By Jason Foumberg

Pedro Velez fashions himself as an art world muckraker. He seems to enjoy bullying the in-crowd, stripping the tenuous links between business and art, pulling the sheets off the back-scratching orgy and generally stirring the shit till it stinks. But “I’m trying to be nicer,” he says with a smirk. After spending the past five years in his native Puerto Rico on an extended “vacation,” Velez is back in Chicago, and he marks his return with a show at Western Exhibitions.

Velez has a history of upsetting people. “You’ll never work in the U.S. again!” shouted über-collector Rosa de la Cruz at Velez after he appropriated her name for one of his artworks, a showcard for a fictional exhibition in which she was unwittingly listed as a participant. Velez’s fake exhibition announcements are one of his more potent forms of critique, and they seem to instigate the most dramatic responses. He’s been making them for years, in both Chicago and Puerto Rico. The cards and fliers resemble typical gallery press for group exhibitions, and Velez “curates” an imaginary cast, which has included art world superstars Maurizio Cattelan, former Art Institute curator Okwui Enwezor, Eva Hesse, Jan Vermeer, and often includes topical news items, such as Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose mother drowned bringing him to the U.S. in 1999, and the endangered coral reef.

Velez relates the story of Rosa de la Cruz’s upset with a bit of pride, for her outburst reveals a lot about the international art community. Certain cities hold prominence in the social history of art. Paris in the nineteenth-century gave way to New York City as the twentieth-century’s cultural capital. In the last thirty years, the number of biennials in far-flung corners of the Earth, from Gwangju to São Paulo to Istanbul, has grown steadily, giving the jet-set curatorial class a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, you’ll often see the same artist roster no matter the region. It’s a story of increased global wealth, where biennial organizers can afford the “best” artists, and, as some see it, is an iteration of the colonize-and-conquer mentality.

The biennial franchise opened shop in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2004. Being just a hop from Miami, where the art crowd convenes every December for its massive art fairs, the island is conveniently exotic. Its unique Latin flavors, sunny beaches, favor-trading politicians and lax regulations on entrepreneurship make it easy to forget that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory—its residents being American citizens. Surely Rosa de la Cruz forgot this when she threatened to excommunicate Velez from U.S. soil.

For being a self-made gatekeeper, de la Cruz wasn’t very knowledgeable about her terrain. Nor were the curators, says Velez, who swept in to take stock of the culture, and export it. Velez believes the art community, including curators, collectors and dealers, has a responsibility to respect its locale. But Puerto Rico quickly became an over-harvested field whose roots have been pulled, and the changing winds of taste blew away all that remained. “Puerto Rico’s art scene dried up,” says Velez. Likewise, in Chicago, he’s complained about curators who don’t bother to take stock of local culture.

As a working critic, curator and artist, it’s often difficult to parse out Velez’s various practices, although the critical edge is ever-present. Is the fake exhibition announcement his art or his curatorial work, or is it an artful form of critique? The term “remote control curators” appears in both his critical writings and his art, referring to exhibition organizers who curate via email in territorialized countries, not bothering to see either the art or the site in person. Somewhat similarly, Velez’s fictional exhibition announcements, which he hands out at art gatherings or shows in the gallery, pluck famous figures from the news feed, and the exhibition venue is never listed (leading to some frustration if you don’t get the hoax). Critic Michelle Grabner interpreted this as Velez idealistically dreaming the perfect exhibition, recalling André Malraux’s 1950 book “Museum Without Walls,” wherein a show is conceptualized using only reproductions of famous artworks.

But Velez is not sitting around waiting for some postmodern fantasy wish fulfillment; his practice focuses on uncomfortable social situations and the problem of inflated cultural capital. Many of the posters in his current show feature images of girl-next-door type porn models sporting bruises and black eyes. These girls embody the spectacle of pillaging—Velez’s art is necessarily un-beautiful. The list of implicated public figures, what he calls the “unwilling performers,” this time includes Puerto Rican condo developer Arturo Madero, Roger Clemens, even Blago. Above it all, a designer store’s shopping bag hangs upside-down in a signal of distress.

