RECOMMENDED

The government has seemingly been left holding the bag in the recent disintegration of the U.S. housing market, owing to its gratuitous propping up of the highly unregulated financial intermediaries to whom it completely turned over the sheltering of the populace, while architects, designers, planners and community organizers have struggled to craft solutions that could be remotely considered responsible, relevant and practical. But an upcoming conference plans to approach the crises in both the supply of and demand for affordable housing by avoiding undue reliance on either the neglectful inefficiency of public agencies or the high-tech futurist utopianism of private firms (c.f. Bruce Mau’s “Massive Change” wankathon at the MCA in 2006), in favor of new connections between poor communities and academic institutions. Learning from, advocating for and being accountable to low-income housing residents, and creating economically viable and ecologically sustainable plans and designs, will be central issues in the discussions at this three-day event. UIC architecture professor and City Design Center director Roberta Feldman told me, “Many of the case studies will illustrate the strategies designers have used to challenge conventional assumptions; that is, the process, not only the resulting designed project.” New models of ownership (Teddy Cruz), research and evaluation tools (Bryan Bell), an existing net-zero affordable housing project (Sergio Palleroni), direct family consultation (Casius Pealer) and reforming zoning and building codes (Michael Pyatok) will be topics at some noteworthy talks and panels. Guided tours of unique design endeavors in West Humboldt Park, Roseland, North Lawndale and Rogers Park will wrap the event up on Friday. (Bert Stabler)

Wednesday, September 22 through Friday, September 24 at 1040 West Harrison, University of Illinois at Chicago. For more info: architectureforchange.aa.uic.edu/pages/index.html

"Study of Nest," 1994/2010, RC print with acrylic paint and UV varnish

RECOMMENDED

In a celebration of the surrealist imagination centered on the relations between human beings and the denuded natural landscape, the indomitable photographic team of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison sets up scenarios and confects collages that feature improbable constructions and collections that are the frames of bizarre performances enacted by Robert. After they have shot their handiwork, the ParkeHarrisons proceed to apply paint and varnish subtly to their prints, endowing the resulting photo-works with a faded surface that renders their subjects slightly indistinct, as though they come from days gone by that we know never were, and are inaccessible to us. Although the ParkeHarrisons intend to make an ecological point, they end up delivering bittersweet shaggy-dog stories, as when we see Robert, with his back to us, sitting inertly in a large bird’s nest after he has taken off his shoes, which have been neatly placed on barren ground nearby. It’s environmental dada. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 West Superior

RECOMMENDED

Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation on the Art Institute’s Grand Staircase considers the events of September 11, 2001 in light of September 11, 1893, when Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda’s landmark speech about global religious tolerance was delivered at the First World Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, just feet away inside the museum’s auditorium. The force of visual impact in the artist’s installation keeps its commentary on the regression of religious tolerance and the global rise of fanaticism from feeling secondhand or pious. Kallat converts the entirety of Vivekananda’s speech into a permanent LED display that takes up both rises of the Grand Staircase, a site previously mined by artist Daniel Buren. It’s surprising how strongly Kallat’s piece resonates with the permanent collection objects surrounding it; the text reflects off the windows of the Buddhist art gallery on the first floor and draws attention to the great divide between this tradition and the Impressionists on the other side of the stairs. Kallat’s choice to reference the events of 9/11 with the colors of the Department of Homeland Security’s alert system is an easy symbolic gesture of terror’s infection on speech that’s nonetheless usefully confrontational. (Monica Westin)

Through January 2 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

Despite radical changes of art in the twentieth-century, a significant market remains for landscape painting, with dozens of professional painters who show that genre in Chicago. One of the most successful has been British-born Ben Whitehouse, whose riparian views have always made me smell the water, hear the insects and feel the sun beating down on some gentle Midwestern stream. So I truly believe him when he says, “I have always thought that good art resulted not from a desire to ‘make art’ but from a genuine effort to solve some kind of problem… if you intend to make a painting to convey authentic landscape experience, the one thing you notice immediately is that everything is moving, evolving… so you want your paint to do that… every square millimeter of it has to be enlivened with light, gesture and mark.” Read the rest of this entry »

At a time when conventional wisdom says  print media is singing its swan song, Chicago-based Design Bureau launched this summer, as a new release from Alarm Press, with a hefty, glossy magazine.

Chris Force, editor-in-chief and publisher of Design Bureau and Alarm Magazine, which recently converted from a print mag into a series of books, decided that the new magazine, which is available now, printed six times per year, was due for creating, conventional wisdom be damned.

“I really wanted to start making magazines again. I really have a lot of faith and believe in [the medium]. And in particular, for the design community, there was a hole in the market for a magazine like Design Bureau,” Force says.

