Gladys Nilsson, "Turnabout Walk," watercolor and gouache on paper, 2009

By Jason Foumberg

Gladys Nilsson, an unrelenting Imagist painter born in 1940, and Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, age unpublished but of the same generation, attended art school together in the early-1960s in Chicago. For the most part, both have stayed here to live as working artists, exhibiting regularly and selling paintings with enough frequency to encourage a continuous output over the past forty-odd years. The early sixties in Chicago proved to be a highly fortuitous moment for Gladys, as her art was aligned with several others who formed the seminal Hairy Who group under Don Baum’s curatorial direction. Eleanor did not break through with this group. Although the two artists do not have cause to speak to each other, their respective bodies of work are like splinters from the same tree; where Gladys’ art has bloomed in the light, Eleanor’s adapted to the shade. Today, they each have solo exhibitions one block apart on West Superior Street. Read the rest of this entry »

photo credit Chris Diers

Ray Noland understands the importance of duplication and distribution. His designs and Internet campaigns (including on the cover of this magazine) contributed to the ground swell of support around president Obama’s campaign, and continue to rally the populace around political figures and events. He’s the mastermind behind the “Go Tell Mama” traveling art show, and co-curator of the exhibition “Officially Unofficial,” which profiles art inspired by Obama, at the Chicago Tourism Center until May 31. Read the rest of this entry »

Armita Raafat recently returned to Chicago after spending a few months in Iran. While there, she researched architectural ornamentation on mosques in Isfahan, a city known for its resplendent Islamic landmarks and Persian tapestries, in preparation for her first solo museum show, at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In a gallery on the museum’s first floor, Armita has effectively transposed the distinctly Islamic decoration to the distinctly bland white-cube exhibition space. The wall sculpture conflates two (or more) cultures by way of their artistic achievements—a thicket of visual information on one hand and a fiction of asceticism on the other, here tensely vying for surface dominance. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

You’re not going to find an abstract painter in the bunch of this year’s breakout artists. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it’s getting difficult to define the value of traditional, solo practices in the age of the networked artist. Today’s image makers are less studio artists than opportunists in the expanded field, less gatekeepers of taste than trailblazers in the public sphere—“social entrepreneurs,” as Mike Bancroft calls it. The timing is just right. As this feature is printed, Chicago’s renowned but diminished commercial art fair has opened its doors to include the city’s beloved alternative, artist run and non-profit spaces. The market’s embers are cooling off, and for many that smells like opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »

Ali (short for Alastair) Bailey is a recent transplant to Chicago, having moved here from London last July to be with his wife, Kavi Gupta Gallery director Kristen VanDeventer. The sense of personal dislocation Bailey experienced upon his arrival suited his work well, for much of “You Are Young,” his first solo show at Golden, involves a quirkily subjective displacement of the familiar.

Bailey thinks of his sculptures holistically, as individual aspects of an encompassing field of vision. At Golden, we see a sprout poking through a tear in an old baseball, and a pair of moldy helmet liners placed atop two crushed water bottles like mushroom caps. In the hallway, a glistening replica of a dropped ice cream cone evokes a child’s chagrin and an adult’s crestfallen impotence. Looming over it all is a creepily faceless figure, its head formed from a deflated basketball, its body a sleeping bag held upright by a hidden pole. Read the rest of this entry »

Rebecca Shore has been making paintings for about thirty years, and some of her newest paintings are her largest yet. She usually paints on a panel that’s roughly the size of a sheet of paper, but a few of the new works are about a meter high. The change in scale allows for a greater density of visual information, which is what’s so satisfying about her new body of work—collections of objects and symbols, seen in shadow, and laid out as if on a blanket, the treasured possessions of a collector. As with any collection, the more that’s amassed brings a greater understanding of the whole.

Shore began painting what she calls these “irregular patterns” by noticing and photographing faux rock patterns on houses, which are handmade wall paintings of abstract shapes made to resemble stacked rocks. Her photographs are on view in the gallery, in a small case for reference, and in the show’s catalog. Shore is an incessant collector of imagery who documents signage, advertisements, and even oddball shapes taken from television screenshots.

Many of Shore’s older paintings look to decorative motifs, such as filigree flourishes and stylized floral designs, recalling sheets of wallpaper. The new work, however, brings the imagistic associations to the forefront, including butcher knives, alphanumerics, slippers and urns. Shore flattens these images, thereby abstracting them, turning them into both essentialized and ambiguous forms.
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Abstract painting has had a long history in Chicago, with luminaries like Morris Barazani, Miyoko Ito, Moholy Nagy, Miklos Gaspar, Charles Biederman, going all the way back to the Armory Show in 1913. Manierre Dawson, who had traveled to Europe, was the first to bring the new ideas home to Chicago galleries, and the Palette and  Chisel Club sponsored the “Abstract Show” of 1915—even if it was only a semi-serious event. Few Chicago artists took up the new approach because there was no money in it, while illustrators could earn as much as movie stars. Among those early abstract painters, Dawson returned to Michigan to become a successful farmer.

