RECOMMENDED

With only a week before graduation, the real world, and Sallie Mae loan officers descend, the seniors and graduate students of Columbia College will gather on Friday, May 15 for the seventh annual Manifest Urban Arts Festival. Though past festivals have boasted impressive musical headliners like OK Go and Lupe Fiasco, budget cutbacks have brought the focus of this year’s festival back to the students’ endeavors. Student artwork will be on sale throughout the festival, whose various hot spots in the South Loop Arts Corridor will be accessible via the free Chicago Trolley or by good, old-fashioned foot power. Read the rest of this entry »

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For this, her second solo exhibition at 65GRAND, Los Angeles-based artist Zoe Crosher continues her work with “The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois,” an extensive collection of photographs inherited by Crosher from du Bois, an American woman who traveled and worked as an escort in Pacific Rim cities during the 1970s-1980s. The archive itself offers incredibly rich material; du Bois photographed herself and posed for snapshots obsessively, generating a collection that features her in a dizzying variety of costumes and personas, and prompting Crosher to nickname her “the Cindy Shermanesque (but she’s the Real Thing).” Crosher’s “reconsideration” takes the form of re-photographing the fronts and backs of du Bois’ photos and exhibiting them in relative isolation from the rest of the archive. Read the rest of this entry »

Angel Otero

By Natalie Edwards

Doesn’t Artropolis sound like a futuristic Ethan Hawke movie where uniformly dressed artists and gallery owners pursue their dream of a utopia based on a foundation of aesthetic principles in an art-historical context? It’s not. Artropolis isn’t utopian or dreamy, and it isn’t over in an hour and a half, but it can be eye-numbing and interest-suppressing, just like movies with Ethan Hawke. Artropolis, like most large art fairs, feels like a celebration of quantity, more than a celebration of art. Making money is a great thing for art to do, and it is something that it must do, but the crap economy and the need to fill up two floors of the monstrous Merchandise Mart means that Art Chicago and the NEXT fair became arenas where mediocrity threatened to gobble up thoughtful stuff on a visually droning, super-sized stage.
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Armita Raafat recently returned to Chicago after spending a few months in Iran. While there, she researched architectural ornamentation on mosques in Isfahan, a city known for its resplendent Islamic landmarks and Persian tapestries, in preparation for her first solo museum show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In a gallery on the museum’s first floor, Armita has effectively transposed the distinctly Islamic decoration to the distinctly bland white-cube exhibition space. The wall sculpture conflates two (or more) cultures by way of their artistic achievements—a thicket of visual information on one hand and a fiction of asceticism on the other, here tensely vying for surface dominance. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tacky as it often is, the American rural road descends into downright sleaze when Joel Ross arrives under the cover of night, plants one of his outrageous signs at the side, and shoots his handiwork in garish color. Subtlety is not Ross’ strong suit; his penchant is to take red-state cultural quirks beyond their already elastic limits, sending them up and revealing the repressed expressions lying just beneath the surface. Would we really be shocked and veer off the highway if our headlights happened to fix on a placard reading, “And then Jesus said: Shut the Fuck Up”? More likely, we would be prompted to drive on a ways and take the next right after glimpsing the tempting sign inviting us to visit the “Unisex
Bordello.” After we had finished pleasuring ourselves, we would surely continue our trip and follow the polka-dot arrow to the land of “False Promises.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 13 at Monique Meloche Gallery, 118 N. Peoria

RECOMMENDED

Julia Katz’s portrayal of California junior lifeguards and children at play in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park accentuates the activeness of unselfconscious childhood with a vivid re-creation of their environment. Water, sand and sunlight all seem to dance with Katz’s robust, expressive brush strokes, as children in her paintings run and splash. The uniform yellow caps and red swimsuits of the junior lifeguards seem to allude to a past era, but the vivaciousness of her work provokes instantaneous enjoyment rather than the doldrums of nostalgic reflection. Read the rest of this entry »

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Provocative Lalla is back in town, having deepened her project of clearing a space for representing Arab women as self-possessed individuals who yet are enveloped in the texts of their culture. Lalla knows whereof she visualizes; a thoroughly postmodern and globalized Moroccan, she injects piercing emotion into her rich color-scenario photographic portraits by covering her subjects in flowing fabrics that she inscribes with precise and elegant Arabic script while at the same time leaving their inscribed faces sharply conspicuous and unmistakably differentiated in feeling. The juxtaposition between culture and personality is not dissonant or strident; whether her subjects are sorrowful, meditative or gently seductive, they seem to be at home within their culturescape. In this new series, Lalla has transcended cultural criticism and has entered a domain of intense subjectivity in which complaints dissolve into troubled tranquility—the end of an era of her life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 20 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Olafur Eliasson beats viewers into submission with beauty. His immersive environments are overpoweringly serene, like an untethered spacewalk, a chasm beneath your feet. Yet, we don’t really know what a spacewalk feels like, and can only approximate its sublimity via simulation. Eliasson is a master at creating such simulations of nature, from sunlight to waterfalls and, at his best, makes viewers highly aware of their bodies by infiltrating their environment.

It’s almost frightening to see how the body responds to such intense changes, as if running through the maze of a scientific experiment. We cower beneath caustic yellow lights, and become easily hypnotized like common chickens in front of a quiet light show. Eliasson’s retrospective presents these stimuli in succession, gallery after gallery, and there’s no choice but to keel over with delight. Read the rest of this entry »

William Hawkins, "Last Supper #6"

RECOMMENDED

Outsider Art may be the chief recipient of derision from the public at large, which frequently sings the refrain, “my 6-year-old could’ve made that!” The childlike desire to create something is entirely different than the overwhelming need to make something, however, and that need, compulsion even, is clearly evident at Intuit’s current show. Read the rest of this entry »