By Jason Foumberg

Red Light for Green Lantern Gallery

Green Lantern, a contemporary-art venue and small-edition publishing house, recently received an unexpected visitor from the city’s Department of Business Affairs and Licensing. Gallery director Caroline Picard was cited for displaying a sign without the proper permit. For years a sandwich board sign sat on the Milwaukee Avenue sidewalk, in Wicker Park, right outside the gallery’s entrance. Picard said the sign lured a good number of visitors to the space, which hosts exhibition openings, performances, readings and, until recently, held regular open hours. The standard hours can no longer be maintained since, after citing Picard for the sign, the city official inquired about the gallery’s business license. Green Lantern is established as a not-for-profit, but no license was ever acquired. Picard paid the $440 fine, which she ceded was fair since the space is partially commercially zoned, but attempts to resolve the license issue at city hall have proved complex and frustrating. This may be in part to Green Lantern’s mission as an alternative art space, which is difficult to properly classify. With its neighbors in the Flat Iron Arts Building, the Green Lantern is one of the last vestiges of a formerly robust arts district in Wicker Park. For now, events must be deemed “private,” but visitors can expect an attendant on hand to open the door during what used to be the open hours. Best to call first, though.

Matthew Paul Jinks currently shows at Green Lantern, 1511 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd floor, through March 13.

Not For Sale

Would it be strange to encounter art listed NFS (not for sale) in a commercial gallery? This label is sometimes applied to an artwork that an artist simply cannot part with, but gallerist Rowley Kennerk instead uses NFS as a keen strategy. Currently his eponymous gallery is exhibiting two paintings from private collections alongside two paintings available for purchase. Kennerk’s strategy, which he employs often, pairs well-known artists with emerging artists, and the result seems more like a curated exhibition than a gallery show. Exhibiting well-known work by important artists establishes and maintains credibility, says Kennerk, for both the younger artists and the gallery itself. “The gallery is not simply a showroom of goods, but a space in which assertions about culture are made,” says Kennerk idealistically. Currently, a work by Llyn Foulkes, born in 1934, who’s had large retrospective exhibitions, and a painting by Enrico Baj, an Italian of Foulkes’ same generation, are hung with paintings by gallery artists Molly Zuckerman-Hartung and Malthias Dornfeld. The good company certainly lends a boost to their resumes, and the private collection loans round out a theme on contemporary portraiture.

Of course, cultural value and monetary value go hand in hand. Recently The Art Newspaper pointed a finger at the Rose Art Museum for lending a Willem de Kooning painting to a commercial venue, Haunch of Venison in New York. The museum’s director defended the loan with an editorial in a later issue, justifying the intellectual completeness of the gallery’s exhibition. Woefully, the museum’s board has since decided to sell the museum’s entire collection, a move that was not anticipated at the time of the loan, but sheds an indecorous light on the de Kooning, which now may or may not be inflated in value due to the excellent company it kept in the New York show.

“Portraits” shows through March 21 at Rowley Kennerk Gallery, 119 N. Peoria St.

The More the Merrier

If the art market is drowning, then perhaps now is the perfect time to trot out smaller, more affordable works. Prints and other small edition works can often pack as much punch as a major sculpture or painting. Several galleries in Chicago are taking advantage of collectors’ shrinking budgets for art and, with the influx of print lovers for the upcoming Southern Graphics Council conference, are putting on large shows of small works. Dan Devening released a new series of multiples, his third such collection. More than eighty editions are on view in “Max Multiple,” from editions of three to 100, ranging from $1 to $3,000. There are some gems here. New Catalogue prints pair famous Minimalist sculpture with designed objects such as the slinky and the parking cone. Adam Pendleton screenprints on mirrored steel. You can grab a bumper sticker conceived by Philip von Zweck for $5 (“Honk if you love silence”) or a poster for $1 by Jason Pickelman. There’s also some sculpture in the shape of functional objects, such as Cody Hudson’s vases and Im Schafer’s porcelain cups—at least that’s what they may be. For good measure Devening exhibits some works from his collection, including selections from the En/Of series, where an artist designs LP liner notes and album cover for a musician.

