RECOMMENDED

Among the twelve Chicago photographers practicing a variety of genres who Catherine Edelman has selected to showcase from her online gallery, Leasha Overturf and Philip Dembrinski take the honors for their inventive visual reflections on the disordered psyche. In her color self-portrait, “Conflict,” Overturf has placed a ripped magazine photo of a model’s broad toothy smile over her own lips to create a provocative play with her relaxed cheeks and shut eyes. In his bitterly poignant color scenario shot, “Keep it Coming Like a Miracle,” Dembrinski has his male subject lost in sweet dreams at a weathered picnic table on a patio littered with detritus in front of a ramshackle house. To their credit, Overturf’s and Dembrinski’s images fit their titles like a glove, showing that perceptive conceptual art can enrich the sparest of texts. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 4 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior

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Like so many Chinese who came to North America over the past hundred years, Andy Chan was born in the coastal city of Taishan. In 1955, his family moved to nearby  Hong Kong, where he attended university and studied traditional Chinese painting. But the tradition that he joined, the Lignan school, was perhaps the least  traditional of all, having begun in the early twentieth century as an attempt to modernize Chinese culture, following the lead of progressive artists in Japan. As Gao Qifeng (1889-1933) explained it: “I took up the study of Western art, paying particular attention to portrait painting, light and shade, perspective, etc. I then picked out the finest points of Western art and  applied them to my Chinese techniques that included masterful strokes of the pen, composition, inking, coloring, inspiring background, poetic romance, etc.” And that is  basically what Andy Chan, and thousands of other Lignan painters, have been doing ever since. The aristocratic Chinese sense of quiet, timeless majesty has been replaced by the dynamic hustle and bustle of the modern  world. Following the lead of his master, Chao Shao-an (1905–1998), Andy Chan has developed an especially explosive sense of form, and used it with great success to make a variety of large animals (especially tigers) come to life. This kind of work is mostly shown and sold in Taipei and Hong Kong, so this is a rare opportunity in Chicago to see the mastery of this contemporary pictorial style. (Chris Miller)

Through August 31 at Palette and Chisel, 1012 N. Dearborn.

A work by George Clinton

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It’s a corny name, and a goofy idea: to exhibit the art of pop-music stars who also like to paint. (Remember the infamous “Golden Throats” recordings of actors who also like to sing?) But actually, this show, tucked away behind a video-production studio in Berwyn, is pretty darn good, thanks, especially, to two remarkable characters: George Clinton (Mr. Funkadelic) and Mark Mothersbaugh, member of Devo and composer of various film scores. They both have a good sense of fun, and they’re used to entertaining people. As Clinton, a former hairdresser, recently told Spin magazine, “Painting is kind of like cutting hair. You just cut shit out until you have something.” It always seems to be party time in Clinton’s head, and his figures are loose, colorful and blurry. Mothersbaugh, however, is a bit more obsessive about his work. A former art student, he sketches a dozen or so cartoonish postcards every day, and then puts some of them through a computer to enlarge, modify and publish them. He’s so nearsighted that he’s legally blind without glasses, so his sense of space is a bit claustrophobic. But it works for him. Unfortunately, not every pop performer can successfully carry a distinctive voice over into lines and colors. Sarah McLachlan is a bit disappointing. But this exhibit also features some local artists, like Nicholas P. Decker, whose drawings on compact discs are also entertaining, even if he isn’t in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (Chris Miller)

Through September 5 at 12th Street Gallery, 7023 Roosevelt Road, Berwyn

RECOMMENDED

For Zarina Bhimji, 46-year-old photo and video artist, stories can be told without characters or conversations. In her 2002 film, “Out of Blue,” showing in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, Bhimji allows her viewers to explore candid shots of Uganda’s domestic and civic landscape through a pastiche of desolate scenes over subtle background noise. Bhimji, a 2007 Turner Prize nominee, has received critical praise for this video work, which was commissioned for Documenta 11.

The tone is set during the video’s second minute when a beautiful Ugandan field ignites in flames. The scene then shifts to a village that represents the aftermath of General Idi Amin’s rule, who killed or expelled hundreds of thousands of Ugandans, in 1972. The next twenty-one minutes are spent viewing interior and exterior scenes of the village. Each scene averages approximately a minute, in which Bhimji allows viewers to interact and experience the surroundings. Subtle details are called to attention: a desolate village, the wind, distant vocals and tribal music.

Most scenes are set at either dawn or dusk, producing a moody tone. Bhimji uses architecture, light and color as abstract characters in response to her own childhood recollections during Amin’s dictatorial rule. Bhimji’s piece records a statement of contemporary grief, sorrow and hope as expressed through concrete visual evidence of Uganda. (Shiloh Aderhold)

Through January 3 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

The Internet is probably the last (relatively) unexplored frontier left in our vastly over-plundered world, so it probably doesn’t hurt to search for God there too while we’re at it. Jason Ferguson has done precisely that with “Google Searching for God,” a solo exhibition that’s not really about the Internet—or God either, for that matter. Ferguson is interested in the epistemological limitations of the search itself, and has often used scientific approaches and techniques to conceptually dissect our desire to know the unknowable. In the past, he’s performed an autopsy on a La-Z-Boy recliner for the International Museum of Surgical Science, taken geological core samples of a historically noteworthy building and photographed the entire surface of a common household lamp in eighth-inch cross-sections, destroying the physical object in the process.

