RECOMMENDED

There’s nothing wrong with landscapes—how they stretch out like a recumbent body, waiting to be touched. Or how they invite viewers to wander through hills and enjoy the colors of a bright sunny day. Scott Addis loves the darkness at day’s end, and his paintings force introspection and quiet meditation on mortality, like those late-nineteenth-century romantics Albert Ryder and Ralph Blakelock. A dark, large barn looming as evening falls—what could be more evocative? Addis, who grew up in a small Pennsylvania town, has got the image-connected-to-feelings of a great painter—but what he doesn’t yet have is the control, the mastery of drawing and tone to make his visions feel endlessly, mysteriously compelling on closer inspection. If he continues to look at George Inness, however, eventually he will get there. Addis credits this Cincinnati fellow, Greg Storer, as his composition teacher, and that site has links to many other excellent Midwestern landscape painters. (Chris Miller)

Through December 1 at Gallery KH, 311 W. Superior.

By Jason Foumberg

On my daily walk I’ve noticed at least three varieties of kale growing in the city’s traffic islands and sidewalk planters, including the crinkle-textured dinosaur kale, which I know to be tasty when sautéed with lemon juice or cooked in an Italian soup. Chicago’s Department of Transportation tends these medians and planters, rotating the shrubs seasonally to upkeep our “city in a garden” motto. Kale can heartily withstand the colder climate, and so it is used decoratively this late autumn. I may have thought little more about the urban kale except I recently read Barbara Demick’s story in the November 2 issue of the New Yorker about a North Korean woman who survived the famine there in the early 1990s by foraging for weeds in her city’s streets and alleys. Communist leader Kim Jong-il could no longer distribute food to his citizens, so many had to get creative with their meals, such as Mrs. Song, who ate barely edible grass and dandelions every day. Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Doran

The West Town gallery Roots & Culture has shown a wide variety of work over the last three years, but, as with most good independent spaces, there’s a house style. It is a recognizable look, the folksy RISD-style psychedelic expressionism promulgated in the wider culture by macramé owls with twig antlers and Day-Glo silk-screen posters with misspelled words arranged on mountains made of diamond shapes. As we reach the turn of the next decade, this faux-primitive handmade aesthetic has, on the one hand, consolidated into a formal surface of ready signifiers that can be freely manipulated like beats and samples and, on the other, deepened into a legitimate if intuitive conceptual approach.

This former aesthetic hedonism teeters on the boundary of self-awareness and pure shamanic design in the works of Rob Doran, now on display. Hot colors in gradient discs sit amidst thick and muddy zigzag brushstrokes. There are, in fact, twigs, mountains, diamond shapes and misspelled words, both handwritten and printed, not to mention dirty white backgrounds and handmade frames. The moment of self-awareness for me comes with a small outsider-esque sculpture sitting on a found plank, in which a braided white snake peers up at the viewer through a miniature wild-haired African mask, flouting the last forty-odd years of scathing critique directed at Picasso-style colonial appropriation. If we are in a truly post-colonial (if not post-racial) universe, then these pieces deliver evocative atavism with breezy aplomb. If we are not, then there’s more of a kick here, though it might be directed at Doran rather than (or as well as) from him. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

It’s hard to forget the first math textbook that contained the answers to homework problems in the back. The idea—that the answer isn’t nearly so important as the process of achieving it—was novel.

Deborah Adams Doering’s installation, “Grand Rapids Redux,” is such an exercise in working backwards. While the answer is provided as her temporary, riverside earthwork created in September and October of this year for Grand Rapids, Michigan’s ArtPrize competition, the current installation at Finestra Art Space shows the algebra behind the solution. Photographs, human-scale stencils, cans of eco-friendly paints and media clips combine to document the making of Doering’s “Code for the Grand River, Grand Rapids_09.”

While any presentation of a foregone ephemeral artwork could be argued as working in reverse, the content of both “Code” and its posthumous documentation supports this reading. From examining binary code of the present, technological age in terms of a circular form in motion (a rotating circle appearing as a “0” at times and a “1” at others), Doering goes on to develop a series of nine circularly derived symbolic codes that express the motion of Grand River. Recalling hieroglyphically inspired abstraction, “Code for the Grand River, Grand Rapids_09” juxtaposes the digital age with the natural world in an environment of human interaction. This integration of art, nature and technology is seen in the work’s title, akin to a digital file with an underscore-and-date suffix.

If the present—an age underpinned by binary code—is the provided answer of an unknown math problem, Doering’s installation shows one means of arriving at that solution: hindsight as insight. (Justin Natale)

Through November 27 at Finestra Art Space, The Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave.

