RECOMMENDED

He Said/She Said is a project space devoted to the exchange of ideas between art and daily life, so it’s hard to imagine a better setting for Michael Stickrod’s work. It’s located in the Oak Park home of artists Pamela Fraser and Randall Szott, who take turns curating in a back-and-forth manner. Fraser gravitates toward contemporary art practice, while Szott pushes those boundaries by focusing on cultural phenomena that may fall outside the realm of art proper, such as found grocery list collections or lectures on eating locally.  Stickrod represents a convergence of the two perspectives: he’s a young artist who has shown at various galleries and at the New Museum, but his work focuses mostly on his personal life, often taking the form of vacation movies, family photographs, painted ceramic plates and other “amateur” practices that tend to be relegated to attics and basements. Read the rest of this entry »

"Drawing," ink on paper, 1948

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Postwar Americas loved to assemble aquaria of small, tropical fish—their slender, floating, shimmering, linear bodies being such a welcome relief from the gritty, heavy, earthbound world of war and economic depression from which they had just escaped.  And when they weren’t expressing their angry, suffering selves, American artists also seemed attracted to those qualities, especially in the world of commercial design, as exemplified by the Bauhaus, and its American outpost, the Illinois Institute of Design here in Chicago. In 1937, Richard Koppe came here to study with Moholy-Nagy, Archipenko and company, and in 1945 he returned to head the IIT Department of Visual Design. And he loved fish! They appear not just in the mural, menus and tableware that he designed for the upscale Well of the Sea restaurant in the Sherman Hotel, but also in his abstract drawings and paintings, now on display at Richard Norton Gallery. His work is light, whimsical, and linear—just like the fins of a 1957 Chevy. (Chris Miller)

Through April 3 at Richard Norton Gallery, 612 Merchandise Mart

RECOMMENDED

Among the more than 300 objects in “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” visions of dome-covered, climate-controlled cities, three-wheeled, bullet-shaped cars and hexagonal housing models might seem more like manna for sci-fi nerds than part of a blueprint for sustainability. The traveling exposition details the legacy of R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller from simplistic pencil sketches of futuristic, towering “lightful” houses designed for a rapidly growing population to Fuller’s geodesic dome from the 1967 Montreal Expo. A self-described “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” Fuller blended disciplines including geometry, engineering and architecture to design housing and machines that create more with less. Read the rest of this entry »

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An aficionado of the Far East, Glenn Wexler betrays his career as a graphics/signage installer in his glossy color photos of billboards and architectural details in postmodern Tokyo, Osaka and Bangkok. Mixing blurred shots taken from train cars with precise studies of outdoor ads, Wexler attempts with success to capture the aesthetic of a journey through the contemporary city, in which the world ordinarily rushes by us until we are arrested momentarily by some commercial icon and fall into simulated zen. Considered separately, Wexler’s most effective images are the motion shots whose subjects dissolve into intriguing undulating pastels. Just to show that he knows that there are other sensibilities, Wexler offers up two somberly moving black-and-white impressions of aspects of pagodas that, perhaps because of contrast effects, steal the show by throwing us far from the madding pitches. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 11 at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery, 325 W. Huron

By Jason Foumberg

That the arts suffer in an economic recession/depression is reflected by the recent shrinkage of Chicago’s own gallery scene. Undoubtedly this will mean fewer opportunities for everyone involved—fewer places to show and sell art, fewer projects initiated, fewer things for the critic to criticize. With this, a new terminology has entered the fray, drawing upon medical and bodily processes: the slimming down will be good for us—a tonic; like a detox, it will purify the body politic; we’ll have to necessarily trim the fat (presumably only a skeleton is needed to keep a body standing). Now that the system has been flushed, the creatives will have to get creative again, as if the strongest wills require the smallest amount of sustenance.

Haven’t some of the most potent art forms been birthed from the direst means—I’ve heard this spoken so often now—the bohemians, the punks, the starving artist? So much of this seems out of control—out of our control; it’s no wonder that a medical vocabulary comes in handy. It calmly and authoritatively explains a natural process, the biologic function of ruin, the doctor’s orders. The trusty diagnostic manual is scientific, prescriptive and factual. Thus the art market, happiest during periods of unbridled growth, is treated like a rampant disease.
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While they were still MFA students at the School of the Art Institute, Monica Herrera and Heather Mullins cut a hole in the wall that separated their two sculpture studios. Although this “window” was not condoned by SAIC building management, it represented the artists’ commitment to forms of collaboration and exchange. The opening challenged the sanctity and isolation of studio work with neighborliness more familiar to “I Love Lucy” than a competitive studio-arts program. Unwilling to relinquish their conversation and partnership, Herrera and Mullins teamed up with textile MFAs Rachel Moore and Rana Siegel in search of a space that would accommodate studios for each artist and an initially undefined open area where they could continue to foster collaborations, community-based projects, and creative public programming.
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The current show at Rotofugi store and gallery includes work by contemporary stencil artists Peat Wollaeger (stenSOUL), David Soukup and Jonathan Wakuda Fischer. Wollaeger’s and Fischer’s works are both about style and vivacious color. Fischer considers Ukiyo-e, the Japanese art form, to be the first form of popular art, and so he populates his art with references to it. Wollaeger’s work is more inspired by urban and graffiti culture—indeed, some of it has made its way outside the gallery and onto Chicago and Damen avenues. The third artist, Chicagoan Soukup, composes work entirely of depictions of the Chicago landscape. Soukup’s stencils are beyond detailed, using multiple stencils depicting objects as small and intricate as brick walls. Unlike Wollaeger and Fischer, Soukup’s work is mostly monochromatic, but he does incorporate the color of the wood supports to create beautiful sky scenes.

