Aviva Alter and Alan Lerner create works of art that examine the human relationship with war and disharmony. In their first collaborative show, “Warning Signs,” this husband-and-wife team reflects on the horrors as well as psychological implications of conflict. Using screen prints, Lerner contrasts images of terror or violence with often-unrelated, irrelevant images in order to raise questions about the nature of the violent act depicted. For Lerner, “making art is an act of resistance,” to quote his role model—the performance artist Anne Hamilton. “Art either represents what I feel about the current state of affairs, as a tool towards social change, or ending war, or altering what’s going on,” he says. Alter, in contrast, uses garments she has sewn and inscribed with thoughtful statements to explore a metaphysical search for meaning in a life infused with both natural and enforced (i.e. war) death. “My work is about how an anxiety-driven world can bring people to the point of settling a situation through some kind of war or holocaust,” she says.

In Lerner’s visually loaded piece, “Killing to Save Lives,” images of mechanical ducks march over the face of a victim of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. “I try to raise questions concerning doubt, responsibility and the clash between our culture and the natural world,” Lerner says. “There’s not a whole lot of talk about the effects of war on the environment and animals.” In Alter’s piece, “How Do You Keep Warm,” a woolen quilt inscribed with the words “Exhale One Last Time” concerns the moment of the last breath, as experienced by Alter, who witnessed her own mother dying from cancer. “It is about looking for meaning and that goes beyond her [her mother’s] life and beyond my own,” Alter says. The woolen, armless military vests that once belonged to Alter’s great uncle, inscribed with the words “Release Longing,” paradoxically infuse comfort and severity. “By cutting off the arms [in the vest], I want to explore what it is you can lose through war, whether it’s an arm, or your mind,” Alter says.

Alter explores the emotional terrain of death and loss while Lerner seeks to remind us of the ultimate responsibility of living in a society driven by a “full-time and permanent state of war.” Mercilessly, Lerner takes a stab at things held dear, such as warplanes, which he mocks in the print showing tree logs flying through the air beholden by the fanciful wings and wheels of an airplane. “I used the images of logs to diffuse that horrific beauty of the warplanes, to make them absurd,” Lerner notes. Throughout “Warning Signs,” the seemingly absurd and incongruent make perfect sense. (Marla Seidell)

Aviva Alter and Alan Lerner show at the Brickton Art Center, 306 Busse Highway, Park Ridge, (847)823-6611, through October 17.

If you have lived in Chicago at any point during the last twenty years there is a solid chance you have heard John Fraser’s name. With a an extensive exhibition record and numerous solo shows at Roy Boyd Gallery, Fraser is an artist who considers himself firmly planted in the experience of Chicago art.

One of the great lessons of minimalism, from Mondrian to Peter Halley, is that it is the viewer’s responsibility to complete the act of looking; reading, as they say, is not a passive act. It is in this spirit that I was thrilled to hear that John Fraser does not consider himself a book artist. Perhaps my initial reading of his work had been too limited, being that it’s easy to get caught up in Fraser’s use of an aged material’s sentimental notions on the surface of his works. In fact, there’s also a sophisticated play of shapes and forms. It’s likely that any lover of all things book-related will be drawn to Fraser’s art, although books represent only a fraction of the materials used in his pieces.

I’m really curious to learn more about the content and motivation behind your work, especially how you may or may not have been influenced by Minimalism.

My work is primarily about the act of seeing or act of looking. I would say one of my primary concerns is to create an object and I am very much involved with making a thing that hopefully can hold a viewer and provide something to look at and study, and reflect upon. Geometry is one of
the skeletons I hang all that on. Color, in a very strict, disciplined way is employed for the same purpose. I have always been considered someone that doesn’t work with color, or someone that would be considered somewhat of a Minimalist, and I am, but I don’t want to be limited as someone who just works in a reductive way, because those are my forbearers, the minimalist artists of the 60’s and 70’s. But I am also a romantic in some ways; I am a student of art history and have many people I feel I am indebted to, I am trying to be respectful of what has come before, but also lock it in the present.

I used to know a guy that was obsessed with collecting old books; he would say he wanted a bottle of cologne that smelled like damp, musty cardboard. Do you think the two of you would have much in common?

