RECOMMENDED

Peter Otto’s putrid palette befits his ghoulish subjects. He is a painter of the dead and the dying.

Contrary to the literal documentation produced by photojournalists, Otto employs painterly abstraction for the purpose of preventing fixation upon the graphic details of the horror he depicts. He, like most good artists, requires his audience to move beyond the particular and toward the universal, and constant, in human nature.

Otto isn’t common. Knowledge of the art and history of Modernity seem to be prerequisite to access the deeper levels of meaning available in his paintings. The selection of works on display at Devening Projects directly considers the distance of time and space extending from Europe in the 1940s to the present-day Middle East. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The African-American community of Chicago’s “Black Bottom” neighborhood, dispersed by white “urban renewal” in the 1950s, is presented here in a mix of faux historical documents, artifacts and maps, colliding a repertoire of symbols associating European racial and nationalist mythology with African-American history and nationalism. There is a knight’s helmet, for instance, incorporating a raised Black Power fist in its design. Likewise, the black panther becomes the center of a heraldic tapestry that, in this case, is a quilt. Corporate and local icons such as the Nike Swoosh and the Maxwell Street Polish take on the aura of legend when isolated from their daily contexts and presented as symbols of a lost world. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Another of the army of redeemers of the ruins, Shane Prine shoots the interiors of derelict houses, finding in the copious rubble and refuse forms that—but for the fact that they are filthy—could pass for modernist sculptures and assemblages. Prine renders his subjects in black-and-white chiaroscuro, taking advantage of shadows and pools of light to show them forth in their ramshackle backgrounds. At an extreme pole of the photographic proclivity to alert us to the unrecognized beauty that lurks in the most unexpected places, Prine’s work insures that we will never look at a pile of construction trash the same way again—or at modernist sculpture. In Prine’s most powerful shot, he offers a view of the side of a chair looming up from the litter, its back lost in black, its upholstery torn and mended with duct tape, and a weathered board propped against its front—a gangplank to the throne. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 24 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Under a banner announcing “EVERYTHING NOTHING” that fills one wall of the gallery space, Daniel Everett presents his sardonic photographic reflections on the way that technology has penetrated our psyches. Everett’s take on the managed environment is nowhere better encapsulated than in “Decoy I and II,” two straight black-and-white shots of surveillance cameras against pure white backgrounds; it turns out that the devices are fakes that are used to hoodwink innocent and credulous passersby into thinking that they are being watched. As if he needed to rub in our indignity more deeply, Everett serves up “Portals” in which we see an empty and forbidding underground parking garage, at the center of which is a vestibule glowing in heavenly white light that is backed by a bare wall instead of a door. Technology is a glitzy and deceptive trap from which there is no exit that seduces us at the peril of our strength and sanity. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.