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The new novelty star on the photography scene is “Cooper: The Photographer Cat,” collared by his owners, filmmakers Michael and Deirdre Cross, with a micro digital camera programmed to snap a color shot every two minutes, wherever Cooper may roam around house and garden. This, of course, is not a cat’s eye view of the world—the camera doesn’t see what a cat does, what the camera captures is not necessarily what Cooper cares about or even notices, and the Crosses have so many images from which to choose that their selection of eighteen of them for this show has to reflect their own visual taste, which runs to striking views, enhanced by the blurs and streaks created by the animal’s movements, of brilliant abstractions of a nature that is dominating when seen from the ground—as when we are crawling in the grass. Of course, there is the odd domestic scene like an unflattering take on a pair of human legs. Cooper is the surrogate for the Crosses who did not want to or were not aware that they could go down on their all fours with cameras strapped around their necks and get the same results. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 11 at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon, (773)755-5100

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Jonas Wood’s painting style possesses such a frank matter-of-factness that an initial impression can be, like the work first seems, over-simple. Coupled with a subject matter that includes the juvenilia of sports trading cards, the trap becomes even more difficult to escape. But upon closer inspection, a terrific artistic calculation is uncovered that exposes the painter’s almost morbid fixation on his medium. It is as if the objects in the paintings have been turned into memorials for Wood’s artistic forbearers, Matisse and the early Cubists in particular. Read the rest of this entry »

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Be prepared for the shock of your political life when you glom on to the photos of the nine feisty conceptual and documentary Iranian shooters who are wilder and woollier than any but the Chinese could hope to be. Did you know that more sex-change operations are done in Iran each year than anywhere else but Thailand? Newsha Tavakolian shows us the life of “Maria,” once a male truck driver and now a beefy coffee-shop waitress. Are you looking for women in uniform? You will be blown away when you see the female cops in Tehran captured by Abbas Kowsare who are dressed in black chadours and point their assault rifles in your face. Is postmodern cultural criticism to your taste? Farhan Moshiri and Shirin Allabadi trump Ad Busters in their “Operation Supermarket” series, in which they let us feast our eyes on their “Hejab Barbie Wooo.” Not to mention Vahid Sharifian who gets away with kinky performance shots where he simulates bestiality, as when he mounts a lioness from behind in his birthday suit in “Queen of the Jungle (If I had a Gun).” And that is only the beginning. Whatever happens in Washington’s strategic confrontation with Tehran, the Iranians have already won the culture war. (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 22 at DePaul University Art Museum, 2320 N. Kenmore.

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Armed with paper-cutting knives, watercolor palettes and sticky pots of glue, the proper Victorian ladies who spent their leisure hours pasting cut-up family portraits into pointedly subjective new contexts were forces to be reckoned with. “Playing With Pictures” is a persuasively argued and richly engaging new exhibition that’s among the first to explore their activities in depth, showing how many of the era’s female aristocrats used photocollage not just as a creative outlet but as a canny form of autobiography that functioned as a tool for social advancement.

Many of the photocollages depict upper-class forms of recreation: fox hunts and garden parties, card games and chess matches played out in well-appointed drawing rooms. The background settings of these works were often drawn or painted by hand and populated with cutout photographs of friends and family, whose placement within the composition was always carefully considered. Read the rest of this entry »

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Not many traditional figure painters receive solo exhibitions in Chicago’s galleries, but the Danish master Niels Strobek (b. 1944) is getting one annually. Every autumn, a half-dozen or so new paintings are flown in from Copenhagen. This year’s crop of large figures, each fifty to sixty inches high, is a bit less edgy than last year’s, like the ominous “Bathsheba” that has been brought back for this show. But still, with their strong flat patterns and bold colors, you wouldn’t quite call them decorative. They demand too much attention, like wall-size versions of the bijin-ga Japanese prints of beautiful women. Strobek calls himself an abstract figure painter, and he does seem to have more in common with hard-edged Modernism than with either the Impressionists or the neo-academic ateliers—except that he can draw so well. Strobek likes to look at young women (actually, just one young woman, his current muse) and this year finds her in various colorful costumes as might be fitting for the low-born heroine of an opera. He also likes to look at the Danish countryside. His carefully studied, luminous landscapes are just as remarkable as his figures. What makes it all so compelling is that Strobek is obviously painting for himself rather than for a market. In the earlier decades of his career he liked his full-bodied, healthy young women to appear in all their natural glory. Now, as he enters his mid-sixties, he’d rather see them in costumed, domestic roles. I guess that’s maturity. (Chris Miller)

Through November 30 at Galleries Maurice Sternberg, 875 N. Michigan Ave, Suite 2520

The “meet-cute,” a cinema trope in which two characters meet in a romantic comedy, is similar to the serendipitous meeting that led artists Brenda Thomas and Karen Tichy to not only share studio space but also collaborate for their latest exhibit, “Diverging Mergers.” Thomas worked at The Container Store in visual merchandising and was in the process of searching for studio space in the Fine Arts Building. Tichy went to the same store as a customer looking for storage for her studio. The rest was fate. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Hocking, "Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21," 2008, archival digital print.

