“Seville 1a,b,c Seville 2a,b,c,” chromira digital print face mounted to plexiglass

RECOMMENDED

Waltzing around the world with his camera from Cambodia, through Indonesia, to Spain, Canadian photographer Robert Berlin captures sinuous and sensuous female dancers on the fly in daubs of whirling color. Possessed by shapely bodies in motion, Berlin sometimes attenuates his subjects to fleeting flashes of form, and sometimes turns figurative, allowing them to entice us with their sexuality. Either way, Berlin’s images strike a balance between ever-present blur and abundant detail, drawing the eye into the disciplined frenzy and keeping it there to dwell on delineated intricacies. Most effective when he abandons himself to abstraction, Berlin’s study of a dervish-like floral-patterned swirling skirt, transformed into a tempestuous mushroom cloud, shows that he is a partisan of power. Berlin wants his images to occupy a visual space between photography and painting, but they are too photographic for that—he is in the time-honored tradition of simulating movement in a still. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 1 at Gallery KH, 311 West Superior.

Heads rolled when the Museum of Contemporary Art closed their running series “Mash Flob: Turning Flash Mob Inside Out” on April 19 with a slightly dangerous game spearheaded by Industry of the Ordinary, the Chicago-based performance art group of Mathew Wilson and Adam Brooks.

Based on the origins of soccer or, to the British-born artists, football, the game involved kicking around rubber molds of the artists’ heads.

“Back in Mayan times, supposedly after battles, tribes would take the heads of their slain victims and use them as rudimentary balls,” said Brooks. “So we decided what we would do is have a game with both of our heads.”

The artists said they have a long history with creating art that deals with soccer and were fascinated by its violent origins. “It has this rather disturbing, possibly apocryphal history of kicking heads around,” Wilson said.

Despite the wind and persistent mist that left the tiled sidewalk and steps outside the museum slick and wet, around twenty people volunteered to play “football.” Another twenty-five or so gathered on the museum’s steps to watch the scuffle from above, where Brooks and Wilson, decked out in army-green parkas emblazoned with “Industry of the Ordinary,” presided over the melee. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Dunda's "Portrait of Paul Hopkin as the most Beautiful Effigy in the World"

By Jason Foumberg

Paul Hopkin is an artist who opened Slow gallery in August 2009 in a west Pilsen storefront. Slow is a curatorial project where Hopkin pairs two (and sometimes three) artists in an exhibition to see a conversation emerge. We chatted about his practice and vision for the gallery.

Tell me about the name Slow.

I am really interested in food, and have been forever. I used to automatically mistrust any artist who didn’t know their way around a kitchen. The connection of slow food and slow art is not coincidental.

Can you explain the practice of curating two-person shows, rather than solo shows?

Solo shows always “work,” but they seem to encourage the dreaded like/dislike response. It is hard to get someone to look at a show of a single artist and encourage them to think about what they are seeing at the same time. Pairing work in ways that are less obvious can draw out tensions, illuminate peculiarities in an artist’s point of view. That content often makes itself apparent as tension or a giggle rather than as a concise answer. Theme shows can dumb down too—they can simply generate an internal checklist—yup, that one is about robots too.

I fell for art because it was introduced to me as a way to change the way people see. I am still in love with the power and problems that that offers. The way I put shows together allows me to put something out in the world that is my take on things, but still keeps the artist’s work front and center. Read the rest of this entry »

Doug Fogelson's billboard at 35th and Ashland

Three new billboards on the South and West Sides of Chicago wordlessly announce the coming spring. Each billboard frames a shock of fuzzy colors, like Abstract Expressionist paintings in the sky. Artist and art-book publisher Doug Fogelson, who has previously worked on public art commissions, this time wanted to create a direct and immediate public action without the restrictive layers of committees and grants. The billboards went up April 8 and they’ll be viewable for one month.

Fogelson sited his abstractions at busy intersections in the Humboldt Park (at Chicago and Spaulding), McKinley Park (at 35th and Ashland) and Washington Park (at 63rd and State) neighborhoods, places he calls “some very rough zones in the city.” The communities living here must too often content with gang violence, drug dealing and a decaying industrial landscape. Will the billboards ameliorate some of these difficulties? “I have seen art and artists positively impact communities both directly and indirectly,” Fogelson says, speaking mostly of his experience with art education in schools. “However, I have no illusions that the effect will be very substantial here.” As public art, the billboards, like graffiti, subvert the expected streetscape. “If this work takes peoples’ minds off the mundane or challenging aspects of life for a moment then it succeeds,” says Fogelson. Read the rest of this entry »

Poet Cassandra Troyan

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Among a number of functions planned around the release of David Foster Wallace’s highly anticipated unfinished posthumous novel, “The Pale King,” a performance-art event in a gallery space seems likely to bring the most breadth and depth in a tribute to Wallace’s work. “Subtitles IV: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment” (a reference to the author’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest”), organized and presented by LiveBox at Threewalls gallery this Friday, will be a wide-ranging, open-ended and fittingly intricate response to Wallace’s prose.

