At first glance, New York-based media artist Josh Azzarella’s solo show at Kavi Gupta Gallery appears to be a straight landscape show, perhaps in the style of the New Topographics photographers of the 1970s, engaging formalist depictions of mundane details of daily use of the landscape. But a second glance starts to peel back the many layers of these images, unsettling any easy reading of their surfaces.

Azzarella’s present body of work, begun five years ago, takes the material of historical footage and photographs as the starting point for a series of erasures, replacements and re-layerings that remove elements of these documents, creating events without actors—landscapes?—and actors without events—portraits?

In “Untitled #15 (Tank Man), 2006, a man is standing in the middle of a street in a wooded, urban landscape. The nondescript expanse of concrete and line of trees have an eerie familiarity. The viewer slowly begins to realize that this is the famous Tiananmen Square protester who boldly confronted a line of military tanks…without the tanks.

Azzarella has said that one of the motivating forces behind his reworking of historical images is the desire to examine memory, how it is formed and how it reads and re-reads images. “I’m investigating the cathectic energy of the imagery, our collective memory, personal memory and my possibility of manipulating an existing memory or creating a memory where one did not previously exist,” he says. Azzarella’s photographic work did in fact begin in a style very much in the tradition of formalist landscape depiction begun by the Bechers in Germany and continued by such German photographers as Thomas Struth and, at times, Thomas Ruff. However, Azzarella became interested in examining not just the content of an image, but the image itself, and, more specifically, the reception of the image–how an image becomes iconic.

Speaking about “Untitled #20 (Trang Bang),” 2006, a work based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Nick Ut taken during the conflict in Vietnam, Azzarella asks “What makes this image iconic?…There are several frames, other images of the same event that are more compositionally compelling that have not become iconic.” Nevertheless, something holds our memory to the image. “It becomes a baroque abstraction,” Azzarella says, “but people always recognize the pink of Jackie’s hat.”

Recently, Azzarella has been working with a somewhat different set of images—not the moments of conflict, but moments on the fringes of history. He says that after five years, the difficult imagery has started to get to him. “My head is so full of these horrible images—I can only take so much before it becomes brutal and exhausting.” He wants to explore “less iconic imagery” to deepen his, and our, understanding of how we collectively create memories based on their documentation. (Michelle Tupko)

Josh Azzarella shows at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington, through November 29.

"Legend (A Portrait of Bob Marley)," 2005. 30-Channel Installation. Courtesy: Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna

By Alicia Eler

It’s pure coincidence that Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz is speaking at the Art Institute of Chicago on Election Day (November 4). Really, it is. Perhaps it’s fitting, however, because in her work internationally renowned Breitz discusses the phenomenon of “celebrity” across cultures, the impossible paradox of language as both a connecting and alienating force and the ubiquitous medium of video (and, thusly, video art) as a visual language—all concepts that pop up around the presidential race that the entire world is watching, nervously. After all, politicians are the biggest celebrities. I called the artist at her hotel room in New Orleans before she came to Chicago. Not surprisingly, I interrupted her watching election coverage.

How did you first become interested in the intersections between celebrity, fan culture and video art?

My interest in both video as a medium and celebrity as a matrix comes back to their function as lingua franca within our culture. You don’t need to be an art-world insider to be connected to the culture of video and digital distribution, or to the cult of celebrity. Both are unavoidable quantities. I have always wanted to make work which might in some way be accessible to an audience beyond the immediate art audience, and therefore have ended up speaking in a language which has a certain familiarity to a broad audience, one which does not automatically alienate.

Was there a specific moment that inspired you to start working with these concepts?

It’s hard to pinpoint a particular moment, but when I first left South Africa and moved over to the States—to arrive in Chicago, my port of entry to this country—I found it both ominous and fascinating that the other kids I was meeting, my peers, shared a particular mental archive with me. I had almost nothing in common with the students I was meeting from all over the world in terms of the background of my country, the politics, the history, the growing up experience, but the one thing we had in common was that we had all been consumers of the mass media: we had all listened to a particular Madonna album at a particular moment in time, we had all had a crush on Brad Pitt at a particular moment in time, and so this common ground and strange set of shared memories seemed to me to be worth considering, not to be too easily dismissed. I came to think of the mass media as an opportunity and a vehicle that it might be possible to hijack and reroute as an artist.

