Rodney Graham, "The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th, 1962," 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

By Jason Foumberg

The artist is standing contrapposto in silk pajamas. He carefully pours yellow house paint from a kitchen bowl onto a sloped canvas propped on a chair in his living room. It is an experiment in gravity and inertia, and the unprimed canvas grips the drips, soon to be congealed as a picture. The artist is at ease. He smokes barefoot atop the day’s newspaper, spread about the parquet floor to catch paint splatters. Time seems to have stopped here, or else slowed to the speed of honey.

There’s something comforting about this image, as photographed by Rodney Graham. It shows the artist’s work as a leisure activity, serene and safe and tidy, but also distant from the world, and private. Is this how art gets made? The scene nods to the American Modernist painter Morris Louis and his followers, and many paintings on view in galleries and museums were birthed in similarly calm settings, but Graham’s photograph, “The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th, 1962,” from 2007, is a fiction, more a record of a mood than an actual event.

The art studio is the image-maker’s terrain, but not all artists use a studio. As a piece of real estate, its existence is intricately tied to exhibition spaces, or the white-cube style. The twentieth-century saw artists expand their practices outdoors, into the streets and the deserts, taking on the roles of writer, curator and critic, organizing collectives and engaging publics. Artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Francis Alÿs embody this post-studio practice, and their work is the subject of large contemporary museum exhibitions and doctoral theses. So why is Studio Chicago, a multi-venue, year-long series of events and exhibitions, looking back to a time before post-studio, when artists worked alone in their quiet cubbyholes? Why is Rodney Graham mining the suburban esthetic? The answer is that artist studios continue to exist, and that “post-studio” is not a pure designation. Orozco does in fact return to the studio to make paintings. Christo and Jeanne-Claude do sell drawings of their public interventions. Studio and post-studio co-exist. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Minneapolis artist Scott Stulen’s paintings and installations rely on the juxtaposition of form, technique and material to elucidate and focus tensions between individual experience and the shared memory of a certain not-so-distant era awash in cultural detritus. In “It’s very beautiful and very cold,” the show’s largest and most accomplished painting, Ferris Bueller’s buddy Cameron’s Highland Park house is blockily portrayed amidst sinuous foliage more loosely rendered. The mirage-like effect gives the artist a sense of personal ownership for the scene experienced outside the VCR—the fictive scene becomes a tangible experience, perhaps even piggybacked with Cameron’s abandonment issues resolved in the crackling of glass and the destruction of Daddy’s Ferrari.

Most successfully, the sculpture “Tree” seems to be built solely on the contrasts of a confused childhood holiday. A long pole has been stuck into the disembodied pillar of a lost pier, with a sad silvery Christmas tree branch attached to the pole like the limp tail of a coonskin cap and holding a single blue bulb ornament. The piece is awash with contrast and conflicted emotion. Winter and summer lose themselves in themselves. Sledding and opening presents is conflated with cannonballs into the lake and fishing with Pop. The mixed-up emotions result in an overall sense of melancholy, the sense that time misremembered is time lost, the past is just that, the door shut to confusing sensations like fireworks at Halloween. (Erik Wennermark)

Through January 2, 2010, at Ebersmoore gallery, 213 N. Morgan, 3C.

RECOMMENDED

Chronicling her relationships with her severe-looking mother and her daughter, from pregnancy through the latter’s infancy and early childhood, Sarah Faust presents a psychodrama in clear yet muted color photographs that are dominated by the matriarch. There is not a crack of happiness in the succession of frames, not even when Faust puts herself in the picture, holding her child as mother checks out a cupboard. Faust crystallizes her feelings in a remarkable study of her mother—shot in profile—seated in a room, wearing a flowing dark dress and staring fixedly and sternly at a white curtain behind which Faust’s daughter stands with head bowed, ghostlike. Mother’s gaze is set above the little girl, indifferent to her presence. An abstract painting hangs on a wall in the background, and Faust has arranged her shot so that a blood-red serpentine line in the painting seems to be spewing from mother’s lips. There is a dimly lit knife on top of a dresser if viewers need any help to interpret. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 20, 2010, at Anne Loucks Gallery, 1046 W. Fulton Market

RECOMMENDED

Devening Projects + Editions hosts another group of A-list superstars and other impressive talent, this time taking aim at that hallowed cornerstone of the American straight-and-narrow: the family. Functioning as an enforcer of social order and stability, family life is a primary target for those seeking to challenge or upset this order, a position the artists in this show adopt unanimously.

With a penchant for mayhem and destruction endemic to any healthy 11-year-old boy, and the creative license of a distinguished mid-to-late career artist, the 70-year old Swiss artist Roman Signer presents a collection of twenty-five short films that elaborate wildly on the term “wreckage” in its most literal sense. It is entertaining to watch Signer find imaginative new uses for small-explosives, bottle rockets and a host of miniature flying contraptions. The greater implications of Signer’s actions are not always readily available. Instead, it’s his sheer inventiveness, applied with equal virtuosity to both situation and materials, which deserves our attention and praise. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Through fifteen color photographic portraits, John Cotter achieves his two aims of showing that being HIV positive does not necessarily lead to panic or despair, but can also provoke affirmation of the days left to live; and of calling attention to the truth that HIV is still around, working its stealthy way and wreaking its havoc. Cotter gets close up and shows us men who have faced the music and have come out of their rude awakening seemingly stronger and more reflective than they were before the bad news hit. Confidence and sometimes exuberant smiles are rife, and the subjects’ statements in the wall texts sound a common theme that knowing that one has a terminal illness can engender a sense of proportion and a change of values. The model father, Jay, who sits next to his son, Daniel, beams broadly, as Daniel smiles wisely, lovingly and supportively. Jay reports that “Daniel knows how to lift me up with a hug or a kiss.” Do not expect irony, victimology, or pity here; Cotter is after inspiration. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 13, 2010, at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted

“On Sundrun” is a multi-pronged, inter-trans-disciplinary multimedia installation at Gallery 400. Masterminded by British-born, Chicago-based artist Mathew Paul Jinks, it brings strangely wrought clothing, a capella feature-length documentary and sculpture together as installation to unpack ideas that orbit a dense tangle of post-colonial theoretics. The video, shot in a swirling pass at cinema verité or some form of the reality-TV esthetic with benign post-colonial vertigo, is billed as the centerpiece. It replays an anthropological experiment involving Jinks and “five performers of Indian and Pakistani heritage as they undertake to spontaneously invent a sporting game one day in a Chicago park.”