RECOMMENDED

Assuming it’s possible to distinguish an artist from a layperson based on abstract theoretical concerns alone: what cachet does an artist carry to distinguish them as such? An unaffected and unremitting tendency to indulge in one’s personal fancy—fantasy—must be it. In concert, Canadian-born, now Paris-based artist Scott Treleaven’s body of work traffics in strains of the fantastic wed inseparably to the individual. His earliest collages appealed to the steamiest type of fantasy, offering candid shots of young punk-rock boys, as if Penelope Spheeris’ seminal documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) were set into homoerotic overdrive. Instead of watching a shirtless Darby Crash recounting his personal philosophies—or lack thereof—we see Treleaven seeing this scene, with the same somewhat-iconic figures played by a cast of anonymous young men.

His latest body of work, on display in his third solo show with trans-local dealer Kavi Gupta, indulges in less-sultry, but perhaps more imaginative fantasies, trading the punk rockers for romantically elaborated visions of Paris and worlds beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Lloyd Wright, Darwin D. Martin House, “Tree of Life” Window, 1904

RECOMMENDED

It has been over thirty years since the Art Institute devoted a full exhibition to the Arts and Crafts movement, a short-lived but crucial development of Modernism, with resounding echoes in the legacy of twentieth-century Chicago art, architecture and craft. “Apostles of Beauty: Arts and Crafts from Britain to Chicago” showcases English and American treasures from local collections, recalling the movement’s emphasis on sincerity, faithfulness and pleasure. The culmination of the Arts and Crafts movement in America is seen in objects from the Prairie school, a uniquely Midwestern style, which is the main focus of the exhibition.

The exhibition comprises five rooms that explore different aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement, from the exploration of nature as a motif to religion and medievalism in design, with exemplars in the work of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, Charles Robert Ashbee, and William Morris. As the journey progresses, one is introduced to additional ideals in the maturation of the movement such as japonisme, the onslaught of photography, Native American themes and burgeoning technological developments.

Hermann Muthesius, an early proponent of the movement, stated that as the values of the movement disappeared, “out of the ashes rose the phoenix of modern art.” Although it was often a domestically bound art form, the exhibition details how Arts and Crafts took the first strides toward full-blown Modernism, acting as an integral comprehensive overview of many of the principles that can be seen a few steps away in the Modern Wing. (Shiloh Aderhold)

Through January 31, 2010 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.

RECOMMENDED

Sensing that South Korea’s hyper-technological urban society concealed a void beneath the glitter and glitz, Gapchul Lee left the cities to venture into the mountainous countryside to regain contact with a more basic nature and with the peasants who still remain embedded in it. Armed with his camera and shooting in black-and-white, Lee had no preconceived romantic vision in mind that would filter his encounter; his images eschew formal composition in favor of the ragged geometries of life, although they always betray an undercurrent of elegance that makes their vitality body forth all the more. As Lee explored more deeply, he was drawn to the rural Buddhist monks and their varied attitudes, sometimes solitary and meditative and sometimes boisterous. Lee’s sensibility, which reflects that of his subjects, is best expressed in an image of a simple table set with chopsticks and spoons that converge on the center, each one from its particular angle, forming a pattern that is never resolved because each of its elements retains a stubborn individuality. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 5 at Andrew Bae Gallery, 300 W. Superior

Marina Kovalevskaya

RECOMMENDED

The wonderful thing about this exhibition is the variety of genres that each of these middle-aged women have entered throughout the decades of their lives as artists—a luxury available only in art careers that never felt the financial pressure to stick to a successful format. And there’s also that wonderful difference between artists trained in St. Petersburg, Russia and Ann Arbor, Michigan. Like the ancient Romans, twentieth-century Soviet sculpture was mostly about depicting strength and importance in portraits of old men, and Kovalevskaya has mastered this demanding art. Soviet sculpture also followed the cool, simple classicism exemplified by Maillol, and she is good doing that in clay and stone, as well as practicing a looser, colorful, geometric kind of folk ceramic art. Brody’s American training focused on a more personal, self-expressive style, with dreamlike silk-screens and abstractions from the seventies leading up to figurative sculpture reliefs and her current photographic documentation of a quiet, meditative life overlooking the changing moods of Lake Michigan. Here are two Chicago women with two very different lives, but both with a sense of beauty that is not specific to any time or place. (Chris Miller)

Through November 18 at Palette and Chisel, 1012 N. Dearborn.

Jon Lowenstein

RECOMMENDED

If carnage and its impact is your eye candy, you will not do better than spending an hour with Jon Lowenstein’s color and Carlos Javier Ortiz’s black-and-white photos of victims of gun violence and their mourners, shot mainly on the mean streets of Guatemala City, where 6,292 people were murdered in the past year in an unrestrained wave of slaughter. There is blood, grief and corpses wherever you look; both photographers are unsparing in their in-your-face attempts to depict brutality unvarnished by glorification and romance. Lowenstein and Ortiz eschew any hint of formal composition, capturing their subjects with seeming unstudied immediacy and making us feel as though we were sauntering down the street and suddenly came upon a dead body or a person contorted in anguish. For the ordinary viewer who is repelled by such scenes, this show is a heavy punch in the visual gut that provides an essential reality check. If we need a further reminder, Ortiz serves up a few takes from Chicago that bring the message home. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 15 at the Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Ave.

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