“Max Multiple” shows through April 1 at Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll.

Over the centuries, gravity has made its rounds. From neutrinos to Newton, from moles to John Mayer’s thematically eponymous song, this force has proven itself as both our friend and natural enemy. In the world of science, it has typically been credited for aligning the universe and controlling the tides, though its intricacies have been increasingly debated during the last half of the twenty-first century. Among X Games types, the same phenomenon is universally viewed as evil as the human liver, both of which must be defied and punished with an undying vengeance. And then came the aging moneyed class, who tried to defy it by way of various tucks and lifts, though doomed like the rest of us.  But let us not digress from the importance of a more positive force bearing the same name, a small mount-making company within the Chicago museum community.

Founded in 2002 by Derek Sutfin and Andy Talley, Gravity has supplied artists, galleries, design companies, collectors and nearly every museum in town with their specialty: mounts. Described as “esoteric hardware” by Sutfin, the company produces armatures for fine art and objects—basically what the viewer doesn’t see at the museum. Starting with the size, shape and desired presentation, Sutfin, Talley and newcomer Brandon Heuser dream up ingenious ways to hover architectural fragments from gallery walls, breathe life into flaccid suits of armor, and keep Buddha smiling while he sits on display.

The challenges that Gravity faces are great, while their most successful results are intentionally minimal. Working primarily in steel and brass, the objective is to fabricate something that is strong enough to hold an object in place, yet not distract from the viewing experience. Applying techniques learned by a master mount-maker, the team has swept the city’s museums, anchoring objects and landing lucrative business deals in the process. Nevertheless, the three are modest about what they do, and aren’t too proud to accept private commissions, like a future project to manufacture custom trampoline prototypes for a pilates studio.

Sutfin and Heuser hold degrees in fine art, and Talley is a former well digger who can build or work on just about anything. He sees himself most as the metal-worker-gone-mount-maker, while the other two have a more aesthetic approach to the mount-making process. The combination obviously works, as the trio has literally built thousands of mounts over the past few years, carving out a specialized niche for themselves in the Midwestern region.

Recent Gravity mounts can be found in the Art Institute’s newly renovated Alsdorf Galleries, where highlights from the Asian Art collection have found a new home. (Andrew Loughnane)

RECOMMENDED

The Center’s winter exhibit follows tradition by showcasing seven young photographers working in diverse modernist genres, including abstraction, street shooting, nature studies, ambient social photography and the documentary in black and white and color. For sheer conceptual precision, creative imagination, passion and technical skill, Nathalie Marroquin steals the show with her black-and-white series, “Life in the 1940s,” in which she set herself up in a tacky vintage flat and proceeded to make herself the star in a drama of everyday domesticity with the aim of showing what she had learned from a study of an era of war on the domestic front–the refusal to “give up” in the face of adversity. A sense of meditative loneliness suffuses Marroquin’s sensitive shadowed images, as we see her cleaning a glass cabinet with a feather duster or cranking a mechanical egg beater in a mixing bowl. Marroquin confesses that she gets a “rush” when she performs these humble tasks before the camera, and we will experience the same when we watch her suspended in a time she never knew. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

Self-loathing and the sensual caress of hard against soft, flesh against flesh, are starkly juxtaposed in Shane Aslan Selzer’s ultra-cryptic video installation titled “Here is Where it Is, Between Us,” at The Suburban. Selzer’s piece relies on a broken-down clothes rack as its main armature, a structure from which hangs a thing called a snaffle which is used as a taming bit, along with a scuffed-up gold strap, a knot of cheap jewelry, a pair of busted sunglasses, and three repellent strips of well-populated flypaper. A small gold foil-paneled screen creates a partially obscured space suggestive of a dressing room or stage wing. The stop-motion video depicts two hands, one small, female and white, the other larger, male and black, tossing objects (a paintbrush, a hammer, an open switchblade) that appear deceptively feather-light as they float downwards. Occasionally the hands brush against each other as the objects are exchanged.

