Helen Maurene Cooper, in the exhibition Faking It?

As digital cameras and their cell-phone-affixed counterparts continue to grow in ubiquity and facility, and as more and more people use these devices to transmit daily personal updates, in the form of pictures of themselves and their activities to personal Web-based facades like Flickr and Facebook, a new technologically informed obsession with personhood—either one’s own or someone else’s—dubbed “egocasting” by cultural critic Christine Rosen, has taken hold in our culture. It resonates particularly well with the young, overly self-aware members of society. An apt art theorist should remain attentive for signs of this new phenomena reemerging in the work of young contemporary artists; the lay art theorist may claim that portraiture is, by now, a pervasive and eternal tendency.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere, Bridgeport’s hip and somewhat secluded multi-purpose alt-space, recently hosted nine artists in an exclusively portrait-based exhibition titled “Transplant Reflect.” The work is unusually divided between two different approaches: technically refined photography and Pop-surrealist street art. Anna Shteynshleyger updates Man Ray’s photograms using the camera-less photographic process to capture images of individual hairstyles, suggesting that an entire personality may be reduced to the shape of a haircut.  At a moment when self-design has become the norm and conformity is unequivocally shunned, we are perhaps nothing more than our outward appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Protest

RECOMMENDED

For an artist whose name roughly translates from the German as “the color of the heavens,” there isn’t much color in John Himmelfarb’s exhibition at Finestra Art Space. Himmelfarb’s mostly black-and-white drawings are primarily about texture, both of the textual and implied variety. The major work in the show is a large ink drawing on paper titled “Protest.” The work is comprised of vertical rows of darkly inked quasi-symbolic, pictographic marks. The gestures in Himmelfarb’s “writing without words” are a series of improvised calligraphic strokes that never rise to the level of legibility. Instead, half-formed images appear and disappear as one reads up and down the row. Other smaller works on paper accompany the much larger “Protest.” In the etchings “Plot Outline” and “Night Life,” layers of delicate lines lay in piles contained within sectioned grids. Each square of the grid is darkened by an accumulation of meandering lines. Taken together they resemble dimly lit waves or folds of fabric. The imagery in the works hearkens back to the beginnings of modernism and its embrace of “primitive” symbol systems. As well-crafted and thought-out as these works are, they would be better served if Himmelfarb’s historical influences were mitigated by some contemporary element. There simply isn’t much necessity nowadays for an illegible protest, especially one so informed by the past. (Dan Gunn)

Through September 30 at Finestra Art Space, 410 S. Michigan, suite 516

RECOMMENDED

West Loop newcomer Spoke Gallery will be attempting to raise some money on September 11 by auctioning off works in a show of piñatas curated by local sculptors Matthew Dupont and Dayton Castleman. The exhibit is entitled “Objet Petit A,” a term coined by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, that refers to an object of desire that the possessor wants to destroy in the quest to attain some ineffable inner quality; in my imagination, this sentiment is also evocative of galleries too in love with their integrity to trouble themselves with financial solvency, a trap Spoke is wisely seeking to avoid. Every auction winner on Friday will face the dilemma of having her cake versus eating it—either smashing her piñata, or leaving it and its inner mystery frustratingly intact.  Items up for bid include a giant nose courtesy of Ben Fain, an origami-esque creation by Harriet Salmon, a chainsaw by Michael James McKean, or an orb from Tomas Moreno that sports a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Proceeds from the auction go to benefit the gallery, as well as Chicago Rarities Orchard Project, “an organization founded to establish community rare-fruit orchards in Chicago.” (Bert Stabler)

September 11, 6-10pm, at Spoke Gallery, 119 N. Peoria, #3D

RECOMMENDED

“Cabrini Green is beautiful,” the man in the film proudly declares, standing in front of a chain-link fence and graffiti-covered wall. And to him and many of the former Cabrini tenants, this seemingly contradictory statement is true. Michele Stutts captures their testimonials in a forty-five minute documentary. Juxtaposed against ten mixed-media pieces, the result is more reactionary than activist. The show serves as a frank record of the tenants’ personal loss of home and identity after the ten-year-long Cabrini transformation project that has forced tenants to relocate in an effort to create a new, safer, mixed-income neighborhood. The emotionally charged interviews, presented in informal dialogues in the tenants’ former homes, are contrasted against the mixed-media pieces’ visual depictions of the demolition. The former presents individual perspectives, while the latter treats Cabrini as a whole. Individual identities are lost in the abstracted depictions of the familiar red brickwork layered with blueprints, coin rubbings, and shredded dollar bills, a commentary on the Chicago Housing Authority’s long, strained relationship with the Cabrini project. More conceptually complex are Stutts’ found-object pieces. The objects’ tactility is further enhanced by their deterioration—a frayed, dirty fabric piece is woven around a rusty rake top—and they appear as if they could be the surviving remnants from the demolition’s aftermath. The contrasting textures careful compositions import a reverence for the discarded objects—the same reverence Cabrini community holds for their former home, no matter how infamous. (Patrice Connelly)

