about “We Are the World”—those well-intended expressions of the otherwise non-existent Reagan-era social conscience? (Okay, we shouldn’t forget “Hands Across America”). In 1985, composer Quincy Jones, along with stars Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, enlisted the help of dozens of (then popular) recording industry superstars, forming a megalo-group called USA for Africa.  They cut a chart-topping, best-selling single, the results of which—a few million dollars of food-aid—was literally dropped into Africa. In full disclosure, this author was prenatal at the time, and thankfully born to parents in Minnesota, and not Mogadishu.

Nearly twenty-five years after the original release of “We Are the World,” a young generation of artistic talent has decided to unite around the glib spirit of this bygone phenomenon with a similar (modest) proposal of their own, in “We Are the World,” at Roots & Culture Gallery. In truth, the group of artists, hailing from places as diverse as Oslo, San Francisco and Chicago, configure themselves around the title of the eighties charity single in name only, taking from it what they will, and ultimately relating to the “We Are the World” phenomenon as the mutual beginning of their collectively lived-experiences. In fact, the entire show is essentially a subtle rumination on the paradoxical conflation of collective and subjective experience endemic to this generation, resulting from its complete and total immersion in post-industrial societies in which consumerism proliferates as a (nearly) unquestionable doctrine. Read the rest of this entry »

William Kentridge, Video still of "Tabula Rasa," 2003. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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Fresh on the heels of Liam Gillick’s recently closed exhibition, which showed how unfulfilling a post-studio practice can be, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened “Production Site,” their contribution to the yearlong, citywide Studio Chicago project, which seeks to re-energize the city’s artists to get back in the studio to make stuff. While so many artists today use digital technologies, contract outside fabricators and expand the role of art beyond the studio-to-gallery system, “Production Site” proves that museums still need studio artists. Curator Dominic Molon charts the transformation that objects undergo between their private creation and their public reception. Some of the mythical, magical heat that bubbles over in the artist’s studio then dissipates in transport to the gallery or museum, but more often than not, the thirteen artists in this presentation tend to reveal that they can conjure stunning effects regardless of place. So, we end up with an engaging, visually vibrant show that nominally tries to link artists around this theme, but the artists take such markedly different turns on this journey that we ultimately get the impression that “the studio” means markedly different things to different artists. Read the rest of this entry »

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A collection of Maya Lin’s recent work, eleven pieces strong, sits in The Arts Club of Chicago. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the obsidian black scar that slices through the National Mall (and mind). That iconic form began with potatoes on a plate—so the story goes. She shaped them like garlic-mashed plasticine and the idea for a thin slab of sculpture glopped into place on the plate in front of her. This genesis story speaks greatly to her career that has since developed, as a sculptor of slick organic shapes.

Strewn across the floor of The Arts Club are perfectly watery blown-glass drops that hint at the feeling of standing on the tip of a blade of dew-covered grass at dawn. Sinuous pins pushed into the wall and a flow of recycled silver suggest a river view from the stars. And a simple, meticulously arranged collection of two-by-fours standing on end melt into lumber waves of spruce, pine, and fir.

Like Andy Goldsworthy, Lin looks at mathematic descriptions of mountain passes and river bends as source texts. She models the liquid quality of water through the use of wood, rhyming spruce grain with waves, which is further informed by Lin’s study of geology, imaging techniques like sonar, and the fluid dynamics of fractal modulations.

The centerpiece is “Blue Lake Pass,” made using sandwiched slices of Duraflake particleboard. Lin splits a mountain range into twenty blocks, carving the bases into the cubic envelope of a skyscraping, overbuilt urban boulevard. Except, instead of crowned towers, the skyline is Rocky Mountain tops. Squeezing between the blocks, viewers weave in and out of mountain chunks that rise as high as your nose and in the traces of machined particleboard grain, there’s a faint echo of something larger than the sublime—a casual suggestion that maybe this is what it feels like when 14,000 feet is only shoulder height. (Ian Epstein)

Through April 23 at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario

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Punk rock purists will argue that “Epics in Minutes” (2004), the first full-length album by Canadian band Fucked Up, was their best output to date, let alone one of the best punk records of the past decade. With little difficulty, the group became underground scene favorites due to their near-perfect execution of the age-old hardcore-punk paradigm: fast, loud and powerful.