Velez is working in the tradition of the artist-as-watchdog, much like artist Hans Haacke’s 1971 exposé on underhanded Manhattan real estate sales, which was framed as an art piece. Velez says that Illinois’ current political troubles would barely make waves in Puerto Rico. Its art scene reflects widespread ill maneuverings, and while a true regulation of any country’s art dealings, from its auctions to VIP lists, would surely topple it, for Velez, to be critical is a performance itself.

Pedro Velez, “The Day of the Corrupt: Our Father’s left US shit,” shows at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria St., through February 14.

An expanse of rubble in eroding basements, platforms and industrial ruins may not initially conjure up aesthetic passions. But Andy Paczos’ three-year effort to paint fifteen acres of the former Chicago Paperboard Company is an exercise in paying attention to the senses.

With an almost documentary vividness, Paczos’s series of paintings juxtapose abundance of life with remnants of lost industry. Plants and animals persevere amid the toil of cracked concrete, rusting fences and graffiti-laden, crumbling walls. Through his painting, however, Paczos doesn’t have preconceived notions about the evils of manufacturing and grandeur of nature. His focus is on the process of seeing and discovering.

“As a painter, I am not creative—I am observant,” says Paczos of his work. “I try not to over-think, but be led by my intuition…to reproduce the baffling world around me with truth. One thing that’s amazing is the stillness, quietness, and vastness of it all.”

In one painting, where a sewer pipe is being replaced along Elston Avenue, Paczos’ intuition draws him to a nearby field of trees along to the Chicago River, some falling under the duress of a beaver’s chomps. The shadows of oncoming winter intertwine with brown, drying grass and twigs on the ground. In the far background, fuming smokestacks, power lines and streetlights remind us that we are still in the city.

Paczos says his observation often depends upon the cooperation of various elements: wind, weather, natural light and the occasional watchful eye of security guards. The sounds of Metra trains would alert him to the 5pm rush period. The setting sun would change the shadow and light of a scene, prompting him to pack up to return another day.

“At various times, I saw coyotes and beavers…snapping turtles shuffling out of the Chicago River,” Paczos says. “I observed a ladybug that landed on my canvas, being careful not to walk on the wet paint as it dried.”

Instead of presenting a wasteland, the paintings illustrate a beauty of contours, deterioration, and shadow. A slope of rubble resembles a majestic mountain range, despite the folding construction sign, building and church steeple also in view. The remains of an opossum create a looming shadow before being blown away days after being painted. A cut I-beam interrupts concrete, and flowering weeds creep through emptied conduits. Though signs of decay and life intertwine, Paczos invites us not to theorize meaning, but simply observe the scenes of the moment.

“Nature will thrive anywhere,” Paczos says. “But that’s not something that I came in with. It’s something that I discovered.” (Ben Broeren)

Through April 5 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Opening reception: February 8, 3pm-5pm.

RECOMMENDED

Dana Carter understands that if you stand still for long enough, the atmosphere around you will put on a show—however subtle, however ephemeral. But how might one capture it, collaborate with it or represent it as artwork?

The collection of mixed-media artworks Carter has on display at Devening Projects and Editions are largely shaped by her experiences during a residency in the desert of Carizozo, New Mexico. There, Carter experimented with light, landscape, fabric, minerals (salt and chalk) and their corrosive and generative traces.

As any of us tromping about the sidewalks of Chicago these days knows, salt crystallizes onto material, producing its own forms on your boots. Carter channels this phenomenon for “Extract from seven days in search of Orion Nebula” (2008), a heavy-duty black cloth treated with salt water that evokes a subtly gleaming mountain scene.

The exhibition’s keystone work is “Looking at you from the Very Large Array” (2008), an ode to New Mexico’s radio astronomy observatory. Carter re-presents footage from a sunlight-drawing experiment as a projected stop-motion digital film—just one element to the larger installation that includes a glass box on the floor to reflects images of radio telescopes. The piece offers a curious comment on the dissonance between human perception and imaging technologies, both artistic and scientific.

