Design: Ryan Swanson

By Jason Foumberg

This is the eighth issue of Breakout Artists, our annual selection of Chicago’s best emerging visual artists. This year is the first time that the Breakout Artists cover story includes an exhibition component, and since the issue always coincides with Art Chicago, it fits that our artists are showing in the fair. In years past we’ve easily showcased artists with performative and community-based projects. This year, the exhibition gives us the opportunity to focus solely on artists who are strong image and object makers, and who are committed to representing our contemporary moment through a visual idiom.

Newcity’s Breakout Artists are on view in booth 12-165 at Art Chicago, floor 12 of the Merchandise Mart, April 29-May 3. Read the rest of this entry »

In a Northwest-facing corner on the twelfth floor of the Merchandise Mart, German artist Achim Zeman perches near the top of a blue-and-yellow ladder with a tape measure in one hand and, in the other, a precisely cut strip of vinyl tape so red it buzzes. He pauses to inspect the color-coded printout of the master plan for his installation. “Insight on site” is a vertiginous use of electric red vinyl tape applied directly to the wall in ambling lines. Zeman makes a mark on the wall, leans down to pick up a level, peels the back off the vinyl tape, drops the curled backing to the floor and presses the tape to the wall. He smoothes it flat and parallel to the twenty-seven other vibrant red horizontal lines affixed there.

Scattered around the room, eight volunteers work similarly and in silence doing the same, over and over. Each devises their own way to place the vinyl tape properly and track which lines remain to be taped.

Nominally, Zeman is an installation artist, and this red-striped piece he’s working on is located in the main speaking venue on the Art Chicago floor of Artropolis, an enormous contemporary-art-cum-antique fair taking place this weekend at the Merchandise Mart. The formula for his work is color, provided by electric red vinyl tape, and geometric pattern—in this case, lines. These two visual elements he adapts to highlight some aspect of the room in which they appear. Here, he explains, it’s all about the corners and creating graphic discontinuity that doesn’t line up with the three-dimensional features of the wall. Read the rest of this entry »

Joseph Kim

What if you’re an artist but nobody wants to show your work? Every artist has probably faced this challenge in the modern era, at some point in their career. It was especially challenging for early modernists in Chicago, who felt categorically excluded from commercial galleries. Thus was born the “No Jury” shows of the 1920s. Today’s version is called the Chicago Art Open, sponsored by the Chicago Artists Coalition, and this year the show is held at the elegant, recently developed River East Art Center. Unlike the earlier versions, the 2010 show does have a jury of local art experts (including an editor, a gallery owner, a former non-profit director and a university photography teacher). Their job was not to keep artists out, but to highlight the best work and give it a room of its own.

Meanwhile, stroll down the hall of the River East Art Center and discover how an artist can avoid getting cut from the selection process: just buy the gallery yourself! Read the rest of this entry »

"Year of the Dog #8," woodblock print with collage and hand coloring

RECOMMENDED

Despite a prolific output of work, this is Judy Pfaff’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. For a large part of her career, Pfaff has been known for her pioneering installations and sculpture. However, in recent decades there has been a marked transition within her work.

In a ­­­1998 interview with Richard Whittaker, Pfaff describes this transition as a shift from the exterior to an “interior landscape.” A 2004 MacArthur grant also spurred changes and increased production in Pfaff’s work. With the unrestricted grant she acquired five acres of land in upstate New York, a staggering amount of studio space, and legions of assembling assistants. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

British photographer Sarah Pickering has devoted herself to documenting in color and black-and-white the sites where first responders train for disasters and civil disorders in environments constructed for the purpose of simulating the dangers that they might have to confront in the real world. Pickering has a special taste for shooting modest rooms that have been set on fire for her and controlled explosions and gas clouds in the fields, but her premier endeavor is her series on Denton, England, a stage-set microcosm of a mid-size city existing only to be the scene of riot training for SWAT teams. When Pickering is around, Denton is depopulated, but signs remain of what the police are meant to control; a barricade of shopping carts, tires and construction boards blocks off an alley framed by dismal working-class flats that are simply facades. Although she has a socially critical intent, Pickering’s images turn out to be politically neutral; those who support the state will be happy that the security forces are sharpening their skills, and opponents of the ruling order will detect the mechanisms of malign power. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

