Joseph Yoakum, "Pleasure and Club House on Lake Placid near Sebring Florida on Indian Prairie Canal," 1964, ink and colored pencil on paper

By Jason Foumberg

In the 1990s, a huge range of contemporary art was categorized into some simple themes. There was a quick consensus that “the body” and “identity,” “memory” and “home” defined the queries and struggles of our contemporary era, as if the big world was so complex—and overburdened by art theory—that we needed to recompose ourselves using these basic building blocks of human life. These efforts at categorization promoted some excellent art works. In the “home” or “place” thematic category, Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House” and Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus ur” (1985-2003, in various iterations) defined a new genre of residential manipulation, with roots stretching back to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1974 “Splitting” of a suburban home right in half, although Whiteread’s and Schneider’s large-scale installations were more of an effort to reconstruct the single-family home rather than destroy it.

The symbolism of the single-family home is resurging amid the American real estate bust, and a particular derivation is on view today in Chicago galleries. Where Whiteread and Schneider (and a host of others, including Do Ho Suh) investigated the site-specific qualities of “home,” the houses of today are generic and reduced to icons in the style drawn by children: a square with a triangle roof. As symbols, these houses are reductions to a universal essence of “home”; they speak about the safety of familiar objects, the comfort of domestic rituals and the fantasy of contained happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Edra Soto, "In Memory Of Our Sentiment (mausoleum)"

RECOMMENDED

The Christian church has always been associated with the body—primarily, of course, the crucified body of Jesus. The Eucharist is the ritual of symbolically ingesting the divine flesh and blood, and the Apostle Paul speaks in his letters of the community of believers as Christ’s body. The founding of the Church in the book of Acts features more bodies, in the graphic deaths of Judas the traitor and the early martyrs Stephen and James.

In Edra Soto’s new exhibition and installation, “Homily,” she turns the gallery into a sanctuary, a sepulcher and, inevitably, a living body, as colorful exuberance struggles against a weary patina of gentle decay. Objects of contemplation are offered by a group of paintings, in which domesticity is abstracted into gemlike miniatures of prismatic gradients, embossed foil, bubbles and shining beacons, spinning dreamlike icons out of familiar images. Twining human bodies made of spiderwebs, a face made of rope, a rumpled-blanket landscape, a purple tree encircled by cavorting clones of Soto’s Benji-esque dog, and a grinning blue-faced shaman wearing said dog as a mantle, all bring to mind an eerie painted illustration of paradise in a Seventh-Day Adventist pamphlet, mixed with the cosmic pagan creepiness of an animal sacrifice in a forest preserve. Read the rest of this entry »

Kehinde Wiley has had twenty-six solo shows in museums and galleries since 2003, and his work is in the permanent collections of sixteen American art museums, including those in Milwaukee, Brooklyn, Denver, Minneapolis and Detroit. Obviously there has been a strong upscale market, both critical and commercial, in the opening years of the twenty-first century for dandified depictions of healthy young men of color, beginning with African-American, and now expanding into sensitive young dudes from Asia. And yet, art critics still continue to discuss whether Wiley can actually paint. Like Louis Comfort Tiffany, he seems to be less an artist and more a manufacturer of high-end luxury goods, with workshops in New York and China, and twenty assistants employed to paint around his digitally manipulated source material.

As Roberta Smith in the New York Times wrote in 2008, his earlier paintings “usually felt dead and mechanical, despite having been painstakingly handmade; their compositions were often fussy and unstable,” while in his more recent work “he is beginning to paint skin in ways you can’t stop looking at….the compositions are consistently calmer, and the spatial play between the figures and their backgrounds is more tightly controlled.” David Greenberg, in Art in America, judged that “Wiley is most successful when depicting in oil the vibrant contemporary street wear of his models with a painstaking skill that borders on the fetishistic.” And perhaps, compared with what passes as figure painting in summer art fairs, these judgments are reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There’s nothing like a good word play to pique my interest in…well…just about anything. Stephanie Nadeau’s exhibition, “Is it Farther or Further?” is no exception. Add in the promise of a “data-powered music box driven by the winds of Antarctica” and I am sold. I mean, who can resist that?

The show’s stated exploration—the human need for solidarity amidst shrinking topography—relies heavily on landscapes drawn, photographed and digitally monitored. Drugstore-quality prints of autumn debris ranging from single sticks to heaps of dead foliage depict isolation losing out to unity. The tension between part and whole underlies a number of Nadeau’s works; sovereignty is met with skepticism.

Travel as a means of isolation is compromised by technology, as exemplified by a centrally placed iPhone on a pedestal. Rotating downloaded images of groups and teams in moments of camaraderie, the device underscores the lost possibility of solitude in mobility. Hence the show’s questioning and ultimate dismissal of “farther,” or distance, in favor of “further,” or degree. Physical distance has been irrevocably diminished, leaving only metaphoric separation in its wake.

The technical skill of the show’s few drawings elevates them to anchor status. Negative space unites the drawings and showcases the artist’s personal confrontation with vastness. In one piece, two open mouths—one a bear and the other human—are isolated against an expanse of white paper. Without environmental context, the metaphoric separation between man and beast seemingly dissipates.