Carter’s concept is certainly compelling, but it’s difficult to fully perceive the artist’s interest in experimenting with the atmosphere while present in the gallery’s white-box, windowless exhibition space. This, ironically, may turn out to be the point. (Danny Orendorff)

Through February 9 at Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll

Larry Clark, "Dead" (from the "Tulsa" series), 1963

RECOMMENDED

If you need a reminder that sixties youth were not always about flower children, consciousness expansion and protest, a jolt of perspective is provided by the twenty-two black-and-white photographic portraits here, taken from Larry Clark’s famous series on Tulsa, Oklahoma’s down-and-out teenagers that he shot assiduously throughout that decade. Determined to be intimate, informal and relentlessly unromantic, Clark was a pioneer in documenting a social circle as its life went down, focusing on mood rather than attitude, activity or style, to the last of which his subjects apparently could not or would not aspire. There are some smiles here and there, but more representative are shots of a chubby young woman reclining on a bed with a look of resigned sadness, who sports a big black eye and a large bruise on her arm; and of a young man sitting bent over with his hands laced behind his sunken head. The scattering of images by Blythe Bohnen and Paul Rosin only fortify the sense of the perennial mundane discontent that sours so much of everyday life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 15 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

RECOMMENDED

The exhibition “Tank Traps and Hijackings” presents the sculptures and photographic collages of Kendrick Shackleford on the offensive. What appear to be two distinct sets of work are tied together superficially in their materials and essentially in their posture. Drawn from news and advertising imagery, the photographic collages are an attempt to hijack the meaning of the culturally pervasive and generic imagery found in the media at large. Flattened through digital process, the end result of Shackleford’s collages is a muddled portrait of everyday life. Far from banal, however, the marks made before rendered photographically show the hand of the artist and the reaction of the individual to the indifferent yet manipulative face of the image. The surroundings of this wood-paneled basement gallery only bring out what already lies beneath the surface of Shackleford’s images, and ultimately beneath the ulterior motives of his source material. In one example taken from an advertisement for Orbit gum, “Little Stinker” reads as both a child’s portrait and a still life, revealing the bizarre conformity imposed on domestic and consumer living.

The space is overtaken with the large wood and spray enamel sculptures that become the “tank traps” of the show’s title. What first reads as formal and quite traditional sculptural objects take on a similarly aggressive stance when considered under this moniker, but one wishes it did not take such a linguistic directive to notice how they function as disruptions to the space. (Tim Ridlen)

Through February 8 at Old Gold, 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd, basement entrance

RECOMMENDED

Memory is a slippery thing: prismatic and shifting, it’s only grasped when viewed slightly askance. The guiding metaphor in the twelve-person group show “Trace/Memory” is—you guessed it—the trace: something that leaves a physical (and, in this case, psychological) imprint on the world that remains after the actual event has passed.

In the exhibition, Jelena Berenc’s drawings and mixed-media installations serve as records, or remnants, of private acts. In one, the artist stamped 11,929 fingerprints (one for each day of her life) onto a lengthy scroll of paper, each print making a different impression from the others. In Sarah Earle’s paintings, illegible words made by dragging a paintbrush tip or other pointed object across layers of encaustic appear as if bubbling on the surface of some primordial goo. Memory takes on a sedimentary texture in Jean Sousa’s digitally altered photographs of floating bodies, and is layered, sandwich-like, in luminous collages by ATYL (Alexandra Lee) that combine childhood snapshots with Hong Kong street scenes. ATYL captures the experience of looking simultaneously at and through a window in images that liken the chaotic cityscape’s optical dazzle to the illusory nature of memory itself.

Curators Beth Hart and Barbara Blades have a keen eye for visual poetry and, for the most part, have selected works that address their subject matter on personal rather than social or political levels. Were these choices less strong, the exhibition might feel constricting or indulgent, but instead their cumulative effect is like memory itself: elliptical, fragmented, and open to interpretation. (Claudine Isé)

Through February 15 at Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Rd.

RECOMMENDED

It’s enough to walk through the checkout line at the supermarket to know what Christa Donner is up against in her solo exhibition, “Re:Production,” at Three Walls. For all the celebrity pregnancy gossip, advice about maternity, and undue publicity about fertility, there are surprisingly few artists in recent memory who approach the subject of pregnancy on its own terms—as a personal and biological process.

Feminist art historically individualizes, rather than generalizes, the woes and joys of the female body. Donner’s artist books, such as “Tunnel Tummy” and “Disease Diary,” employ the issues of the body to illustrate narrative accounts of experiences that many of us leave only in the hands of doctors.