However, “spontaneity of invention” is better understood as “according to Jinks’ plot to engineer the generation of a ball-and-stick game.” An unattributed jumble of subtitles narrate the video, marred by intentional fragmentation. Somewhere underneath that, it recounts the sentiments and observations of the performers as they play an amorphous game that begins with small talk between strangers and ends with “capture the flag or cricket.” Read the rest of this entry »

Given that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago served as the breeding grounds for nearly every locally grown artistic movement, from the Monster Roster through the Hairy Who to the Imagists and beyond, it is not unreasonable to consistently anticipate new and interesting developments from its students. So, what’s brewing on Michigan Avenue at the moment? These days we look to the latest outgrowth of apartment-gallery spaces around the city for a reliable answer.

Monument 2 Gallery, the latest example of this locally esteemed phenomenon, appeared this fall on the site of the former Camp Gay space in Logan Square, but like most domestic gallery spaces, don’t expect it to be around long. Acknowledging the tendency of such spaces to appear and disappear with the changing seasons—or in this case, leasing-cycles—the gallery’s proprietor, Michael Thibault, envisioned his endeavor strictly as a one-year operation, having “no interest in owning a sustainable gallery.” When the lease is up next August, he’ll move on to something else, but not without leaving an exhibition history richly colored by his friends and classmates. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If we ever needed proof that straight photography always presents the world through a specific sensibility, we can find it in extremis in Sarah Hadley’s sepia-pigmented studies of Venice, Italy on misty evenings, seemingly frozen in time in the nineteenth-century. Whether she has fixed on details of statues, back alleys, the fabled canals, footpaths, grand cathedrals with spires soaring to the sky among the birds, or humble abodes hugging the ground, Hadley always casts a pictorialist spell, placing us alone in the fog, observing a world transfigured by a grand poignancy. Hadley is most effective in depicting seductive distance when she allows a faceless human figure into the scene, as in “Ascension,” where we see a man from behind, blackened to a shadow by the fog, walking up a flight of concrete stairs by the side of a vaporous canal. The only fruitful response is to surrender to the mood of bittersweet loneliness that Hadley consistently projects and evokes, and to forget that Venice is also a sinking twenty-first century city. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 17 at Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan.

"Siesta Upstairs," c. 1945, oil on panel

RECOMMENDED

“There is a living, moving geometry in a city, and it tells a human story,” Margo Hoff (1910-2008) explained to an art magazine in 1963, and that’s pretty much the story of her painting, from the thirty years spent in Chicago, to her following five decades in New York.  The current retrospective, at Corbett vs. Dempsey, shows just how much those stories changed after she left Chicago at age fifty. The Windy City was full of mysteries for this Oklahoma girl, and her paintings are small windows into urban life, usually nocturnal. What are those strange neighbors doing tonight, anyway? Moving to New York, she felt more like one of the crowd—a bustling, thrilling, restless crowd, and her paintings began to resemble vibrant, folksy art quilts. Indeed, she had begun cutting painted canvas into pieces and then pasting them all together, with a very precise sense of design, into collage, full of brilliant colors, sharp edges, and rhythmic energy. Was she going to the jazz clubs to hear Monk, Davis and ‘Trane? She went to a lot of places, teaching classes in Uganda, Beirut, and Sao Paolo, as she had at Hull House, and just seemed to have an endless enjoyment and curiosity about the world. “A hospitality of heart,” as one friend put it. More understated, but still quite enjoyable, are a few of the urban geometries of contemporary Chicago painter and post-rock musician, Sam Prekop, which play, like a b-side, in the east wing of the  gallery. Visiting this show will likely be the highlight of any dark, wintry day in Chicago. (Chris Miller)

Through January 16 at Corbett vs. Dempsey, 1120 N. Ashland.

RECOMMENDED

To accompany her video, where we see her dancing with a man in a bar, Carrie Schneider has placed a color scenario photo, “Still Life,” of barflies in a tavern – a man slumped over, a couple kissing, a man taking a swig of whiskey, two detached women, and a man staring off into the distance as he holds his beer bottle limply. This, says Schneider, is a slice of “bar culture,” which is also the basis of the video. By all appearances, “Still Life” depicts bar culture as a failed social form in which people are lost in their own worlds, with boozing their only principle of solidarity. We are reminded of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” played in the key of despair rather than mere desperation. Schneider says that she is inspired by Brassai, photographer of the French inter-war demimonde—the documentarian of decadence. Schneider’s performance video, “Slow Dance,” begins with a pan of the scene that she panoramically encapsulated in her photograph, but then we see her look at a man across the room; their eyes meet, she advances on him and seduces him into a lascivious dance as the barmaid looks on with fascinated indifference. The dance morphs into an undulating ménage-a-trois and then, at last, the two partners are once again alone together, at which point they separate, turn their backs on each other definitively, and re-enter their solipsistic detachment, receding among the barflies. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.