By Rilee Chastain

On a day filled with the fresh, budding appearance of spring sun, Patrick Skoff arrives at Diversey Harbor in Lincoln Park with a gleaming poster-size white canvas and an abundance of paint supplies in tow. With the shining Chicago skyline as his backdrop, Skoff begins his trademark performance of squirting paint on the canvas using a ketchup squeeze bottle while park visitors walk past.

“What are you painting?” asks a 6-year-old boy who has been fishing in the harbor.

“Just a picture,” Skoff replies.

“What kind of picture?” the child presses.

“An abstract picture,” Skoff answers. “Do you want to help?” Read the rest of this entry »

Collector Peter Lemke in his gallery

By Jaime Calder

“Here it is,” he says. “It” is stunning. To enter Peter Lemke’s gallery is to enter a forgotten world of Chicago street art, a time capsule of work from nearly a dozen artists, some of whom have since moved on to other cities and other projects, some of whom are still residing and creating right here on these very streets. Lemke walks over to the nearest wall and grabs from a heap of poster boards.

“These are my Wesley Willis pieces,” he boasts, and holds up a fish-eyed image of Milwaukee Avenue drawn by the deceased outsider artist. “Wesley gave these to me,” he explains, placing the poster alongside sixteen others like it, “but these I saved.” Lemke gestures to the walls of the gallery. Though the stack of Willis works is impressive, it is the gallery walls that truly amaze: the product of Lemke’s self-imposed rescue operation, an operation that has provoked the interest—and the ire—of a number of artists.

Peter Lemke began collecting street art in 2004 when, while living near the intersection of Milwaukee and Halsted, many of the installations Lemke had enjoyed seeing in his neighborhood began to disappear or suffer defacement. “When one of my favorites went,” he says, “that was it. I started taking them down before any more got ruined.” He holds up an older piece by (art)illery, a yellow canvas featuring a wounded eagle in flight. A Sharpie-scrawled “holla yo!!!” mars the work, alongside childish doodles and scrawls. “This is disgusting,” says Lemke, who is very vocal about what he does and does not consider art. Insistent that he couldn’t let taggers and Daley’s buffing crew continue to destroy these installations, Lemke spent the next four years taking down the works—some of which are impressively large—and storing them in his basement and garage so that they could later be enjoyed by the public in a safe environment, free from the city’s deleterious elements. Read the rest of this entry »

Sigmar Polke, Ashes to Ashes, 1992

RECOMMENDED

The MCA’s latest public iteration of its permanent collection focuses exclusively on paintings, most—but significantly not all—drawn from its own holdings. Titled “Constellations: Paintings from the MCA Collection,” and organized by associate curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the idea is to eschew chronology and linearity in favor of focused and intimate conversations among works from disparate time periods. It’s a laudable attempt on the MCA’s part to rethink its collection dynamically, as something that is, to some degree at least, porous, open to questioning, and responsive to its surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

Agata Czeremuszkin

Nestled in the trendy West Loop-Fulton Market District is one of the city’s newest delights, Ewa Czeremuszkin’s EC Gallery. Here, where the cool mesh with the seasonal; here, where Oprah works and hosts her tent show, Ms. Czeremuszkin grows her dream. In less than a year she has presented one group and four solo exhibitions of new and mid-career abstract painters. Most happen to be either Polish, like her, or trained at academies in Poland.

Czeremuszkin, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland, holds a masters degree in painting. The simple elegance of the petite EC Gallery, approximately eighteen-feet square, adjoins her studio, and is “a dream of mine being fulfilled,” she says. “This is my life. As an artist I wanted to promote other artists, given the difficulty of placing in galleries. I have selected those who, in my view, merit an exhibition.” She continues, “I have connections and knowledge of European artists who’ve shown in Europe, but not here. So it’s an opportunity both for them to show in the U.S. and for a U.S. audience to see their work.” Read the rest of this entry »

Kara Webbel, Banana Phone, pen and pencil on paper

The problem of an open-call group show is that the submissions can range from the wonderfully eclectic to the utterly clichéd. Such is the case at Barbara & Barbara Gallery’s new exhibition, “The Telephone Show.” Various pieces align the wall but there is no cohesiveness evident. It was a disappointment to note that many of the pieces seemed to shy away from the various “issues” that could relate to the telephone: the necessity of mass communication in our everyday lives, the change in its size and primary functions throughout time, the advent of text messages.

The few pieces that were most captivating specifically addressed our means of communication. In “Call Log” by Celia Rose Marks, a month’s worth of incoming and outgoing calls were printed inside of a palm-sized zine. The bulk of calls were made in Chicago to Providence, Rhode Island. Many of the calls were made repeatedly and at both short and great lengths. This was in contrast to her transcripts of saved voicemails. Without the full context, the content of each voicemail was at times humorous and jarring. The transcripts of what we say on a regular basis, devoid of the technical and grammatical rules employed with the written word, demonstrate a clear discrepancy between speech and text. Jacqueline Roig’s found assemblage of objects, titled “Emergent See”—and including things such as the head piece of a telephone, a pine cone and a scrap of paper with phrases such as, “A period of doubt and orientation” and “A period of sear and trial solutions”—beautifully offset the sometimes juvenile works also on display. Roig’s tiny, box-like assemblage displays the connection between our speech and the physical objects we aim to describe. Those two pieces alone save the show from being devoid of rich messages. (Britt Julious)

Through August 22 at Barbara & Barbara Gallery, 1021 N. Western.