I know exactly what you are talking about in terms of those sensory responses to such things; like us, they have a collected history, have been touched by many people and carry a certain amount of history to them. Regardless of what the content of those things are—and those are some things that I find very attractive—but I would have to say I’m not a book artist and I’m not so much concerned with books in terms of all the loaded meaning that they possess, what they carry forward and their function in today’s world relative to current technologies. But all of those things are very much respected and taken into account.

I’m glad to discuss how your pieces move beyond the literal substance of what they are made of or how they are made and how the formal elements carry the conversation into a deeper discussion on the nature of metaphor and language.

Absolutely. That’s all governed by an origin, the origin being formal, and material. They do represent my values, which are very concrete in terms of how I want to conduct my life, but in terms of my art making they are hopefully directed at displaying very high values, in what I believe is a way to live. And geometry, as it has been for a while, carries all of that. The book is just one component; once it becomes a part of the picture plane I negotiate that plane. Nuance, subtlety, and beauty and all the things I think are worth looking at, those all matter to me.

(Steven Wirth)

“More and Less,” shows at Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 North Wells, (312)642-1606, through October 21.

Putting the final changes on her installation, “Fingerprint DNA—A Portrait of an Arab-American Family,” at the International Museum of Surgical Science, Geraldine Ondrizek pushes a white curtain off a window-unit AC. She steps back, debating, then momentarily replaces the curtain before removing it again.

“The air is messing with my threads,” she explains, gesturing to the dozens of strings attached to the back wall. The fibrils dance in the air-conditioner’s breeze before lacing through multiple loom-like panels of silky fabric, connecting to blue, gray, green and black spools of thread. The fabric is dyed to recreate the gels produced by a DNA fingerprint—specifically, the fingerprints of her husband’s Arab family—and layered to showcase their similarities.

A graduate of Carnegie-Mellon University and a professor at Reed College, Ondrizek has consistently sought to create works that are not only aesthetically provoking, but that also resonate with her viewers on a personal and political level. Since she began showing her work in 1989, Ondrizek has sought out alternative spaces, wishing to communicate her ideas with as broad an audience as possible. “I’m an academic,” she says, “and I’m not looking to produce something that’s going to be commercially successful. But if my work can teach someone something new or start a conversation—that is a different sort of success.”

Her earliest works—explorations in botany and animal life—heralded the development of her later pieces, which revolve heavily on that which makes us human on a biological and physiological level. A strikingly attractive, petite white woman, Ondrizek was raised a Catholic in a family with Jewish roots, learning early on that the individual is a product of their environment. When her mother passed away of cancer, Ondrizek was struck by the idea that she would be haunted for the remainder of her life, knowing that, thanks to genetics, the disease could strike at any time. Spurred on by this and the loss of her first child, she produced her 2004 installation, “Repairing RNA,” using an enormous linen panel dyed with an infected RNA cell. Women hunched over the panel, sewing “repairs” into the fabric, questioning the ethics of manipulating undesirable cells.

Having married into a Palestinian family, Ondrizek is also intrigued by the polarization others feel based on their external appearances. Works such as her “M168: Tracing the Y Chromosome” visually trace the genetic mapping of M168, the biological descriptor of the earliest traces of mankind. Similarly, “Fingerprint DNA” features the DNA testing of her husband’s entire family, drawing to light that humans, though each unique, are not so wholly dissimilar, and that no one person or group of peoples can be polarized on their genetic makeup alone.

“We’ve become a world of hybrids,” says Ondrizek, “like a hot house full of flowers. People may be different, but we’re all one in the same.” (Jaime Calder)

Geraldine Ondrizek, “Fingerprint DNA—A Portrait of an Arab American Family,” shows at the International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 North Lake Shore, (312)642-6502, through October 17.

Over the past twenty-five years, Indonesian artist Heri Dono has carved a niche for himself amidst the international art world of noisy surveys and bulging biennials. Working consistently within a self-defined conversation between Indonesian traditional arts and popular American cartoons, the artist skewers the topsy-turvy world of Indonesian politics and post-colonial modernism with deft humor and sarcasm.

