By Rachel Furnari

Matthew Metzger’s paintings address themselves directly to the history of abstraction, but they’re also astonishing and accurate representations of the discarded objects of everyday life. They are about both the lives of things and their renewed vigor on the flat surface of a painting. The opening of his new exhibition at DOVA Temporary, “The Interrogative Remainder,” brought up a number of questions about Metzger’s process, motivations and the importance of 1970s arena rock.

For the most part, your paintings are fanatically illusionistic, reproducing the surfaces and two-dimensional forms of various ordinary objects and ephemera with great skill. And yet you are not interested in the painting “passing” for the object itself. I am tempted to describe your realism as entropic—always undoing its own illusion or betraying its artifice. Can you talk about your paintings’ relationship to the real, to the thing itself? Read the rest of this entry »

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“Parallel Plot,” Matt Saunders’ solo show at the Renaissance Society, features photographic prints and rotoscoped animations by the Berlin-based American artist. Saunders’ process, making use of photography, collage and painting, starts with film stills, Mylar, ink and oil to create prepared negatives for the darkroom. These negatives are in turn used to produce original prints ranging from the very small to the very large. Trained as a painter at Yale, it is not surprising to see that Saunders’ work runs the gamut of painting’s genres: landscape, interiors and portraits are the focus of this artist’s portfolio, though pure abstraction is equally at home in the work presented here. Of particular interest are large-format contact prints made by taking original paintings, taping them down to large sheets of photographic paper, and exposing them to light in the darkroom, resulting in x-ray-like images that compress the painted image and its support into a single layer. Many of the works presented here are altered portraits of actors and actresses who have departed popular memory, appropriate for Saunders’ ghostly images. The subjects refer to the traditions of representational painting and cinema, like Warhol before him. However, Saunders is working toward the opposite end of the Warholian conceptual spectrum: away from endless reproducibility and toward uniqueness; away from the glamour of film and toward the obscurity of history. Beautifully installed and conceptually rich, this show surely warrants a visit. (David Emanuel)

Through April 11 at The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis, (773)702-8670

RECOMMENDED

Seamlessly merging single color images into panoramic “constructed landscapes,” Kevin Malella comes up with compelling scenes that could be taken as straight shots featuring brilliant juxtapositions. Sheer beauty is Malella’s strong suit, as when he offers up a study in which railroad tracks dusted with a fresh carpet of snow foreground a tract of suburban duplexes abutting the towers of Chicago rising in the distance on a soft partly sunny day. Guillermo Srodek-Hart moves inside and shoots cluttered old shops in rural Argentina, delivering rich and subtly lit color photos that combine complex composition with densely overflowing content, as in his study of shelving in a general store on which cases full of gaucho knives vie for attention with crates of vegetables, spools of twine, bags of dog food and fertilizer, and a stuffed wildcat and falcon, not to mention most of the rest of the stock. Evincing perfect complementarity, Malella and Srodek-Hart, each in their own ways, achieve rare marriages of form and fact. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 8 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

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Founder of the Institute of Design, which for a brief moment in the mid-twentieth century made Chicago the center of world photography, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was the great experimenter, addicted to the idea of a purely photographic vision that would develop his medium’s possibilities for transforming human sensibility so that people would be fit to survive and prevail in an industrial environment. Although he has been shown in his adopted home many times, this lavish exhibition, which covers five galleries and is accompanied by informative wall text and handouts, finally—through the efforts of curator Carol Ehlers—gives Moholy his due and allows us to appreciate his many facets whole. From his straight shots of cityscapes from unfamiliar angles (now part of the visual vernacular) to his “light paintings” and photograms in which directed light and objects play on photo-sensitive media without the mediation of a lens, Moholy was ever breaking new ground in technique; yet, in retrospect, a look at the light paintings, which were his boldest endeavors, reveals that the forms of those haunting astral abstractions are photographic versions of the contemporary paintings of the era that are most kindred to the works of Joan Miro and Paul Klee. Rather than being ahead of his time, as he wished to be, Moholy was of them as a genuine creator. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 9 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan.

“RimWare” is a handmade, four-piece porcelain dinnerware set with inlaid drawings of gay rimjobs. On a small appetizer plate, a man washes his behind in the shower. As the meal moves on to salad, soup and dinner courses, the scene gets progressively dirtier. Assholes receive lickings. Each piece of flatware has a decorative gold mesh pattern around its lip.