Through September 25 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior, #204

RECOMMENDED

Owing to pure courageousness, or perhaps just personal inclination, Julia Hechtman has decided to try something rather monumental with means that are quite simple. Her first solo exhibition at Devening Projects centers on a group of eight fairly typical nature photographs presenting deciduous forest settings in various stages of seasonal development. Shot at oblique angles, each image lacks a horizon line, a key compositional element, which would normally serve to orient us, the viewers, within the space described; as such, we are provided with a space, albeit an indefinite one, ensuing a sense of dislocation as if to suddenly find ourselves waking, face up, in a field on a bright winter morning. We could be anywhere. We are certain we are somewhere, but where exactly remains unknown. This unconventional perspective, and a complete absence of foliage in some instances, cause Hechtman’s photos to seem a little eerie, but altogether understated while remaining clearly within the bounds of generic nature photography. Her attempt to capture the nondescript beauty of the everyday natural word is ultimately not an ironic parody, but remains altogether sincere. The monumentality of her task consists in her attempt at sincerity within a supposedly outmoded and exhausted approach. Though not entirely alone in this endeavor, Hechtman has a few close compatriots in the work of photographers John Opera and Melanie Schiff, not to mention the monumentally scaled canvases of painter Claire Sherman. It’s interesting to note: Sherman, Schiff and Hechtman each spent an extensive amount of time at Oxbow, the School of the Art Institute’s back-woodsy retreat on the other side of lake Michigan—undoubtedly time well spent. Hechtman’s photos reexamine the strength of artistic will; asking, can an individual rescue an entire genre from the deep torpor of cliché? (Nate Lee)

Through October 10 at Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll

Icarus’ Sister

RECOMMENDED

In a brilliant postmodern paean to classical modern painting, Crisanta de Guzman creates searing surrealistic color scenario photographs in the computer from her own shots and appropriated photographic images, and then hypes them up to produce seamless ultra-graphic brightly-colored simulations in the styles of the old masters set in contemporary times. Guzman’s photo-works are imbued with an impressive range of deep-cutting meanings; each of them evinces its concept stunningly, as in “Overhang,” in which we see, from behind, an unsuspecting girl walking down a sunny suburban street as a tornado of detritus, including an SUV, a house for sale, and bird-like and leaf-like shards (actually “folded fake million dollar bills”), descends on her, perhaps to sweep her up into it. With a nod to “The Wizard of Oz,” Guzman observes: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” The loss of innocence and its inevitability haunt Guzman, giving her still dramas poignancy, as in “Icarus’ Sister” where the subject kneels before a tattered dress with wings that is bedecked with orange and red feathers and is mounted on a headless dressmaker’s mannequin, as jumbo airliners soar effortlessly through the sky outside a window. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 10 at Woman Made Gallery, 685 N. Milwaukee Ave.

RECOMMENDED

An old-school modernist straight black-and-white photographic abstractionist, Ken Konchel shoots details of the most powerful architectural structures that he can find to create geometric force fields that assault the viewer’s eye. With a proclivity for massive concrete and steel forms that his framing places in juxtaposition, Konchel’s aesthetic combines the sense of imposing brute solidity with the subtlety of twists and turns, and intensifies the play through the varied visual relations among the components of the designs he intuits, producing an effect of elegant monumentalism that is reminiscent of Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Paul Strand. Konchel’s subjects are overmastering; we feel them confront us and sense that we can do nothing to alter them, as in “Into Joe”—his most abstract study—in which the black silhouetted masses dissolve into obdurate blocks. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 25 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

Barbara Crane’s photography is synonymous with Chicago. She’s been documenting the city’s cultural and civic life for so long that her insights have become ingrained into our own experience, as if to inhabit Chicago is to enter a Barbara Crane photograph. Skyscrapers brace each other in clusters; crowds entangle themselves at the crushing rush hour; couples pair up for thrill rides at the fair, and Barbara was there to catch a shot.

At 81 years old, and with over seventy-five solo exhibitions under her belt, Crane’s retrospective, opening this fall, solidifies and celebrates her commitment to a unique and singular vision. Over 300 pieces from sixty years of work will be exhibited, accompanied by a thick catalogue with slick reproductions. And she’s still working—her newest series picks up on her classic theme of the pedestrian experience, distilling it into a grid of leggy forms and elongated noontime shadows. Read the rest of this entry »