Jenny Priego

By Bert Stabler

New media artist and University of California-San Diego faculty member Ricardo Dominguez was threatened with revocation of tenure this past spring over protests made by three Republican congressmen against state funding of his projects to create cell phones that could lead migrants to fresh-water stations in the desert, and another to initiate a “denial of service” virtual sit-in against college fee hikes on the UC president’s home page. Dominguez’ institutional censure is hardly up to the level of hardship endured every day by thousands of illegal immigrants, especially since such notoriety can hardly hurt his art career. But it makes the point that there are real stakes, and a real audience, in the new culture wars around socially engaged art, as well as in the much larger propaganda battle over immigration.

The reason Dominguez’ work attracted animosity was because it initially caught the attention of major media outlets, including CNN, owing at least in part to his ideas. The quality (and thus the power) of aesthetic works that take on important issues is… important. The effect of a clear, strong statement is immediate in the video interview that Chicago artist Miguel Cortez shot with his parents; it simply presents his father’s memories of the brutality he repeatedly experienced in his younger days at the hands of border police, when he wasn’t given passage to come work in almost equally brutal conditions. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Lazarus likens his latest project to marriage. “There’s compulsion, but it’s not easy,” he quips. At the time of our conversation, he is hard at work organizing a fifty-vehicle memorial procession to be held on June 25, the one year anniversary of Michael Jackson’s passing. It will begin at the pop icon’s childhood home in Gary, Indiana, and continue to downtown Chicago. The vehicles, bearing silk-screened orange flags, will blast a retrospective playlist from a pirate radio station rigged by Lazarus. Participants are asked to document their experiences through photography and video to contribute to a “repository of documentation.”

“I’m interested in the complexity of trying to mourn somebody who had a complex life,” Lazarus elaborates. This occasion marks the first time that the photographer has worked on such a large scale. His plans are grand by most standards, even his own. He concedes, “I envision fifty cars, but I don’t know what count we’re on.” As with any other project of this magnitude, there are issues that need to be resolved, some more pressing than others. There are the logistical issues, like route planning and accommodating a growing “small critical mass of energy,” including last-minute participants and those without transportation. Additionally, the pirate radio station isn’t working well enough just yet. He hopes his back-up plan, burning the playlist to CDs for each car, does work. For a while, his car battery was dead, jeopardizing his own participation in the event. Fortunately, he managed to find one within thirteen minutes of pleading on his Facebook page. He hopes the replacement is functional. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

With passionate devotion and dauntless dedication, Jerry Pritikin installed himself in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the early 1970s and stayed there through the decade, recording the buoyant springtime of the gay movement and all its vicissitudes in black-and-white and color photographs. Deploying a photojournalistic approach, Pritikin went where the action was and captured the vibrant and boisterous spirit of the times, so different from today’s edgy temperament. Lest we forget what any group of suppressed people feels when it liberates itself from whichever closet, Pritikin offers up a shot in which two buxom ladies—one of them in a shift emblazoned with the injunction to “Support Lesbian Mothers”—hold aloft a large banner reading “Dykes and Faggots Anarchists!” The gents are not to be outdone; we see two men in a gentle embrace, one of them wearing a t-shirt embossed with the declaration: “Commie Jew Faggot and Proud.” Then AIDS, mainstreaming and the social conservative backlash set in, and the pride of defiant vitality gave way to patience and prudence. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 13 at the Gage Gallery, Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Ave.

Shawn Stucky, “When You’ve Forgotten How to Love"

RECOMMENDED

I met Deadline Projects Art Collective founding member Holly Sabin in her recently remodeled Pilsen gallery space. We sat on the only piece of furniture there, a rose-colored Victorian-esque couch. “I’ve got a lot to do before this weekend,” she said, looking around the mostly empty room, which would soon be filled with art and artists for a show she curated. Titled “Art Party,” the show is intentionally themeless.

“It’s really about bringing friends together, to connect talented people I know with enjoyers and purchasers,” Sabin said. “Art Party” features the work of seven local artists of various mediums, among them Ryan Shultz, who is currently competing on the Bravo network’s “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.” Shultz’s oil paintings expose the fine line between pleasure and self-affliction. Also on display is the work of Kansas-native Shawn Stucky, including his mixed-media image, “When You’ve Forgotten How to Love,” whose muted colors are reminiscent of the gauzy and gray state of dreaming. The work of local notables Scott Ashley, Arielle Bielak, Gretel Garcia, Damien James and Sarah Perez is also on display. Read the rest of this entry »

Andy Resek

RECOMMENDED

It’s safe to say that Juggalos, the clown-makeup-wearing, Faygo-chugging misfit fans of Detroit-based rap metal groups Insane Clown Posse and Twiztid, are unlikely subjects for most artists, but not Andy Resek and Johanna Wawro.

