RECOMMENDED

Known for his celebrity shots, which depict his subjects in sepia-toned prints that throw them back a century and exude a whiff of decadence and often exhaustion, Chicago-based Marc Hauser has worked for thirty-five years in many straight genres, including street photography, the archetypal portrait and the scenario portrait. In this broad sampling of forty-seven images, it becomes clear that each of Hauser’s ventures reinforces the others and that they all display a common sensibility of introspection combined with an array of emotions that unites the mean streets with the cloistered studio. Intermixed with the other images, the celebrity shots take their humble places, divested of hype. In the exhibit’s banner image, the odd couple of G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary stand next to each other with furrowed brows and tight lips, staring into the camera with stern and stony determination—the quintessence of tough guys. Hauser explains that he shot the deviant duo on their speaking tour, “State of the Mind, Mind of the State,” inside a closet at Park West. Hauser turns everything and everyone into the bad old Chicago style, including the prophet of LSD and President Nixon’s plumber. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 2 at Eyeporium Gallery, 1431 N. Milwaukee.

Mary Ann Lea (Dorr), "Davenport, Iowa," 1952

RECOMMENDED

In an ambitious and successful effort to encapsulate the achievements of the generation of students taught by Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind at Chicago’s fabled Institute of Design in the post-World War II period, curator Paul Berlanga has brought together sixty-eight black-and-white photographs by more than twenty artists that—when taken as a whole—do not so much convey the spirit of experimentation for which the I.D. was known as a film noir sensibility that is pervasive across the many genres and techniques the contributors deployed. The famous members of the last modernist generation, such as Barbara Crane, Joe Jachna, Ken Josephson and Ray Metzger are represented here; but the treats are images by neglected figures who have been rarely exhibited. Among them, Mary Ann Lea’s exquisite and moving abstractions are the treasures of the show; we see a cluster of four grain elevators, shot from below, reduced to massive black cylinders that frame a diamond-shaped patch of clear sky bordered on two sides by ladders attenuated to brocade. Ominous and elegant, “Davenport, Iowa,” which Lea shot in 1952, captures the deeper spirit of a time whose complexity of sensibility has been effaced by popular and official history. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 5 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior

RECOMMENDED

On the roof of the Art Institute’s Modern Wing, two jet engines lie naked under the sky.

For the installation “Untitled (Alliance),” British artist Roger Hiorns (born 1975) chose two Pratt and Whitney TF33 P9 turbofans and, with curator James Rondeau, placed them atop the Bluhm Family Terrace. Boeing provided major funding for the installation.

In the works for which Hiorns is better known, he’s been able to exercise complete authority over an environment or object, e.g., “Seizure” from 2008, wherein a London residence was filled with a chemical solution that precipitated blue crystal on every available surface. Here and now, rather than receiving an additional covering, the two jet engines have been mostly flayed of aluminum skin, their systems of control revealed.

Given the museum’s large collection of designed objects, the jet engines could bespeak the golden age of modern industrial design—but they don’t. Rather, on the terrace, the disintegrating engines confront the surrounding downtown architecture in an uncomfortable way: they are remainders of the horror when jet engines collide with buildings, and the ubiquitous corruption that results. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Can paintings that appear to be outdated examples of European landscape art possibly be considered “contemporary?” Apparently not, at least, to the curators who keep such things out of contemporary art museums. But what if they are made by an artist who emerged from the practice of abstract and conceptual art? Today, Gary Bowling is a successful landscape painter, but most of his paintings through graduate school were abstract, focusing on gesture, texture and the dynamics of color. When he became the art professor of a small Midwestern college, he produced projects like “Homage to the Hindenburg,” whose conceptual program was “to honor tragedy, and wonder how tragic events evolve into mythology.” The local newspaper, circa 1980, records that a large crowd, including the town fire marshal, gathered on campus  to see one of his art students, wearing a feathered war bonnet, fire a flaming arrow up into a hydrogen-filled contraption, deftly constructed from hundreds of sealed trash bags tied together with twine. The results may have been beautiful as well as thought provoking, but eventually Professor Bowling came to realize that much of what he found interesting required an element of not just surprise, but shock, and “I didn’t care much for that part of myself.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The minaret-shaped recesses, French doors, steam radiators and relief tiles in Roxaboxen don’t evoke for me the bookstore that was the space’s last occupant (since I never visited it), but more generally a strange Art Nouveau eclectic exoticism at the tail end of its postwar home-décor revival—the environment of my 1970s toddlerhood. Printmaker Miranda Stokes may not have the same associations, but since she lives in the adjoining living area, it seems as if the wedding-cake Orientalism of her surroundings has seeped into her subconscious as well.

Her show in the space features a long twenty-odd-foot scroll of collaged images and decorative motifs across from a number of small works in shadowbox frames; both walls use a number of techniques, from etching and block print to lithography and screenprinting, to create a curious theater of childhood memories and personal narratives. Sometimes echoing the indistinct fever dreams of Odilon Redon, the parlor tragedies of Felix Vallotton or the quaint vignettes of A.A. Milne’s illustrator Ernest H. Shepard, her scrawled drawings, blurred through intermediary processes, melt into the photographs she uses as source material, creating a sense of the magical possibility of handicraft so cruelly foreclosed by industrial modernity.

But there is an irony and violence that cuts the nostalgic treacle. At the end of the room, small, incomplete cartoon drawings reminiscent of David Shrigley cower meekly in the shadow of a comically bedraggled but thoroughly ferocious model of a polar bear’s head. Sporting mangled teeth and empty eye sockets, its presence hammers home the odd but distinct menace common to curio shops and deep memories. (Bert Stabler)

Through May 23 at Roxaboxen, 2130 W. 21st St.