On that note, I was reading through the articles on your website, and I was particularly interested in something you said during an interview with Rosanne Alstatt in Kunstbulletin (2001): “The hyper-visualization of difference is used as a tool to promote sameness.” That line really stuck with me. Could you tell me more about that?

For a long period of time we urban creatures were defined by what we produced, what we made, what our jobs were. Increasingly in the post-WWII period, we’ve come to be defined not by what we produce, but by what we consume, what we watch, what we buy, what we hear. There is a certain equation at the heart of the mass media that never goes away: on the one hand what is constantly being sold to us is the promise of individuality, the promise of the possibility to define ourselves as distinct from others, but at the same time mass consumerism insists on homogeneity. Everyone is wearing the same t-shirt or buying the same pair of sneakers, as a gesture of individuality or distinction, but in so doing of course becomes part of a broad tribe of consumers. This tension between wishing to be oneself and to make meaning out of that which you consume, on the one hand, and the pressure, on the other, to conform, to be like others around you, is central to the culture we live in and remains a central obsession in my work—a set of questions that I come at from different angles again and again.

Yeah, I’m thinking about “Karaoke” (2000)—the same song but they’re not native English speakers. I was thinking about that, when people are singing karaoke they’re often not even sure what the words mean, but there’s this feeling of “connectedness.”

Language is supposed to be a transparent quality, a medium that connects people to each other, which serves as a bridge from one person to another. But often language can be exactly the opposite, a quality of exclusion, something that prevents people from participating and being a part of a given moment. In the work you’ve mentioned, karaoke became a metaphor for the language that comes from the outside. Often when people sing karaoke, they sing love songs, songs that are supposed to express something internal, emotions from the inside. But of course the tension is that with karaoke, you’re always receiving language from the outside as you read the scrolling words, language that is precisely not from your heart. So again, the same equation that we discussed earlier returns, the tension between wishing to express something internal which is yours as an individual, as opposed to the need or the inevitability of having to negotiate outside forces, the constant reminder that language ultimately belongs to nobody, language is something which we all share.

"Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon)," 2006. 25-Channel Installation. Courtesy: Jay Jopling / White Cube

In your artist statement about “The Babel Series” (1999), you say that “the resulting discordant environment owes as much to the new poetics of Dada, Futurism and the Soviet avant-garde as it does to Andy Warhol and MTV.” With Warhol, of course you have the shift in which the art world starts incorporating mass culture icons. And I’m thinking about this now, especially with video art—I was just reading a New York Times article that talked about artists taking bits from the Obama/McCain debates and chopping them up, and it made me think of your work. With that sort of art that’s happening now, do you see any difference between “high art” and “low art”?

I believe there is a direct continuum between YouTube, popular music, Hollywood and what artists are doing. I don’t see my position as an artist as distinct from that of other cultural producers. I want to, or even need to, be a part of that continuum. Which is not to say that this is a big happy-family-continuum, but I think that as an artist, it is as important to be aware of one’s relation to the history of art and the practice of other artists as it is to keep up with the daily newspapers, with YouTube, with new developments in television and popular music.

Speaking of YouTube and the Internet, I was thinking about “Legend,” 2005, in which you went to Jamaica 20 years after Marley’s death and had thirty Jamaicans sing their versions of “Legend” in a professional recording studio; and “Working Class Hero (A Portrait of John Lennon),” 2006, in which, similarly, you recruited fans to re-perform Lennon’s entire first solo album “Plastic Ono Band” (1970). I’m wondering if you see parallels between the process behind your work in pieces like these, and the phenomenon of YouTube fan culture? I’m thinking about the fan/celebrity culture that’s emerging now on YouTube that parallels what Warhol predicted: everyone will have their “15 minutes of fame.” And that’s what’s happening with YouTube. The process behind the Lennon and Marley pieces is similar to what fans of YouTube celebrities do. What do you think about the relations between your work and  YouTube celebrities’ fan culture?
To put it crudely, sometimes when people eat the same food, they shit the same shit. We’re all part of the same zeitgeist, and so it did turn out to be the case that the series of work you’re referring to (my portraits of Bob Marley, John Lennon, Madonna and Michael Jackson) predicted the YouTube format. The first of these works was made in late 2004, early 2005, just before YouTube broke, in that split second before it became a natural part of our landscape. When YouTube came on the scene, people started to ask me if it bothered me that its forms and strategies so closely mirrored my own. In fact for me, that felt like an amazing confirmation. It was incredible to realize that, parallel to what I was doing in my work, there were millions of people out there all looking for similar avenues to place themselves within popular culture. At best, any art reflects its times and what is going on at the time at which it is made, preferably with a critical twist, or such that it becomes legible in a new way.