Ultimately, the show doesn’t convince whether human solidarity is something to be sought or fought. I’m inclined, however, to consider such unity in terms of the “data-powered music box driven by the winds of Antarctica,” which succeeds in theory alone. (Justin Natale)

Through October 31 at Experimental Sound Studio, 5925 North Ravenswood

David Burdeny, "River Nile, Cairo Egypt," c-print

RECOMMENDED

The allure of unplanned urban form is everything to photographer David Burdeny, who shoots clusters of buildings around the world in slightly muted color to emphasize the patterns that they disclose when they are considered together in a single display. Although Burdeny depicts compelling configurations when he snaps at middle distance or from above, his most arresting images are panoramic ribbons of skyline taken from afar that bisect expanses of water and sky, revealing in a frozen moment the energizing experience that we have when we approach the towers of a city’s center. Burdeny’s masterpiece is a shot taken on the Nile River in which most of Cairo’s skyline is bathed in mist and a cylindrical tower stands forth sharply etched like a sentinel, its reflection plunging into the vasty deep. Burdeny belongs to the tradition of straight photography that alerts us to the sights and sites that we overlook in our daily round, and that offer us delight when we are willing simply to look. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 West Superior

David Akiba, "Simple Distances #5" 1980

RECOMMENDED

Shooting scenario street portraits in a nameless city in black-and-white, David Akiba proceeds to put his prints through a photocopier and then photographs his reproductions, coming up with grainy images that emphasize alienation even when he—only once—captures an embrace. Most characteristic of Akiba’s approach is a diptych recording the same scene of a man walking through a corridor with a shadowy woman in front of him and a man standing behind him in a doorway; in the left panel, the woman resolves into a black silhouette, the walking man is reduced to a mottled decomposing cartoon figure, and the man in the doorway retains a recognizable presence; in the right panel, the woman has become a stain on the wall, the walker is silhouetted in black, and the standing man is a mottled cartoon figure about to fuse with the wall. For Akiba, the perspectives that we take on ourselves and the people around us vary, yet whether we are in high relief or about to disappear, we are always alone. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose

Jason C. Hawk; Salvatore "Sal" Dominguez; Lloyd Mandelbaum, and Eric Gushee. Amy Hilber, their fifth member, is not pictured.

By Jaime Calder

Earlier this summer, five twenty-something artists, frustrated with what they considered a lack of fresh work within the current art scene and looking to develop a new artistic community, packed up their apartments, picked up some nail guns, and moved themselves into a 4,150-square-foot warehouse in Logan Square and began to set up shop. With fewer than five months under its belt, Red Gate is out not only to make a name for itself—but for a whole new group of artists investing themselves in a new aesthetically minded, cooperative society.

“Three and a half years ago, I was feeling really kind of disillusioned with the way school was going,” says sculptor and painter Jason Hawk. “Everyone was very involved in their own little world. So what I started thinking was, ‘How I could build some sort of an active community in this really isolationist place?’” Hawk wasn’t alone. As he spent more and more of his nights (and wee morning hours) in the studios at the School of the Art Institute, he found that a few of these late-night workers shared in his feelings of disaffection. Read the rest of this entry »

"The World is Charged with the Glory of God (Hopkins)," 2010, oil on canvas

Like his friends and colleagues among The False Image and the Hairy Who, Philip Hanson appropriated the formal strategies and saturated colors of comic books, circus posters and signage, among other popular forms, during the sixties. While Imagists like Jim Nutt, Christina Ramberg and Karl Wirsum distorted the human figure to produce psychosexual images and psychosocial critiques, Hanson became interested in a landscape of words. He started with what he calls “aphoristic sequences” and then moved on to entire poems. His current exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey of fifty-nine oil paintings and drawings reference well-known works like Shakespeare’s sonnets and the short poems of Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Hanson creates vibrant pictorial space using the words of poems by transposing the formal qualities of language, like tone, color, rhythm and sound, into the elements of painting. It’s an exciting alchemical process combining analytical, symphonic and diagrammatic arrangements enriched by elaboration and improvisation. Hanson studied poetry at the University of Chicago and was impressed by the strategies of the New Criticism popular at the time, called “close reading,” which rigorously examined the interconnections between words and images in literature. Trips to Europe where he was impressed by the “grand sequences of rooms” of palaces and museums and the phantasmagorical work of Adolf Wolfli, who was institutionalized in a hospital for the insane, enriched Hanson’s spatial and formal vocabulary. Fortunately, the Imagists and Hanson were supported in the sixties and seventies by the NEA, foundations, the at-that-time-emergent MCA and galleries like Phyllis Kind, which began in Chicago and moved to New York. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

There is a formal elegance to Stephanie Syjuco’s installation at Gallery 400, despite the awkwardness of the objects on display. Each object was designed online by users of Google’s 3D modeling program, SketchUp, and then reproduced in the gallery by Syjuco using basic materials, such as cardboard and foam core, cut and taped together into geometric shapes. The gaps between the real and the virtual, between the designer and fabricator, add tension to this seemingly simple, visually appealing installation. Read the rest of this entry »

"Uh Oh," oil on found vintage photograph, 2010

RECOMMENDED

In a genial and nitty-gritty cascade of absurdist humor, Justin Henry Miller appropriates vintage family and individual black-and-white photographic portraits from times way gone by and then applies his paintbrush to render the subjects hilarious by endowing them with fanciful headgear or grotesque faces, like a father, whose head is an ominous skull, presiding over his wife and three little children. Nothing tops Miller’s photo-work, “Uh Oh,” in which a portly and deadly serious matron stands behind her husband, whose head has been replaced by a golden globe with cut-out eyes and a distressed and bewildered vacant mouth, and whose nose has been transmuted into a long pathetic drooping sausage. Somewhere between a P.T. Barnum freak show and a reflection on the emptiness of seriousness, Miller’s gallery of the ridiculous is poised to ignite the laughter that attends the recognition of the vanity and irony of all things temporal, or simply to bring us back to the days when we were in grade school and drew moustaches and eye glasses on pictures to while away the boredom. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 16 at Zg Gallery, 300 West Superior