With eccentric lead vocalist Damian Abraham, a.k.a. “Pink Eyes,” at the helm, Fucked Up’s saga began to take a few unforeseen turns following their early underground success. The band continued to gain in popularity; Vice magazine jumped onboard, they signed to Matador Records, became born-again Christians and—as the cumulative result of all three occurrences—saw their punk-rock credibility vaporize. Like the great punk-rock front men of days gone by, Abraham’s solo live performances revel in chaos. The 300-pound lead vocalist routinely strips into the nude, and draws his own blood. More recently, his personal life has become punctuated by unpredictable exploit. In 2009, Abraham began making regular appearances on Fox News’ notoriously conservative program “Red Eye,” as an unofficial liberal color-commentator. Read the rest of this entry »

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Always possessed of a sensibility directed towards decay, disorder and ultimately death, Laura Letinsky has at last reached the limit in her latest series of tabletop color still-life photographs, which take the leap into the abyss of memento mori. Shot at dusk, when French folk wisdom has it that dogs transform into feral wolves, Letinsky’s shadowed images serve up surfaces scattered with the detritus of life, as when we are treated to an array that includes a gruesome dead bird, cigarette butts, a fragment of an orange peel, a plastic candy wrapper, and some black globules of uncertain origin—all placed on an oblong piece of sadly wrinkled paper. Proof that Letinsky has come a long way down the highway to hell hangs in the gallery’s back room, where an earlier study of a kitchen table counter, replete with a dirty beaker, soiled butter knives, a folded sponge, and a wilting plant was shot in the morning and still carries the promise of a return to neatness and intelligibility. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 13 at Monique Meloche Gallery, 2154 W. Division

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Justyna’a Adamczyk’s “New Paintings” is a taut, elegant show of eight roughly similar paintings from 2009. They are all the same size, 23.5 by 27.5 inches, and the same material, washed-out acrylic on linen. They all embrace white space and, at their best, simplicity. They also seem to represent a journey, taken clockwise around the gallery, of an artist discovering and developing her strength. “Sztukas” is the title of the first work, which is an apparently untranslatable Polish word meaning… “something untranslatable.” An opaque white cloud—noteworthy for the absence of opaque forms—rains down a tangle of vines that might festoon a ceramic tile or a teapot, engendering an initial fear that the work is too decorative, too crafty; a fear that is then gradually dismissed. By painting the final painting, “Seriously…,” any sign of the stiff knick-knackery is gone, replaced by two dark washes of varying opacity. A large blob reads as a torso. A second, thicker blob is an ominous, even brutal shape, like a bird pecking out the eyes of a dead man or thoughts forcibly escaping the brain and turning into a comic thought-bubble, mocking and cruel. In between these two extremes is the transition, with each work selectively adding and subtracting elements, searching for the best fit. Cutesy lipstick puckers and seashells are first allowed to exist alone, before being met with threats of violence. The tchotchkes then disappear altogether, but for the remnant bloody splash, and finally a vague remembrance. Adamczyk’s process hones the work to its finest point of expression, leaving me with hopes of the next works to come. (Erik Wennermark)

Through February 13 at EC Gallery, 215 N. Aberdeen

This Valentine’s Day, Chicago artist Aaron Delehanty has come up with an alternative way to celebrate: The Monster Movie Seminar. As part of his current residency at Ravenwood’s Lill Street Art Center, he and friend Matt Fagan of Brainstorm Comics (who Delehanty calls a “monster movie expert”) present this one-off event of all-things monster, from discussions to movie-clip-viewing to costumes. “It’s more campy than sort of scary,” Delehanty admits of the two-hour, BYOB event, which he calls “an alternative to doing anything traditional or romantic on Valentine’s Day.” Delehanty says with this event he’s trying to bring in an event that’s a little more unconventional than what the “conservative” Lill Street is used to. “In a way we’re bringing something bizarre that wouldn’t [normally] happen at an institute like Lill Street,” he says, “where, like, there are moms who come to classes and stuff.” As for the holiday itself, Delehanty doesn’t hold back. “Valentine’s Day is so fake, and people try to pretend it’s real,” he says. “Monster movies, they’re totally fake and people just enjoy it. So it’s a good alternative. I don’t know if this has made my wife very happy, though.” (Tom Lynch)