Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.

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Lilli Carré’s exhibition of new prints at Spudnik Press contains mysterious symbols, fractured forms and cautionary tales. This small, informal show of works that Carré completed as an artist-in-residence at Spudnik includes several intricate screen prints and two handmade books. Carré is best known for her graphic novels and illustrations, but this series of prints is her first foray into traditional printmaking.

In her prints, Carré layers flat translucent colors to create the ghostly figures that float through her narratives. In the simple accordion-fold book, “Dreams,” a man imagines a naked woman appearing next to him on the train. Her red hips lean against his blue coat making a rich purple color where the two overlap. In the handmade book, “Don’t Drink from the Sea,” Carré depicts a hot summer evening in the city where people sweat so much it forms a pond and pale green figures swim through deep blue water. In both works, Carré uses the ability to adjust the transparency of the ink to tell a story about the fragility of the human form. Read the rest of this entry »

“If I’m satisfied, there’s something wrong,” says Diego Leclery, reflecting on an art practice focused on his own self-identity and how to express, subvert, denigrate or indulge it.

For his solo exhibition titled “The Natural,” now on view at Julius Caesar, Leclery hand-delivered postcards to advertise the show, allowing him to fully relish each recipient’s reaction as they caught their first glimpse of a fully frontally nude Leclery amidst a lush Brazilian rainforest. The most salacious piece in the exhibition, however, is “You Watching Me Watching Congo,” an unedited documentation of Leclery watching the film “Congo” as he reclines feyly akimbo on an overstuffed couch. It is a gender-ambiguous restaging of the reclining nude genre. Read the rest of this entry »

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It was by good fortune that I made a pilgrimage to the Farnsworth House, Mies van der Rohe’s disciplined and graceful glass and steel dwelling on the Fox River, the day before I saw Renate Wolff’s new wall painting, “Skies in Between,” at Devening Projects and Editions. Wolff has produced a cool and stunning non-objective composition in a long narrow room. Asymmetrical balance, preternatural attention to detail, preoccupation with the problems of space and an extremely limited palate echo the restraint of the international school associated with Mies and his Bauhaus colleagues. Mondrian, Itten (interaction of color is key in Wolff’s painting) and El Lissitzky (although there are no diagonals anywhere) might be Wolff’s other godfathers. She is likewise in conversation with colleagues working on a contemporary reopening of the investigations of early and mid-twentieth century Modernist abstraction and reappraisals of the dictums of its cadre of famous interpreters. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc PoKempner

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Were evidence required to prove that Chicago is the hands-down Home of the Blues, even the most hardened skeptic will become a believer by taking in the scores of black-and-white and color photos shot by ten homegrown practitioners in this overflowing show. Every aspect of the urban blues is on display—portraits of the greats, dynamic performance shots, venue and backstage scenes, and studies of the culture surrounding and enveloping the music. Although the blues filters life in all its attitudes through its earthy prism, the pathos behind its sensibilities is captured in veteran blues photographer Marc PoKempner’s piercing black-and-white study of the worn and weathered hand of a man extended across the top of a bar towards a crumpled and torn five dollar bill. Keep this image and the feelings that it evokes in mind at Blues Fest. Willie Dixon once said, “You can’t have the blues if you can sing the blues.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 30 at the Chicago Photography Collective, 29 E. Madison

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Twenty-five years ago, Tom Parish began visiting Venice, Italy for one month a year, took photographs, and returned to Detroit to realize his painterly vision of the ancient city. Back in 1933, the year Parish was born, Chicago galleries were a likely place to find paintings on the subject of Venice and its Old World culture and romance. But don’t expect to see reflections of gondolas and magnificent palazzi shimmering on the sun-drenched lagoon, like Monet’s “Palazzo Dario” on view at the Art Institute. There still is plenty of atmosphere in Parish’s work, but it’s more like the gritty ambience of a modern Euro-crime television drama. It’s all a bit off-kilter, because with everything sinking, there’s no longer any such thing as a true, vertical line in Venetian architecture. As these paintings are so large (six-by-eight feet) and the space so deep, a viewer is immersed in the sometimes dark, always crumbling illusive and watery world, rather than kept at a dry and comfortable distance. Happily, the second floor of Gruen Galleries is just the right space to see a dozen of these large paintings, which become like windows looking down on the canals. You can feel the dampness and almost smell the gasoline fumes from the outboard motors. Sorry, no gondolas, and no people either, since this is a very private, personal vision that follows the program of surrealist cityscapes that Parish was painting back in 1980. You won’t find the civic pride of Gentile Bellini, the architectural vistas of Canaletto, the teeming urban life of Guardi, the spacious, romantic drama of JMW Turner, or the social vignettes of Singer Sargent, but what you will find is a sharp sense of time and place, and a very useful metaphor for growing old and lonely with dignity and grace. (Chris Miller)

