Whether you lament over reading Times New Roman or you find yourself searching for the colophon in the back of a book, you should find yourself at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere this Friday night. “TYPEFORCE: The Annual Chicago Show of Emerging Typographic Allstars” has its opening reception at 7pm and continues through March 14. Though the actual practice of typography is anything but new, its importance cannot be ignored. As local artist and contributor Margot Harrington puts it, “It’s just such a building block, a cornerstone of design history. For me, it really is one of the most basic fundamental parts of my background in graphic design.” Though it is held in high regard within the art world, the public has only really just recently re-embraced typography. “There has been a noticeable wave of lettering in popular culture in the last decade,” says Luke Williams, who will be making his Chicago debut. He posits that the availability of such programs as Adobe Illustrator have pushed typography back into the conversation. With around twenty local artists on display, the show is sure to be varied. Between Williams’ “set of vowels that embody a blend of high-class royalty, with whimsical 1960′s Americana themes” and Harrington’s screen-printed ampersands onto collages of vintage books and found paper, there is bound to be something for every fontophile. (Peter Cavanaugh)

photo by Jane J. Gaspar

By Jason Foumberg

There is a room. It is filled with salt. It is the “Salt Room.” Doug Fogelson’s latest exhibition pairs photograms made from salt with 3,000 pounds of rock salt spread on the floor, wall to wall, of a storefront gallery. Fogelson founded and directs Front Forty Press, an art-book publisher based in Chicago, and he often exhibits his own photographic prints and sculptural installations. “Salt Room (Winter on the Moon)” is his first publicly exhibited ground covering.

The salted layer of floor here evokes many things: the luminous snow right outside; a moonscape, wasteland or other no man’s land; a crystal palace’s ashes. It is a gravel aquarium for humans to frolic while passersby peer in through the large street-level display windows. The overall effect is crunchy and cold. Read the rest of this entry »

On the day I visit Pamela Fraser’s East Garfield Park studio, everything outside is white and cold: a blizzard has just dumped several inches of snow on the ground, on the branches of trees, and on the tops of cars unlucky enough to have had to spend the night outside. Inside, Fraser’s studio is warm and inviting, but the sense of enveloping whiteness remains, thanks to the huge white walls, high ceilings and bright natural light streaming in from a large window at one end. Fraser, who is assistant professor of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the Oak Park domestic art space He Said–She Said with her husband, Randall Szott, has occupied this studio since last June. Like many of Fraser’s paintings, it feels spacious, light and airy—neatly organized, though not obsessively so, and humming with focused energy.

Her current solo exhibition at Golden consists of nine drawings, all of which were executed on the floor over a single month in late ’09 during an inspired burst of energy. Fraser has been investigating color as an aesthetic as well as a cultural construct for several years now, ever since she was asked to teach a class on color theory at UIC. As she immersed herself in countless historical and theoretical texts on the subject she realized the traditional color-theory curriculum needed some serious revamping. “Color is often discussed as if it were an isolated phenomenon, and not in the world,” Fraser explains, citing the Bauhaus school theories (espoused in the writings of Swiss Expressionist painter Johannes Itten) as a primary example. “It presumes a universality that I can’t buy, and I can’t teach.” Read the rest of this entry »

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897, Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

RECOMMENDED

Nan Goldin, whose photographs of her friends revealed a twilight world of entertainers, addicts and melancholy lovers, has nothing on Albert Besnard, whose 1887 etching of two morphine addicts is on display in the exhibition “The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850-1900. This beguiling show of prints, illustrated books, drawings and small, fluid, mysterious bronzes, traverses not only dark private states of mind connected with reveries, madness, love, suicide, domestic violence and rape, it contains prints which express intimate reactions to the public tumult of the age. A view of Paris in which the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1865 sail off in the ill-wind of a terrible human cloud by Nicolas Chifflart and a grieving weaver, her loom and wool waiting in the background, watches a dying child in a dark lithograph titled “Need” by the German Kathe Kollwitz. The print is part of a suit documenting the sorrows associated with the Weaver’s Rebellion of 1897 in Germany.