It wasn’t until universities began their own art schools, and Ab-Ex flooded the art world, that abstract painting could be considered a practical career option—and this was  the path chosen by William Conger in the late 1950s. He found an early mentor in Chicago abstract painter Raymond Jonson, who had moved to New Mexico by that time,  and later in Elaine DeKooning. Their transcendent, formal approaches were dramatically different from the “monster roster” of Chicago Imagists of that decade, and are still  reflected in Conger’s work, although he has gone in his own, unique direction.

Conger also began his career in academia at this time, taking an MFA at the University of Chicago, and began a lifelong interest in the methods and institutions of  academic study. In 1971 he returned to Chicago as chair of the Art and Art History Department at DePaul University, and in 1984 moved up to Northwestern where  eventually he would chair the Department of Art and Art Theory.

How does a stellar career in academia impact the life of an artist? Is it somehow connected to all those frightening, high-tech, aggressive images of Conger’s work in the  1980s and ’90s? Maybe, maybe not, but at least it has led him to become immersed in the theoretical literature of contemporary art, and encouraged him to become an  articulate voice in that field. An extensive interview can be found online at geoform.net, and if you actually want to talk with him, he’s been holding forth daily on the  aesthetics-l listserv for almost a decade.

Conger practices and advocates painting that is allusive: “The important thing for me is to make paintings that exist somewhere between actual depiction and complete abstraction,” he says, so that they can serve as “surrogates or metaphors of selfness—layered metaphors of self-imagining” in a style that critic Donald Kuspit now calls “Fantastic Abstraction,” as it asserts “the repressed psychic reality” of living in America. (Although it also strongly resembles the Bauhaus period of Kandinsky.) The artist Lorser Feitelson had said much the same thing about his own paintings from 1950-51 as a “configuration that for me metaphorically expresses the deep disturbance of our time”—and it’s interesting to compare the discomfort of Feitelson’s Los Angeles with the ominous visions of Conger’s Chicago.

Whether “Fantastic Abstraction” will stick around as a Chicago style remains to be seen. Despite his four decades of teaching, Conger has few followers, and the “repressed psychic realities” of younger artists don’t seem to require Conger’s brand of meticulous craftsmanship and formalist credentials. He may just be an historical anomaly, an outsider on the inside. (Chris Miller)

William Conger, Paintings: 1958-2008, shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, through March 24, and at Roy Boyd Gallery through March 3.

By Jason Foumberg

Pedro Velez fashions himself as an art world muckraker. He seems to enjoy bullying the in-crowd, stripping the tenuous links between business and art, pulling the sheets off the back-scratching orgy and generally stirring the shit till it stinks. But “I’m trying to be nicer,” he says with a smirk. After spending the past five years in his native Puerto Rico on an extended “vacation,” Velez is back in Chicago, and he marks his return with a show at Western Exhibitions.

Velez has a history of upsetting people. “You’ll never work in the U.S. again!” shouted über-collector Rosa de la Cruz at Velez after he appropriated her name for one of his artworks, a showcard for a fictional exhibition in which she was unwittingly listed as a participant. Velez’s fake exhibition announcements are one of his more potent forms of critique, and they seem to instigate the most dramatic responses. He’s been making them for years, in both Chicago and Puerto Rico. The cards and fliers resemble typical gallery press for group exhibitions, and Velez “curates” an imaginary cast, which has included art world superstars Maurizio Cattelan, former Art Institute curator Okwui Enwezor, Eva Hesse, Jan Vermeer, and often includes topical news items, such as Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy whose mother drowned bringing him to the U.S. in 1999, and the endangered coral reef.

Velez relates the story of Rosa de la Cruz’s upset with a bit of pride, for her outburst reveals a lot about the international art community. Certain cities hold prominence in the social history of art. Paris in the nineteenth-century gave way to New York City as the twentieth-century’s cultural capital. In the last thirty years, the number of biennials in far-flung corners of the Earth, from Gwangju to São Paulo to Istanbul, has grown steadily, giving the jet-set curatorial class a sense of purpose. Unfortunately, you’ll often see the same artist roster no matter the region. It’s a story of increased global wealth, where biennial organizers can afford the “best” artists, and, as some see it, is an iteration of the colonize-and-conquer mentality.

The biennial franchise opened shop in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2004. Being just a hop from Miami, where the art crowd convenes every December for its massive art fairs, the island is conveniently exotic. Its unique Latin flavors, sunny beaches, favor-trading politicians and lax regulations on entrepreneurship make it easy to forget that Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory—its residents being American citizens. Surely Rosa de la Cruz forgot this when she threatened to excommunicate Velez from U.S. soil.