Selzer’s installation is an intuitive and self-reflective exercise in looking, seeing and, yes, in feeling, a soiled and vaguely sadomasochistic apparatus that encompasses the entire room, from the coiled electrical cord powering the projection to the cold, hard floor you’re standing on. It’s incredibly off-putting and intractable, a conceptual tease that refuses to deliver the goods. But if we quit trying to make it all add up and instead let the contradictory associations and affects it evokes wash over us, the piece becomes strangely liberating, too. It’s in the combustive abrasion of expectation and experience that the “Where” of Selzer’s title is found. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 12 at The Suburban, 125 North Harvey Avenue, Oak Park. By appointment.

RECOMMENDED

The ambiguous exhibition “Either Both/And or Neither/Nor” was created over the course of a week inside of Scott Projects. Paul Cowan and Scott Cowan, artists and brothers, usually keep their art practices separate but came together for this conversational collection. Less collaboration than call and response, each piece seems to have a double or a rebuttal elsewhere in the exhibition. In this way we don’t see a series of separate works, but an interrelated riddle. A picture of Bobby Fisher in a chess match near the entrance suggests as much. Take, for instance, two pieces titled “Those Who Produced The Wealth Were The Poorest No. 1 & 2.” Two black and mirrored Rorschach patterns had been formed by pressing two canvases together. These canvases hung on two separate propped pieces of plywood. The oppositional and anthropomorphic works echoed the action of the brothers themselves. The doubling continued in two columns made of clumpy handfuls of plaster and slathered in shiny gray-black paint. The gushy forms of “Column No. 1 & 2” were tactfully grotesque and inviting. The pieces had a matter-of-fact construction that was decidedly anti-aesthetic. Some of the gestures came off as a bit hackneyed, like the two monochromatic mustard paintings that hung close to the ceiling and were labeled as a response to a paint-covered cinder block. But what the individual pieces lacked in material complexity or legibility, the collection made up for by activating the exhibition space as a site of comparison. (Dan Gunn)

Through March 12 at Scott Projects, 1542 N. Milwaukee, 3rd floor.

RECOMMENDED

The opening reception for Richard Colman’s show “Opera Pink” at Phaiz maintained the gallery’s reputation for bringing LA-cool to Chicago. With Shepard Fairy, Dalek and Ron English as contemporaries, Colman’s show is, as one local artist put it, “somewhat of a big deal.” The opening drew a host of artists from a variety of different scenes, from the academic set to the graffiti crowd. The venue was continuously packed all evening—a who’s who of Chicago’s own artistic community with Dalek (who was involved with production of the show), photographer Mireya Acierto and DJ Sadie Woods. While Colman says that he intends his product to be “thought-provoking,” the strength of this show, and his work in general, is its visual joy. His work is gorgeously sweet in a flat, one-dimensional and excessively repetitive style. These are design motifs found often in “outsider” art. Rainbows of color, including gold, create a sense of hope and positive feelings. Colman’s work borrows the graffiti esthetic on its own terms; in the gallery, it tends toward installation, or an overall mural-like approach, rather than a focus on individual canvases. Absent were titles, an artist statement, and even pricing information. Was this a symbiosis of graffiti-commercial crossover work, or the hip affectation of an in-demand artist? (Sara McCool)

Through March 22 at Phaiz, 673 North Milwaukee.

The word “grease” usually implies slippery, fatty substances, or underhanded dealings. In Allison Katz’s “You Talk Greasily,” the adverb seems to refer to the artist’s style of painting, in which thin layers of paint (oil, acrylic, and spray paint) are applied in a sloppy yet controlled manner. The strokes vary from painting to painting, some soft and muted, others aggressively jagged and harsh, as if Katz hesitates to commit to a single identifying style. If not for the recurring color palette, it would be difficult to classify the body of work as belonging to one artist. The style varies according to the subject—a detailed still-life is displayed next to a minimalist female profile, followed by a patterned abstract. (No single source of inspiration is cited; the show’s press release further puzzles viewers with quotes from Shakespeare, Robert Rauschenberg and poet Theodore Roethke, whose connection is not established.) The most arresting piece of the show is “Dancer,” oil and acrylic on canvas. A woman in a yellow jumpsuit (exuding an eighties-like vibe) stands in a contorted, abstracted environment, legs apart and arms raised in what might be a defensive gesture if the title didn’t suggest otherwise. Placed off-center, the figure’s unusual stance spans the height of the canvas, taking control of the piece. In Katz’s other pieces, the human figure is common but not dominant—when present it is suggested by silhouettes, outlines and profiles rather than fiercely and proudly displayed. (Patrice Connelly)