Joel Dean

RECOMMENDED

“Big Youth”? A clever name for this exhibition of thirteen recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute, first, because it sounds like a kick-ass rock band (the gallery shares its building with the Dusty Groove record store), and second because that’s what our preeminent local art school has been all about for the past quarter century, as it has cultivated the energy, optimism and despair of big-hearted young people dropped like battered fish into the boiling pot of postmodern, post-industrial, post-rational culture. “An over abundance of information, cultural blurring, spiritual ambiguity, and the darker-side to happiness,” as one painter, Austin Eddy, put it. So that, as his fellow exhibitor, Carl Barrata, says: “when each work is looked at in its entirety, it adds up to a simple conclusion: something is wrong… and the clues that are given won’t yield a solution; they are too busy bouncing off each other and only show how far-reaching the wrongness is.”  Which is a pretty good description of every frenetic, passionate, eye-catching, but half-cooked, goofy, and discombobulated painting in this exhibit. And yes, happily they are all paintings, the old-fashioned kind made with brushes and paint that do not rely on conceptual gamesmanship. Think of this exhibit as a compilation album of new garage bands, and perhaps these songs will only demand one listen, but who knows where these sincere, talented artists will end up as they settle into adult lives. Chicago does have a strong tradition of rebellious juvenilia, but not every artist has to grow old in it. (Chris Miller)

Through September 5 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

RECOMMENDED

Roman goddesses of the hunt, not. Margaret LeJeune’s series of color photographic portraits, in “The Modern Day Diana,” of women who take to the fields and forests with their weapons and bring their trophies back dead, show unassuming and ordinary people who betray no traces of blood lust. Shot in their simple rural homes and sometimes lounging on their beds in full dress, we often have only the slightest hint that LeJeune’s subjects are devoted to the pursuit of game. We see benign Kathi sitting back and taking a break from stitching up her jeans on a sewing machine; only at a second look do we glimpse two petrified fowl on the floor behind her and the gun racks above her head. If the National Rifle Association is looking for propaganda, they will find it here. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 14 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior, #204

RECOMMENDED

Much in the news as a site in the “war against terrorism,” Pakistan is for Sabba Saleem Syal a “contested” country without a fixed identity–a site in the culture wars of our time. To prove her point that diversity rules, Syal has cut out scores of informal color photos of Pakistani women of all kinds–veiled, head-scarved and decidedly modern–linked them with thread, and hung her construction on the gallery wall. The threads convey the message that these women are bound together tenuously as representatives of the same cultural scene. Yet their differences are stark. At one demonstration, women hold up a sign reading “Islamic Law As The Best Way.” At another the placard reads “Stop Violence Against Women.” Syal has provided through her tight conceptual photo art a welcome corrective to prevailing stereotypes. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 14 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior, #204

Spain-based artist Cristina Guerrero’s first US exhibition is comprised of dueling canvases, juxtaposed in order to illuminate that sordid bridge between reality and advertised fantasy. The ‘real’ in question are styled glimpses of a hyper-fetishized female form (the artist’s own) shown in contrast to the fantasy of commercial sweets and domestic items. At first, the two canvases in each set seem so visually similar that it takes a moment to process which is natural and which is manufactured. The argument begins to fall flat when you realize that these depictions of women are a parade of camp that the artist has conjured up to incite shock. In one grouping, “Dulce IV,” a red vinyl-clad torso posing desperately for the viewer is mirrored by a red heart-shaped lollipop coated in so much shine that it’s safe to assume it was in the model’s mouth just before its close-up. How can we be moved to contemplate our own bad habits and fixations if the ‘real’ is this unrelatable? The most successful diptychs are those that offer a hint of human tangibility: a tan line at the end of a leisurely summer, a head of sunlit hair set in curlers or a lounging pair of legs.

Despite a tired notion of femininity, the technical beauty of these masterfully produced oil paintings combined with the artist’s sensitivity to design and light is undeniable. I am hopeful to see what is next for this painter when she credits her viewers with a little more substance and truly invites us to engage in a dialogue with her ideas. (Ryanne Baynham)

Through September 8 at Gallery KH, 311 W. Superior.

A small real estate brokerage in Wicker Park is an apropos venue for Rosemary Lee’s solo exhibition, “It happens that the stage sets break down.” The versatile office-as-gallery context thematically contributes to the installation of drawings and pliable sculptures, whether or not intentionally. The common element shared by “It happens that the stage sets break down” and Living Room Gallery? Ambiguity. Like the venue itself, Lee’s work combines to present the viewer with elements of a constructed space, albeit an indeterminate one.

In the four drawings from which the show’s name comes, dark geometric shapes allude to misshapen interiors, reduced to planar skeletons. Dark and light, horizontal and vertical combine to draft blueprints of vacant spaces, as silent as they are empty. The drawings’ material, Mylar, is fitting in its white opacity; it occupies what would be the interiors’ walls, adding murk to the already minimal.

Another of the show’s works, “Reconstruct,” more playfully addresses the theme of construction and confusion. A collection of gray, fabric bricks is strewn throughout one part of the gallery, some stacked, some fallen. The paradox of the bricks’ shape—connoting the solid—and the soft, stuffed fabric captures the uncertainty expressed in “It happens that the stage sets break down.” Ideas of stability are debated, but ultimately denied. Instead, the indeterminate spaces Lee constructs (or alludes to) exist somewhere between the fantastic and the familiar. (Justin Natale)

Through August 22 at Living Room Realty, 1530 W. Superior St.