Sarah Hadley, "My sister's dresser"

RECOMMENDED

In a tour-de-force of color photographic aesthetics, Sarah Hadley ranges from muted and finely blurred pictorialism, through standard realism in varied light, to sharp graphic precision in her quest to reveal the significance and quiet beauty of the most humble and familiar things. By diversifying her styles of presentation, Hadley insures that we are aware that the way in which we see the world determines our response to it. It is, indeed delightful to contemplate Hadley’s soft and nuanced image depicting a vase in her spattered sink, so reminiscent of a delicate impressionist painting. It is indisputably energizing to behold her bold representation of a blazing campfire at Indian Lake, Ohio. The most telling image in the exhibit is a straight-on still-life—after Vermeer—of a decaying pocked Golden Delicious apple appearing from the shadows on her sister’s dresser. All of Hadley’s photographs stir memories; the ones taken with an unprepossessing approach bring us back directly to what we felt when we glimpsed what she has seen fit to show us again. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 3 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

Patty Carroll

RECOMMENDED

The eighteen veteran Chicago photographers here offer up sixty-two color and black-and-white images that comprise a visual smorgasbord of all things culinary—the comestibles themselves, the cooks who prepare them, the places where they are served and the people who consume them. The joy of the show is to see how the contributors project their own distinctive styles into their images, compelling the realization that our response to the shots is less dependent on what they depict than on how it is represented. Nearly a quarter of the show is justly devoted to Chicago’s queen of pop photography, Patty Carroll, who spent the year of 1989 taking straight-on color photos of the facades and signage of our sweet home’s inimitable hot-dog stands, which, under her lively gaze, body forth boldly as urban folk art. Carroll is as sophisticated as they come, yet there is not a hint of campy or kitschy condescension in her sensibility; squarely in the Chicago tradition, she knows all the tricks, but she has a golden democratic heart. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 28 at the Chicago Photography Collective, 29 East Madison

By Jason Foumberg

New York City often lures Chicago’s career-minded artists, and Los Angeles welcomes the weather-beaten, but this week it was announced that two Chicago art scenesters are leaving us for cities with smaller art populations and equally dreadful weather, so goodbye to Dominic Molon and Derek Erdman, thank you, we’ll miss you, come back soon.

Dominic Molon, photo by Walead Beshty

Sympathy for the Curator

Museum of Contemporary Art curator Dominic Molon announced via Facebook that he scored a job as chief curator at St. Louis’ Contemporary Art Museum. Although the MCA’s chief curator position has been vacant since last August when Elizabeth Smith resigned, the museum’s new director Madeleine Grynsztejn filled that spot with Michael Darling, formerly of the Seattle Art Museum. Three weeks after Darling arrived at the MCA in mid-July, Molon announced his departure. Is director Grynsztejn cleaning house, or is Chicago’s glass ceiling all fogged up from the mouths of the upwardly mobile? Read the rest of this entry »

"American Goldfinches," 2008. Courtesy of Klompching Gallery, New York

RECOMMENDED

Is there such an animal as a postmodern bird watcher? Paula McCartney demonstrates that even that is possible in her deep, rich and muted color photographs of various and sundry feathered friends taken at a distance at which they merge into the dense woods that encompass them. “Idyllic” is what McCartney calls her images and we are ready to agree until we find out that the assorted avian creatures are kitschy models that she picked up at craft stores and deployed in her scenes. No problem; McCartney can fool even the most discerning fancier of fowl. For those who are hip to the program, her shots will evoke the smile of absurdity. What else is possible when we peer at a sensuous orange thrush nestled on a branch of a denuded tree in autumn, strive mightily and fruitlessly to admire it, and then remember that it is simply a simulation? (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 26 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan.

"Growing Pains I, Brighton, UK," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Starting on Flickr as a rank amateur and garnering a million hits in a year, Miss Aniela has glided into the gallery world with her color photographic self-portraits that are redolent with seduction. Projecting herself as her own kind of playmate, Miss Aniela puts on sportive and wry performances laden with hooks that would prick even the most repressed puritanical gentleman. There she kneels in waiting in a black bikini, on a mousy carpet in a blasted rubble-filled bathroom, surrounded by moldy picture magazines, with her expression fixed in the dare: “Take me if you can.” At the top of the image she has placed the text: “The Sea Serpent gracefully holding his tail Led off the first dance with the lovely Miss Whale And Mr. Sea Lion a gallant young spark Requested the pleasure of dainty Miss Shark.” Playboy magazine, not. Arousing for certain male eyes, you bet. Miss Aniela will be taken, but only on her terms; call it post-feminism gone over the top. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 4 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 West Superior.

