Zach Taylor & Aaron Williams, " Assembly 1," 2010

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Zach Taylor and Aaron Williams have completely different ways of communicating. Taylor’s language is couched in the mechanical world, yet concerns itself with a journey rather than the mode of transport, a distance covered emotionally which is then embellished, infused with ulterior definition and given greater resonance by the straight-edged precision of text woven in by Williams.

The bulk of “Finished” is collaborative in just this way, image and word shaping each other, and where these two aspects seamlessly fuse is where the art really kicks and communicates something, though perhaps not always decipherable—sort of like this review—for how ultimately internalized it feels. I almost have mixed feelings about the show because it’s so good to look at that I was distracted from interpretation. The work was resilient to associations—despite the nostalgic imagery of Jiminy Cricket and the Land O’ Lakes mascot—so initially I could only admire the way paint was perfectly calibrated on canvas, the technique employed and the sheer physicality that occupied the gallery. Read the rest of this entry »

Derek Chan, "Daily Practice," 2010.

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Derek Chan is no stranger to the “monastic residency”; at the invitation of Theaster Gates earlier this year, he performed one as part of the Whitney Biennal. For his current solo exhibition, however, he was not contained within a courtyard as he was at the Whitney, and instead headed West, embarking on a trip to the four corners.

His travels are the fodder for this show and his trip across the sacred Salt Song Trail also inspired the publishing of a book, in conjunction with Golden Age, on view within the exhibition. It compiles the text and images from his journey.

Chan transforms the gallery space into a gathering place. The peaceful residue of his performed rituals (Chan performs here each Tuesday in November from noon to 4pm) clings to the meditative, process-oriented paintings, collage and works on paper.

The shapes, patterns and repetitive mark-making they display are drawn from a mixture of Eastern religious symbolism and Western Modernism, with the new addition of Navajo and Hopi imagery and objects bubbling to the surface. The recurring grid matrix, evocative of the warp and weft of a loom, frame many of these individuated marks like relics stowed within the cubby holes of a desert shrine. Read the rest of this entry »

Christine Perri. photo by Henry Berry

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Christine Perri’s sui generis installation, “Story Forest, or the Progress of Narrative: A Sculptural Diorama,” located in the eight floor North Exhibit Case of the Harold Washington Library Center, tells an elliptical yet engaging story about story making and telling.

The Chicago artist uses figurative carved-wood sculptures and reliefs (in themselves finely wrought), various tree parts, drawings and paintings as well as books (both of wood and paper) to craft a fractured fairy-tale-like tableau on how the primal sources of nature are transformed into cultural expression—primarily, into the kinds of human experiences represented and discoverable in books. Think Field Museum displays meet the Daphne-Apollo myth meets the Painted Forest folk-art museum of Valton, Wisconsin.

Besides a number of carved-wood pieces, the fifteen-foot-long Story Forest (it really is behind glass) includes logs, stumps and branches that Perri salvaged from the street and sometimes painted, all on a bed of wood chips, as well as elements like the backdrop of large-scale forest drawings.

The diorama relates how trees become art, how trees become books, how creators (like Perri herself) shape figures and characters in visual art and literature, transforming the raw materials of life (and nature) into stories, myths, imagination and knowledge. This self-reflexive web of connections is intuitively apprehended rather than conceptually art-referential, one of the work’s strengths. It is perhaps because of Perri’s self-taught art background—though she has an MA in English from UCLA, organized the intriguing if patchy “Chicago Does Wood” group exhibition at the Hull House Center for Arts in 2005, and later was juried into a Brooklyn outdoor sculpture show—that this almost-sequestered library installation looks like nothing else around. (Jeff Huebner)

Through December 31 at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 South State

Alberto Aguilar

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Whether an artwork is dazzling or alienating, spectators keep a certain distance and rarely visit a gallery simply to be close to art. Nonetheless, “Things To Be Next To” at Three Walls accurately describes the experience of this exhibition, which imparts a feeling of closeness through ordinary materials and simple installation. The show includes sculptures and photographs by Alberto Aguilar and Peter Fagundo from Chicago, as well as Warren Rosser and James Woodfill from Kansas City. From Fagundo’s stretched electric blanket to Aguilar’s stack of old books, the artwork is culled from the things that pile in garages and fill basements. Aguilar’s simple gesture of stacking and photographing these objects and Fagundo’s poetic titles like “she lays under the sun, i lay under the moon,” make these objects appear cared for and valued, even having outlived their usefulness. And a narrative emerges, about a family, from these random stacks of broken furniture and discarded toys: children are grown, a chair goes unused, and a cat balances atop half-unpacked boxes. Read the rest of this entry »

"LF4-5," 2008. Blood, UV resin, plexiglass

Cattle blood taken from slaughterhouses, Plexiglas and UV resin make up the components that Jordan Eagles uses to create his preserved-blood paintings. “Most people come into the studio and expect it to smell. It doesn’t even smell. I know,” Eagles says. In the past, he needed to leave the blood in Tupperware containers to get the blood from red to black. This would leave such an offensive odor he would have trouble breathing and would need a mask at times. This prompted him to develop a new technique for aging the blood.

In 2006 Eagles won the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) award for best emerging artist. His exhibition at David Weinberg Gallery is his first show in Chicago, with nine pieces on view. Their colors are exquisitely bold and rich, and each image is reminiscent of the solar system with sunspots, exploding stars, the cellular structure of the body, or fireworks.