Around the Coyote, the arts organization that once produced the very high profile community art show of the same name, has called it quits officially. Although it’s been struggling the last couple of years, a decade or more ago its annual festival was either a lightning rod for anti-gentifrication conspiracy theorists, or a galvanizing force in the daunting battle to keep artists around Wicker Park in the face of gentrification depending on your point of view. The last decade saw its transformation into a year-round nonprofit, but it was never able to fully establish a new, broader agenda with adequate financial resources.

Here’s the text of their announcement:

After two decades of working with Chicago’s vibrant emerging arts community, Around the Coyote is regrettably closing its doors and ceasing operations as of May 8, 2010.  The staff and board of directors would like to express their thanks to all of the artists, donors and collectors that supported the not-for-profit for so many years. Read the rest of this entry »

Olof Olsson, The Suburban's booth at NEXT. Photo by Paul Germanos.

By Jason Foumberg

This year I had a bit of a different perspective on the art fair. It was the first time that Newcity exhibited our Breakout Artists, and in addition to selecting the artists for the cover story, I installed their art in our booth, on the twelfth floor, in Art Chicago. During installation, gallerists scrambled to unpack crates, boxes littered the hallways as rock music spread over the speakers, carpenters and electricians with handcarts scuttled about the booths like bees in a hive. Some booths, reserved by galleries from farflung locales, remained volcano-delayed and empty until the zero hour when their crates finally arrived. Bulbs were screwed into place, sculptures dusted, the music turned off, and then there was an eerie calm. The gallerists sat down at their tables, applied lipstick, straightened ties, and waited. Although I’ve installed exhibitions before, it was a humbling experience to see hundreds of galleries prepare for a massive opening in tandem. I wanted them all to succeed.

For as much hope as the art fair stirs in me, it delivers an equal amount of dread. Though we were a show booth only, and not set up for sales, manning the booth recalled my days working at a commercial gallery, and by instinct I started flashing my waxy grin to stoic faces. And who were all those faces? Go to enough gallery openings in Chicago and you’ll recognize the same twenty people, but here were streams of strangers, all apparently interested in viewing contemporary art. Was this their annual art pilgrimage, like attending church on Christmas eve? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a tour de force of extreme transformation, Deanna Krueger appropriates diagnostic MRI films, rips them into shards, staples them together, and overlays them with monotypes to produce glistening abstractions in red, ice blue, gold, gray, brown and tea green. From a distance, Krueger’s photo-works are assertively attractive by virtue of their jagged textures and glass-like surfaces, but on closer inspection they reveal worlds teeming with detail that never betray any pattern or overall meaning, but involve the eye in the plays of line and form in each sector of the surface. Krueger drapes her works unprepossessingly on the gallery’s walls without frames—anything more would detract from their self-standing integrity. She titles them with references to astral bodies, flora and precious stones, but viewers are better off ignoring that new-age flourish and looking instead for the way that they open the doors of perception to exquisite psychedelic experience. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 3 at the Illinois Institute of Art Gallery, 180 N. Wabash

RECOMMENDED

Is there a contemporary Chinese photographer whose work is not worth a close look? Gao Lei continues with the unbroken string of cutting-edge images from China that have hit Chicago in the last five years while he breaks with the dominant postmodern trend, by going global in his choice of subjects and shooting documentary series in black-and-white. Lei traveled to the Gaza strip with neither a sentimental humanistic, a political, nor a photo-journalistic intent, but to explore the “harshness” of a place that curator Wu Hung explains represented for Lei “the purgatory of contemporary mankind.” Lei’s pellucid, finely tonally graded prints reveal that harshness when we see a row of masked fighters with their assault rifles; two men shot from behind leaning anxiously over a wall as a little girl faces the camera with grim bitterness in the foreground; and a mother sitting straight in a chair, her expression fixed in stony stoicism, as her wounded and bandaged son sits on the floor in front of her in sullen pain. Gao Lei is a documentary poet, transmitting a truth lying beneath the surface. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 19 at Walsh Gallery, 118 North Peoria

RECOMMENDED

Jennifer Cronin’s nude self-portraits are demure, with wet hair or strategically placed limbs covering other unmentionables. She sets herself against a backdrop of oftentimes Caravaggio-esque, dramatically lit domestic interiors. The bathroom, that most intimate and tight quartered room of the house, features prominently. A student of both art and psychology, and a suburbanite born and raised, Cronin appears as equally uncomfortable in the banal spaces she occupies as she is in her own bare skin. That tension manifests itself in figurative amalgamations, varying in form from the goofy glob to the haunting wispy vapour that accompany her as she squats on the toilet, soaks in the tub or scrutinizes her own reflection in a vanity mirror. The shape-shifting apparitions splinter the intimacy of the scenes, adding their own emotionally charged presence to the composition, sometimes with humor, as they ooze between Cronin’s finger tips, and sometimes as an eerily Hitchcockian stalker, when an outstretched paint stroke issuing from the shadows gropes toward her unsuspecting bare shoulder.

Director of the Elephant Room gallery Kimberly Atwood selected the name for the gallery from the idiomatic “elephant in the room,” hoping that the art on display in the spare but well-finished room would serve as that enormous non-sequitur in need of contemplation and confrontation—and in this suite of paintings, it does. (Thea Nichols)

Through June 12 at Elephant Room Art Gallery, 704 S. Wabash