“Werner Herzog Bear” (photo: Tom Van Eynde)

By Jason Foumberg

With the Chicago Cultural Center’s programming in transition, artists and their audiences mourn some of the disappearing services as the city struggles to redefine its official stance on the visual arts in relation to tourism and commerce. Early on the city evicted a ground-floor gift shop from the Cultural Center, along with most of the respected visual arts staff. With the re-installment of longtime curator Lanny Silverman, the gift shop, too, has undergone some rehabbing into a mock souvenir shop. Named The People’s Palace’s Gift Shop, the life-size diorama created by Zachary Cahill playfully mixes cultural metaphors to draw uncomfortable parallels between capitalist and communist economies. “Yes, we’re open, come in,” announces a pink neon sign at the entrance, but the mock shop is otherwise confrontational and uninviting, having been besieged by economic catastrophe and slash-happy bears. The exhibition team boldly commissioned Cahill to layer confusion upon absurdity as a commentary on the Cultural Center’s mess of affairs, thereby holding up a mirror to its own painful transformation. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chicago will miss Xina Xurner when Young Joon Kwak and Marvin Astorga move to Los Angeles next month.

That’s the sense one got last Thursday night, not long into their set at The Burlington.  (Michael Perkins, who normally rounds out the group, was absent.) Performing in heels, bedazzled jeggings, and a shredded tank, Kwak exploded into the chorus of “You Will Die (I will Fuck You).” Half the crowd became one sweaty, bouncing, bearded id. The other half leaned toward the back, perhaps longing for the safe confines of Union Park, as Kwak’s drag alter ego growled: “Come over here so I can touch you.” Read the rest of this entry »

Elizabeth Ernst, “Frank and Kitty,” 2012

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Among the four intensely serious photographers here, Elizabeth Ernst is the boldest and deepest, plumbing the recesses of psychological distress by shooting images of grotesque doll-like figures that she has sculpted and placed in scenes, and then painting over the prints so that they take on enhanced emotional resonance. In a scenario that is hideous and humorous at the same time, a big buxom fat lady presses her lips against the cheek of a slight man who lets out a Munchian scream. Whose nightmare-fantasy are we witnessing? There is something that we can only call cute in Ernst’s work, which only makes it all the more disturbing. We may remember that Chicago’s very own John Gacy moonlighted as a clown. Read the rest of this entry »

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Enjoying a posthumous boom lately, hitherto undiscovered Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier shot the city in black-and-white, with a little color thrown in, through the last half of the twentieth century, favoring portraits, cityscapes, ordinary activities, and—in this show of fifty-five miniature working prints—studies of people of all sorts who have succumbed to sleep outdoors. The tiny size of the images works to Maier’s advantage, because if we want to read them, we have to get close and peer into them, and then we find ourselves inside the scene with her subjects, unable to contemplate them from a distance. Most of Maier’s photos are standard-issue street shots in the informal style of the time, and tame, even timid, to boot. Confrontation is not the name of Maier’s game; she likes to shoot her subjects from behind if she possibly can. Read the rest of this entry »

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From the street, 65 Grand looks like the gallery has morphed into a record shop. The recognizable square dimensions of eighty vinyl albums are displayed on shelves that cover most of the length and height of the gallery walls, and turntable-like sculptures occupy the middle of the gallery. Of course the small square of the record album oscillates toward being read as a small canvas, making the album analogous to a painting. Read the rest of this entry »

Andreas Fischer, “Interior,” 2012, oil, acrylic, charcoal, cut canvas

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Andreas Fischer is known in Chicago as a true painter’s painter, making works whose emotion, intimacy and presence are as important as they are often ignored in favor of firmer topics of discussion. Confronting the mechanical from the title on, the exhibition “Robots Will Keep Us As Pets” forces the issues by placing his work in the context of four other painters who, like Fischer, exhibit the irreplaceable human qualities inherent to a painting practice. While Fischer is by far the most free from the formal predeterminations which define mechanical production, each of the painters showing with him—Chicago’s Sofia Leiby, Trew Schriefer, Ariel Dill and Amanda Dalton Innis—make works driven by the painter’s sensitivity for materials, an aesthetic “just-right” mode of composition, intuitive harmony of colors and the seen-yet-indefinable importance of touch. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Aguhar, “No Top Needed,” 2010

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Mark Aguhar’s art is a loud declaration of her being. She was, in her words, a “genderqueer person of color fat femme fag feminist,” and tried figuring out where such a person fit in this world. Aguhar, twenty-four, was an MFA candidate at UIC when she committed suicide back in March. The outpouring of grief was widespread—not just her friends in Chicago, or their hometown of Austin, but Choire Sicha paid tribute on The Awl, which he co-founded. A group of local friends have put together a tribute of their own at Gallery 400, showcasing Aguhar’s work as well as work inspired by her. Read the rest of this entry »