Ferguson’s particular brand of neo-conceptual absurdism is compelling in part because the objects resulting from his investigations are often highly sculptural in nature, and strangely beautiful to boot. Take the creamy white stream of text rolled out across the simple wood table at the center of Ferguson’s current exhibition. Read the rest of this entry »

Thursday night, August 20, three artists and one online-gallery curator, all of whom have found success in the world of art, will share their thoughts in a panel discussion moderated by Lynn Basa, Chicago artist and author of “The Artist’s Guide to Public Art: How to Find and Win Commissions.” Online-gallery curator Nikko Moy and artists Chad Kouri, of The Post Family, and Lee Tracy will discuss the importance of “bricks and mortars galleries” in addition to the use of the Internet for artists to showcase their work. The idea came to Basa around March. Her gallery had just closed and she was talking to Tracy who was “so enthusiastic and inspiring.” From there, she connected with Kouri and then Moy, who she already knew from searching for places to sell her work. “One thing led to another and before we knew it, we had a panel,” she says. “I’m motivated to dispel the myth of the starving artist,” Basa says. “They can make a living doing what they love. There’s a ton of money out there.” The discussion is at 6pm at the Chicago Cultural Center.

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Having cut her photographic eye with incisive scenario shots of people recreating their most desperate, embarrassing and traumatic moments—some of which are on display here—Jill Frank has turned to capturing groups of young people enacting symbolic tableaux on the streets and in the parks. The results are radically funky, as in “For Ye Shall Be as an Oak,” where we see three husky college dudes raising a fourth on their shoulders as their arms jut out in an attempt to simulate the mighty tree. Since Frank snapped them in color bathed in luminous lamp light on a concrete path in the dead of a winter night after a fresh snowfall, we can only speculate about what they might have ingested at the time. Having explored life’s agonies in painful detail, Frank is obviously in the mood for its playful ecstasies. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 30 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

RECOMMENDED

A devotee of road trips through the hinterlands, Michael Wayne shoots digital photos of the landscape—earth, trees and sky—as he speeds along; applies beeswax and acrylic varnishes to his straight prints with the aid of his collaborator Marco Logsdon; and produces an effect that freezes his subjects in dense entangled forms drenched in seductive colors that bleed into one another. Although he claims that he is documenting “passing,” Wayne has, instead, transmuted motion into integral and lively compositions with an impressionist surface that concentrates our gaze. It is the materials that Wayne has applied that do the trick by removing the sense of indefinition and forward thrust from his images while leaving a vibrant yet static blur. Wayne’s small cyano-toned set of five studies of strands of ink-blue trees takes us away from nature and delivers us to a distinctive, compelling and decidedly aesthetic sensibility—almost art for art’s sake. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 5 at Logsdon 1909, 1909 S. Halsted

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There’s a name for what’s happening when someone sees the Virgin Mary in a steamy window or Jesus in a pool of pancake syrup. It’s pareidolia, the psychological tendency we have to perceive otherwise meaningless visual or auditory phenomena as significant, like seeing a face in a rock and pictures in clouds, or hearing secret messages in a recording played backwards. While for many a coffee stain or a paint dribble is just that, for Vesna Jovonovic these kinds of random splotches trigger images of surgical instruments and internal organs, which are brought fully into being through the artist’s series of “ink spill” drawings. Each begins as a splash of ink or paint and ends as an elaborately rendered, surrealist twist on medical illustration where the interplay of chance and intent determines the final outcome.

The Museum of Surgical Science has done an especially nice job of contextualizing Jovonovic’s artwork, placing it as they have across from an exhibition highlighting new advances in medical illustration by students at UIC’s Biomedical Visualization Program (both shows are part of the Museum’s ongoing “Anatomy in the Gallery” series).  Read the rest of this entry »

“Can nature and technology co-exist?” asked Robert Wayner in his staccato-speak. “It’s critical that we continue to explore how wild nature and technology can exist together.” With this as his magnetic north, the geologist turned musician, turned painter and sculptor, now gallery owner, has pinned his hopes on his Black Walnut Gallery where he showcases Chicago artists and his own wood sculptures. Relocated from Wicker Park to the West Loop-Fulton Market area, Wayner’s current offering is a group show titled “Closure.”

Growing up in Southern Illinois farm country in a Mennonite household, Wayner’s imagination drew him to woodworking, which “filled me with amazement,” he recalls. “The Mennonites have been in the forefront of the green movement for a while,” Wayner shares, “as well as being big in third-world relief and agrarian stewardship.” Although he admits, “I don’t think that brought me to where I’m at,” those early groundings are reflected in the flow of the two-story gallery, with its domestic, natural feel and its bundled fasces hanging by twine at points in the long throw of the place. Earlier this year Wayner presented a group show of Mennonite artists. Read the rest of this entry »