If you walked into the Kunsthalle New gallery in Pilsen at around 8pm last Saturday, the first thing you would have noticed was a group of people standing and staring at the ceiling. Above them, what looked like a pile of rags jumped and rustled, like a cat wandering under a pile of clothes. It was artist Chris Collins’ contribution to the thirty-some projections at Chicago’s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), a one-night exhibition by Chicago-based internet artists.

BYOB is the brainchild of Rafaël Rozendaal, a Berlin artist who started the event as a way to bring net artists together in a seamlessly adaptable exhibition. Because the only stipulations are that artists must attend and they must bring their own projectors (they’re known as beamers in Europe), BYOBs were meant to be exported far and wide. Since its first incarnation in Berlin in July 2010, there have been more than ten BYOBs in cities across the globe. Nicholas O’Brien and Brian Khek, both SAIC-affiliated artists who do internet and computer-based art, organized the Chicago version. “It’s really about coming together and saying, yes, this is kind of one community, even if it’s not in one geographical location,” O’Brien says. “Also, being able to share with others in the physical space and not having to be limited by the typical channels of communication on the internet. Like, you don’t have to have a certain number of ‘likes’ to engage with the space, which can really dictate the online traffic of certain projects.” Read the rest of this entry »

at BYOB

By Jason Foumberg

Last Saturday night, the fifth annual Earth Hour (turn out your lights for one hour) met some blazing competition in the form of BYOB, or Bring Your Own Beamer, a group show of digital video art projected simultaneously and splatter-style on a Pilsen apartment’s walls, ceiling, floor, anywhere. Of the dozen or so projectors, only a couple overheated. The room was packed full of viewers and it was hard to avoid getting a beam of light shot into your eyes every now and then. Sometimes the effect of a projector throwing its image on a body perfectly captured the event’s energy and premise, of being made by and for the crowd.

Often, in video art installations, there is some glitchy tweaker noise or looped ambient music to accompany the projections. In the four video art shows I saw this weekend, all of them featured this type of soundtrack, amplifying the lights-off, hyper-sensory experience. Barbara Kasten’s “REMIX” at Applied Arts is accompanied by what used to be called intelligent dance music, by Lucky Dragons; Nicolas Grospierre’s “TATTARRATTAT” video at the Graham Foundation has a minimal soundtrack of softly hypnotic beats; Ben Russell’s sculpture of 16mm projectors at threewalls creates its own hissing and popping music; and a single ambient track blanketed all the videos at BYOB. Sometimes these soundtracks are intrusive, and sometimes they melt into the viewing experience, but they are always necessary; video art today is competing for your attention. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

One of the most versatile, productive and consistent conceptual photographers on today’s scene, Ryan Zoghlin receives a stunning mid-career retrospective in this exquisite show curated by Susan Aurinko. Ceaselessly trying out different kinds of cameras, film, and printing processes—old and new—Zoghlin always adapts technique to meaning, delivering distinctive integral images in each of the nine diverse series, with forty-three images on display. At one extreme of his sensibility, Zoghlin offers up alluring and dynamic infrared images (“aerotones”) of the vapor trails at air shows that explode the photographic abstraction into bursts of patterned energy. At another pole, Zoghlin’s constructed industrial landscapes (“Unnatural Resources”) taken with high-speed 35mm black-and-white film present one of the most ominous renditions of a negative utopia that is nonetheless spiked with humor—as when glass jars belching smoke create a white-hot fog worthy of a chemical disaster. Taken together, the components of the exhibition complement and enhance one another by contrast effects, giving viewers the opportunity to sample the varieties of visual intelligence. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 22 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

Claire Sherman’s decorative landscapes offer the explosive joy of youth, which is probably why, five years into her career, she has had solo shows in New York, London and Amsterdam, as well as this, her second show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. The gallery sales pitch suggests that she is questioning the “historical distinction between abstraction and representation,” as it can be questioned with paintings going back to the Lascaux caves. Other critics have connected her work to the Romantic era and Kant’s notion of the sublime, while it might also be noted that her kind of brush-driven landscape was first developed in Han Dynasty China.

Antiquated as it may be, her work feels as fresh as tomorrow because she’s not looking back. Like Faulkner’s characters in “Wild Palms,” the title she has borrowed for this exhibition, Sherman is exploring her own destiny which, this time around, includes some chthonic visits into enormous caves and a few almost figurative monumental still-lifes. Read the rest of this entry »

"Untitled (Coloma to Covert: Sandwich)," 1993/2006, archival pigment print

RECOMMENDED

At 83 years old, Barbara Crane has achieved the rank of one of the leading photographic modernists of the second half of the twentieth century, but she is unwilling to rest on her laurels and has ventured forth into new and unfamiliar realms, transposing her love of nature into a digital key and producing color pictorialist images of flowers and leaves that sometimes burn with an orange ember glow, and sometimes embed us into green and pink bowers redolent of the Easter season. Once, by turns, an assertive provocateur showing various and sundry Israelis with Uzis, and the quintessence of Zen precision revealing the details of animal and vegetable forms, Crane has now surrendered to the siren song of imagined beauty, made objective through the offices of Photoshop enhancement (though not, at least, outright transformation). Crane had always been precise; now she is hazy and suggestive. Yet her edge peeks through, especially when she consumes the woodlands in an autumnal blaze. (Michael Weinsten)