For being a self-made gatekeeper, de la Cruz wasn’t very knowledgeable about her terrain. Nor were the curators, says Velez, who swept in to take stock of the culture, and export it. Velez believes the art community, including curators, collectors and dealers, has a responsibility to respect its locale. But Puerto Rico quickly became an over-harvested field whose roots have been pulled, and the changing winds of taste blew away all that remained. “Puerto Rico’s art scene dried up,” says Velez. Likewise, in Chicago, he’s complained about curators who don’t bother to take stock of local culture.

As a working critic, curator and artist, it’s often difficult to parse out Velez’s various practices, although the critical edge is ever-present. Is the fake exhibition announcement his art or his curatorial work, or is it an artful form of critique? The term “remote control curators” appears in both his critical writings and his art, referring to exhibition organizers who curate via email in territorialized countries, not bothering to see either the art or the site in person. Somewhat similarly, Velez’s fictional exhibition announcements, which he hands out at art gatherings or shows in the gallery, pluck famous figures from the news feed, and the exhibition venue is never listed (leading to some frustration if you don’t get the hoax). Critic Michelle Grabner interpreted this as Velez idealistically dreaming the perfect exhibition, recalling André Malraux’s 1950 book “Museum Without Walls,” wherein a show is conceptualized using only reproductions of famous artworks.

But Velez is not sitting around waiting for some postmodern fantasy wish fulfillment; his practice focuses on uncomfortable social situations and the problem of inflated cultural capital. Many of the posters in his current show feature images of girl-next-door type porn models sporting bruises and black eyes. These girls embody the spectacle of pillaging—Velez’s art is necessarily un-beautiful. The list of implicated public figures, what he calls the “unwilling performers,” this time includes Puerto Rican condo developer Arturo Madero, Roger Clemens, even Blago. Above it all, a designer store’s shopping bag hangs upside-down in a signal of distress.

Velez is working in the tradition of the artist-as-watchdog, much like artist Hans Haacke’s 1971 exposé on underhanded Manhattan real estate sales, which was framed as an art piece. Velez says that Illinois’ current political troubles would barely make waves in Puerto Rico. Its art scene reflects widespread ill maneuverings, and while a true regulation of any country’s art dealings, from its auctions to VIP lists, would surely topple it, for Velez, to be critical is a performance itself.

Pedro Velez, “The Day of the Corrupt: Our Father’s left US shit,” shows at Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria St., through February 14.

By Jason Foumberg

Artist Young Sun Han placed a Craigslist ad for a stranger to engage in a twenty-four-hour sustained hug. After receiving several responses, Young invited Gerald O. Heller to participate. Though not an artist himself, Gerald was comfortable with endurance practices, having run thirteen marathon races. The two men began their embrace on December 30 at midnight, and after moving through several emotional phases of excitement, physical fatigue and mental boredom (they agreed to remain silent), comfort, and finally, impatience, Young and Gerald released on December 31 as a crowd counted down the last seconds of 2008.

The world record for the longest embrace is twenty-four hours and one minute, a duration that could have easily been exceeded here, but that was not Young’s intention with his performance. Instead, he wished to heighten a hug’s normally fleeting physical sensation; even the most heartfelt hugs between mothers and sons last only a few seconds; even as we spoon with lovers, who we may have known for a lifetime or for one night, we must eventually push away. At which point does a hug or a handshake become uncomfortable or even taboo? Young wished to fight the internal stopwatch, commanded by cultural conventions, and invited the public to watch.

Since the performance, Young has returned to Auckland, New Zealand, where he is a permanent resident and has lived for the past two years. The Skokie-native runs an art gallery there, called City Art Rooms, a spacious white cube with large arching windows, with Kylie Sanderson, wherein they exhibit the work of emerging artists. While earning his art degree in Chicago, at the School of the Art Institute, Young worked on a project that also extended for twenty-four hours. He hit the streets of the city and engaged twenty-four strangers for one hour each, learning as much about them as a casual conversation would allow, and they about him. He then photographed them, and moved on. The idea of the stranger also figures in to his 2004–05 double-portrait series of couples that Young approached almost at random and photographed in their domestic settings.

Now, with the hugging performance, the complexities of intimacy are given full expression. At times Gerald, a tall 64-year-old Caucasian, felt like the contours of past lovers or even of the artist’s father, says Young, a twenty-something Korean-American. Also on view in the gallery space was a projection of a self-portrait. Here, Young has a red sheet over his head like a child’s ghost costume, with three holes ripped in it: two for eyes and one for his dick, protruding gloryhole-like. The photographic print could easily extend commentary on anonymous Internet sex sites, like Craigslist, where Young met Jerry, where identity is shrouded during a transaction of pleasure. The ghost looks strikingly like a Klan member, so that the gay ghost comes to represent the self-loathing and internalized shame inherent in some repressed homosexual desire. Too often, though, gay identity becomes over-sexualized, and is maintained as a simultaneous concealment and exposure; the public image of the sanitized and witty gay seems nothing like the haunting image of symbolic ancestors dead from disease.