Currently in Chicago to install his second solo exhibition at Walsh Gallery, Dono describes his practice as a marriage of globally recognized cartoon iconography and Indonesian folk iconography. Dono says, “The basic concept of my work is the concurrence of globally available cartoons with pre-Islamic Indonesian animist beliefs. In my practice I mix animism and animation. Both are based on the belief that everything has a soul to be reckoned with. In a cartoon a chair can run. Animists believe that every object is imbued with a soul. From this point I make socio-political commentary using humor.”

In Indonesia, global pop-culture icons and animist icons exist fluidly on the same plane. Marilyn Monroe can appear on a package of indigenous herbal medicines as easily as any other figure. Dono reinvigorates traditional iconography by introducing new narratives into staid genres. Traditionally confined to retelling episodes from the Ramayana, Dono has traveled to many parts of the Indonesian archipelagos staging Wayang Kulit (shadow-puppet theater) stories of Frankenstein and the devastating 2004 Tsunami. He says, “Suharto’s regime used traditional puppetry for propaganda, to Javanize the other islands, so I wanted to undermine that practice by introducing contemporary tales into the genre which could respect the experience of a larger audience.”

For this new exhibition, titled “Pleasures of Chaos,” Dono presents a series of superhero-inspired paintings. However, in Dono’s cosmology, the superhero is alternately an antihero, an absurd figure or a fallen hero. The paintings feature fantastical figures, amalgams of robots, cartoon superheroes, politicians and Indonesian mythological figures. The protagonist relies on the “upside-down mind” of an essentially corrupt political system. Dono paints halos above many figures, regardless of whether they are known as “good” or “bad” figures. This confusion is typical of Indonesian political life. Dono says, “It is difficult to know what is real and what is not. Television serves to confuse the public as to who is good, who is bad, who is corrupt, who is not.” With the advent of reduced censorship in the Indonesian press, sensationalism overtakes hard news. The painting “An Angel with Clowns” depicts politicians stylized in the Indonesian Wayang style cavorting with a blond “celebrity,” blondness being a status symbol across Asia. Dono says, “Nowadays, a leader does not have to be great, he only has to have power and be friends with celebrities.” (Sze Lin Pang)

Heri Dono shows at Walsh Gallery, 118 North Peoria, 2nd floor, through August 23.

Multi-colored acrylics, charcoal sketches, spray-painted graffiti and yarn textures show the range of style in Chantala Kommanivanh’s solo exhibition, “One Sole Journey: A Self-Examination of a Refugee’s Identity.” Diverse imagery and media mingle as he pieces together memories and stories from his Laotian family and current emotions to represent an identity that, though drawn from many sources, remains unique.

Chantala was born the youngest of five brothers in a Thai refugee camp in 1982 during the Cold War, coming to the United States when he was 2 years old. Abstract, emotional elements in his paintings combine with images taken from photographs of the refugee camp and influences from his childhood in Chicago.

“I felt the need to detail, to preserve the feelings and stories of my family,” Chantala explains. “In examining my own past, I want to recognize the struggles of refugees all over the world who come to strange places, deal with poverty, hunger and identity.”

A faint charcoal sketch of the face of Chantala’s oldest brother Konglakhone is superimposed on heavily textured brown background in “Brother T-12046.” Chantala explains the brown represents the “dirt, grit and toughness” of a sibling who had the “shortest childhood,” working since age nine. Konglakhone’s refugee ID shows underneath his face, as a yarn bracelet symbolizing good wishes curls over the image, giving it texture and paying homage to the protective older brother.

Chicago’s influence emerges in Chantala’s play with spray paint, juxtaposing graffiti with vibrant backgrounds, as if representations of his family are on the walls of the urban landscape, removed from their original time and place.

His father’s shadowy visage in “Refugee Daddy” plays suggestively with negative space to imply eyebrows arched with fatigue and determination. The contrast of green spray-painted symbols and specks of orange show a clashing of worlds, with the only other definite feature being the father’s refugee number. Chantala explains how he sees the permanence of numbers as that number is replaced with a social security number.

Transitions to America pop up in the exploration of Chantala’s past. With means both defined and undefined, verbal and symbolic, he presents a visual odyssey of rediscovering his identity between different worlds.

