RECOMMENDED

In the wake of the Associated Press accusing artist Shepard Fairey of copyright infringement for basing his now ubiquitous Obama Hope poster on one of their photographs, Stacia Yeapanis’ talk on fair use at this year’s Version Media Festival is exceptionally relevant. Yeapanis also plucks materials from popular culture and reformats them in her video art, called fanvids, so-called because she uses material from Xena and Buffy as a fan. Through her own experience having her work removed from YouTube by Fox Broadcasting, she has extensive knowledge of the current roadblocks, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), to individuals being able to exercise their right of “Fair Use” as spelled out in the US Copyright Code. She has uncovered information regarding how, as a result of the DMCA, websites such as YouTube are able to protect themselves from copyright-infringement liability by using automated systems to help large-scale copyright holders identify their content on line. Yeapanis plans to address “why the DMCA is being misused by many large corporate media companies to intimidate individuals into taking down their videos,” in effect, keeping many cases out of the courts and preventing new precedents for new media practices from being established. “My work is about the user’s response, not the producer’s intent,” she says. (Sara McCool)

Stacia Yeapanis lectures on “We Have a Right to Be Angry: Feminism, Fanvids and Fair Use,” Saturday April 25, 6pm, as part of Version Festival, at The Benton House complex, 3052 S. Gratten Ave., Benton House Gymnasium Classroom, ground floor.

Consumers are the new criminals: a trope that was always overdetermined and simplistic, and that by now feels worn out and somewhat outdated given the new batch of financier sinners we’re scapegoating these days. In fact, the current economic shipwreck makes environmentalist finger-pointing seem almost nostalgic, as Nicole Gordon’s show at Linda Warren Gallery illustrates. Gordon’s paintings, with obvious influences from Northern Renaissance painters Bruegel and Hieronymus Bosch to William Blake, are simultaneously religious and carnivalesque, each one illuminating one of the seven deadly sins as acted upon the planet. Gordon considers each sin from a purely environmental perspective, where, for example, gluttony is imagined as an apocalyptic oil-drilling scene, and envy as a surrealist diamond mine. The connection is hardly new, and the show doesn’t leave very much up to the analysis of the viewer in terms of theme or intellectual challenge. The paintings turn out to be most interesting in their hybrid style, which comprises a striking combination of quasi-realistic backgrounds and cartoon-like, overtly artificial foregrounded figures. This kind of visual mash-up seems to offer much more insight into the way we experience the world now—perhaps a comment on the simulacric way we interact with the natural environment (when we do so at all), where specific fictions have allowed such eco-holocausts to take place. However, the images themselves, from animals in gas masks to a childish depiction of a man being sodomized by a gas line, seem overly simplistic, and it’s hard to know how we’re to take the final image, “The Culmination,” which depicts a literal apocalypse, complete with a nuclear cloud in the distance; the artist statement claims these paintings reflect hope and a possibility for change, but other than the ambivalent style, the work itself shows the frustrating lack of complexity that underlies all propaganda, eco-friendly or otherwise. (Monica Westin)

Through May 9 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 W. Fulton Market

Hank Willis Thomas, “Smokin Joe isn’t j’mama” (1978/2006)

RECOMMENDED

From straight documentary to cultural criticism of representation; from celebrations of tradition to biting postmodern play; from sentimentality to irony, this lavish exhibition is the most brilliant survey of recent African-American photography ever to hit Chicago. The contemporary stars–Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Willie Robert Middlebrook, et al.–are in the house, but so are less well-known lights whose works deserve long looks. For stabbing wit, no one is better than Hank Willis Thomas whose “Smokin Joe isn’t j’mama” (1978/2006) captures his chunky subject donning a blue bonnet as he sits leaning over a stack of pancakes with an air of bemusement. For the recovery of lost memories, Thomas comes through again with “The Oft Forgotten Flower Children of Harlem” (1969/2006), which shows the hippies in all their laid-back splendor hanging out on the street–icons of peace and love with a dash of Jimi Hendrix. Thomas does it all with panache, but that is just a slice of this stellar show. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 14 at DePaul University Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore

RECOMMENDED

If his career had begun a few decades later, Ian Hornak (1944-2002) would probably have been making large-scale photographs instead of paintings. Indeed, his dreamlike landscapes seem to have been made in Photoshop, where one photo image has been superimposed upon another. The assertive qualities of good representational painting—the command of space, value and line—just aren’t there. But Andy Warhol didn’t need those qualities either—and Hornak’s paintings effectively present the hedonistic-tragic world they shared. His still-lifes catalog the best that money can buy, but is that enough?  A dark, lonely shadow seems to be creeping in from the center, as if all those high chroma colors, even if they bleed into the surrounding frame, were just not enough to keep us happy. His landscapes, which often superimpose images of sky and earth could well be advertisements for cemeteries, as they express the longing for eternal peace. The only figure painting in the show envisions “Asmodeus” (the lustful, Biblical  king of demons), appearing here as a handsome young dude who seems to be the title character from “Angels in America,” the  gay fantasia set in the same time and place (NYC, mid-1980s) in which the painting was made. Hornak was not quite the painter that Bouguereau was, but he offers us a similar world of material excess and spiritual despair, and this is the first exhibit of his work since his sudden death in 2002. (Chris Miller)

Through April 30 at Galleries Maurice Sternberg, John Hancock Center, 875 N. Michigan Ave, #2850

