Matthew Metzger, "Re-release: Discourse." Acrylic and Oil on Panel.

By Rachel Furnari

“I’m a romantic about everything else in my life, but not about art school,” says Erin Chlaghmo, who begins her MFA program in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this fall.  Romanticism, though, may be exactly what’s required to assume the burden of debt that comes with a degree that can cost upwards of $40,000 a year for a two- or three-year program. Chlaghmo is one of an increasing number of artists to pursue their graduate degrees in studio-arts without the guarantee of a lucrative career (or even a living wage) to pay off their student loans. Most students have a surprising and unmitigated enthusiasm for their graduate work despite being aware of the low odds for successfully working full-time as an artist—of being chosen out of the 300-plus yearly graduates for a show with one of a few commercial galleries in Chicago—and the attendant financial risks that have been exacerbated by the current economic environment.

In interviews with students from five local studio-art MFA programs—Columbia College, Northwestern, SAIC, the University of Chicago (U of C) and the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC)—descriptions of access to faculty, visiting artists, financial aid, professional development programs and limited material resources reveal how these artists make use of their programs to create art; to think, to network, to teach and, most importantly, to have a stake in an ongoing, critical conversation about contemporary art—though the quality of this conversation was definitely up for debate. While these schools have their differences, their students and graduates make up an undeniable segment of the contemporary art scene in Chicago and in a real way represent its future. Their institutional alignments, then, are crucial in determining how and in what direction the Chicago scene develops. By identifying those alignments it may be possible to better understand how the energy and creativity of these students might be expended in order to transform contemporary art in Chicago. Can the arts community undo the institutional biases in order to acknowledge the means by which art schools shape the Chicago art environment for practitioners, curators, dealers, audiences and critics? Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

“A springtime strip” is the name of an editorial recently published in the University of Chicago’s student newspaper in which its writer—a freshman—bemoans his peers’ revealing dress in the warmer months. “Do our students become tramps to more effectively enjoy the weather, or do they use the weather as an excuse to more effectively become tramps?” (This sentence and others were decried by readers as hateful and misogynist, and later redacted by the paper’s editor.) The writer frets over short shorts not longer than its wearer’s pinky finger, and men’s “thin, transparent, often sweat-stained T-shirts meant to be worn as underwear.”

Several days later, in a news segment called “The Patdown,” WGN reporter Pat Tomasulo headed out to the lake shore to fret about topless men. Who should and should not go shirtless was the gist of the reporter’s commentary, with a few nods to short shorts and peek-a-boo butts. For comic relief, and perhaps as a hyperbolic example, Pat jogged a little wearing a black suit and tie in the warm spring sun.

Besides being excuses to point at semi-naked bodies in public, these two incidents beg the question, are we indecent? Has our sense of good taste fallen behind our sense of fashion? I had the opportunity to ask Timothy Long, curator of the clothing collection at the Chicago History Museum, if he finds the current styles of dress to be inferior to times past. With a huge trove of clothes at his disposal—more than 50,000 objects mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries—Long withheld judgment, instead opting for the long view. We don’t follow trends or adhere to tastemakers anymore, he said, although certainly we’re more inclined toward the casual. For reference, we were inside the exhibition “Chic Chicago,” a historical tour of women’s couture that traces the development of the modern woman through her dress. (To boot, each dress on view was worn by a Chicago socialite.) Read the rest of this entry »

Are you the kind of person who wishes Halloween came more than once a year? If so, consider your wish granted. For the price of an entry ticket to “You Oughta Be in Fangs,” ThreeWalls’ benefit extravaganza this Friday, May 29, you can be part of an elaborately conceived, fully immersive environment where 1920s-era vampires party the night away at the International Museum of Surgical Science, a four-story lakefront mansion filled with all manner of exotic, flesh-piercing objects.

Over a year in the making, this one-night-only event is written and directed by Death by Design Co., an artistic collaboration-cum-business run by Teena McClelland and Michelle Maynard, who’ve carved out a specialty niche by creating fantasy death scenes for all-too-willing victims. Their clients star in custom-made horror movies by acting out their own (inevitably grisly) deaths for the camera.  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

This past Saturday’s opening at Scott Projects featured work by Arend deGruyter-Helfer, Aylor Brown, Bailey Salisbury and Carson Fisk-Vittori, a team of four recent undergraduates who collectively assembled while at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and who share a tendency towards conceptualism and a subtle sense of aesthetics. Their respective concerns appear dissonant, except where their processes touch upon the transit of information from the physical to the digital, and back again. Accordingly, Carson Fisk-Vittori begins the exhibition with two QR code images laser-printed on clear vinyl and adhered to the wall near the gallery entrance. The two-dimensional QR code, like its more familiar one-dimensional counterpart, the UPC barcode, is an optical representation of digital data, capable of being read, with the assistance of special software, by a cell-phone camera. Once read, the code immediately redirects a user’s web-enabled phone to a particular URL; a process, called hardlinking, bridges physical and digital space.  Unfortunately, no one present endeavored to scan the two works (and my outmoded cell-phone lacked the proper technological capability to attempt a reading), leaving a vital component of the work unacknowledged, though the impact, of a possibly fruitful expansion of physical space, may still be felt. (Nate Lee)

Through June 2 at Scott Projects, 1542 N. Milwaukee. Open by appointment.