More than forty sculptures and drawings constitute an exhibition exploring the premise that we “construct” clothing by creating shapes with volume out of flat materials. Diane Simpson literally constructs slightly larger than life-size models of clothing from lightweight and prosaic materials like composition board, copper tubing, translucent plastic sheeting and every variety of industrial mesh and vintage linoleum. She works with the deliberation and exacting craftsmanship of a master tailor to produce clean, predominately abstract and linear sculptures that take their inspiration from the sleeves of seventeenth-century gowns, American early twentieth-century aprons (with an art deco rhythm), Amish bonnets and Samurai robes, among other articles of clothing. Simpson’s architecture of gowns and aprons reveals the complex and fluid—here, unyielding—structure of clothing, in certain pieces, especially the gowns, but her analysis uncovers more than clever structural engineering. These stripped-down models of women’s clothing can appear cage-like and restrictive. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A foreclosed home is not a pretty sight after its owners have been dispossessed. At least that is the message of Chicago-based German photographers Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann who have undertaken the task of shooting the interiors of scores of houses that have gone on the block with deadpan straight-on documentary eyes. Geissler and Sann show us gutted rooms and hallways in which there is often some trace of lives left behind, like the remains of a photo-collage of fashion models on a bare wall above an electric plug stuck into a wall socket from which the cord has been severed. As a result of their uncompromising documentary approach, Geissler and Sann evoke neither nostalgia nor a sense of beauty, but simply a realization of what the wear and tear of life do to home sweet home, once the façade is stripped away and we are left with the clump of insulation that has worked its way through a hole in the ceiling. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 23 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

By Bert Stabler

Seemingly poised to become the Fox News of local art punditry, the blog Chicago Art Criticism has (albeit from a purportedly post-Marxist perspective) been keeping up a sustained attack on contemporary social practices in art. Recent articles by Laurie Rojas, Ian Morrison, Chris Mansour and Jamie Keesling have all taken a hard party line in wringing their hands over the supplanting of the heroic artistic and cultural vanguard of the twentieth-century heyday of Modernism by the post-Fluxus proliferation of social and ideological practices being cast as artwork—practices like community kitchens and gardens, pamphleteering and swap meets. A screed on the blog by Platypus Journal contributor Bret Schneider targets the work of Chicago artist Claire Pentecost in a vitriolic diagnosis of (to use two of his go-to terms) art’s “dangerous” effort to recuperate the “failed” activist politics of a bygone era. Citing precious little theory or research to substantiate them, he offers epic-sounding generalizations, such as: “the undaunted optimism of social art practices glosses over suffering and constriction altogether in its wriggling away from historical trauma.” Or, “There is no fundamental condition of human existence yet, at least hopefully. Believing so is a major setback and an arbitrary nostalgia.”  Nostalgia bad, historical trauma good, got it.

But can art simultaneously fail and be dangerous? Well, if it fails to be art, hopefully it can do so by aspiring to be dangerous. As Pentecost said in a 2006 interview on the art podcast Bad At Sports, “If you’re talking about art as just the kind of stuff that gets validated by museums and galleries, maybe what I do isn’t art. But I think that art is a much bigger and broader human enterprise. I’m more interested in building movements.” And, while she describes change as a slow, multifaceted process, the things she makes, organizes, presents and participates in reflect her belief in the potential of producing knowledge publicly and collectively. Pentecost has worked on biotechnology experiments with the collective Critical Art Ensemble, helped to run and program the active community cultural space Mess Hall in Rogers Park, created seminars and publications in association with the Continental Drift project and The Midwest Radical Culture Corridor group, documented the encroachment of corporate-style farming practices in Europe and South America, created an installation and a newspaper about food economics and, closer to the purview of “real” art, presented a series of wall drawings as photographs, created monumental sculptures made from processed snacks, and commissioned miniaturist painters in India to render her portrait from staged tourist snapshots. Read the rest of this entry »

Romare Bearden, "Out Chorus," 1979-80, etching and aquatint. Courtesy of the Romare Bearden Estate

RECOMMENDED

Weren’t Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence two great jazz artists who made prints instead of record albums? They were both storytellers, and as they improvised on their various themes, they had more in common with Ben Webster or Miles Davis than with the icons of late modernism in the visual-art world, especially with the scenes from Lawrence’s Genesis series, now on view at G.R. N’Namdi Gallery. Internet renderings cannot do justice to the delight and impact of these images, where Lawrence tells the story of creation through the body language of a charismatic minister at a storefront church, as Lawrence himself had experienced him sixty years earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

If you’re put off by the serial self-portraiture for which Susanna Coffey is best known, the body of paintings now on display at PEREGRINEPROGRAM should come as a relief and a revelation. Coffey’s technical facility and feel for color are evident in this “Night Painting” series, but these landscapes in oil are unpopulated, quiet, and diminutive, sometimes just the size of an index card. They carry all the emotion of her portraits but lack foregrounded faces, and they also convey something at once more abstract and affecting. Millet’s “Starry Night,” a painting admired by Van Gogh, is an inspiration for Coffey, who wants to “observe the appearance of darkness.” The “color of night,” as she calls it, is investigated in “Main Street Moon, Johnson Vermont,” an homage to Millet through Van Gogh, in which stars appear as bright jagged tears in a sky awash with blues and grays. In “Skowhegan,” meanwhile, deep blue hues differentiate themselves in Rothkoesque auras, both subtle and expressive. Though their tones are mostly quiet, these paintings are not quietistic; there’s too much drama in the painterly gestures and voluptuous application of oils to suggest detachment or passivity. The artist’s hand remains conspicuous, and the surfaces of the paintings abound with action. Read the rest of this entry »