In his artist statement, Young writes that art saved his life. In fact it gave him direction, and freedom. Perhaps to be sincere is uncool, said Young when I asked him about the sentimentality of his projects, which are refreshingly devoid of hip irony. Indeed, they are genuine endeavors. During the culmination of the hugging performance, onlookers engaged each other in a group hug.

Young Sun Han shows at Swimming Pool Project Space, 2858 W. Montrose, through January 31.

By Beatrice Smigasiewicz

Lilli Carré flips through comics at a café in Ukrainian Village where she can often be seen leaning over a half-finished drawing, crowded by a laptop, a stack of pens, notebooks and an unfinished coffee. She had just released her first graphic novel this October with Fantagraphics Books, “The Lagoon,” and has a full-color comic, “The Carnival,” on the horizon, scheduled for release in the spring issue of Mome. In the midst of comic-book projects she’s working on a handful of illustration assignments, and while I want to ask her how she manages to find time enough to sleep, she pulls out a handful of zines she’s been working on.

Its only been three years since what started as a comics feature in a student paper, “The Tales of Woodsman Pete,” about a hermit who’s slowly losing his wits in the wilderness, was nominated for the Eisner award. This was shortly followed by the premiere of her animation, “How She Slept At Night,” at the Sundance Film Festival.

Still in her early twenties, Carré admits she didn’t think seriously about making comics until she moved to Chicago in 2002 to attend The School Of the Art Institute. There she had a chance to try her hand at writing, but by the end she says she was turning in illustrations to go along with her writing assignments, and started working on animations with experimental filmmaker Chris Sullivan. “He pointed out things to me about my stories that made me think about how I craft them in new ways. I just really respect him, his work, what he finds important in a story and it’s characters.”

But it wasn’t too long before Carré stumbled on the Holy Consumption group, (which includes Chicago’s comic-book artists Jeffrey Brown, Paul Hornschemeier, Anders Nielsen and John Hankiewicz). Drawn to Hankiewicz’s beautifully rendered but idiosyncratic stories, she admired the intuitive way in with he structured his narrative. “They follow their own logic,” Carré says, and “I was excited to come across such a unique and engaging book. I think Hankiewicz’s ‘Asthma’ is one of the best comics to come out in a while.”

Like Hankiewicz, Carré focuses on developing the moment rather than telling a particular story. She’s always resisted the straightforward front-to-back readings of a narrative. Her most recent release, “The Lagoon,” is an accumulation of a three-year process based on a short comic she wrote in the remote parts of Michigan. Carré has been writing and rewriting the story, which she says, “is in essence much closer to a poem than any sort of a novel.”

Drawn in black and white, Carré’s style and wit brings to mind early American sensibilities of comic book artists/animators like George Herriman or Winsor McCay. Inspired by early classic horror films, “The Night Hunter” and “The Creature from the Lagoon,” Carré admits she wanted to “try and make something similar, slow-paced and eerie, something that would simply let the water and the night hold their own in the story for a while.” The narrative revolves around a creature from the lagoon that comes to pay the family a visit each night. As each family member learns to deal with the song of the creature in his or her own way, the attention of the story shifts to focus on sound itself. The night resonates with sounds of snoring, clocks ticking and creaking floorboards that pick up pace with finger tapping and whistling. Each sets the tempo, pace and mood of the story but also define the characters relationship to the creature and to each other. Every character seems to be possessed by and aware of the sounds around them. Whether it’s the call of the wild, or the lure of the siren’s song, everyone has his or her own relationship to the call. Grandpa, like a cat in heat, whistles lounging in the flowerbed emptying the lot of every little petaled stem he sets his eyes on, the mother and father lured by the creature’s song disappear in the swamp, and the granddaughter, Zoey, learns to play the eerie tune on the piano.

Yet, the story of “The Lagoon” itself doesn’t resolve in a typical way—if it resolves at all—Carré admits she’d rather “leave the reader to make his own conclusions about the significance of this creature and its song based on how the family members relate to it and individually deal with this unknown thing that has dipped into their lives.” Take it as is, the book aims to give the reader something that they can pick up and read over and over, finding something new in it every time.

Lilli Carré signs copies of her new graphic novel “The Lagoon” at Quimby Bookstore, January 15, 7pm-8pm. She will also sell prints and various little handmade book items. On Tuesday, February 3, Lilli Carre and Alexander Stewart will be present for the MCA’s Work In Progress from 11 am-7 pm.