Stenciling is an inspiring art form because it can be very affordable to easily reproduce multiple pieces, and in this way it is interesting that both Wollaeger and Soukup also produce video work (another easily duplicable medium). Soukup’s videos are more commercial pieces, while Wollaeger has produced several “viral” internet videos, many about his stenciling craft. Some of the stand out pieces in this show are Wollaeger’s stencils on vintage television sets that illuminate his work, bringing video and stenciling together in an engaging way. (Sara McCool)

Through March 15 at Rotofugi, 1953 W. Chicago.

RECOMMENDED

In person, Sarah Krepp’s paintings look very different than they do on a computer screen. Although this can be said of most artworks, in Krepp’s case the difference between image and reality is remarkable because it has everything to do with the compression of information by electronic and, to a lesser extent, photographic media. When viewed as reproductions, Krepp’s whirligig paintings appear dense and flat, like amped-up Chutes and Ladders game boards swathed in blaring hues of red, yellow and white. But up close, what’s striking about the work is its hairy three-dimensionality. Thick tufts of black thread are sewn or otherwise affixed to their surfaces as if bird’s nests, shredded tires or toupées have been crushed against them by a windstorm. Sometimes, sections of the canvas hang like torn flaps of skin.

Krepp deftly incorporates different types of measurement, documentation and industrial detritus in the form of wooden rulers, rolled-up book pages, scraps of printed information and unidentifiable bits of plastic hardware to the extent that these paintings can’t really be considered abstractions. They’re more like agglomerations that are, at times, a bit too literal in their mode of signification, as in the artist’s punning juxtaposition of the words  “see” and “sea” in one painting. Such tendencies are completely absent in the grid of exquisite small-scale drawings installed in the rear gallery, which parse the paintings’ snarl of data into discrete tendrils of information. Here, poetic distillation wins out over sensory overload, and the work is so much better for it. (Claudine Isé)

Through April 14 at Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 N. Wells.

RECOMMENDED

Mexican filmmakers Jorge Estrada and Daniela Paasch reverse field here and offer us miniature and radically still meditative photographs of places and things in the small towns of their home country, through which they hope that “the relevance of a memory is subjugated by the aesthetic of a moment.” Like haiku poetry, Estrada’s color and Paasch’s toned images are all about emotion, using their subjects to trigger humor, poignancy and, most of all, that sense of intense absorption that we feel when we find ourselves contemplating an object or scene that has no special meaning, yet has attracted our unaware gaze. That mood is captured most exquisitely in Paasch’s sepia-toned studies of “forgotten” things, such as two metal chemical drums, one of them on its side, resting abandoned on a cracked and pitted street. In a film, no frame is self-sufficient; Estrada and Paasch understand that there is another mode of time than succession. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

Marguerite Zorach

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Interwoven threads of Impressionism, Modernism and Surrealism are on view at Madron to commemorate Women’s History Month, showing a breadth and influence of abstract style among generations of American artists. The diversity of the works almost portrays an identity crisis for what constitutes modern women’s art, which makes Madron’s exhibit all the more interesting. Globs of tangerine, yellow, azure and black slapped on a 1970s-era piece by Michael Corrine West invoke Jackson Pollock. In contrast, Martha Walter’s earlier work, “Paris Café,” depicts the gaiety of late nineteenth-century bourgeois leisure through impressionist strokes that are more defined than West. A splatter of multicolored, geometric confetti by Hilla Rebay contrasts the angular, surrealist scenes of Margaret Mullin. The majority of the exhibition’s works still cling to some amount of representation while being emboldened by abstraction. This is most clear in Marguerite Zorach’s “Farm with Barns and Trucks.” The barns and trucks in Zorach’s work are recognizable but de-emphasized in favor of the sublime countryside that is enlivened by emerald and peach hues. The blend of old and new dazzles, and for art lovers, the show’s variety is inviting. (Ben Broeren)

Through April 10 at Madron Gallery, 1000 W. North.