RECOMMENDED

Gallery director and curator Scott Speh looks toward the heavens for this exhibition, titled after the dictionary definition of the word “celestial.” Here six artists deal with the skybound through symbolism, metaphor or literal depiction.

The rainbow as a celestial phenomenon is evident in Michelle Grabner’s “Untitled Flock Drawing,” a wall installation composed of shimmering bits of rayon flocking with subtle pastel color gradation created by spray-painting onto the gallery walls. This piece falls just short of visually mesmerizing, as bits of flocking have been blown off the wall by viewers, leaving dangling chunks of fibers, but also emphasizing the ephemeral nature of the material.

Shane Huffman’s “Forevering” is a spacescape photograph taken by the Hubble Telescope overlaid with a wash of semen and menstrual blood. Here, Huffman conflates the beauty and immensity of space with human biological functions, toying with notions of microcosm and macrocosm, and the limits of infinity.

Sprinkled throughout the exhibition are Stan Shellabarger’s photographs of jet trails against blue skies, which are a continuation of his inquiry into human-made marks on the earth, and in this case, on the sky. Unfortunately, these fit more interestingly into Shellabarger’s body of work at large than they do into this exhibition, where they seem an obvious inclusion and are overshadowed by larger works. (Jamie Keesling)

Through February 14 at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

Todd Chilton’s paintings offer a broken geometry rendered in a handmade manner. Drips escape certain strokes and imperfections allow the composition to shift slightly. The canvases are variations on repeating geometric (almost fractal) patterns, emanating from the center but bound to and by the edges. Paintings such as “Untitled (blue diamonds)” have a shallow crystalline topography that the perceptual properties of color serve to deepen and heighten. These structures grow more intricate and exaggerated in his canvases from 2009. Chilton’s color is often optically charged as in his zebra-striped canvases where the boundary between the striped regions form an optical illusion. With Chilton’s canvases you can feel yourself looking, and you can see Chilton’s hand in painting. The result is a tenuous exchange between the painting and the viewer that never quite fully assembles into a concrete meaning.

Scott Fife crafts iconographic busts from familiar materials such as cardboard, wood glue and drywall screws. Four large heads protrude from the gallery walls looming slightly above eye level. Possibly with an eye toward the imminent inauguration, Fife includes a young Abraham Lincoln. Also present is a hot pink Cassius Clay and two busts of artist Ed Kienholz. The disembodied heads are authoritative, imposing and a touch monumental. Hollows exist in each face that that allow an interior view of the overall structure. Fife allows his materials to exist in a dual state of transformation simultaneously as cardboard and as persona. Each figure’s visage, combined with the familiarity of the materials, creates a distinctly palpable sense of their own hollow, mask-like forms. (Dan Gunn)

Through February 21 at Tony Wight Gallery, 119 N. Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

If you don’t already know how to check your tits and/or balls for cancerous lumps, you can learn everything you need from Shannon Gerard’s installation currently on view at Green Lantern Gallery. Despite their purported educational value, Gerard’s screen-printed illustrations work best as comedy rather than straightforward instructional material.

Jennifer Wilkey’s photographs of knitted and embroidered objects in hospital settings combine the warmth of handicraft with the sterility of medical institutions. The objects themselves, such as a doctor’s mask embellished with embroidered microorganisms, or cups of pill capsules stuffed with green fabric, seem more at home in staged photographs than on display in the gallery.

Clare Britt and Derek Haverland address consumer culture in conjunction with pathological illness. Haverland’s installation of stacks of stark white credit cards, reminiscent of pristine medical settings, recalls economic issues surrounding healthcare and the pharmaceutical industry. In a similar vein, Britt’s wall collage of found images from fashion magazines only relates to illness in the context of this exhibition. A swirling black mass of Fendi and Versace labels, shoes, jewelry, and sunglasses, brings to mind a tumorous growth or a magnified pathogen, as well as consumerism as a kind of sickness. (Jamie Keesling)

Through February 7 at Green Lantern Gallery, 1511 N. Milwaukee, 2nd floor.

Newcity art editor Jason Foumberg is interviewed about the state of the art journalism/coverage in Chicago in the latest installment of the art podcast, Bad at Sports. Listen here.