Candice Breitz speaks at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Price Auditorium (111 S. Michigan Ave) at 12pm on November 4. She urges you to vote before you come to the lecture. At 5pm on November 5, she’ll lecture at her alma mater, the University of Chicago (Cochrane Woods Art Center RM 157).

Supporters extend hands and cell phone cameras toward Barack Obama as he preaches his message of change. An arranged multi-ethnic array of young adults yawn and stare blankly at a rally for the next great chapter in American history. Protesters in Guantanamo-orange jumpsuits, bags over their heads, kneel in a line outside the Federal Courthouse in Denver during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

In a series of photographs, Joeff Davis, a staff photographer with Creative Loafing media, captures the political idealism, banality and unease in the 2008 presidential campaign. His Hyde Park Art Center exhibition, “Political Frenzy,” provides inconvenient observations that tarnish the sanitized luster of presidential campaigns.

“My photos are a bridge between photojournalism and art,” says Davis, who has covered every presidential election since 1996. “I like to document what’s going on, but also put out a sort of anti-propaganda of the political process. I have a political agenda.”

Not that Davis’ photography is particularly right or left wing. He skewers the way candidates shift through the campaign, dilute messages and “prostitute themselves” as corporate donors fork over hundreds of millions of dollars. Behind the pomp, Davis shows oft-overlooked stories, emotions and demoralization.

Davis’ most affecting images capture police brutality toward protesters during both party’s conventions. The faces of Eric Gidcumb and Clayton McKee are shown with bruises and gashes on their faces after being beaten by police during the Democratic National Convention. Outside the Republican National Convention, a medic treats a woman after police sprayed her in the face with pepper spray. To his knowledge, the photographed protesters were peaceful and were not charged with crimes, Davis says.

“To be fair, a small number of protesters were more violent,” says Davis. “But this was overkill. Political protest is a vital part of democracy.”

Aside from the irony of free speech violations at an event celebrating the democratic process, other images display a campaign of intense passions. Some challenge preconceived notions of Washington celebrity.

A day-old wall mural of Obama is marred by a graffiti swastika, with eyes crossed out. Sarah Palin’s teleprompter bodes of the ever-present threat of Al Qaeda, as another photo of her shows her giving a stiff, right-armed wave. Although usually seen as a genial, commanding figure, former president Bill Clinton scowls with jaw clenched and eyes focused off to the side. In contrast to their official glamour at the Republican convention, Former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara are shown frowning, with age resting in their bored expressions.

“Each photograph has a story lurking under the surface,” says Davis. “People will take what they want away from it.” (Ben Broeren)

Joeff Davis’ “Political Frenzy” shows at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 South Cornell, through November 16.

By Lisa Larson-Walker

Doug Ashford is an artist and teacher at the Cooper Union School of Art, in New York. He also is a member of Group Material, an artists’ collective that for thirty years has created work questioning a variety of social themes and activist causes. On Saturday, October 25, Ashford will discuss Group Material’s “Democracy” (1988), a yearlong art project exploring the conflicts and failures within American democracy, as part of the symposium “Disruptions: The political art in now” at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The following is an excerpt from a conversation held in New York.

What changes do you notice within the strategies of activist art, what new methods are used, or what new spaces are being confronted?

I’m interested in the notion of artists’ turn to politics as a way to describe our investment in practices close to the experiences of beauty as an investment in the dialogical, the socially collaborative, the community based, a whole list of the past, probably twenty years. Those practices that are supposedly blending the relationship of art to activism have become seriously formulistic. Art has the potential to speak to aspects of humanity that are hidden and overwhelming. This potential could be overshadowed by the pragmatic needs of the social activist. So in that sense, when her social capital is taken by the status quo, the social activist may have an art form that has become decorative.

Can you think of anything that doesn’t function politically?