“Mother’N'Child,” in which the title itself evokes urban influence, is somewhat reflective of the Christian icon of Madonna and Child. A scattered, multicolored background frames the sketch of a distracted baby Chantala and his content-looking mother. Graffiti throughout the painting includes an outline of a cross to acknowledge the kindness of a Chicago Baptist couple who sponsored the Kommanivanhs’ entry into the United States.

“Tradition has to keep going,” Chantala says. “But artists also have to innovate and find their own voice.” (Ben Broeren)

“One Sole Journey: A Self-Examination of a Refugee’s Identity” shows at All Rise Gallery, 1370 West Grand, (773)292-9255, through August 23.

Frank Piatek became known in the seventies as a practitioner of “Allusive Abstraction.” His paintings show tubes intertwining, crossed and knotted. Early on he was compared to Frank Stella, but as he developed, his paintings became elegant biomorphic emblems, situated in a kind of no-man’s land between figuration and abstraction, often full of a ripe sexuality and made perhaps for the contemplation of a simple biological fact—that the body plan of all animals is a tube, and that at a fundamental level we all are tubes, made for processing the materials of the world. But in Piatek this brute materialism is imbued with an intense spirituality: the knotted and intertwined forms come from the Book of Kells, from Aztec, Minoan and pharaonic Egyptian iconography. They are part of what Piatek calls his “archaeology of knots.”

Born in 1944, Piatek attended Lane Tech—the high-school classrooms were often filled with screams from the roller coaster at Riverview across the street. At the School of the Art Institute he achieved a string of early successes—in 1967 he won the foreign travel fellowship; in that year Don Baum brought a curator from the Whitney to visit the studio Piatek built with his father, a visit that led to his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial before he had even finished his BFA. He took the fellowship money and embarked on an intense regime of travel and work, filling notebook after notebook with seminal drawings and sketches and ideas, leaving Paris just as the May 1968 demonstrations began to boil over. He was back in Chicago in 1969, and had one-man shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, as well as the Phyllis Kind gallery, the place to go for all things Hairy Who—Jim Nutt, Barbara Rossi, Karl Wirsum, Gladys Nilsson—at a time when everyone was talking about “the Chicagoization of New York.”

But Piatek was not really one of that crew. Over the following decades he cultivated an art of spiritual resonances and concatenations, making the basement of his studio into a place of esoteric symbolic investigations. A turning point for him, he says, came on December 9, 1972, when, after dreaming of a dead man in a boat, he created his first boat sculpture, an emblem of shamanic communication between macrocosm and microcosm, between this world and what he calls “the Great and Timeless World.” As early as 1977 he contributed one of these death boats to N.A.M.E.’s “Daley’s Tomb,” a show otherwise full of political sarcasm. For example, there were works like Tom Palazzolo’s “The Presumption” that showed the late mayor as Christ in Raphaelite ascension into the clouds. But Piatek’s shamanic boat was a gesture not at all in the mocking spirit of his Hairy fellow travelers.

This same gravity can be seen in the current installation at Finestra. “Almost Voyage Time/Traveler’s Report” is an altar-like installation of two boats placed together to form a dehiscing seedpod. Hanging from lengths of intertwined and knotted string are paper tags, gessoed and covered with drawn marks, word fragments and printed matter like stock quotes, etymologies and Egyptian sacred writing. It is a gathering together of materials on the verge of being transmitted; there is an aura of readiness and anticipation. It is a moving emblem of death and finitude. (David Mark Wise)

Frank Piatek shows at Finestra Art Space, Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, Suite 516, through July 30.