Through April 30 at Think Art Salon, 670 West Hubbard

RECOMMENDED

Chris Bradley has created a Robert Gober-style sculptural constellation where common objects (pretzel sticks, potato chips, paint rollers) are cast in bronze, painted as real fakes, and presented as fractured icons extracted from a personal narrative. Where Gober’s icons are weighted with psychosexual trauma and Catholic guilt, Bradley’s objects are simply the products of boredom. Not that boredom is bad—Gober has shown us that we all have cages, and that we can dream ourselves out of them. Bradley’s cage is probably his studio, the home of his beer and chip stash. He balances the chips, beer, avocados, chewing gum and other foodstuffs onto lumber armatures and tops them with palm trees so that the shacks punctuate the gray-and-white gallery like little deserted islands. A line of pretzel sticks on the far wall form a horizon line, and there’s a piddling sound of trickling water from a makeshift fountain in a beverage cooler. The sense of a provisional existence is successful, but lacking any foreshadow of risk, magic, fear or fatality just compounds empty upon empty. Junk food totems—sculptural doodles, really—signal somebody captive within, and captivated by, their own life. (Jason Foumberg)

Through April 2 at Shane Campbell Gallery, 673 North Milwaukee.

The Chicago Artists’ Coalition (CAC) is moving to an 8,000-square-foot space in the West Loop—the former FLATFILEgalleries—which has prompted CAC to initiate Bolt Residency, a juried one-year artist residency program that will offer continuous support for the chosen artists’ professional and artistic pursuits. Cortney Lederer, Director of Exhibitions and Community Outreach, says she hopes the new residency program will build the relationship between artists and the community. “We’re partnering with major cultural institutions, visiting artists, galleries and dealers from Chicago who are going to work with these artists on an ongoing basis and really evaluate their work one-on-one,” Lederer says. “I would say that that is the core of the residency program. I think, for us, it’s so much about community.” With enormous studio space, two exhibition areas and nine open studios, the artists will have the freedom to work with the space as they choose. “I really want to make sure that folks are serious, dedicated and want to be there,” Lederer says. Open-house tours of CAC’s new home at 217 North Carpenter will be held April 10, 2pm-5pm and April 19 from 5:30pm-8:30pm. (Nancy Wolens)

"Mirror Image," 1995

RECOMMENDED

The boldest genre of late-twentieth century postmodern photography, the feminist self-portrait survives in the ceaseless experiments of Rosemary Warner, who began her voyage of self-discovery in the 1990s and has not yet stilled the agonies of existence. An inveterate postmodernist, Warner does everything from scratch negatives, pile multiple images into her compositions, segment her works, tone the aesthetic surface, deploy multiple exposures, and mix up her subjects—and that is only the beginning. She sometimes even hires models, which does not make her images any less self-portraits in an existential-psychological sense. And there is no technical method to her madness; everything is done for insight. Warner is on a tear to show all the dimensions of confinement, from oppressive bondage to reposeful quietude. Her most revealing image has her naked and encased in an empty tub, her head pressed against its side, at the limit of self-abjection. Warner makes one nostalgic for feminist truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 1 at Alibi Fine Art, 1966 West Montrose

"Repose in Black," 2011. Oil on canvas

It’s hard not to smile at each of Douglas C. Bloom’s visions of our modern world. Starting with the kind of rough, blurry, monochrome photo images that Luc Tuymans finds in old newspapers, Bloom manipulates them into clever little stories. Where Tuymans wants us to dread our sordid, ruthless era, Bloom interrupts or entwines those images with flat, often rectangular solid-color passages, making something like a comic-strip joke about the modern corporate landscape of shallow people and places, as if all modern life took place in a Holiday Inn.

Bloom is adept at both the selection and manipulation of images, and they look good big up on walls instead of just on the small computer screens where presumably they were designed. But they fit a bit too easily into the superficial corporate world that they’re spoofing, and seem best suited to cover the walls of a trade show display booth in the hospitality industry.

Bloom explains that “while destroying the painterly pictorial surface, a new photographic image is created” while engaging in “the destruction of traditional painting in favor of something new.” Haven’t we already had a hundred years of photo images manipulated by journalism, advertising and photo-based painting? How much more destruction is still needed? (Chris Miller)

Through April 12 at Carrie Secrist Gallery, 835 West Washington

RECOMMENDED

Painters and graphic artists make thousands of aesthetic decisions on every piece, so one might expect them to be the most sensitive and demanding art critics. On the other hand, one might also expect them to narrowly prefer work just like their own, which is what makes the artist/critic/teacher/historian Franz Schulze (born 1927) so exceptional. A freelance writer for the Daily News and then the Sun-Times, he coined the phrase and wrote the definitive history of “Chicago Imagism” in his 1972 book “Fantastic Images: Chicago Art since 1945,” and also introduced the term “Monster Roster.”

Though he may have celebrated the “freakishness,” “eccentric individualism” and “introversion” that continues to dominate Chicago figurative art, his own large-scale drawings celebrate the sanity, brilliance, strength and responsibility of his portrait subjects, most of whom are twentieth-century architects such as Helmut Jahn and Thomas Beeby. Schulze is an expert on that subject, which he covers in many of the 1,369 publications credited to him, including major biographies of Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Depicting strong human character within an architectural setting is a Renaissance agenda, requiring a demanding representational style, where sloppiness cannot be excused as expressive eccentricity. Even if Schulze is no Dürer or Titian, he still carries it off quite respectably. (The exhibition also includes some deft still-lifes of the tropical plants, coffee cups, and drafting tables that might be found in an architect’s office.)

As a bonus, this current show also features self-portraits made over several decades, giving us a good picture of a frumpled, restless, discontented man driven to explore, explain and create. (Chris Miller)

Through March 26 at Printworks Gallery, 311 West Superior