Studio Construct 188

By Regan Golden-McNerney

Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten has been developing a distinct approach to abstract photography. Inspired by the simple forms used by Bauhaus artists from the 1930s, Kasten begins her process by arranging basic shapes and colored backdrops atop glass and mirrors. These “constructions” are photographed at dramatic angles, using traditional cameras and printed digitally. Kasten describes her work as “concrete photography” because her goal, as she explained in a recent interview with photographer Heidi Norton, is not to render the physical world immaterial, but to make something as ephemeral as light palpable as it bounces off reflective objects and surfaces. In her current exhibition at Tony Wight Gallery, Kasten’s photographs, created between 1974 and 2011, are linked together by her consistent approach and interest in light. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In the heaven on earth of postmodern play, Anthea Behm is the games’ mistress, this time consummating a high-low (don’t ask, do tell) unholy liaison between stodgy elitist cultural theorist Theodor Adorno and sportive young adolescent-minded Ferris Bueller, played by a number of male and female performers wandering through the Art Institute spouting texts from the theorist’s impenetrable aesthetics and the boy wonder’s screenplay, in succession in an endless forward-backward loop without beginning and end. Don’t worry if you aren’t a graduate student in semiotics; Behm has made the audio loud and indistinct, leaving the viewer-listener to pick out words and phrases like “socialism” and “who gives a cultural crap?” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

This exhibition of work from the group El Stitch y Bitch reminded me of the essentially “relational” aims of feminist work of the 1970s and eighties, specifically Judy Chicago’s Birth Project, a series of embroidered depictions of birth stitched by women, non-artists, from all over the country. While the work on display at Antena in Pilsen looks good, the process out of which the work arises—groups of women stitching, sharing stories, discovering common traditions and discussing the impact on their lives created by the issues of the day—is key. Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Honchell

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As fiber-based artists Amy Honchell and Young Cho reveal in statements about their respective practices, their works are shot through with personal meanings and associations: Honchell recalls the mountainous Pennsylvania landscapes of her childhood, and Cho elaborates an intimate mythology revolving around a recurring imaginary character. But the private origins of the pieces in “Fictional Landscapes,” now up at Dominican University’s O’Connor Gallery, are given over to something immediately accessible to viewers, thanks in part to the manner in which both artists use narrative elements to solicit audience engagement.

In one series of drawings, Honchell creates studies in postindustrial abstraction that exhibit an insectile elegance, the dark lineaments of skeletal machineries contrasting with brightly colored backgrounds. “Murmur, Sigh, Whisper,” meanwhile, is a sophisticated gesture of childhood delight in which the artist shapes ultrafine glitter into a scintillating hill topped by an ethereal structure—a dreamy vision of shimmering, granular materiality. Cho’s precisely rendered pencil drawings are spare, delicate and minutely detailed. The childlike figure that inhabits them—an intimidated everyman whose face is always hidden—engages in private rituals of loneliness against a vacuous white background. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Veteran photojournalist Alex Webb has spent his life getting into the recesses of the non-Western world, learning, as rock icons Rush said, to “catch the heat of the third-world man.” Webb is an unreconstructed street photographer, looking for the moment at which drama—intended or not—reaches a peak that he can capture to make it seem that the humdrum life that everyone leads, whoever they are anywhere, achieves an epiphany of shock and awe. Read the rest of this entry »

Leigh Ledare

By Gretchen Holmes

My lover always complains about the smudges I leave on his glasses when my nose and cheeks and forehead smear oil and makeup across his big, thick lenses. ”Darling,” he says, “your love and its little mark-making project, it obstructs the aim of my gaze.” This seems ungrateful: my love’s lenses, the point of contact between his appraisal of my formal qualities and my own expression of desire, are the palimpsest where my filthy face writes and rewrites its love letters. They are a screen onto which intimacy is projected from both sides. But that kind of screen is also a barricade ensuring that these two hopeful, hungry trajectories never meet. The scene encourages the unilateral effusions that make intimacy so seductive: my to-be-looked-at-ness and his wanting-to-be-wanted-ness condone each other, and ideology’s most despondent-making pathologies become sweet, private yearnings that nurture our bond. A more doctrinaire feminist would toss her lover’s glasses aside, thus disarming the patriarchy and transforming the male gaze into a dizzying, haptic blur. But me? I persist. Read the rest of this entry »

“A lot of people feel alienated when they come to art shows, because they’re like, ‘I don’t know how to act hyper-serious and I don’t necessarily want to,’” says Jake Myers, a volleyball player and high school art teacher. His new exhibition gratuitously merges art and sports, homoeroticism and hypermasculinity, and heroicism and existential suffering. “When people come and see my work they just can’t help but smile and not take themselves too seriously.” The show’s title, “Suburban Commando,” refers to Hulk Hogan’s cheesy comedy-turned-video game (which is available to play in the gallery), as Myers’ show seeks to reclaim the lost messages of pop-culture heroes.

In the foam-core print “Morphin,” Power Rangers are lying on a couch in emulation of a seductive Calvin Klein ad. “Right now I’m interested in finding all these things that are supposed to be hetero-normative, and you realize very quickly that they’re so strange, they’re so bizarre,” Myers says. “I take those things that are a little bit off or uncomfortable and exaggerate them.” This blended celebration of sexual ambiguity, athleticism, and 1980s nostalgia is delightfully “craptacular,” to use Myers’ description. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Born in Cuba, Maria Martinez-Canas was taken by her parents as an infant to Puerto Rico and is now a Cuban-American photo-artist who has spent her sentimental and artistic life attempting to recreate in images the native home she never had. Having been preoccupied with cultural displacement and now middle-aged, Martinez-Canas is confronting her family history and finds that she cannot easily disentangle fantasy from reality. Rather than resolving her doubts, Martinez-Canas has depicted them in complex and elegantly produced photo-works, in which she lays a base of photographs (reality) and then overlays them with tracings of other photographs, segmenting the composition and presenting it in faded, misty, dreamy black and white. Read the rest of this entry »

George Healy

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In 1996, the Museum of Contemporary Art celebrated the opening of its formidable new building with “Art in Chicago 1945-1995,” an epic survey whose catalog served as the first comprehensive history of Chicago art. Fifteen years later, with the opening of a more modest facility at DePaul University, Chicago art is once again being celebrated, but in a very different way. Rather than attempting to establish a canon of Chicago art, museum director Louise Lincoln has asked forty-one people she happens to know—scholars, colleagues, collectors, art critics and others—to pick a Chicago artist who “is famous, used to be famous, or ought to be famous.” Often, they picked the latter. Read the rest of this entry »

"Rock City"

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An acknowledged Samuel Beckett fan, the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell answered questions with either non-sequiturs or other questions in a series of 1980s interviews in BOMB magazine. In the Abbott-and-Costello rhythm of “Waiting for Godot,” Mitchell spoke of will and emptiness, pertaining to her often colorful expanses of furious brushwork. “It’s hard to squeeze paint if I don’t feel like it,” she said. “If I don’t feel what I’m doing there’s no point in it.” Her “blank spaces” she refers to as “like a restroom on the auto route. Isn’t that a wonderful word, ‘restrooms,’ where you go pee?” Read the rest of this entry »