Theaster Gates: urban planner, sculptor, coordinator of arts programming (and an established eccentric-in-residence) at University of Chicago, has transformed a small gallery space at the MCA into a site for ritual and musical conversation that combines his two major influences of African-American and Japanese traditions—Gates has long been involved with Japanese sculpture through his own sculpture study and projects.

The space itself is deceptively simple, lined with boards that resemble the tops of wine crates, and it resembles something of a plywood cave, a canvas as well as a finished room that’s both prehistoric and of the moment, in the middle of its own construction; but the gallery is incomplete without the performances—or “temple exercises,” as Gates calls them, that he leads each Tuesday, which combine communal discussion with a kind of blending of different genres of spiritual reflection. The effect, with an appropriate dose of open-mindedness, is refreshingly humane and a reminder that art’s job now seems to be to help us recreate relationships with the real world rather than imagining it differently or presenting different worlds to us.

The most noteworthy element of the show is its relationship with performances by the Black Monks, a group of Baptist-Buddhist musicians Gates jams with, combining
prayer bells, Buddhist chanting, bluegrass, complex spinning, soul, jazz and slave spirituals: an impressive range of genres of music that truly interact and intervene with one another. Their performances, beautifully paced, kaleidoscopic, and truly narrative (often the instruments speak back and forth as though in an improvised conversation), call both religious ritual and Noh theater to mind; and they’re not afraid to linger on notes of interference, discord and atonality.

But while the Black Monks’ music comes to its own logical conclusion after a long, slow groove of mounting tension, other elements of Gates’ project don’t sit together quite as well. While he’s managed to create a true space of exchange between gallery, artist and audience, Gates’ production (it is firmly planted in the world of theater, in the end, more than anything else) doesn’t leave enough room for critical interpretation or new ways of seeing the elements he combines expertly as a curator; and certain moments in his own performance, such as when he paints on the wall with his own hair, feel overly exhibitionist rather than truly engaging in specific cultural traditions.

Gates says on his Web site about his work that “practicing art has become increasingly difficult to separate from the rest of life. It is fuel for contemplation, discussion and performance… the work is no longer limited to a particular material or medium. Relationships are now the root.” “Temple Exercises” embodies this kind of relational aesthetics, even if it errs on the side of stagy. (Monica Westin)

Through February 1 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave. For related performances, see schedule here.

Jill Jeannides, "Trading Games"

Tasked with considering “the personal, political and economic issues pertaining to the cultural currency of money,” the artists in “Money Money Money” present money as aesthetic object, money as karmic reward/retribution, money as palimpsest. A suitcase stuffed with twenties and a Wall Street Journal critical of the bailout is titled “Oops.” A bald eagle formed from dimes and pennies hangs above a birdseed altar. The phrase Buy or Die bathes a wall in blood-red neon light.

There are some compelling images here that get diluted by an over-reliance on parodic manipulations of dollar bills and other hard currency. The preponderance of rebus-like collage paintings combining various national currencies with other charged symbols quickly grow tiresome, especially when the “message” they impart isn’t especially insightful. The problem that faces juror Mary Jane Jacob and selected artists lies partly with the dematerialization of money itself. Paper money doesn’t hold the symbolic power it once did; today, invisible lines of credit seem more determinative of our fates. The U.S.’s shift away from a productive economy toward a purely speculative one tilts the concept of money even further towards the phantasmagoric, yet much of the work in the show feels ploddingly literal. Its most successful offerings—Daniel Mellis’ conjuring of signed artworks out of $20 cash, and Cheri Reif Naselli’s doomed attempts to reconstruct $10,000 worth of shredded currency, for example—rouse anxieties inherent in a multifarious global economy that may well have surpassed our ability to comprehend it. Performances by Mellis and Naselli occur every Saturday through the show’s run. (Claudine Isé)

Through January 31 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior St. #204