Curators from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where the exhibition originated, assemble these works to shed light on media and imagery during a period where there was a reorganization of the boundaries between what we think of as public and private life. Because of their size, discursive or contemplative nature, collectors often stored prints and studied them in private rather than displaying them. The entire cycle of Max Klinger’s wonderfully strange symbolist saga “The Glove or Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove,” narrating the finding of a woman’s glove in ten fantastic, subtly erotic and non-linear etchings, hangs in the dimly-lit galleries among other intimate, variously decadent, symbolist and realist prints. Etching and lithography build subjects out of inky layers of dark tangled or cross hatched lines, drypoints are perfect for creating atmospheric grays, the medium, in turn, is predisposed to the subjects of obsession, possession and describing the low light of the sick room or the ill-lit corners of the fin de siècle urban world. (Janina Ciezadlo)

Through June 13 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

Štepán Grygar, Street (Prague), 2002.

RECOMMENDED

Tenaciously resistant to postmodern cultural play, the six contemporary Prague-based Czech photographers who have been brought together here by curators Karel Cisar and Karen Irvine continue their country’s poetic modernist tradition with evocative black-and-white and color images of ordinary objects, moody spaces and mild constructivist angle shots that exude worn, tired and poignant emotions that are mirrored in their subjects. Although the curators advise  that the show “represents a small, very specific slice of photography in the  Czech Republic today,” it remains that such works are rarely being made elsewhere at the present time and are a throwback to the golden age of Czech photography between the two world wars. The restrained mundane sensibility, in which decay is never so rife as to resemble ruins, is most perfectly captured in Marketa Othova’s study of a shiny tiled floor littered with a few dispersed scraps of foam board that appear to have fallen from the ceiling, signaling disrepair that has not come anywhere near the brink of destruction. While the world outside Western Europe forges ahead with bold experiments, these artists look backwards and are frozen into pillars of the past. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

Scott Wolniak, with concurrent shows at 65Grand and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, says his work is “an investigation into how art-making can be a template for examining everyday occurrences and experiences.” It’s about elevating the everyday to aesthetic significance.

For “You Can Lose Your Balance” at 65Grand, Wolniak contorts, tears and twists canvases painted all white. He slices canvas and hangs a brick in a tear to create a ‘balanced’ composition. He punctures the rippling, white surface of a Little River in acrylic using a twig. The paintings, he explains, consist of “dumb acts of wrestling and sabotage” that “occur in lieu of anything remotely resembling technique.” So he splinters the canvases’ wooden frames. He has you believe that the paintings in this show leave more to chance than to the artist’s touch. In the words of Argentine canvas-slasher Lucio Fontana, punctured canvases like Wolniak’s reveal “a dimension beyond the painting” that illustrates “the freedom to conceive art through any means.” But Wolniak takes this a step further when, in ”Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles),” the image of a lightbulb going on and off paired with the switch click, click, clicking on and off becomes mesmeric. The sound takes on a meditative repetition like listening to tap-dancing, typewriting, rain falling on a tin roof and a stream of flighty, illuminating, then extinguished ideas enter and exit the viewer’s mind. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In her exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, “From the Offices of Scientists,” Aspen Mays assembles a set of installations inspired by science office spaces. Reminiscent of a theatrical set, her installations “Jellybean Universe,” “Boom!” and “You’re Next” use office materials such as a dry-erase board and cardboard boxes to re-create a scientist’s office. Looming at the center of her exhibition is a giant 850-pound boulder, “Boulder Desk,” mysteriously at the mercy of a weak desk, behind which an encased sign on the wall reads, “If you think you found a meteorite bring it here and we’ll check it to be sure.” Playful and witty, the installation is a diversion from the process-driven photographs that characterize May’s solo exhibition currently on display at the MCA 12 x 12 gallery.