“Subtitles,” a series of multimedia and performance projects inspired by literary figures and themes, began with a strict medium guideline; the first, centered around Poe, consisted of one video performance, one audio performance and a reading. “Since then, we’ve expanded and gone beyond this format,” notes Matt Griffin of LiveBox theater, who has curated a number of past events in the “Subtitles” series. Griffin had “secretly wanted to do a Wallace show the entire time,” and in conversation this year with artist and poet Cassandra Troyan, Wallace’s name was finally brought up, and by coincidence “Pale King”’s release date was announced for the same day. Though the immediate impetus for this year’s “Subtitles” is the release of “The Pale King,” performances will encompass a range of Wallace’s work. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Heidi Norton is the consummate packer, joining experiment with process, conceptual message, reference to art history, and meta-photography, just for starters, in her enigmatic works, which employ multiple forms (photography, painting and, most recently, sculpture and found objects), sometimes separately and sometimes in a mix. No doubt all of this variety is brought together by the motif in which it is packaged—plants and shrubs. Yet they appear in many guises, evoking disparate moods. As a result, none of the works in the show is representative of the whole or epitomizes it; each conveys its own meanings. “Dead Palm Burnt by the Sun” is a still-life photograph of a row of objects, including the wildly forlorn desiccated palm, on tabletop backed by a white sheet that has been put over the window behind it. The objects are attenuated in rough, even dynamic, elegance; a muted range of purple and plum constitutes the palette. It looks like a painting, not a photograph trying to simulate one. However one interprets it, “Dead Palm” makes decay enticingly vital. At Norton’s soft core we find art for art-play’s sake. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 14 at Ebersmoore Gallery, 213 North Morgan, #3C

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Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at Rhona Hoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contemporary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it is Bhabha’s collages on display here that chiefly create this sense of dislocation between past and present. The foundations of Bhabha’s collages are photographs of abandoned construction projects in the desert landscape of the artist’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The landscapes in Bhabha’s photographs appear stretched and twisted, an effect attenuated by streaks of ink lapping over the images. Bhabha’s collages are grungy and frenetic. The conflict between man-made development and nature is vividly rendered: the sun-drenched landscapes are awash in hot pink and neon orange better suited to billboards than pastoral scenes. The spontaneity and density of Bhabha’s collages speak to the upheaval of the landscape depicted in the underlying photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

Henry Fuseli, "Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head," 1793. Oil on canvas. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington.

Something terrible happens in the world every day, so tragedy is the bread and butter of daily journalism, but as the subject of Aristotle’s “Poetics,” the foundational text of European aesthetics, it well deserves the scholarly attention which University of Chicago professors of art history, as well as philosophy, English and classical literature have given it in this special exhibition at the Smart Museum. Focusing on two centuries of Western European art, “The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900” attempts to trace changing attitudes towards what we call tragedy.

The highlight is the collection of paintings that relate to Shakespearean theater. There are portrait sketches (1785-90) of the actress Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth by George Romney from the Princeton University Art Museum. More impressively, there is the life-sized painting of the tragic actor Philibert Rouvière as Hamlet, from 1865, by Edouard Manet on loan from the National Gallery, and Henry Fuseli’s nearly life-sized depiction of “Macbeth Consulting the Vision of the Armed Head” (1793) from the Folger Shakespeare Library. Read the rest of this entry »

No matter how much white Valspar goes into turning industrial lofts into blank spaces for high-art contemplation, the red-wine trail and social-calendar truth is that most exhibitions are born first as well-lit parties without music. For Paul Cowan, sculptor-turned-painter with a tactical sense of art humor, this ironic dichotomy was enough to build an exhibition around. In “Breaking the Law,” Cowan’s latest at new West Loop space Alderman Exhibitions, the artist made his fun by embellishing his paintings with colorful helium balloons. These were stuck floating in gangs at the entrance; in the space, their laces tethered around a lump of damp sculptor’s clay; or wedged behind Cowan’s quick-drawn paintings, propping them away from the wall. The paintings themselves looked just along for the ride, each tooting a single note in oil-stick on canvas, silently secondary to the installation as a whole. As expected, the opening’s atmosphere was somewhere between birthday party and contemplative art event, but by the end of the night, the punch lines started rolling as these balloons wandered and sagged like drunken guests, leaking helium, and eventually sank to the floor. As they dropped from behind paintings, the canvases fell to their traditional positions against the wall, setting up the rest of the exhibition’s five-week run with the dull topper, “but seriously, folks…” (Steve Ruiz)

Through May 16 at Alderman Exhibitions, 350 North Ogden, 450E.

By Jason Foumberg

When we’re tourists we often find ourselves standing on graves or admiring tombs of the illustrious dead. Several years ago, after a traipse through some European cemeteries and catacombs, I became (morbidly) obsessed with the Capuchin ossuary in Rome, a series of underground chapels decorated with the bones of monks in the seventeenth century. Where a tomb designed by Bernini or Michelangelo hides the deceased behind decadently carved marble, the Capuchin monks used actual bones for their headstones, creating decorative patterns in the style of Baroque stucco bas-relief or fresco—swirling aureoles and floral motifs—while other skeletons are collaged into tableaux, such as a clock made from phalanges and flying cherubim composed of skulls and winged shoulder blades.

I wanted to learn why the Capuchins built their shrine to death but, oddly, I could not find any full historical accounts about this strange place. I realized that the thousands of tourists who visit the chapels each year are not informed about why this place exists or how it came to be; we are simply left to ogle the lugubrious sculptures and ponder our own mortality. Tourists to the bone chapel can purchase postcards of the crypts so that the visceral images of bodily decomposition may be contemplated in private or distributed around the world like a decree: death trumps art. Read the rest of this entry »