“My Funhouse,” an audio-visual exploration of Juggalo subculture, is situated in a modest storefront gallery. Wawro’s snapshots of teenagers decked out like their heroes adorn bright purple walls. Empty cans of Faygo frame the windows. A big-screen television loops disorienting footage from a recent Twiztid gig, which Resek captured entirely on a Flip camera. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Lentz, "Sts. Sergius & Bacchus"

RECOMMENDED

Gay Christians have long had a problem with their church—but not always—as proposed by this exhibition of contemporary Byzantine style icons by Br. Robert Lentz OFM and two of his former students, Lewis Williams SFO and Father William Hart McNichols. Many of the early saints have been venerated as couples for over a thousand years, and there is some evidence that one couple, the martyred Roman officers Sergius and Bacchus, had been joined by the early church in a kind of same-sex union. As with all ancient texts, widely diverse interpretations are possible, but if you want to believe that pre-Medieval Christianity tolerated or even sanctified same-sex union, this is the place to meditate upon more than a dozen highly crafted icons. The overall effect is breathtaking—maybe even stifling—since the pieces seem to have been perfected with obsessive intensity that shares the fervor, if not the otherworldliness, of the school of Photios Kontoglou on Mt. Athos where Brother Lentz once studied. There is such a strong, inward-pulling focus on the expressive eyes, there sometimes seems to be a greater emphasis on self than on the Ad majorem Dei gloriam. Read the rest of this entry »

Wes Carson, “201004240121”

RECOMMENDED

Ending up somewhere in a liquid world of surreal fantasy tinged with New Age, Wes Carson gets there by putting his willowy model through various paces, shooting her in the act of performing so that the resulting photo will be blurred, and then printing the image digitally in blue tones to make it look like a nineteenth-century cyanotype. Although we can discern her features—and then barely—in only one image, Carson’s subject is clearly a lithe and tough beauty who can stand up to any assignment, such as appearing to take off into the misty sky like a Greek goddess turned angel. What saves Carson from hackneyed sentimentality is the woman, whose strength dominates his images; etherealized as he mightily strives to make her, she will never morph into a water nymph radiating the incredible lightness of being or a foamy sprite. The model rises to her ultimate level of power when she appears emerging from an arch formed by two enormous wrench-like hands sprouting from the earth; her black garment and legs attenuated to shreds, she casts a ghostly overmastering presence. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 17 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

Floating World Gallery on North Halsted features Japanese artworks, but at the end of this week, on June 25, it will trade woodblock prints for paintings, songs and short films in an exhibition entitled “What Bright Thread,” Snow City Arts’ (SCA) annual gallery night.  A Chicago-based nonprofit which provides chronically ill children with opportunities to learn creative arts, SCA will showcase a select number of pieces by participants in its various programs from the past year. Executive Director Paul Sznewajs explains that the tradition, now in its twelfth year, not only allows children to take pride in their abilities but to expose their creations to the outside world. “It allows others to participate,” he adds. The collection changes each year, but this year promises to be exceptional for one reason in particular. In addition to traditional visual mediums, there will be an even greater emphasis on multimedia projects than before, the latter constituting a separate room in the gallery. The theme of the event itself was inspired by the poetry of a teenage patient. Regardless of the works themselves, Sznewajs stresses that people need to recognize “that all children need to create and to learn.” (Emma Ramsay)

Aaron Curry, "Bones (Standing)," 2009. Private Collection, London.

By Jason Foumberg

Sometimes an artist is referred to as an “artist’s artist”; that is, they don’t have public name recognition, yet are respected by other artists and makers. Think Forrest Bess or Joseph Yoakum. Like trade secrets, their images are passed around in studios, their names invoked with reverence. Alexander Calder (1898-1976) was never an artist’s artist, but the Museum of Contemporary Art’s newly opened exhibition, “Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy,” aims to reposition him as such.

Calder is a corporate darling, as his instantly iconic steel constructions are plopped in plazas of almost every major city. At the MCA, they tell me he’s the most requested artist by the visiting public. He’s been on constant display there, in a corner gallery on a stairwell landing, at least since 2007. But Calder is so ubiquitous that he’s become invisible in the art world, so populist that he’s ignored by artists. Can you remember the last time that you paused to look at the Calder sculptures in that stairwell gallery?

The current show is a refreshing re-hanging of Calder’s sculptures, but not an altogether convincing statement on his legacy as beacon of contemporary art. There are over fifty of Calder’s mobiles and stabiles in one large gallery. The metal sculptures are strikingly ethereal. These are not the hulking chunks of steel that one expects from his outdoor pieces. Fish and cats float among abstract leaf and snowflake shapes, connected by thin arcs of wire. The adjectives ‘playful’ and ‘whimsical’ are often applied to these sculptures, but I also saw much elegance and formal refinement, even prettiness. I was instantly moved to sketch these sculptures, and I urge any visitor to do the same to best sense Calder’s acuity for shape. Read the rest of this entry »

“Can we hang the painting this way?” asked an interior designer, holding up a washy abstract canvas over an antique side table. The painting is by Deborah Boardman, and the answer was no, even though it would have fit better horizontally, but sideways, in that corner of the living room. Peter Fagundo, whose collection of paintings is being used in the staging of a restored landmark mansion in Evanston, made the call. “It’s not one of mine,” he said, although plenty of his own works, a decade’s worth of paintings, grace the home’s walls and halls.

The funny exchange between designer and artist highlights the typical way that many interior designers and homeowners use art—as one design element among many, like a carefully placed basket of potpourri. Janet Kohl and Peter Fagundo purchased the Evanston home twelve years ago with the goal to restore it, and this week’s celebration, with tours and workshops, marks the culmination of a massive home-renovation project. For one of Janet’s previous restorations, HGTV caught her on film belittling the use of framed Monet prints as a design tool. For this project, with the help of Peter’s art collection, the goal is to challenge one’s assumptions of how we incorporate art into our lives. Read the rest of this entry »