Meticulous, even obsessive in the methodical approach to her photography, Mays subjects the viewer to the prevailing process in science research by collecting and categorizing information. In “Every Leaf,” the artist attempts to photograph every leaf of a tree, a process that takes Mays nearly nine hours to accomplish. Providing the viewer with a kind of visual index and a display of 900 snapshots recognizing leaves of various sizes and hues. In “Einstein’s Rainbow,” Mays borrows every book on Einstein from the inter-library loan system, nearly 1,500 in all, which the artist organizes by color on in various rainbow arches. In the tremendous magnitude of materials from her study of these subjects, Mays’ scrutiny and categorization provides an overwhelming but moving display on the nature of investigation and a curious attempt at making sense of the wealth of information. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Aspen Mays shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art through February 28, and at the Hyde Park Art Center though April 25.

Óscar Fernando Gómez

RECOMMENDED

Expertly curated by Claudi Carreras, this show, which brings together ten contemporary Latin American photographers from Argentina, Mexico and Peru, is more proof that the cutting edges of camera work have migrated definitively to the non-Western world. Whereas unbridled postmodern experimentation dominates in East Asia and Iran, mordant and revealing social criticism takes the lead south of the Rio Grande. Livia Corona takes top honors for her color series documenting the results of former Mexican president Vicente Fox’s program of building more than two million low-income houses, implemented with public funds by private investors who proceeded to raise up vast swathes of identical ticky-tacky dwellings across the land, often without providing basic utilities. Corona’s panoramic view of an enormous tract and her intimate family portraits leave the viewer with ambivalence—certainly the living conditions of the inhabitants have improved, but are projects the path to progress? The other nine contributors are also intelligent and sensitive, each in their own ways. Chicago has been fortunate over the past year to be treated to rich offerings of global photography; this show is another must-see. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 31 at Instituto Cervantes, 31 W. Ohio

RECOMMENDED

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is presenting the collaborative group Art & Language, with works ranging from 1965 to 2007. Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson founded Art & Language in the late sixties in England, and during the following decade the group grew to include other members (and a New York branch). The group is currently comprised of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden.

Sometimes, we forget that Art & Language is a group of theoretical visual artists, not (plainly) writers or theoreticians. Unlike many of the calcified conceptual art experiments from the sixties, the works on view here are immediately fulfilling and effective visual art. The visual, of course, is still given a textual component. Be sure to consider the take-away writing component of the show provided by the gallery. The texts read as both preparatory sketch and conversational presentation. Through this writing the twenty works in the show—while arranged loosely by date—are given an even, contemporary, presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The white lines of tape on the floor shout CAUTION!, DANGER!, and a low, spraypaint-riddled brick wall straddles the back corner. Ebersmoore is transformed into a construction site to house the distressed and crumbling imagery in Ryan Travis Christian’s post-apocalyptic drawings. “ANTEXPAGNA,” an imaginary word for imaginary worlds, is a celebration of the artist’s surreal personal narratives.

Following Mark Mulroney’s sexually graphic comic-art appropriations (also recently shown at Ebersmoore), Ryan Travis Christian’s drawings reference comic art in a more understated way. The use of pattern and heavy black lines ground the often amorphous, and the graphic zig-zags invoke Charlie Brown’s mournful voice in existential crisis. Examined closely, cartoon hands peek out from amorphous clouds of debris, and melting, frowning faces appear in hazy repetition. Stepping back, the seemingly random explosions in graphite coalesce, and the reason behind the rhythm of the cartoon imagery becomes clear.

Just as the frames of a comic strip imply the passage of time, the stuttering lines in “ANTEXPAGNA” slow down and illuminate a distorted, frame-by-frame sense of perception. We are thrust into the minutiae of destruction, or, perhaps—as a visitor gleefully remarked—Christian’s drawings are our celestial epiphanies immediately followed by a car tire demise. (Julia V. Hendrickson)

“ANTEXPAGNA” shows at Ebersmoore, 213 N Morgan, #3C, (312)772-3021, through March 13.