The artists’ collaborative Material Exchange, currently made up of Sara Black, Alta Buden, John Preus and David Wolf, has seemingly sidestepped most of the sticky questions about whether their practice is, or is not, art, with such ingenuous simplicity that it’s hard to understand how no one else has figured it out. Focused on the repurposing of waste materials, or “salvage, reuse, reclamation, foundness,” Material Exchange (MX) works to re-imagine the utility of obsolete materials in ways that refigure and reinvigorate its embedded values—those inherent to the characteristics of the material itself, and those pesky surplus values of exchange.
In practice, their work operates as a Venn diagram of external design, internal design and direct exchange. These terms are used by MX to describe projects that are directed at diverse audiences. External design refers to largely pedagogical work, such as collaborative projects at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Harrington College of Design, in which students interested in sustainability were introduced to waste materials and invited to design and rebuild them for either a predefined client’s specific needs or the speculative purposes of innovation. Internal design tends to make more philosophical, conceptual and even playful inquiries into the nature of materials, while direct exchange is exactly that: the facilitation of material exchanges between those with excess or unwanted items and those that need them. This willing division of energies creates a flexibility that allows MX to occupy various sites of reception and expectation without contradiction, tedious defense or institutional legitimization. Therefore, a recent refashioning of salvaged doors into a bus stop for Braddock Active Arts, Pennsylvania, is, ultimately, just the thing: a bus stop, with as much or little value as any given viewer invests in it. 
On the other hand, Material Exchange has moved easily within traditional art institutions like the MCA and the Smart Museum, entering and altering their art-related waste streams. Their newest project at ThreeWalls Solo, “The Way Things Drag Their Futures Around,” was inspired by Martin Heidegger’s discussion of a hammer in a carpenter’s workshop in the philosopher’s seminal work “Being and Time.” As a thing in the world, the hammer is understood in terms of its future use, how it points to its own definite and uncertain possibilities—to hammer a nail, to join separate pieces of wood, to make a table. In this exhibition, one large mulberry tree and several smaller branches slated for removal by the city have been transported to the gallery and reassembled horizontally with an additional tree house to resemble a backyard disaster of yore. The questions are manifold, but Material Exchange is centrally concerned about the tree’s entropy and new life: do the dried leaves, the wood, the bark call out for specific uses, or do we bestow its utility, its identity, its futurity? In moments like this, standing beneath and among the reaching branches, gazing into the softly lighted, broken tree house containing a mulberry sapling and the potential of resurrection, Material Exchange seems to have found the perfect aesthetic analog to their reuse work—an experience that captures the cyclical life of things and their indeterminate futures. (Rachel Furnari)

Material Exchange shows at ThreeWalls Solo, 119 North Peoria, through August 2.

“There is no death and art can prove it.” At least that’s what Vincent Dermody claims. He should know; he buried himself in 2003 at a solo exhibition whose ceremonial killing made way for the everyday process of living-on as an artist in Chicago. A self-styled latter-day P.T. Barnum, Dermody’s diverse artistic practice is a little bit sideshow and a little bit poetry, held together by the optimism of relentless self-promotion. Chicagoans will have a chance to experience his showmanship first-hand during his two-month residency in the Pedway Open Studio beneath the Cultural Center. To ask him what he’ll actually be doing in the Pedway is to discover just how difficult it is to describe his work for a market that too often demands simple brand-identification.

Dermody emerged on the scene in the late 1990s haphazardly, gaining attention for the exhibitions he curated in his apartment and, later, as an original member of the performance group Lucky Pierre. Concurrently, he was a founding member of Law Office, a curatorial collective well-known for their often corporate-sponsored, intentionally lowbrow installations and events: for “Sex Party,” a bacchanal was organized in a space where four non-artists had been invited to construct their fantasy porn sets; “Midnight,” a curated poker game among hand-selected artists with a $1,000 pot, had a more overt philanthropic dimension. Such casual conceptualism is consistent with Dermody’s emphasis on the overwhelming importance of his public persona (and not the objects he produces) to his artistic practice. In this sense his predecessor could be the late German artist Martin Kippenberger. The amount of press Dermody generates is indicative of his projects’ immediate success and of public favor for relational art, but he has struggled in the past for acknowledgement from local contemporary art institutions and eminences.
Now that he’s finished his MFA at UIC, Dermody is acting as Chicago’s fine-art superhero, taking on every possible media to rescue art from its perceived ivory tower. The Pedway Open Studio promises to enlighten all visitors with tarot-card readings, divine oracle consultations, prophetic poetry and voodoo houseplant sculptures. Dermody will also be debuting his new photography monograph “Everyday Demons,” published by Vice’s former photo-editor and New York scenester Tim Barber. Everything’s for sale. Rachel Furnari)

Pedway Open Studio is located beneath the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington, (312)744-6630.