Design Bureau will be covering design and design conversation from around the world, while keeping with unique and diverse editorial topics, from Lamborghini designers to bicycle culture and design. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Lauren Anderson

By Jason Foumberg

Out and about at the new gallery exhibitions this weekend, I noticed some nearly sold-out shows, with red dots signaling feverish sales, and collectors cheerily purchasing the hot commodities. As a critic I don’t usually pay attention to price lists or count the red dots, but it was hard not to notice that multi-thousand dollar artworks were being snapped up at every venue. Gallerists were glued to their phones, pumping handshakes and flashing weird smiles. There’s something exciting about all this but also something a little strange. Erik Wenzel called it “Halloween for a very specific segment of the population,” and it is indeed playfully grotesque. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Seized with the purpose of revealing the archetypal and impossible longings exploited by television advertising, Anat Pollack photographs moments of commercials from the screen and processes them in the computer so that the original color images no longer bear traces of specific products and communicate only hazy hopes and phantasmic dreams. In one of Pollack’s most effective images, a car reduced to a blur of motion rounds a corner, radiating the sense of speed and control. Other studies are more bucolic and tranquilizing. If Pollack intends her series as a foray into cultural criticism, she fails, because her technique results in photo-works that are suffused with soft impressionism that renders the eye contemplative and absorbed in the aura of the ideal, rather than in questioning it. If Pollack aims at showing us that advertising manipulates deep-seated desires, she is stunning, but only after we have broken the spell that she casts and are aware of her program. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 25 at ARC Gallery, 832 West Superior #204

RECOMMENDED

Shooting on the streets of Paris—but it could be anywhere to achieve his effects—Gert Wiedmaier produces black-and-white photographs of cityscapes and people who are out and about on their business, and then coats them seamlessly with varnish and wax so that his subjects dissolve into a subtle fog in which they retain their form, yet appear to the viewer at an impenetrable remove. No doubt, Wiedmaier’s takes of iconic monuments, such as the Arc de Triomphe, are evocative by casting the city of lights in a soft enveloping gray, but his depictions of random collections of people who are abstracted from any specific time or place betray his distinctive sensibility (the pathos of distance) and his philosophy (existential isolation). Lost in a void and moving purposively, but without any apparent purpose, Wiedmaier’s pedestrians symbolize the absurd—endless and seemingly self-enclosed activity that will never be consummated in a satisfying meaning. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 30 at Thomas Masters Gallery, 245 West North.

RECOMMENDED

Imagine you’re a busy exec with a huge staff of Nike-stitching slave labor in Sri Lanka to control. How to comfortably manage them from the beautiful Pebble Beach golf course? The Yes Men have answers. Step into their gold skin-tight Management Leisure Suit, equipped with an inflatable three-foot long phallus, at the end of which is embedded a computer screen so that you can monitor, communicate with and direct your off-site sweatshop, while still swinging your nine iron freely. You’re busy. You owe it to yourself.

Or consider this: if those silly militant “environmentalists” prove to be correct about the increasingly unstable climate, how might you guarantee your own survival in the wake of global catastrophe? Don the Halliburton SurvivaBall, a fully equipped self-sustaining six-armed ball that functions as a life-support system. It can even draw “resources” from other living organisms to keep itself powered, and will ensure your safety come hell or high water, which are certainly viable options. Read the rest of this entry »

Chuck Walker

RECOMMENDED

Heather Marshall and Chuck Walker might well be called the yin and yang of figure painting in Chicago. What could be more delicate than Heather’s small, bright, flat photo-realism—and what could be more bold than Chuck’s wall-sized, dark, deep, Baroque-dramatic paintings? So it’s quite a thrill to see them side-by-side at Linda Warren Gallery this month, but it’s also something of a disappointment, since the stories they each tell don’t quite deserve their technical mastery, without which, Marshall’s paintings are merely overworn clichés of modern photography’s critique of American life, while Walker’s paintings would not rise above sentimental pulp fiction. Their technical mastery, though, does make this a memorable exhibition. Marshall’s finesse is breathtaking, while Walker’s bravura figure painting can only have resulted from the tens of thousands of figure sketches that he’s done over the decades, several of which have been posted on a small wall in back of the gallery. Unfortunately, unless they’re done by famous artists, such life drawings have minimal market value, but Walker packs as much teeming life into them as into his paintings that are a hundred times larger. Something has to be said for his lonely, single-minded pursuit of this kind of image making that was abandoned by the American art world at least fifty years ago. This is his first solo exhibition in a commercial gallery in fifteen years, and we can believe that he will continue to soldier on with his hard-scrabble visions of urban life, regardless of what sells in this show or not. (Chris Miller)

Through October 23 at Linda Warren Gallery, 1052 West Fulton Market