Through March 28 at Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery, 1044 W. Fulton Market

RECOMMENDED

Curated by Britton Bertran, “Buttress, Buttress” uses the idea of the buttress—as architectural support, decorative prop or defense mechanism—to explore four artists’ relationship to site-specific practice within a gallery setting explicitly devoted to this approach. Jessica Paulson’s and Rebecca Ward’s installations provide the most obvious examples of “buttressing” via works that limn the contours of Mini Dutch as both an architectural and conceptual space for the play of ideas. Paulson’s geometric arrangement of drywall, wood and black tape is affixed to a corner wall bridging the entry hall, gallery proper and gallery director Lucia Fabio’s living room. Ward places strips of red tape across the ceiling and over the front windows like billowing curtains. Set against the blue and green film she’s taped over the glass, it becomes a theatrically illuminated three-dimensional drawing.

Three abstract paintings by Aline Cautis are arranged against the opposite wall. Painted a pale yellow by the artist, the wall provides a contrasting ground for her paintings’ moody, iridescent palettes while also extending the field of painting into architecture and vice-versa. Denise Kupferschmidt uses book pages and photographs to reference idiosyncratic spiritual mythologies. In two side-by-side collages, images of sunshine, ocean, seashells and sand are stacked totem-like in the shape of upright surfboards. Kupferschmidt’s inclusion provides a welcome “spinner” to Bertran’s otherwise straightforwardly elucidated themes by positing the buttress in ideational terms: as provisional suppositions that artists may temporarily lean up against for fresh perspective, like surfboards planted in the sand, or the walls of Mini Dutch itself. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 8 at Mini Dutch, 3111 W. Diversey

RECOMMENDED

Titled “Give the Past the Slip of La Mancha,” Andrew Falkowski and Karl Erickson’s collaborative project at The Suburban slices through masculine stereotypes, idealized historical myths and authoritative language systems with a keen eye for how time’s passage reduces even the most hallowed cultural icons into figures of kitsch. The drawings and text-and-image collages that form the show’s bulk feature nerd-mascot Booji Boy, cut-out knights in ornamental armor, and quotations drawn in billboard block or ransom-style lettering. And yet, despite the freewheeling mix of cultural references from DEVO to Don Quioxte to the Who, Falkowski and Erickson’s collaboration lacks the visual pleasure and ironic punch that each delivers on his own or occasionally together, as in their series of competing Hogans Heroes and M*A*S*H portraits.  Both artists use tropes of failed boomer idealism to make visually compelling and conceptually convincing works—Erickson’s latch hook rug portraits and Falkowski’s colorful hostage-note text paintings come foremost to mind—but their project here never quite transcends a stilted cut and paste aesthetic. It feels like the artists are working out ideas to be fleshed out later—and maybe separately. That think-tank aspect is fine, and appropriate for a space devoted to experimentation. But it may disappoint those expecting more from these provocative cultural ransackers. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 12 at The Suburban, 125 North Harvey Avenue, Oak Park. By appointment.

RECOMMENDED

In her extra-wry postmodern photographic send-up of the classical Dutch still-life painting–redolent with detailed depictions of comestibles sufficient to satiate any gourmand–Stephanie Dean displays for our delectation contemporary treats, such as tomatoes bearing their identification stickers, cheese bars coated with wax sporting their nutritional information labels, and plastic tubs stuffed with hydroponic lettuce. At a distance, the images do not betray their ubiquitous signs of commerce and are simply intriguing and extravagant arrangements of food, but get a little closer and the vestiges of the supermarket aisle are all that you will be able to see, and you are guaranteed to crack a smile, if not break into a chuckle. Dean’s images are neither ads nor beauty studies; they are pure play spiced with generous sprinkles of biting irony. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 27 at Flatfile Galleries, 217 N. Carpenter