By Jason Foumberg

The CIA used art—yes, visual art!—as a strategy during the Cold War. Abstract Expressionism at first, then Rauschenberg and Johns, were exported to European venues in a power play of cultural might. What could be more impressive than those giant, domineering canvases oozing self-expression and painterly freedom? With the help of the CIA, Americans won prizes and audiences abroad, including the prestigious Biennale.

If cultural colonialism is what it takes to be heard the world over, then so be it. “Heartland,” an exhibition of contemporary Midwestern art, co-organized by Chicago’s Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, proves the method still viable in 2009. If the scene in Los Angeles can get a retrospective at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, in 2006, then the Dutch can surely claim the Midwest. “Heartland” opened overseas first, and is now on view here. It was an unexpected collaboration, but one that bore fruit. Midwestern art got to strut on the international stage and European artists, in turn, produced art inspired by the Midwestern spirit.

What, exactly, is the contemporary Midwestern aesthetic? Don’t say American Gothic. Don’t draw corn and cows. “Heartland” thankfully plows through these stereotypes. When the topics of farming (Marjetica Potrc) and cow hides (Carol Jackson) inevitably arise, though, the artists cleverly treat them as ready-built canvases upon which to elaborate sociological projects. Otherwise, the curators have taken great care to expand the definition of “the Midwest.” From Minneapolis to Detroit, down the Mississippi to New Orleans (a geography traced by the curators), and in locales rural and urban, the Midwest of today encapsulates America’s complexities: boom and bust, political profiteering and progress, community can-do-ism and unfettered violence, homestead pride and gang turf wars, urban decay and renewal. Maybe more than a little bit of that inventive pioneering spirit does survive. Read the rest of this entry »

It may seem like a small victory, but paper still exists. Yes, paper, that humble material. What we once claimed to drown in is now a collector’s item. For some, it’s like Tic Tacs, disposable and then who cares? But many do cherish and covet it. I’ve seen someone sniff paper and sing, “Ohh that smells like paper.” I’ve seen someone mourn a crinkle. I’ve seen strange rituals involving paper cuts (no, I jest). In spite of the digital and the recycling revolutions, paper survives. Better than that, paper, and the things placed atop it, are time capsules. If you enjoy libraries or archives you can appreciate that.

So, it’s no wonder that people hoard newspapers. Their hoarding keeps long-dead information in constant vigil. Jeremy Lundquist isn’t a hoarder but he has collected ephemeral papers, or ephemera, in order to propagate them, to let them live again and again. His output, fittingly, is on paper. Lundquist is a printmaker, itself a technology on the brink of extinction and with a thick history, from mass commercial applications to avant-garde experimentation. Artistically, Lundquist sits right between these two poles, culling material from pamphlets and signs and turning them into subtle etchings that kiss the paper they’re printed on. Read the rest of this entry »

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In college I saw Christian Marclay’s 1989 “Tape Fall,” a piece that features a ladder supporting a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which plays the sound of a waterfall while unspooling a ribbon of tape into a pile on the floor. Then in August 2008 at Vega Estates I saw David Moré’s “THIS MEANS SOMETHING! Close Encounters with Barbara Streisand,” a basement installation in which 8-track cassette tapes shuttled around pillars throughout the space, playing both Streisand and the soundtrack to “Close Encounters” on sixteen speakers, eight of which were adorned with that film’s iconic mashed-potato model of Devil’s Tower. The progression from Marclay to Moré gives me the feeling that the attempt to resolve cultural technology with technological culture is finally maturing into something lots of people can richly appreciate. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the dialogue of Francine Turk, the observer finds secret traces of the romantic tradition existing alongside modernity. “Body Language,” currently at Chicago Art Source, abounds with both wit and passion. “My works are emotional portraits. I don’t always draw from my own experiences,” the artist says. “My latest series of works are direct responses to a desire to draw a relationship between mark-making, the figure, and language.”

The exhibition is dominated by nudes, primarily mixed media on paper, and charcoal, which the artist has been using comfortably for some time. “I can get caught up in the process of making, and end up killing the thing. I am not great at expressing lots of self control when it comes to that; the more linear figure drawings in the show are harder for me in that sense,” she shares. Then there’s her subjective journey into things French. “My impulse to fly to Paris and rub the graves at Pere LaChaise Cemetery was one I cannot fully explain; it was a gut impulse that I followed through with.” Read the rest of this entry »