“It’s gonna be epic!” says Chris Kerr in anticipation of his recent exhibition opening, likely referring to the battling monkeys, alligators, wizards and cannibalistic Girl Scouts in his pictures. Kerr’s painted world is a mix of mythic and magical beings, often in ambiguous hazy spaces or non-descript, empty landscapes. As a self-professed friend of animals, and reared on Disney cartoons, Kerr’s sensibility comes across in waves of humor and abandon: a mother and cub tiger hug lovingly, but also monkeys fight in trees with bloody swords. The tooth fairy is a pudgy, balding man and Santa gets it on with a snowman in a snow globe. The just opened “Neo-Country” exhibit also contains the treasures of Kerr’s recent forays in the woodshop including facsimile hangers, irons, clothespins and lint rollers, presumably to accompany the hand-printed t-shirts.

Most of Kerr’s paintings and drawings have an air-brushed background, and the figures are painted in acrylic. He attempts to get a painting just right in a single sitting. This means that as mistakes happen, the work gets thrown away. Kerr’s successful works display his sense of spontaneity and improvisation like a comedian with a good sense of timing. Humor is abundant in Kerr’s pictures and sculptures, as is a rampant imagination. He pulls out witches, robots, gnomes and zombies as if they had always existed and one merely needed to look in the correct spots to see them.

A group of garden gnomes sit squat in the bushes outside the gallery. Kerr’s gnomes are made literally from the garden, as he dug a cone-shaped hole in the ground and filled it with plaster. When they dried, they came out and were painted with pointy hats and beards, their noses the shape of Kerr’s thumb, from the inverse casting. Whimsy seems to flow through Kerr’s blood.

“Neo-Country” is currently showing at The Believe Inn, a new alternative space in artist Sighn’s studio. Known for hand-carving words and phrases in wood, Sighn has been working on carving “It’s OK” in an edition of one million. This Thursday beginning at noon at The Believe Inn he will work for twenty-four hours non-stop, and welcomes an audience. A tree is planted for each sign sold. (Jason Foumberg)

Chris Kerr shows at The Believe Inn, 2043 North Winchester, www.believeinn.org, June 26 5pm-9pm and June 28 Noon-4pm.

Last Saturday in the MCA’s 12×12 exhibition room, a boy began to prance around, chanting the phrase “Hibiscus and gravy! Hibiscus and gravy!” The boy’s annoyed mother led him out of the room. Surely there is something rather wonderful about an artist who can provoke a scene like this. Mark Booth’s text paintings and drawings seem slight and ephemeral, and they are, in a sense, recordings of fleeting thoughts that most people do not stop to record or even verbalize, unless they are children.

The works are the result of a kind of automatic writing, but they are not less beautiful for that: “toppled frozen trees / an owl made of delicate thoughts” is hand-lettered near some drawn marks that enact a sureness and fluidity of gesture. As Booth puts it, the phrases and sentences in his text painting are “simple structures that open up and reveal a world,” and each work contains “uneasy alliances” of ideas that construct tiny narratives.

The concern with language is not just intellectual faddishness—an early diagnosis with dyslexia led Booth to a relationship with language that he describes as oblique. Hints of alphabetic breakdown are everywhere—those crosshatched boxes with the height and width of a letter show up in many works. In one of the most successful pieces in the MCA show, Booth says he had made a mistake: “IT WAS A SOUND A MUSICAL SOUND THAT PRODUCED AN EMOTION WHICH ELUDUDED WORDS BUT COULD BE IMAGINED METAPHORICALLY.” He had not meant to spell “eluded” that way, but it has a marvelous effect in the way the word-mistake draws itself out, like a musical sound.

In fact, sound has been part of Booth’s artistic practice from his beginnings at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received a BFA in printmaking in 1987. Later, at the School of the Art Institute, he worked with sound artist Lou Malozzi and others, and became active in the flourishing experimental-music scene here. He is now a member of the SAIC faculty in the Sound Department (as well as Painting and Drawing, and Liberal Arts and Writing.) He is also a longtime member of Tiny Hairs, an instrumental collective that explores minimalism, noise and pop. In a way parallel to his sound art, Booth’s poetry and text paintings and drawings are concerned with the materiality of language, and though he has been published in journals like Jubilat, he does not really fit in with the so-called language poets that are represented there. A certain childish abandon and delight in improvisation seems to set him apart from those mandarins who insist on the materiality of language but not much else. (David Mark Wise)

Mark Booth shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, through June 29.