RECOMMENDED

Fitted out with infra-red film, which produces sharp contrasts between glaring white and deep black, Sarite Sanders took off for Egypt to bring us a new take on the ruined scenes of ancient glory that were so dear to the hearts and eyes of nineteenth-century travel photographers. Although she references the old school in her studies of temples, statuary, obelisks, colossi and friezes at close and mid-range, Sanders’s images are decidedly surreal and often seductively eerie, as her subjects seem to come alive in a world that we never see with our naked eyes. Sanders’ stunning take of the “Striding Colossi of Ramesses II” with columns bathed in blinding light against a black sky scarred by an unearthly super-grainy cloud bank recalls the old Flash Gordon flicks that imagined distant and forbidding planets. At the antipodes of a documentary, Sanders’s series is arresting neo-Orientalist visual fantasy. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 10 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan

RECOMMENDED

Jack Tworkov (1900-1982) was among those bold founders of  the New York School who brought Abstract Expressionism to America and the world. But for a while, in the late 1940s, he sometimes applied his formidable energies to portraying some women whom he knew, not as formal portraits, but as impressions of their personalities, as might be felt as they sat in the studio one morning, chatting with the artist. So, this is a fun show, because these were smart, lively, urban women, and Tworkov enjoyed their company, as he applied a variety of color schemes and designs to make expressive snapshots of each, not as models, so much as friends. The glory of Ab-Ex painting is a sense of freedom—anything goes—but there’s a certain tension in how a woman presents herself in public, and that tension is the glory of these paintings and drawings. (Chris Miller)

Through May 23 at Valerie Carberry Gallery, John Hancock Center, 875 N. Michigan.

Luke Dowd’s show “Happy Happy Sad Sad” is almost as simple as its title, comprised of a number of screen prints that depict close-ups of cut diamonds, mostly patterned but sometimes randomly placed in the composition. Perhaps the most impressive quality of these prints is the way they appear to reflect light, in a trompe l’oeil that draws attention to the artificial nature of a mechanically enhanced diamond (or at least its market value). Most of the prints appropriate a single color or two along with the black-and-white figures, but the most interesting ones make use of several bright hues in both foreground and background, where their placement can be additionally evocative—for example, one print includes the magenta, yellow, and teal of newsprint’s colored ink, evoking mass reproduction. Reproduction and the construction of uniformity in natural and man-made objects is of course the major trope of the show, so that the iteration and repetition marking the compositions is clever. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Paul Germanos

RECOMMENDED

Housed in the refurbished Texas Ballroom, the April Gallery exhibition features installations, video and text-based objects that engage academic research with artistic practice. Heavily textual pieces like Kristi McGuire’s “I mean, it’s sort of half-heartedly about Modernism, I guess,” where McGuire draws a visual and mental map on mirrored glass in an effort to locate modernist thinkers, stands in the vicinity of Andrea Slavik’s “Slum Love,” a dual-screen video juxtaposition with clips from the recent feature hit set against a candid recording of racially slurred monologue, with Rebecca Gordon’s piece from her ongoing series on performance.

With so much going on in such a small space, the central focus (perhaps because of the sheer size of the work and its expanse) rests on a fourteen-foot table in the center of the gallery. The group’s collective work, “Bibliography,” displays a selection of contributions from exhibition participants in the form of letters, quotes and project proposals that bring in James Elkins, Terri Kapsalis and Adelheid Mers establishing a geographic and theoretical reference point from which the recent School of the Art Institute MA candidates engage in their work. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Through May 10 at 3012 S. Archer.

TOMS Shoes, a nonprofit organization focused on helping children in need in underdeveloped nations, hosts its One for One event this Saturday at the OhNo!Doom Gallery. The event hopes to promote TOMS’ overall mission: to donate a pair of shoes to a child in need in Africa and Argentina for every pair purchased through them. Event coordinator and TOMS Chicago spokesperson Miranda Saucedo acts as host of the event this Saturday, in hopes of bringing artists together to help promote TOMS’ cause. “What I’ve decided to do with this event is make a very collaborative thing between artists and TOMS Shoes,” Saucedo says. “I collaborated with the guys from OhNo!Doom and they’ve gotten some of their guys to come in and paint the shoes that are bought for the event.” All artists involved will be putting forth a valiant and volunteer effort to bring awareness to the TOMS mission and, hopefully, to get a good number of shoes sold at the event. “The biggest thing is that I’ve offered to compensate all these artists,” Saucedo continues, “and all of them have wanted to do it for free. I just hope that from this event that more people can learn about TOMS. That, and I think OhNo!Doom is a really great artistic community and gallery.”

Lucia Fabio

By Damien James

“I’m really nervous,” says Lucia Fabio, director of Mini Dutch Gallery, when asked how she feels about “metabolizing” the artwork of EC Brown. As she looks at Brown’s paintings on the walls of Mini Dutch, her admiration is palpable. “Erik’s work is amazing. You don’t see drafting skills like his often. His odd, elongated panels and color palettes are always so intriguing, and I’m really fond of the sexual undertone to his work.”

Billed as “one show: three openings,” the current Mini Dutch exhibition started with the EC Brown solo show, then came the “metabolizing,” in which Fabio responded to Brown’s work by creating new pieces of her own and re-curating the show, like a call-and-response between the two artists.

Fabio’s nervousness can’t be contributed solely to showing with Brown, however. She hadn’t produced much work on paper since graduating from The School of the Art Institute, in 2007, opting instead for large-scale paintings and sculptures, often inspired by her pet rabbits. “While in school I focused mainly on the figure, but near the end became so fed up with the system and with making ‘meaningful’ work that I painted my female rabbit, Patina, mounting my male rabbit, Fujoe, on the wall. It measured nine feet by ten feet, and it was such a relief.”
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