Susan Aurinko

By Jason Foumberg

A friend recently asked me what a curator does. Are they like librarians? he asked. For an art outsider like my friend, the definition of a curator is limited to a stereotype suggested by the quiet halls of the museum. In the art world, though, the title of curator is totally unfixed. Just as the definition of artist was blown open in the early twentieth-century, the role of curator is no longer an elite, academic-bound job title.

Museum curators create solo retrospective exhibitions or thematic group shows, and biennial curators are jet-setting networkers. Often these types of curators have the highest degree offered in their academic field (art history or art studio), but that doesn’t mean they work in cushy, first-class jobs. They do more fundraising and donor development than actual exhibition planning, they give lectures and write catalogue essays, and they build and sustain their museum’s collection, if it is a collecting institution.

All of that is fairly routine and traditional in relation to the curators that I recently spoke with. They call themselves curators, but do not work for a museum. Do their self-ascribed job titles expand the definition of a contemporary curator, or merely confuse it? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

For a pure orgy of fantasia, check out Angelo Musco’s mammoth photo-works in which thousands of nude men and women disport themselves underwater in tangled conjunctures and simulations of schools of fish. Musco achieves his undeniably overpowering and shocking effect by taking countless shots of small groups of submerged people, combining them in the computer to compose his gargantuan images, and printing on metallic paper supported by aluminum and plexiglass. Two years in the making, the title work of Musco’s show, “Tehom” (Hebrew for abyss), tells the whole story. Measuring 12 x 48 feet, “Tehom” is ample enough for Musco to fill the surface with spinning vortices of bodies separated by a bevy of freer formations. Identifiable individuals pop out of the composition, bearing expressions that run the gamut of human emotion. Italian Renaissance philosophy championed the “coincidentia oppositorum,” the conjunction of opposites; Musco’s surrealism is right in that line. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 10 and Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 W. Washington

RECOMMENDED

Catherine Edelman can say with justice that her space is “the gallery that Michael Kenna built.” Since 1988, Edelman has delivered her walls over to Kenna’s atmospheric black-and-white environmental photographs, shot throughout the globe, all in the same soft and finely delineated style, seventeen times. Featuring recent images from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, among other far-flung places, Kenna’s present installment highlights the consistency of his position as the solitary shooter who hews to the modernist path of producing distinctively photographic beauty through contrasts of tonality and chiaroscuro. The effect is usually dreamlike reverie, but Kenna is also capable of evoking more tempestuous moods, as in two studies of the Huangshan mountains in China, in which the peaks rise up from roiling fog that resembles steam from an unseen furiously boiling cauldron. The secret of Kenna’s appeal to collectors is his ability to draw the eye into scenes that border on the sublime, yet are small enough and sufficiently domesticated to infuse awe with comfortable repose. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 10 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior

"Floral Arrangement #2"

RECOMMENDED

Photos will never do justice to Jason Middlebrook’s installations, nor will reviews. His current exhibition, titled “Less,” is experiential, requiring your presence and your time. The reclaimed and reused wood—no new materials are used here—alters the air. It has a scent, as does the chewed gum on a school desk that spells out “I am so sick of Sarah Palin.” What is new, however, is the vitality imbued in each dirty, chipped, warped, partially painted and haggard piece, each turned and crafted but ultimately discarded segment.

“Floral Arrangement #2,” an imploding collection of bits of furniture and lumber that stretches through most of the central gallery space, needs to be walked under and around, and interacted with to see where these individual scraps of wood might have once intersected with your own lives. A bit of a bed, what’s left of a chair—this all belonged to us at one time. Our own remnant scents might linger, our weight might be seen in the fibers, our intentions in the cracks and dents. Read the rest of this entry »

"The Painter of the Hole 1," 1948. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966.

RECOMMENDED

The aesthetic of German artist George Grosz (1893-1959) was forged during his service in the First World War. It was his disenchanted and pessimistic vision of war and the subsequent excesses of interwar German society that animated his artwork and brought him notoriety. With the Nazis’ rise to power, Grosz fled to the United States in 1933. Historically, the consensus has been that his work in America was inferior to his previous output, but this show at The Arts Club of Chicago, of only this American work, complicates that verdict.

George Grosz’s venomous satire is still largely evident as in the 1940s series of “stickmen,” emaciated gray figures of working-class poverty. These tortured souls are mutilated and deformed, as in “Grey Man Dances.” The figure’s ears are boarded up, chest empty and lips sutured shut. Grosz’s grizzly topics are amplified by his murky color choices and encrusted paint applications. Another poignant work that evinces the traumatic dislocation of Grosz is “The Painter of the Hole I” from 1948. Sitting at an easel, the same hollow-brained figure stares desperately at a rotting, blistered canvas. His brush is at the ready but the support is crumbling along with the world and his own body. His task is unenviable and absurd. His brush can’t help the situation, and it can’t drive away the rats from his feet. As a metaphor for Grosz’s own growing skepticism with political activism, this painting reveals his discontent with an activity that increasingly seems as hollow as his “stickmen.” (Dan Gunn)

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

By Kate Tierney Powell

The 20th Annual Evanston + Vicinity Biennial opened its doors on Sunday to a world of works that hang, protrude, stand, wipe, light up and may require watering.