No, not if made by humans. Because, all culture happens for a reason, and all the ways that art moves us privately and socially is arranged, not dictated, but arranged through discourse.

Is that the inherent politics of discourse then?

Yeah, discourse is always in struggle. In that sense, I’m sort of a classic seventies cultural studies person, in that I see that the way we are able to describe ourselves as being formed in culture is dictated through power, from power. Not directly, because culture is controlled in so many different ways—by definition it is a political terrain. It doesn’t necessarily mean that political interventions will always change culture, that’s the beauty of it. And that’s why I would always insist to talk about this social turn, from the point of view of an artist’s use of politics to make epiphanies.

It seems like there’s been a big change in the availability of financial support for artists and art collectives since 1988. It’s positive for there to be more capital for these groups to have, but there is a definite way to get good at getting this money, and then maybe that’s why things get so formulaic, which seems to me to be negative. Can you comment on that?

It depends, because we know nothing is free. That’s the great American colloquialism. We know there’s no free lunch. How funding is then directing the thesis or the critique or the feelings or the affect is, from my perspective, is something that has its own culture. The relationship between art institutions and philanthropy, the actual resources they’re able to use, and how that the idea that the philanthropist is then also a cultural figure, is changing through time.

Within this, what do you think about the notion of a cultural capital that progressive political art can bring to a philanthropist? I don’t want to be overly sensational and say that they’re trying to ‘wash away the sins of capitalism’ by making this gesture but…

The idea of the redeemer, or the idea of redemption, often seems to be big in some of the rhetoric that validates the critical rhetoric around collaborative practices. Group Material was always extremely suspicious of this, because we always thought of ourselves as part of the audience. If you think of yourself as part of the audience, the idea of the artist as ethicist saving someone else is structurally a problem if it’s not self-critical.

So then what problems are considered in this reconsideration of Group Material’s “Democracy”?

The problem is that if we import that reorganization of the aesthetic to the political without changing and thinking about its effect, its aesthetic effect, what are the real forms we have as artists? We can’t repeat the formalisms of the past and expect great meanings to emerge. It doesn’t do me any good to have another experience socially in which someone tells me how to be political. Similarly, it’s not going to help for you to say there’s this sublime moment in which we are going to become enveloped by the awe of nature, that’s not going to work anymore. Art is different, and the social context for art is different, so the repetitions are frightening in this sense that they become the backdrop for business as usual, for art as exchange and not revelation.

Doug Ashford will participate in the symposium “Disruptions: The political in art now,” October 25, 11am, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago.

The art of Mindy Rose Schwartz helps me understand the city where I live: a landscape of endless avenues and rows of mid-century bungalow homes, bricks bracing for the chill, and corner bars touting an old style—a style not updated in decades but drunk down with pride. As radiators creak on for the first time this season, and the scent of winter’s onset hits the air, the mind is tugged back through some retrograde memories. But that smell isn’t mom’s cooking; it’s just a years’ worth of collected dust burning on the open radiator grill. Sometimes Chicago feels like a city-sized family room.

Macramé is a major component of Mindy Rose Schwartz’s sculptures. Just as knitting had its popular resurgence recently and crossed gender and generational lines, macramé was in full force in the 1960s and 70s. Knotters of the thin white rope proclaimed their medium’s potential to not only decorate a hanging plant, but also wore it as an emblem of the female movement. That is, where the first feminists decried crafts including macramé as pigeonholing femininity, the second wave found pride in so-called women’s work. That so much knotted rope can be tossed between ideologies and interior decoration delights Schwartz, but her work does not take a stance either way. To Schwartz, these forces animate macramé, along with other objects of personal value, and that is a good thing.

“I love to make things,” says Schwartz. She created and teaches a course for art students called Extreme Craft that explores the boundaries of the handmade. Her current exhibition of new sculpture features objects both literally and figuratively transported from her suburban Skokie childhood home. Many flaunt macramé, and some are without. The whole series is on view at Old Gold, an exhibition space in the wood-paneled basement of a Humboldt Park home.