By Emma Ramsay

It seemed like nothing more than a way for a couple of unemployed college students, living at home in the suburbs, to kill a few summertime hours. For the longest time this was the truth.

Vivek, my friend and collaborator, assured me that we could reconstruct Robert Smithson’s cornerstone of land art, “Spiral Jetty,” in a single day, in the forest preserve of DuPage County. I was skeptical. Smithson’s monument to nature, completed forty years ago on the coast of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, is a 1,500-foot long, fifteen-foot wide coiling mass of mud, precipitated salt crystals and black basalt rock. It reportedly took Smithson and his crew six days to construct, and was financed for nearly $9,000. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Jason Pickleman discovered dozens of psychedelic silkscreen prints from the sixties and seventies tucked away in flat files he purchased two years ago from a now-defunct art gallery. “Corporate Psychedelia” marks the first time his collection has been displayed in its entirety.

The prints are psychedelic in the strictest sense of the word, with unnatural color schemes and geometric yet strangely evocative forms. These works do not offer conventional portrayals of anything in particular. Like true psychedelic art, they attempt to transcend the mundane. They show what is not there as opposed to what is.

Though thoughtfully crafted, the pieces are compelling neither individually nor as a group. From either perspective, the shocking nature of psychedelia is lost; garish hues and abstract images become expected, like slight variations of the same image. However, the collection cannot be written off entirely—the intriguing, ambiguous nature of its provenance compensates for its banality. Read the rest of this entry »

Caught In The Devils Vice, 1988

RECOMMENDED

We can be absolutely certain that Reverend Howard Finster hailed from parts unknown, even if those parts resemble rural southern U.S.A. The mystery surrounding him expands with each piece of art, signed “Howard Finster from God” or “Howard Finster Man of Visions” or “Howard Finster World’s Minister Of Folk Art Church Inc,” among other outlandish and intriguing things. He might come from a charming tourist attraction he displays intimate knowledge of with “Jeff and Jane Camp on Planet U Run.” The chaotic and over-populated landscape resembles Finster’s own alien homestead in Summerville, Georgia, which bursts with handmade buildings and sculptures onto which are affixed paintings, wood carvings, wood burnings and artifacts ranging widely from the buttons of a pea coat to melted cathode-ray tubes. The spectacle of accumulation is as powerful as the sheer otherness of Finster’s vision, which exists solely to transmit the word of God as Finster hears and sees it, and is frequented by a cast of characters such as Presidents Washington and Eisenhower, Henry Ford, Coca-Cola, Satan and, of course, Elvis Presley. Read the rest of this entry »

Jian Yiming, "Pop Star," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Among the five emerging photographers that gallerist Martha Schneider has brought together in her never-ending quest for fresh talent, Chinese color portraitist Jiang Yiming takes the palm for his series depicting kindergarteners posing as who they want to be when they grow up. Shot against a traditional Chinese watercolor painting of a soft autumn landscape, Yiming’s subjects pop out in brightly sharp-edged graphic relief, each one of them in full professional dress and all of them evincing intense seriousness about their performances. A little sailor boy stands at stoical attention, cradling a toy rifle in his arms; a budding young artist holding a brush and a smeared palette, and decked out in a paint-spattered shirt and jeans stares at the camera earnestly; a prospective musician in tie and tails, with his eyes shut, has fallen into a pained trance as he strokes a violin; and a little girl in a shiny red jacket vogues with determined insouciance. Little do they know what lies ahead. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 11 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

Sara Kopera, "Some Days Are Blue," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Of the five young photographers and photo-artists featured at this annual exhibition, Sara Kopera transcends beginner status with her multi-hued, subtly textured, softly focused and muted study, “Beyond Realization,” in which two ambiguous figures occupy the extreme left center within a horizontal gap in a worn and weathered stone façade that runs across the picture plane. Much as we attempt to discern the figures, which appear alternately to be merged into the statue of a man sitting with his back towards us, and objects broken into fragments, we cannot pin down what they represent, which is how Kopera intends to affect us. If Kopera is fascinated by the enigmas of spatial perception, Shana Gordon is drawn to the pathos of time in a critique of progress; her color images capture contemporary places into which she has introduced her hand holding black-and-white photographs of what the sites looked like back in the day. For those attracted to lighter fare, Jen Clar serves up nocturnal color shots of glowing brassieres flying over telephone wires. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 9 at the DePaul University Art Museum, 2350 North Kenmore