Through July 2 at Gruen Galleries, 226 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Two decades ago, when Alice Hargrave exhibited her black-and-white photography at the Cultural Center, she was consumed by a deep and unsparing gothic sensibility of ominous distress. Still fascinated by the “sublime decay and disintegration that occurs over time,” Hargrave now shoots in color and has plunged into the unforgiving tunnel of nostalgia, producing medium-format studies of depopulated landscapes depicting places where her family lived, and miniatures of worn images from family albums that she has re-photographed. In both series, Hargrave’s subjects are forbidding and inaccessible—faded and faint in the miniatures, and shadowed in the landscapes of dark woods that we are reluctant to explore. Standing alone as the only larger close-up, Hargrave’s impression of a blackened stack of books lying on a table, backgrounded by a softly focused white fog blanketing the forest beyond a window, encapsulates her sensibility—the past will irrevocably remain opaque to us, we can’t go home again, and it is all so somber. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 18 at Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 N. Ravenswood

Catherine Forster, "They call me theirs," multimedia installation

While it’s busy giving celebrities and sycophants outlets like Twitter to share banalities, new media does have uses that do actually benefit civilization. Since 2005, Upgrade! Chicago has been part of an international network of individual groups that marry artistic inspiration with cutting-edge technology. The group consists of active members in the Chicago contemporary art community as well as scientists, tech wizards and more. “What we want is to create a dynamic space to stimulate our artistic community,” says Sara Schnadt, “and have artists collaborate with people from different disciplines, blurring lines and distinctions, which is something that new media art is doing frequently. Schnadt and other participants in Upgrade! Chicago meet the second Tuesday of every month to showcase work and create different exchanges through new media art. “There’s a close affinity to the open-source movement that Wikipedia and Flickr come out of,” Schnadt says of Upgrade! The project is inclusive by nature and predicated on the collectivity of art as opposed to the collection of art. The June Upgrade! will feature a presentation and discussion of the work of Catherine Forster. Forster, curator of Live Box gallery, formerly worked in microbiology, which informs her work as an artist. “We’re looking forward to seeing her perspective of art from this really broad vantage point that she has,” says Schnadt. The next Upgrade! Chicago meets on June 8, 7pm, at The Nightingale, 1084 North Milwaukee, and is free. (Andrew Rhoades)

It’s a gallery! It’s a performance space! It’s a bookstore! It’s a café! The revived Green Lantern Gallery, temporarily housed at Chicago and Maplewood in Ukrainian Village, permanent location TBD, is aiming to be Chicago’s answer to Gertrude Stein’s living room. It’s an expanded vision of the original Green Lantern Gallery, which director Caroline Picard once ran out of her apartment. When the city shut it down due to an ordinance against such ventures, it left Picard with a choice: go big or go home (no pun intended). She’s going big. The new dream is a joint collaboration with featherproof books, another independent press interested in books that cross the boundaries between visual art and literature. “It’s like a high-school mega crush,” featherproof’s Zach Dodson says of the relationship between the presses. Picard recounts their fateful meeting at the NEXT art fair as a “marathon… of gossip and story-swapping and big-bang idea speculation.”

Under the umbrella of Lantern Projects, the space will feature a bookstore/café/bar up front, a performance space downstairs, an art gallery upstairs. Four year-long artists-in-residence (but don’t worry, City Hall—they won’t literally reside there!) will double as baristas, while the folks at Green Lantern and featherproof will toil away in their attached shared office space. The goal is interdisciplinary dialogue and artistic community. “We hope to break open current systems in order to supply alternative dynamisms: messy, vibrant and innovative collaborations between artists, audiences, mediums and ideas,” Picard says. The temporary headquarters opens up today, June 1, but “it won’t be the end-all-be-all” space of her vision just yet. For Picard, it’s “one step at a time, I say.” (Rachel Sugar)