Because Schwartz’s sculptures frequently conjure a suburban, middle-class experience, their presentation in Old Gold’s setting is like a fated love affair. One macramé web occurs on and around a fireplace. Mantles are common exhibition venues (perhaps the domestic curiosity cabinet), and here Schwartz delivers a hulking tangle of material that packs all the personality of Diane Arbus’ photograph of an oversize Christmas tree. Schwartz also creates her own credenza-type display shelves to host an assortment of ghost-like figurines, flowery ornamentation in metal, and mini Constructivist-esque wood assemblages. For Old Gold, she created some intentional pieces of décor such as ceramic owls for the basement’s built-in bar nook.

I asked Schwartz about the state of rawness or roughness—or even intentional ugliness—in her art. “It’s a real part of the world,” she says. “Prettiness and nausea”—they coexist. (Jason Foumberg)

Mindy Rose Schwartz shows at Old Gold, 2022 North Humboldt, basement entrance, through October 19.

We all know how clothing emotes: shoulder pads are bossy, a bonnet is prude and ruffles like to be ravaged. That it’s easy to take a garment’s personality for granted—clothes are often called our second skin, as if our limbs sprouted thread—is cause for reconsidering how an outfit has the possibility to transform its wearer. In the maximalist camp we’ve witnessed drownings in fabric and ornament, and in the minimalist movement we’ve seen refinement pushed to ascetic extremes. (And, of course, there are fat pants for when you just feel like crying on a Friday night.)

Diane Simpson’s sculptures are clothing personages. In her current show, titled “Cover Ups,” the slightly larger-than-life objects are mostly torso-shaped and hollow, emphasizing cavities where a body would normally enter. Forms inspired by vests, aprons, collars, umpire’s padding and an x-ray shield for medical patients aren’t made to be worn, though, and seeing them on pedestals, hanging from the ceiling, and upon stages of Simpson’s own design turns them into purely visual objects.

Simpson’s sense of materials and construction places her sculptures on par with avant-garde fashion design. Yet, where designers have deconstructed fashion to death, Simpson constructs fashion-based forms from the pop culture minefield. “Vest,” from 2006, features patterns as seen on tiles in a New York City subway station. Seventeenth-century aristocratic muffs and imperial bibs, the graceful geometry of 1920s Art Deco, Japanese armor, and 1950s-era matronly socialite garb are plucked as inspiration with equal gusto.

Simpson, who was born and raised in Joliet, now lives and works in Wilmette. She has been showing her art in and around Chicago since the late 1970s. Much of the garment-based work was conceived for a commission at the Racine Art Museum in southeast Wisconsin. In 2007, Simpson built multiple sets for the museum’s storefront windows. Appropriately, the museum is housed in a former department store.

The adjective “architectonic” is often applied to the hard, angular forms that Simpson creates. Garments have served as inspiration for many previous sculptures, but their final forms tended to be less literal. At the core, Simpson is an abstract sculptor who delights in the various associations that a pattern or form may induce in a viewer.

Simpson’s work is often credited with promoting an empowering image of femininity. Given that her aprons and dresses stand upright in bold poses, it’s difficult not imagine the female-associated forms as symbolic. It might be, however, that the angular bodies and boxy, broad-shoulders are byproducts of Simpson’s particular construction process that includes a penchant for symmetry and a taste for rigid materials. The feminine aspect is incidental to the overall formal vision, and perhaps Simpson’s objects are best deemed Female only in contrast to H.C. Westermann’s playful constructions, which, if we need to assign a gender, are henceforth Male. (Jason Foumberg)

Diane Simpson, “Cover Ups,” shows at Alfedena Gallery, 434 W. Ontario, through October 11.

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.

High Hopes
From shelter to shelter, hope poses as a novelty that always falls in high demand, but this week, after an effort fronted by local mural specialist Augustina Droze, a renewed sense of optimism will take root at the Great Hope Family Center—a homeless shelter located in Pilsen—and will make its way into the shelter from the outside-in. “I designed the mural to be garden-themed as a play on words with the shelter’s name,” the artist explains. On display on one of the shelter’s outside walls, Droze’s latest, completed with quite a bit of help and inspiration from Chicago Public School students, encapsulates the message of “Great Hope” and converts it into a slightly more sustainable “Hope Garden.” Incorporating student-designed flowers based off of their dreams of the future, the final result—to be revealed on location this Thursday—depicts the future as something capable of cultivation regardless of circumstance. “Whether they enjoy painting or painting on walls in general, the kids love it,” Droze says.

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.