“What I am hoping is that the viewer is drawn into it and the imagination starts to wander and starts to feel wonder in the material,” Eagles explains. “That experience for them brings them to a place to experience their own set of circumstances in spirit and body. What is also interesting is that you take something that is no longer living and it is killed and making something beautiful out of it.” Read the rest of this entry »

"Benita," 2010

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The barrel of a giant wooden artillery gun skewers the first room of Ebersmoore, crashing right through the gallery wall into the living space hidden behind. Named after the artist’s girlfriend, “Benita” unites the private and public in this intimate art gallery. Michael Rea’s conceptual gesture is overshadowed by the sculpture itself, constructed of wood in Rea’s usual attention to craft and humor. Here, Rea’s work again addresses issues of masculinity and heteronormalization. The massive barrel of “Benita” (around fifteen feet long) should more than compensate for any male shortcomings; the scope contains a small TV playing what could be a Tribune executive’s email, but turns out to be the steamy softcore shower scene from “Stripes.” The sculpture also functions on a political level—since the Supreme Court is removing all limitations to the second amendment, this gun could soon be coming to a store near you. Around the gun’s base are more all-wood sculptures: three kegs, a bong (already packed up with sawdust) and an assortment of machetes. With this setup, you can almost hear the hootin’ and hollerin’ of the good ol’ boys having a time down on the gun range. Read the rest of this entry »

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Artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-78) undertook a variety of projects, but may be best known for cutting apart abandoned and condemned buildings. He saw “un-doing a building” as a gesture against “the industry that profligates suburban and urban boxes as a context for ensuring a passive, isolated consumer.” In his literal deconstructions, Matta-Clark sought a “kind of architecture which incorporates this sort of animated geometry or this animated, tenuous relationship between void and surface.”

In “Home for a Hypercube,” the central piece in a show at Hungryman Gallery, Jacob C. Hammes suggests what might happen to that box of consumer isolation when planes and fissures in domestic space are tessellated into a tesseract, the geometric representation of the cube in four dimensions. Read the rest of this entry »

"Urbis Paganus IV.9.I. (Posterity title)," 2009, Mixed media on matte board. Courtesy of Greene Naftali Gallery, New York

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“Third Mind,” a mid-career survey of LA-based artist Richard Hawkins’ art work, opened this October at the Art Institute of Chicago, and will travel in early spring to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. The exhibition reveals Hawkins’ breadth and variety of media, including drawing, collage, assemblage, inkjet prints and painting. Two abstract paintings, “Pink Feather” and “Bad Medicine,” are collages of used clothes and towels covered in thick swaths of color. Each canvas dawns a feather protruding from their sides reminiscent of Joan Miró’s “Man, Women, and Bull” of 1935 in the Art Institute’s collection.

Hawkins’ works deals insightfully with male queerness by representing its negotiation with a system that encourages both its assimilation and its exploitation in media imagery. Hawkins moves through various cultural examples, from John Wayne Gacy (a painting by the incarcerated killer sent to Hawkins is shown in the museum’s library), to male heavy-metal icons, to native peoples in various states of cultural loss, to the puritanically censored sexuality within classical sculpture. In this task the methods of his collage, bluntly combining handwritten text, abstract mark-making and printed images, serve him well. The slipshod quality of magazine cutouts brazenly paperclipped to their destination affects a directness that reads as the unmitigated activity of an individual, thereby reclaiming the subject matter as the act of an actual human being. Read the rest of this entry »

First prize: John Dempsey's "The Great American Landscape"

By Jason Foumberg

Last week’s short-lived controversy surrounding Chicago’s first Art Loop Open, spawned by the ouster of competitor Bernard Williams, stirred a small media frenzy. Prior to Williams’ disqualification and later reinstatement by the competition’s organizers, a few media outlets promoted the event and explained the ground rules. But controversy is media gold, and by last Friday everyone was buzzing about Williams’ disqualification.

In the rush of reporting, no journalists or commentators officially put into print why the controversy mattered. Few publicly shamed the organizers for their mistake, or commended them for sticking to their rules; nobody opined whether or not cell-phone text-message voting really empowered the public to command contemporary art; nobody said that this competition was good for the community. Even after the prizes were handed out, no media outlets endorsed the winners or empathized with the losers. Does this polite journalism mean there’s a lack of critical capacity in our local arts coverage? Or does the silence imply a shared agreement: the competition wasn’t welcome from the start? Read the rest of this entry »

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While the unbounded freedom of conceptual art is the empty kernel at the core of our aesthetic era, much art nonetheless still makes its point more effectively in what it does than in what it says. And it seems no coincidence that France, the nation that formulated sadism, the most perfected practical realization of modern solipsism (as well as other, lesser political and cultural revolutions), also gave us Le Dernier Cri (in French, “The Last Scream”). Le Dernier Cri is a printmaking collaborative, begun in Marseilles in 1990 by then-couple Pakito Bolino and Caroline Sury, that has printed mountains of eye-popping (or, more properly, eye-gouging) work by artists from Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Perversion of all sorts is rendered impeccably on sumptuously beautiful matrices, almost choking the viewer with a dazzling fecundity of bodily expulsions and amputations, presented in profuse silkscreened colors and pristine textures. Read the rest of this entry »