RECOMMENDED

Taking the peony—from budding through blossoming to wilting away—as a metaphor for our transient and fleeting everyday experiences, Jean Sousa’s thirteen digital and digitally altered color photographs of the life-cycle of the flower move between soft and atmospheric abstractions, and harsh and densely, deeply detailed studies. The two directions are not random; the suggestive abstractions dominate the phases of growth and maturity, and the enhanced representational shots are concentrated in the period of decline and death. In Sousa’s vision, the richly delineated impressions of the end of life—withering yet intensely colored—blow away the vagueness of youth. At the finale, dead yellow petals that still hang on form a carpet over the scattered remaining pink and white ones, symbolizing past vitality that carries over into the first movement of the next visual symphony. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln.

RECOMMENDED

Mary McCarthy describes her new paintings as a metaphor for the “general conflict between order and chaos.” The same could be said for everything under and beyond the sun, but what distinguishes her work is that the conflicts she creates are thrilling and almost beautiful. In each painting there seems to be something that doesn’t quite fit, yet belongs there anyway. Like the chunk of one-by-six pine board that’s been defiantly nailed to the corner of “Beatrice (The Kiss Off),” holding together what otherwise seems to be an explosion of conflicting, overlapping polygons. Is this also a metaphor for the break-up of a relationship, as the title might suggest? The artist speaks of her work in strictly formal terms, but she seems to be presenting the active, challenging life of an ambitious young woman in the city. Read the rest of this entry »

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In 1999, Janet McKenzie’s “Jesus of the People” was selected by Sister Wendy Beckett, the BBC television art docent, from among the ten finalists in the National Catholic Reporter’s “Jesus 2000” project to discover “who Jesus might be for our time.” As Sister Wendy wrote: “This is a haunting image of a peasant Jesus—dark, thick-lipped, looking out on us with ineffable dignity, with sadness but with confidence.”

Using a young African-American woman as the model and symbols associated with American Indian and Taoist spirituality, the piece has generated more controversy than veneration, which was presumably that independent newspaper’s intention. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the mid-1950s, Chicago was a center for magazine and book illustration, and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts was one of America’s leading commercial art schools. Drawn to that school and hoping for that kind of career, a young Canadian, Phillip Renaud  (1934-2011), traveled here from Edmonton, Alberta not far from the village where his father ran a trading post. In the following decades, he got that career, putting illustrations into Playboy magazine, among others, and various grade-school textbooks. But his sharp, crisp design and sparse, minimal figure drawing is possibly more the result of his study at the Art Center in Pasadena, and those are the qualities that stand out in the current retrospective at the Palette and Chisel Academy, where he has been a popular instructor over the past decade. Read the rest of this entry »

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During the 1980s, artists who produced anxious or enigmatic objects gave up the responsibility to be serious, or at least they shed some of the trappings of the high seriousness characterized by Minimalism. Dan Gunn’s “Patchwork Plateau,” on view at the MCA, is an object resembling a room-dividing screen and is placed on its side. It has many attributes whose ambiguity could be unsettling, except that it is painted a cheerful shade of green. Many of the parts of “Patchwork Plateau”—the name must refer to its table-like orientation, although the geographical connotations linger—seem to be found and not found at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

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Back in 2002, John Allen Muhammad, the “Washington Sniper,” captivated the country through his brief months of infamy as he made his way with his young accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo on a long and winding road from Washington state, through the Southwest and Deep South, to Maryland and Washington, D.C. gunning down twenty-seven random victims with his rifle. In 2005, photographer Joel W. Fisher retraced Muhammad’s journey, shooting with his camera the depopulated sites of the killer’s deeds. Read the rest of this entry »

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Love is a many-splendored thing, but only in photography can love attain the zenith of self-referential purity and perfection, albeit in a series of images that could never be tokens of real life. Through the magic of the computer, Kelli Connell shoots the same female model, in the twilight of youth, playing the roles of two friends/lovers; mixes up the images digitally; and composes them in seamless color scenarios depicting moments of intimacy and distance in the subjects’ relationship—the quintessence of narcissism. Read the rest of this entry »

Alec Regan

RECOMMENDED

It’s been over six years since Brandon Alvendia and Caleb Lyons put together a Spring Break-themed art show at the Butcher Shop Gallery, a cavernous warehouse on Lake Street, now closed. Featuring over fifty artists (including me), it was primarily and ultimately a formidable bacchanal. Alvendia, who was giving out stenciled spray-tans, was again present for another iteration of the gallery beach party, again in a cavernous warehouse right by Lake Street. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Zachary Cahill’s über-conceptual installation at Threewalls is only a partial representation of the artist’s long-term project: his satirical, and inevitably impossible, efforts to found an orphanage on Chicago’s South Side, along with vivid imaginings and permutations of said orphanage explored through seemingly limitless media. The project’s scope as a whole is so big that the word “conceit” seems too understated to encapsulate what Cahill is up to; even a long, dense exhibition essay by Joan Copjec herself, citing everyone from Bourdieu and Lacan to Newt Gingrich, and interweaving arguments about late capitalism and the relationship between museums and orphanages, seems dissatisfied with its own encapsulation with the project. The exhibition, “USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project,” according to only some of the available literature about the show, is rooted in or speaks to notions of art’s use-value, relational aesthetics, 1990s neo-conservatism, various branches of neo-Marxism, governmentality, and the model of the art exhibition itself, all embodied in an overwhelming mass of pseudo-documentation and mixed-media installation riffing off this fictional hyper-institutional orphanage. Read the rest of this entry »

Alberto Aguilar: Proposal for “Working Class Uprise.”

By Jason Foumberg

On the heels of Marilyn Monroe’s burlesque appearance on Michigan Avenue, a citywide debate ignited over the value of our public art. Should public works send a meaningful message to the entire city and tourists alike, or should they be (merely) entertaining? Should public art challenge our taste levels—and whose taste levels, theirs or ours? That the Marilyn colossus opened up this discussion, once again, proved that our public art is an important slice of our city’s culture. And yet, many artists and art lovers felt defeated, even excluded, from the Marilyn worship. If public art is for all, why is it selected by a secret few?

In response to this increasingly polarizing situation, I asked Chicago-based artists to create an ideal public artwork.
These twenty-six responses are unpolluted by the committees, private interests and politicians that usher public sculptures to their often-neutered realization. Most of the artists featured here do not typically make traditional or monumental public artworks, so the submissions take the format of conceptual designs, sketches, and drawings posed as questions and critiques. Read the rest of this entry »