poster for Mandate

By Jason Foumberg

“Why do all the work?” asks Nadine Nakanishi of traditional printmaking techniques. The rhetorical question is often posed to her and Nick Butcher, who together run Sonnenzimmer, a silk-screening poster-design studio in Roscoe Village. A shopper at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco stopped at their booth to ask why he shouldn’t simply get posters made at Kinko’s where 11×17 full-color sheets are available for about one dollar each. The question doesn’t frustrate Nadine but emboldens her to promote print culture, and she’s clearly spent a lot of energy doing so. Nadine is thoughtful, articulate and passionate about the continuing need for local, hand-crafted prints—not fine-art prints but posters, announcements, catalogues, books, flyers—and Sonnenzimmer’s output is testament to this ethic.

Nadine and Nick started as painters and gravitated toward prints as they realized how a print could fulfill a need where a painting couldn’t. At first, they traded rent for poster designs. After mentoring with local print legend Jay Ryan, they founded Sonnenzimmer in 2006 as a fully functioning business enterprise. Their love for painting hasn’t died, though, as painting and drawing often makes its way into their printed compositions. Read the rest of this entry »

John Chiara

RECOMMENDED

This two-person show is a conceptually rather than aesthetically driven conversation between two Bay-area photographers who use experimental methods to capture uncanny landscapes. John Chiara’s epic, faded Cibachrome prints of ocean and suburbs are taken with immense homemade cameras, limiting his options for subjects to places he can drive or hold the camera, creating off-kilter, alienating compositions. His prints themselves, developed in similarly unorthodox homemade tubes, illuminate the materiality of the images with unpredictable, washed-out colors and the marks and smears left by uneven developing chemicals. Where Chiara’s photos are delicate and ephemeral, Sean McFarland’s are all cold-edged and sublime. His process involves piecing together digital images (some his, some found) to create images of lightning storms and aerial shots of various topographies, which he then re-shoots as black-and-white Polaroids to produce a consistent fictional documentary. It’s a smart pairing, intellectually, given the concern of both artists with the deconstruction and extension of the photographic medium, but McFarland’s photographs are trickier; his process isn’t obvious or even suggested by the final images, which look like straightforward snapshots, leading to the question: must we know how an image is constructed in order to best appreciate it? (Monica Westin)

Through November 29 at Swimming Pool Project Space, 2858 W. Montrose.

RECOMMENDED

If, as Aaron Siskind said, one of photography’s great services is to “redeem the ruins,” then there could be few greater challenges to fulfilling that purpose than imaging the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward in 2005. Jane Fulton Alt rose to the occasion and came back with color photographs that combine sensitivity to the tragedy and yet exude self-standing beauty through their elegant composition and clear muted colors. The impact is meditative; the viewer is drawn into a mood of vibrant sadness, as one might feel when listening to a stirring eulogy at a loved one’s funeral. Shooting scenes of depopulated destruction rather than showing us those whose lives had been shattered, Alt lets us inhabit the demolished cityscape without a sense of voyeurism. Among the stunning and piercing shots, the most telling shows a blasted tree festooned with shreds of clothing that eerily resolves into scarecrow-like figures bound together like Siamese twins. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 27 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

RECOMMENDED

The naked bathing woman, like the wine-and-bread still life, is one of those enduring standards of modern painting. Presumably it has been just a matter of multitasking necessity, as the artist likely consumes his subject after completing the painting. Naked bathers have shed their clothes in front of Picasso, Cezanne, Degas, Renoir and so many others. The bather got a major update in the sixties, in the hands of Tom Wesselmann, and now, as taken up by Carroll Dunham, the bather gets wet and nasty. Neither perverse not pornographic, Dunham presents the traditional bather subject as a straightforward, monumental picture of sex, undressed. Dunham’s bathing woman is not Venus, nor weepy muse, nor Nature personified; she is all tit and cunt, like an animal. The genitals are tightly cropped, depicted with energetic strokes in pencil, watercolor and oil pastel on small sheets of paper. These are sketches for large paintings, concurrently hanging at Gladstone Gallery in New York. Here, fifty or so drawings hang in clusters on the living-room and dining-room walls of artist Pamela Fraser’s home in Oak Park. It’s almost impossible to disconnect the setting from the subject; a single-family home on this broad, tree-lined residential street houses rough and ripe depictions of sexuality. To encounter each is an entirely intimate matter. (Jason Foumberg)

Through November 14 at He Said-She Said, 216 N. Harvey, Oak Park, by appointment.

Aron Gent

RECOMMENDED

Too old-school postmodern to be true, Aron Gent and Anthea Behm have troped Baz Luhrmann’s 2008 movie “Australia,” playing with it so hard that reference to their pretext is lost in the play of differences. Gent decided to take a time-lapse color photograph of the flick’s lovemaking scene between Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, who turn into faded-red, aqua and diaphanous white silky swirls and streaks that retain just enough definition to make the paramours resemble ethereal angels. Another kind of high irony is effected and affected by Behm whose video challenges us to listen to and stare at her sitting before a microphone with a cup of water, from which she chugs when she gets dry throat as she drones on describing each scene of Luhrmann’s three-hour romance in the dullest reportorial style; Behm is clear in conversation that she does not expect anyone to hang in for the long haul through her hell of boredom. If for nothing else, we can appreciate Behm’s revival of the endurance test—she went through the exercise non-stop without a text. For Gent, “Australia” disappears into phantasmagoria and, for Behm, into deadening torpor and finally utter banal nonsense that is impossible to follow. Jacques Derrida’s dictum was to exhaust the text to impertinence. No one does that better than Gent and Behm. (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 15 at Concertina Gallery, 2351 N. Milwaukee.

Siamak Filizadeh

RECOMMENDED

What would a young, urban, sensitive artist feel about growing up in Iran? Yes, he or she would HATE the repression, hypocrisy and, worst of all, banality, of a cleric-run state in the modern world. And so one enters this exhibition confronted by the monumental image of a crumbling statue of some self-righteous Imam being fellatioed by a hot, pink babe. The current regime is not going to last very long—there’s too much pressure from an outside world that offers young people more appealing alternatives. But what, other than anger, contempt, despair and disgust can these young artists offer? Where is a vision for a new Persian man or woman in a new Persian world? The only positive qualities found here are vigor and humor—especially in the cartoonish painting of Siamak Filizadeh and the brightly painted, poignant caricature sculptures by Bita Fayyazi. It’s notable that both them are still living in Tehran. Unfortunately, the most enjoyable part of this exhibition is the Persian classical music being played within one of the video installations. For whatever reason, young, educated Iranians seem more connected to their great tradition in music instead of the visual arts. Although, we should keep in mind that these thirty-six artists are just the ones chosen by the Chelsea Art Museum in New York. (Chris Miller)

Through November 22 at the DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore Ave. A review focused on this exhibition’s photographers ran in the October 15 issue.