Forty years after the first Evanston + Vicinity Biennial was held in 1970, submissions for the open-call exhibition continued to rise, up nearly forty percent from last year, indicating this juried show is still an important showcase for emerging and veteran artists alike. Of the roughly 570 local artists who submitted works, only forty-seven artists and roughly sixty works made the cut.  John Himmelfarb, an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, and Julie Rodrigues Widholm, the Pamela Alper Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, juried the exhibition, reviewing the submissions digitally, and narrowing them down to a broad range of painting, sculpture, drawing, installation art, mixed media and photography. “The vibrancy and diversity of Chicago’s large community of artists was reflected in this year’s submissions,” said Rodrigues Widholm, who spent nearly forty hours pouring over hundreds of digital images. Himmelfarb felt the submissions were both visually and conceptually strong, and though certain pieces were difficult to review in a digital format, the pieces they believed might be risky, were quite successful in the space. Read the rest of this entry »

"L.A. Claim," 2010, gouache on paper

“These are the people I love,” remarks Carmen Price as we admire his ninety-eight panels of graphically embellished names of friends. The salon-style grid of drawings, like commemorative texts, are adorned faintly with pearlescent acrylic washes and cubed or loopy cursive lettering.

Price traces his involvement in the arts back to grade school where he decorated classmates’ Trapper Keepers, and a similar adolescent distraction dominates his visual vocabulary today. Although a single work can engage Price for a year or more, he describes his approach to each composition as largely intuitive, with no particular plan of attack or specific outcome in mind when he begins.

This call-and-response method, a fluid, almost musical template for working, produces layers of transparency blocked by opacity, indivisible amalgamations of various mark-making and a variety of paint-handling techniques that make a single piece appear almost collaged together. Othertimes, images read left to right, row by row—an individuated, wholly imagined strand of hieroglyphics. Complicating this matrix is his employment of a handful of iconic symbols, namely the caricatured alien head a la 1990’s X-Files ads, that function as surrogates for the unknown, the ambiguous or the literal other worldly. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

John Parot’s exhibition, “Hobbies,” addresses the game of pursuit in gay online dating. In his figurative and abstract works on paper, panel and canvas, Parot makes a sardonic jab at the homogeneity of online dating profiles.

In his collage piece, “Total Eclipse,” Parot combines magazine cutouts in a composition reminiscent of online profiles. Heads float on a flat black background, magazine cutouts allude to common idols and makeshift horoscopes identify a popular cast of gay characters like “the disco dreamer missing brunch” and the “Faux Hawk forever on trend.” Yet his work goes beyond a play on stereotypes. Sculptural work, such as a wooden striped black-and-white paddle, “Haze Him,” pushes the viewer to consider not only the characters associated with online dating but also the possible commodities and behaviors of its players. Parot’s pieces, riddled with allusions to whiskey and nights spent bar hopping, may exclude other possible romantic interactions, taking on the it-is-what-it-is approach to online dating.

Undercut with Parot’s own profile is a more poetic, if not romantic piece, “Self-Portrait, Infrared.” Here, Parot charts minute lists of personal likes on black triangular canvas:  “six pack of Diet Coke and a bottle of Jack,” “tacos after midnight,” “late night bike rides.” Although mostly common and unrevealing, the confessions point to a desire for a romantic connection regardless of the flawed medium. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Through June 12 at Western Exhibitions, 119 North Peoria.

Jowhara AlSaud

RECOMMENDED

For its traditional summer genre show that features contemporary developments in time-honored photographic forms, the gallery has brought together four gifted portraitists, each of whom proceeds along a different path and projects a distinctive sensibility. Ursula Sokolowska’s color scenario studies of distressed people in decrepit environments exude an ominous sense of bitter oppression; Jess Dugan’s black-and-white environmental portraits—presented as triptychs—are warm and relaxed without being smarmy; and Jennifer Greenburg’s color images documenting the diehard devotees of the 1950s rockabilly lifestyle are consummated without a trace of ironic superiority or a hint of a sneer. The bold experimentalist in the show is Saudi Arabian photo-artist Jowhara AlSaud, who takes snapshots of friends and family and then etches out the negatives to create dynamic minimalist photo-cartoons that pack a powerful emotional punch just by virtue of their absence of detail. Having eliminated their facial features, but leaving their hair and the patterns on their blouses intact, AlSaud captures the vibrancy of three women pressed against each other in convivial friendship. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 3 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

"Land of Cockaigne," 2010, oil on canvas

RECOMMENDED

Robert Barnes played chess with Duchamp, worked with Matta and has a pancake recipe from Max Ernst. With these anecdotes Barnes fed my sense of wonder while I was a student of his, in 1973-74, at Indiana University, Bloomington. A generous and excellent teacher, his painting-class conversations were like his paintings, brimming with allusions, ideas and references all in constant movement. Drama and myth, or more specifically the interpenetration of drama and myth with everyday life, supply the content for a current exhibition titled “Paradise,” with five large works (approximately sixty-inches square) and several smaller paintings.

Abundance is a fitting subject for Barnes, who responds to an era characterized by an increasingly dystopian vision of scarcity, by depicting several versions of paradise. In “Land of Cockaigne,” where an everlasting banquet pours toward the viewer, a man with a collar and crown of leaves and fruit munches on a chicken leg while a pig wanders through another corner of the canvas. “Mag Mell,” “Eden,” “Avelon” and “Opium” make up the set; each one crowded with its own storied plentitude of incidents, settings, nourishment and objects. Read the rest of this entry »