RECOMMENDED

Michael K. Paxton’s exhibition title, “Alpestrine,” is also a botanical term meaning “grown at high altitudes or mountainous regions.” This is the birthplace for Paxton’s inspiration and fitting for his first solo show of paintings at the Linda Warren Gallery. Paxton’s aerial views of mountains and islands are on a gargantuan scale. “Full Mountain,” a mixed media on unstreched canvas, is the largest piece in the show, measuring 5×12 feet. More impressive than the pieces’ size is the artist’s approach—though the subject matter is solid and heavy, the pieces appear airy and ethereal. The mountainous structures are not rigidly defined, but flow into amorphous forms that continue off the canvas. Warm reds and browns mingle effortlessly with blues and greens to create temperate textures, a large leap from the artist’s previous black and white palette. Paxton, who has been an active artist in Chicago for more than thirty years, and currently teaches at Columbia College, is originally from mountainous West Virginia. A recent trip to Greece, where he spent his time hiking and exploring some of the highest peaks in the Aegean, resonated with his childhood memories, inspiring this series of work. Though a personal catharsis for the artist, viewers too will be able to identify with the mountain’s symbolism as obstacle or stepping-stone to a higher level. (Patrice Connelly)

Through February 7 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market

RECOMMENDED

Scott Wolniak channels the energy of light and color with a somewhat distanced, if not overtly ambivalent, attitude towards its healing properties. His current exhibition, titled “Ungray: Color, Light and Other Balms,” focuses on the simulation of natural phenomena as found in many New Age healing methods. As a subtle but sensible development from his artificial grass and weeds (also exhibited here), his “Simulated Sunprints” look as if bathed in the natural light that is absent from Chicago this time of year. Wolniak has carefully folded these colored sheets of paper and soaked them in bleach, which ironically is anything but healing, for a result that still appears to reference specific textures and materials undergoing a long transition from one state to another.

Across the room, the video “Healing Colors, Musical Notes” uses footage shot through a “color cube,” a commercially manufactured light-therapy box. Paired with music from Jim Dorling, this video offers no hint of irony in its appeal to the energy chakras; however, the noted use of the “color cube” as a stand-in for actual light and color phenomena seems to carry on the idea of artificial healing in a world—or season—that is beyond bleak. If one chooses, the experience is no more than the color and light it emits, but even the tight video frame projected on the expansive wall of the gallery hints at an awareness, which Wolniak never completely divulges, of the flippant device that mocks the sun. (Tim Ridlen)

Through April 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

RECOMMENDED

Revolutionary socialism lives on the gallery walls in Fred Lonidier’s full-frontal attack-installation denouncing capitalist globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement that is composed of photographs, graphics and copious text in Spanish and English taken from articles on “Imperialist Corporations” that appeared in the old-left Monthly Review. Maybe, as it becomes excruciatingly obvious that capitalism is the last thing from a panacea, a jolt of intellectualized rage decorated with inspiring images of the Mexican wretched of the earth rising in protest against their abysmal working conditions is just what we need. In any case, Lonidier proves that no ideology ever dies and that even a way of thinking and seeing in which plodding and tendentious theory cohabits with passionate uplift can still find adherents in a cool and fragmentary electronic mediascape. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 31 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior St. #204

RECOMMENDED

“This Shadow is a Bit of Ideology” at Gallery 400 is a wide-ranging group show with ideological content that is also a bit shadowy. Several of the exhibition’s artists use overtly recognizable conceptual strategies, such as Shana Lutker’s serial drawings and etched mirrors, or Matt Hanner’s and Andrew Falkowski’s re-appropriated images of Napoleon, M.A.S.H. and Hogan’s Heroes. But is it politically relevant to know how Hogan’s Heroes shaped the national consciousness? Some bright spots include Karl Ericson’s yarn and mesh shag rug of Louis the XIV. The limply protruding yarn turns the divine right of kings into sensuous kitsch. Deborah Warner’s splattered AbEx parody and embroidered text painting, “monster appetites feed in private,” contains a possible reference to the CIA’s alleged role in promoting Abstract Expressionism abroad as pro-capitalist propaganda. Nearby, Jordan Wolfson’s untitled video shows a slow pan-out from the first Macintosh computer next to freeway with an appropriated narration about Abstract Expressionism as the first true “American art.” These ruminations on art and American-ness culminate in Dave McKenzie’s work, titled “Politics is the Art of Compromise.” McKenzie presents a lone veneered administrative desk with two organized stacks of paper sitting atop it. Each sheet is an acceptance letter for naturalization that has been heavily edited. Blank spaces remain where key words that reflect the values of the United States have been omitted just like so many individuals’ hopes for citizenship. (Dan Gunn)

Through January 24 at Gallery 400, 400 S. Peoria.