Donner’s most shocking and ingenuous move in “Re:Production” is an attempt to disassociate maternity from its strictly female context by introducing symbolism from the animal kingdom. Human sexuality, when viewed alongside alternative mating behaviors found in species like the Surinam toad or slipper limpet, shows there’s no “unnatural” way to get it done. The artist’s collaborative animation with biologist Andrew Yang injects a little humor into larger questions of gender identification by borrowing the sober language of animal documentaries.

In vibrant murals and drawings, colorful organs and fetuses deck the walls in a montage of fiction and biology. Subjects such as egg donation, hyperthyroidism, infertility, and adoption are treated with honest irreverence and enthusiasm to get at the heart of the matter. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Through February 13 at Three Walls, 119 N. Peoria St. The artist will give a talk on January 29 at 6pm.

RECOMMENDED

In harsh and powerful scenario photographs in black-and-white and color, Stasys puts his naked and partially clothed male models—either paired or solitary—through tests of will, the external duress and sometimes brutality of which are symbolic of the inner stresses and struggles that he believes and feels are at the core of the human condition. Deploying props such as wooden planks, ropes, balls, blocks and textiles, some of which serve as extensions of the body, Stasys’s images evoke the unresolved tension within a sense of confinement that we would discern were we to dip our attention below the shifting concerns of practical life. One of the most profound and accomplished photo-artists on the current scene, Stasys goes to extremes yet is never overdrawn; two men locked in fighters’ stances face each other at close range grabbing and pulling at the ends of the towels that cover one another’s heads as they themselves pull their bodies back in the eternal dance of nearness and distance that we never overcome. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 28 at Thomas Masters Gallery, 245 W. North

Michelle Bolinger, "Untitled (second)." Oil, graphite & colored pencil on paper

RECOMMENDED

“Suspend” focuses on the work of five contemporary female painters working in various modes of deconstruction: from flat surfaces and geometric patterning to painterly landscapes and aggressive gestures. That the work is not immediately “feminine” is to its credit—it holds up as a legitimate counterpoint to all-boys shows, like the one currently at neighbor 65 Grand, without expressionistic angst or self-conscious posturing.

Michelle Bolinger’s creamy built-up canvases with passages of stippled impasto are the most developed paintings in the show. The inclusion of “I’ve been through the desert (second)” with “The Frontier” is an excellent opportunity to compare the effects of her multimedia (oil, graphite and colored pencil) technique on both paper and canvas.  “Frontier” has a dawn snow-like, aurora borealis luminosity that every Chicagoan will easily identify. Clare Gill’s paintings are almost representational, and though flames in “Smoke Signals” are admirably burnished and fiery, there is an awkward patchwork-effect in the others that suggests an internal dissatisfaction with a singular style or manner. Aliza Morell seems more settled with a series of paintings that could be about light and space, but are equally plausible ‘80s disco quilting patterns. Although this variety fuels the show’s interest, there is a remarkable coherency to the selection of paintings, a testament to the power of good editing. Also showing Stacie Johnson and Kimberly Towbridge. (Rachel Furnari)

Through February 14 at Roots & Culture, 1034 N. Milwaukee Ave.

"Two Citizens of East Lansing," ca. 1948-1953. Lacquer on masonite.

RECOMMENDED

Murray Jones (1915-1964) exemplifies that moment in American art history when artists turned radically inward to express their personal struggles with the world instead of an enjoyable view of it. And so he did both—moving back and forth among surrealist, Constructivist, abstract expressionist styles and a sentimental regionalism (his region being the Midwest, especially Chicago since he studied at the Art Institute). Near the end his life, he also spent a year in Kyoto, where he developed a strong affinity for a more positive, Japanese aesthetic of peaceful, beautiful surfaces. This retrospective shows work from all the styles through which he passed, but especially enjoyable to this viewer was the work he did after he visited Japan, including a return to Regionalism, where he really put his painterly, expressive skills to work in crafting some delightful images of the urban Midwest. Also showing in the gallery are two colorful nightclub scenes from another Chicago painter of that time, the legendary Archibald Motley. Be sure to see them both. (Chris Miller)

Through January 31 at Robert Henry Adams Fine Art, 715 N. Franklin