Bu Hua, "Savage Grow," 2008

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Video programs provide curators with an economical means of packing a lot of content into a relatively small amount of gallery real estate. For audiences, however, the task of watching what may well add up to several continuous hours of video without the ability to pause, rewind or skip can be daunting. Inevitably (or more precisely sometime around the second hour) individual works begin to bleed into one another, and thus any lengthy video program’s success must be judged on the program’s overall thematic flow as well as the strength of each work individually. Luckily, those who take the time to sit through the three-hour endurance test that is “Shanghype!” are apt to feel enriched by the experience rather than drained. Read the rest of this entry »

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In an age when an individual can become anyone from anywhere, it comes as no surprise that artist Barbara Wakefield uses alter ego Ann Guiford to execute her mixed-media projects. Developed in the winter of 2009, Wakefield uses Ann Guiford to create objects and installations via an online dialogue with her Twitter and Facebook audiences. For her latest project, “Ann Guiford: Handkerchief Series,” Wakefield collected personal hankies from friends and family and embroidered each with a visual image of Guiford’s reaction to stories shared by her audience. A familiar icon emerges—the penis. “Ann Guiford Hankie #1” is stitched on a pristine white cloth and shows a curved, erect penis. This easily contrasts with “Ann Guiford Hankie #2” and “Ann Guiford Hankie #3,” hung side by side, on orange-dyed cloth with jumbled, seemingly flaccid representations. The embroidery is less defined than in #1, with the images appearing more similar to abstract constellations or connect-the-dot drawings than phalluses. Perhaps Wakefield is suggesting a peaked curiosity or excitement in the former compared to boredom and monotony in the latter. Although only three hankies are on display, the small exhibit elicits inquisitiveness about the fantastical stories originally provided to Wakefield. Regardless of size, the project is sassy, making the audience just as interested in “Guiford’s” visual stories as Wakefield is in those derived through her online interactions. (Britt Julious)

Through October 30 at Dubhe Carreno Gallery, 118 N. Peoria

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Entering a Francis Chapin exhibition is like walking into a cocktail party where the guests are loud, chatty, well-dressed and just a little tipsy. If the location were New York, the woozy chatter would be about the latest shrink, but since this is Chicago, it’s about boats or vacation homes in Saugatuck. So there’s lot of energy and excitement about the world—even if the painting depicts the hulk of a derelict warehouse looming against the ‘L’ tracks. Chapin (1899-1965) was a small-town Ohio boy who liked modern urban life and, centering that life at the corner of Michigan and Adams, he had a twenty-year career teaching lithography at the Art Institute, while making quick, expressive oil and watercolor paintings of the busy world around him that included Chicago and the various artist colonies where he taught over the summer. Making more of them than he could sell, a few dozen were boxed up with the estate, and only now are making their first public appearance. It’s an assortment that spans four decades of the painter’s life, from the lonely figures of the 1920s and thirties to postcard views of Chicago landmarks in the fifties. In between are some excited, very colorful moments of the lively twentieth-century Chicago—especially around trains, switch yards and bridges. Chapin loved trains with the big-eyed wonder of a boy. (Chris Miller)

Through October 31 at Richard Norton Gallery, 222 Merchandise Mart

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Proving, if that needs to be done after scores of examples, that Chinese photography is today’s avant-garde, performance artist Liu Bolin has himself painted, places himself in cityscapes where he nearly “disappears,” and then has an assistant shoot him in color, faded into the environment. Bolin’s ghostly presence haunts the drainage pipes, propaganda posters, stockade fences, public buildings, and construction sites with which he chooses to fuse, always standing stoically expressionless to drive home a reminder that the individual is still standing despite the overwhelming onslaught of (post)modern life. Nowhere does Bolin achieve his concept more perfectly than in his “Provisional Wall,” where his spectral figure ethereally fills a narrow opening in a stockade fence that is foregrounded by unkempt vegetation and bald dirt patches; above and behind the fence, modern towers rise, bathed in a haze, as though they belonged to a fantasy city that denies the disordered reality that artifice will never tame, and the flesh-and-blood human being who has not yet been effaced. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

Richard Katz

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Having had a falling out with the board of the Chicago Photography Center, which he founded, photography teacher and community activist Richard Stromberg inaugurates his new space and community endeavor with a show bringing together eight of his present and former students from the Center and the defunct Jane Addams Center, where he practiced and honed his brand of cooperative learning as the basis for individual growth for thirty-three years. Among the veterans, Rick Katz stands out for his brilliant color abstractions of details of the Antelope Canyon outside Page, Arizona on the Navajo reservation. Balancing light and composition with exquisite power, Katz penetrates into the canyon’s recesses, capturing streaks and pools of light that pour through openings in the ceiling and manifest as displays of fiery reds, yellows and whites that illuminate the richly textured red-brown walls and floors. Katz’s masterwork is “High Noon” in which the multihued light streaming through a passageway takes the shape of a blazing lantern defined by encircling walls, their grooves and ridges swirling in place. In Katz’s aesthetic, wild excitement is disciplined by complex form, precipitating the most intense beauty. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at 4001 N. Ravenswood