RECOMMENDED

Clare Rojas’ paintings and drawings, like a Coen brothers movie, are uncomfortably funny and lightly disturbing. Both the Coens and Rojas have embarked on similar aesthetic projects: to show that an enjoyably queer outward appearance may cloak mysteriously empty motivations. A thought goes one way but the face goes another. The eyes are windows to a hole.

If Rojas’ scenes followed a narrative, then they could easily be adapted to comic-book form. Instead, the disjointed scenes, like other Kavi Gupta Gallery artists Adam Scott and Chris Johanson, use a cartoonish style to tease the cutesy/awkward divide. The images in the show, titled “Believe Me,” feature rabbits, bearded men with elfin shoes, black geese, eight-pointed stars and graphic floral patterns. These would be well-suited to tarot cards, where distinct scenes, like a naked man in a ditch, appear to mean something ominously specific, yet a card reader would interpret them differently, maybe benignly.

If I ever start a cult, I’d hire Rojas to design my cult’s stationary and Christmas cards. When paganism is birthed from boredom, and dystopia needs some decoration, Rojas hits the right wrong note every time. (Jason Foumberg)

Through July 25 at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington

RECOMMENDED

“Hamartia” is an error committed in ignorance that results in unintended disaster. In his current solo exhibition at The Green Bicycle Organization, Daniel Baird applies this concept to the potential demise of human technological advancement. Space, technology, institutional preservation and exhibition, and the forces of nature are confronted through re-presentation as museum artifacts. In “Untitled (HP Pavillion #ze4560us, August 2003 – April 2007),” a laptop immersed in desiccant, a material used to maintain dryness in museum exhibition cases, is enclosed in a protective plexiglass virtrine. “Hamartia,” the show’s namesake, consists of desiccant beneath six feet of soil contained in a plexiglass pillar. Visually striking and placed in the center of the gallery, this piece suggests a commentary on environmental issues in a way that arises more subtly, and more enticingly, in other works. “Acquisition,” for example, a sheet of plexiglass printed with mirrored window tint representing early hominid hand axes, juxtaposes one human innovation, the use of tools, with another, potentially more superfluous invention—tinted windows. This piece brings attention to the myriad tools available contemporarily, all having sprung forth from humankind’s monumental leap that was the use of tools. Shown amidst a grouping of plants that belong to the gallery, a second consideration arises, that of technological advancement and the attempt to manipulate and contain the natural, or the naturally occurring. The contained presentation of the natural alongside the invented and manufactured in this exhibition questions these very distinctions while positing technology itself as a kind of hamartia. (Jamie Keesling)

Through May 30 at The Green City Bicycle Organization, 1626 N. California Ave. Open by appointment.

RECOMMENDED

“There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes sound.” This quote from John Cage functions as a starting point and thesis for “Several Silences”; its message can be sensed soon after entering the large, open space of the gallery, which becomes an echo chamber for the steps and mutterings of viewers and the various sound pieces included in the exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Young hands, old hands and imprints of hands; hands clasped in prayer, gesturing in conversation, festooned with outrageous nail extensions, groping at food, playing musical instruments, locked in fists with gauntlets on the wrists—all that and much more appear in Norman Sagansky’s series of color photographs celebrating the most expressive elements of our anatomy, save the face. For all the sensitivity of his static sculptural studies, Sagansky comes into his own with his action shots of the insane flurry of dancers’ hands as they strut their stuff in Daley Plaza, and especially his take of a café in Cologne, Germany at a photo fest where the patrons reveal their wildly diverse moods through their gestures of animation, boredom and ruthless determination, as a beauty in a large dominating photo on the wall presides over them with her fingers seductively stroking her lips. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph

RECOMMENDED

In an unsparing onslaught of photographic social criticism, curator Natasha Egan offers us ten artists with messages questioning the depredations of modern civilization whose images never fail to be beautiful. Top honors for deadly wit go to Dionisio Gonzalez, who confects color panoramic images of shots of rude shanties in Sao Paulo, Brazil intermixed with bits of that city’s postmodern architecture to create an impossible street in which the wealthy and the wretched come cheek to jowl. On a more metaphysical plane, Liset Castillo takes on the age-old commentary on vanity, constructing sand-castle cities in her backyard, shooting them, destroying them, and then shooting the ruins that she has wrought. On the museum’s top floor, Christina Seely reaches the acme of irony by providing us with a world map showing where the mega-carbon footprints are, and then serving up scintillating large-format color photos of the cities that produce climate change taken from afar at night, gleaming with unearthly brilliance. Postmodernists always try to have it both ways. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 5 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

The title of Albert Oehlen’s show at Corbett vs. Dempsey, “A Vanguard With Decorum,” evokes the complicated specter of jazz, a connotation that is reinforced in the catalog essay by gallery co-owner and accomplished musician John Corbett. Indeed, every piece in the show reinforces that association. Oehlen’s monochromatic collages, with their jaunty tangles of parallel lines and calligraphic clef-like flourishes so clearly depict a hard-swung musical score that I could imagine them as a retrospective of Art Blakey album covers designed by Stuart Davis. Their high-energy design is unimpeachable, and it’s great to see a contemporary master like Oehlen showing in such a deserving small space in Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »