RECOMMENDED

Despite its advanced age of 115 years, the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Art didn’t seriously get into the teaching business until about twenty years ago, when traditional art schools realized they could not survive without granting an academic degree (so young BFAs could get a salaried job somewhere). That put a lot of art teachers, as well as students, out on the street. Now this aging mansion on the Gold Coast offers a nice warm place for them to get together, and the annual faculty show, like a speed-dating party, provides an opportunity for un-institutionalized teachers and students to find each other. No degree, no curriculum, just classes teaching whatever style that enough students want to learn. What’s  exceptional about this year’s show is the inclusion of a few bi-coastal artists who come to Chicago to teach for a week or so. Especially noteworthy is the appearance of three paintings by David Leffel from New York, who is at the forefront of the revival of Baroque painting. Can Leffel paint like Rembrandt, or at least like a very eccentric follower? Also noteworthy in this exhibit are the traditional Chinese brush paintings by Andy Chan, as well as a full-size portrait of him by Zhiwei Tu, whose hometown (Shaoguan, which is larger than Chicago) gave him his own museum. Indeed, more than a third of the artists shown in this exhibit were born in China, Korea, or the Philippines. Consider this a showcase for the wide world of styles that are more visually enjoyable than intellectually challenging, which is why they don’t especially fit into modern academia, but still are collected by people who enjoy looking at paintings. (Chris Miller)

Through February 24 at Palette and Chisel, 1012 N. Dearborn.

The College Art Association’s annual conference rolls into town this week, bringing artists, art historians, curators and critics together in the banquet halls of the Hyatt Regency for a few days of art smarts and cheese platters. Forty-something years ago the conference also convened in a local hotel, around the same time that our own Museum of Contemporary Art was founded. This note, from the archives of the artist Allan Kaprow, surfaces from that era:

“The CAA is a hotel full of aging fags. I was certain it would be raided by the police.”

From then-director of the MCA, Jan van der Marck, sent to Allan Kaprow, on MCA letterhead. Dated January 30, 1968. From the Allan Kaprow Papers, Getty Research Institute, box 12, folder 5.

The Flat Iron Arts Building opens at six on “First Fridays,” and by seven a small line has formed at the gallery’s entrance. It’s a donation affair, and considering you’re bound to spend twenty dollars on cheap beer or a cab at some point later in the night, giving the girl at the door five dollars doesn’t sound like a waste. She hands out maps and points people up to the stairs.

The early gallery crowd is comprised mostly of adults over 30. They’ve got their standard-issue clear-plastic wine cups and smart glances. The wood floor creaks as a woman goes in to hug an artist. She points at a mural behind him. It is an abstract piece full of greens, yellows and oranges. It is also the main focus for the night. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Rezac

There’s a trend practiced by some of Chicago’s established and regarded sculptors that, while not new, resurges every few years like a scheduled comet passing overhead, illuminating the heaps of unsorted recyclables that calls itself “contemporary sculpture,” for a brief flashing reminder that we can trust our eyes, not just our minds. In short, formalist tendencies persist. City of grime and grit and gut this is not. This city was built on beauty, so it’s no surprise that spirituality or mysticism or whatever unnamable eternal thing creeps in from time to time.

Christine Tarkowski (born 1967), Susan Giles (born 1967), and Richard Rezac (born 1952) all stoke a formalist eroticism, as their sculptures pierce right through to the core of perceptual understanding, without having to busy the mind. There’s an ease of access partly provided by familiar materials—cherry wood, polished and rustic cast metals, cardboard and tape—but each also favors architectonic forms: Giles plays with minarets and crenellations, Tarkowski breaks and re-circuits parking-garage ramps and the geodesic dome, and Rezac’s sculptures evoke knobs, nooks and floorboards. There’s a logic to each construction but the direct response is pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

As part of his broader study of “industrialized space” in the era of globalization, photographer and installation artist Mark Curran honed in on the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Research complex in Leixlip, Ireland that has since been closed down as the multinational technology giant went in search of cheaper labor. If we did not know the back story, we would look at Curran’s unframed, large-format photographic documentary portraits of the factory’s workers—tacked on the gallery’s walls—not as commentaries on the depredations of corporate capitalism, but as reflections on how individuals have become trapped in a technological environment, in which, in this case, they are wrapped in sterile white gowns, gloves and caps in order to protect the environment from them. Curran’s subjects, in frontal poses, jar through their juxtaposition of all-too-human faces and the inhuman workplace that other human beings have created. Curran’s anti-capitalist critique and the critique of technology that his images betray operate somewhat at cross-purposes, yet both have their truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 19 at the DePaul University Museum, 2350 N. Kenmore

RECOMMENDED

“Expect the Unexpected,” a survey of paintings and works on paper by the late Hollis Sigler (1948-2001), organized by the Rockford Art Museum, is now on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Adroitly curated by Patty Rhea, the volume of works by Sigler helps reveal their lasting value.

A Chicagoan by way of graduate school, Sigler was one of the founding members of the feminist art collective and alternative gallery Artemisia (1973-2003). She found critical success in the early 1980s, and showed at the 1981 Whitney Biennial. The current retrospective contains twenty years of her work.

The lack of irony in Sigler’s work instantly identifies her as part of a previous generation. Domestic scenes heightened with symbolic narratives pulse with energy in van Gogh-esque staccato brushstrokes, dots and dashes. Shallow, warped spaces and cartoon-like representations betray Sigler’s heavy reliance on the traditions of outsider art, complete with apocalyptic imagery and populist religious overtones. These tropes are employed to an emotional end, repurposed to address the nature of feminine and queer desire. “Desire Released,” from 1983, shows a woman backlit by the moon as she dances in an earthen valley that is subtly erotic. Much of Sigler’s work focuses on the liberation of desire, whether just beyond the valley, outside of a window or rising to heaven.

Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, which recurred in 1991. She created the “Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers” series in response. An artist who makes work specifically about the cancer experience may face marginalization in the survivor story genre, but Sigler’s art transcends such easy shelving. The current retrospective reveals Sigler’s intense engagement with culture. While she certainly positioned herself as a passionate advocate for women’s health issues, her painted legacy suggests a larger project of self-actualization. (Dan Gunn)

Hollis Sigler shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 W. Washington, through April 4.

Ninna Berger, "Venus in Clothes," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Do you remember “USA for Africa”? What about “We Are the World”—those well-intended expressions of the otherwise non-existent Reagan-era social conscience? (Okay, we shouldn’t forget “Hands Across America”). In 1985, composer Quincy Jones, along with stars Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, enlisted the help of dozens of (then popular) recording industry superstars, forming a megalo-group called USA for Africa.  They cut a chart-topping, best-selling single, the results of which—a few million dollars of food-aid—was literally dropped into Africa. In full disclosure, this author was prenatal at the time, and thankfully born to parents in Minnesota, and not Mogadishu.

Nearly twenty-five years after the original release of “We Are the World,” a young generation of artistic talent has decided to unite around the glib spirit of this bygone phenomenon with a similar (modest) proposal of their own, in “We Are the World,” at Roots & Culture Gallery. In truth, the group of artists, hailing from places as diverse as Oslo, San Francisco and Chicago, configure themselves around the title of the eighties charity single in name only, taking from it what they will, and ultimately relating to the “We Are the World” phenomenon as the mutual beginning of their collectively lived-experiences. In fact, the entire show is essentially a subtle rumination on the paradoxical conflation of collective and subjective experience endemic to this generation, resulting from its complete and total immersion in post-industrial societies in which consumerism proliferates as a (nearly) unquestionable doctrine. Read the rest of this entry »

William Kentridge, Video still of "Tabula Rasa," 2003. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

RECOMMENDED

Fresh on the heels of Liam Gillick’s recently closed exhibition, which showed how unfulfilling a post-studio practice can be, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened “Production Site,” their contribution to the yearlong, citywide Studio Chicago project, which seeks to re-energize the city’s artists to get back in the studio to make stuff. While so many artists today use digital technologies, contract outside fabricators and expand the role of art beyond the studio-to-gallery system, “Production Site” proves that museums still need studio artists. Curator Dominic Molon charts the transformation that objects undergo between their private creation and their public reception. Some of the mythical, magical heat that bubbles over in the artist’s studio then dissipates in transport to the gallery or museum, but more often than not, the thirteen artists in this presentation tend to reveal that they can conjure stunning effects regardless of place. So, we end up with an engaging, visually vibrant show that nominally tries to link artists around this theme, but the artists take such markedly different turns on this journey that we ultimately get the impression that “the studio” means markedly different things to different artists. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A collection of Maya Lin’s recent work, eleven pieces strong, sits in The Arts Club of Chicago. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the obsidian black scar that slices through the National Mall (and mind). That iconic form began with potatoes on a plate—so the story goes. She shaped them like garlic-mashed plasticine and the idea for a thin slab of sculpture glopped into place on the plate in front of her. This genesis story speaks greatly to her career that has since developed, as a sculptor of slick organic shapes.

Strewn across the floor of The Arts Club are perfectly watery blown-glass drops that hint at the feeling of standing on the tip of a blade of dew-covered grass at dawn. Sinuous pins pushed into the wall and a flow of recycled silver suggest a river view from the stars. And a simple, meticulously arranged collection of two-by-fours standing on end melt into lumber waves of spruce, pine, and fir.

Like Andy Goldsworthy, Lin looks at mathematic descriptions of mountain passes and river bends as source texts. She models the liquid quality of water through the use of wood, rhyming spruce grain with waves, which is further informed by Lin’s study of geology, imaging techniques like sonar, and the fluid dynamics of fractal modulations.

The centerpiece is “Blue Lake Pass,” made using sandwiched slices of Duraflake particleboard. Lin splits a mountain range into twenty blocks, carving the bases into the cubic envelope of a skyscraping, overbuilt urban boulevard. Except, instead of crowned towers, the skyline is Rocky Mountain tops. Squeezing between the blocks, viewers weave in and out of mountain chunks that rise as high as your nose and in the traces of machined particleboard grain, there’s a faint echo of something larger than the sublime—a casual suggestion that maybe this is what it feels like when 14,000 feet is only shoulder height. (Ian Epstein)

Through April 23 at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario

RECOMMENDED

Punk rock purists will argue that “Epics in Minutes” (2004), the first full-length album by Canadian band Fucked Up, was their best output to date, let alone one of the best punk records of the past decade. With little difficulty, the group became underground scene favorites due to their near-perfect execution of the age-old hardcore-punk paradigm: fast, loud and powerful.

With eccentric lead vocalist Damian Abraham, a.k.a. “Pink Eyes,” at the helm, Fucked Up’s saga began to take a few unforeseen turns following their early underground success. The band continued to gain in popularity; Vice magazine jumped onboard, they signed to Matador Records, became born-again Christians and—as the cumulative result of all three occurrences—saw their punk-rock credibility vaporize. Like the great punk-rock front men of days gone by, Abraham’s solo live performances revel in chaos. The 300-pound lead vocalist routinely strips into the nude, and draws his own blood. More recently, his personal life has become punctuated by unpredictable exploit. In 2009, Abraham began making regular appearances on Fox News’ notoriously conservative program “Red Eye,” as an unofficial liberal color-commentator. Read the rest of this entry »