Thirty years after Judy Chicago’s “Dinner Party,” a gathering of thirty-nine vaginal-themed plates (on permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum of Art), over-sexed ceramics no longer seem that shocking—not that Dustin Yager’s “RimWare” needs to shock in order to be successful. Yager is after something different than sexual liberation, perhaps, even, critiquing its opposite. As gay sex practices shed their taboo associations, commemorative plates, such as the “RimWare” collection, codify the dream of domestic bliss. “Oh, what interesting china,” remarked the conservative senator’s wife in “The Birdcage,” from 1996; “it looks like young men playing leap frog.” Today, sodomy need not be reduced to ambiguous detail. As the gays love their home decorations, and home-decoration retailers know this all too well, the market for fashionable homoiserie grows with the force of a Viagra-laced boner. Read the rest of this entry »

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The theatricality of peeling back the red curtains, which drape the entrance to Diane Christiansen and Shoshana Utchenik’s first collaborative work, sets the tone for their multimedia wonderland currently occupying Gallery One and its flanking catwalk at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Imbued with a whimsical sense of play, this artist environment, which incorporates elements of collage, painting, drawing, sewing, linocut prints, sound art, animation and sculpture, is a winsome accumulation of objects and ideas that explores the dichotomies of internal and external relationships.

The journey begins amidst the coniferous trees of the Ego Forest, complete with a canopy of stylized, Buddhist-inspired swirling paper clouds suspended overhead. The sprawling tentacles of a softly glowing paper-mâché octopus dominate the Relationship Bardo, and the two-dimensional pup tent in the Teacher Garden is a sort of Potemkin pit stop. The viewer’s quest ends in the Meditation Clubhouse, constructed of re-proposed wooden doors and boards, if one is brave enough to walk the narrow plank up it. Read the rest of this entry »

Helen Maurene Cooper, "Tuskegee," 2008

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As hip as they come, Helen Maurene Cooper and Michael Ratulowski are postmodern to the core, deploying their cameras to make ambiguous cultural statements in color. Seizing upon the conceit of commemorating the anniversaries of rappers’ deaths, Ratulowski would buy a 40 and proceed to shoot himself pouring out its contents in alleys and on stoops and sidewalks, without any discernible reverence and somewhat off-handedly, as though he was performing an assignment; yet he has encased his photos in ornate old-timey frames. Is it irony or camp? Cooper, who is blazing along with her third show of 2010, had previously exhibited images that played mercifully with fashion. Here she takes a walk on the wild side with scenario shots that place her subjects—mainly herself—among urban rubble or verdant glens where their passions are brought forth, although, of course, in provocative fashion poses. Bent over with her hands on her thighs, her dress riding up, her legs spread apart and her hair tousled over her face, Cooper stands in an orange-brown haze amidst construction trash as a forest looms in the background. Is it high concept or burlesque? (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 10 at David Weinberg Gallery, 300 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Duncan Anderson’s newest exhibition at Kasia Kay Art Projects, a continuation of his miniature sculptural tableaus and fantastical figurines, is fascinating in its meticulous storytelling. Anderson toys with train-set men and dollhouse furniture, creating architectural-style models of strange worlds and fantasy narratives. The titles invoke mysterious stories of tiny, mundane heroes and heroines. An amputee octopus with little-girl legs clutches a harp on the first day of school. A policeman and his dog are locked in a face-off with another officer, trapped in a desolate landscape.

Resting on mismatched shelves, columns and pedestals, Anderson’s characters huddle together in the small gallery space like a forgotten back room of Grecian statuary. Yet, instead of marble, the common materials are cheap plastic and gift-shop souvenir porcelain. Working on such a miniature scale allows for a play between the charming and the strange, but the crushed velvet and tacky painted surfaces are slightly repulsive. The size, as it draws one closer, begs for a kind of craftsmanship that is lost beneath a plastic pallor.

Within the individual sculptures lie arresting juxtapositions of familiar and alien worlds. However, viewed as a whole, the exhibit is less coherent because the range in the sizes of the characters is wildly varied. Anderson’s experiment—and his problem—is scale.  (Julia V. Hendrickson)

Through March 20 at Kasia Kay Art Projects, 215 N. Aberdeen St.

RECOMMENDED

Appropriating photographs of scenes of devastation from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and further afield that she finds on the internet; tweaking the images in the computer; and then painting elegant bits of “restorations” into them, Susanne Slavick presents yet another variant of the ubiquitous project of redeeming the ruins. Slavick’s most effective photo-works feature the gutted and twisted hulks of bomb-blasted cars that she has decorated with designs and figures from ancient civilizations. In “Hemorrhage,” Slavick serves up a hopeless wreck from a car bombing in Sri Lanka that she has surrounded and filled with sinuous patterns derived from an illustration in Firdawsi’s fourteenth-century Book of Kings. Although Slavick’s intent is to begin a “healing” process and to slam imperialism on the way, the effect of her images is to fix the viewer in contemplation of aestheticized brutality which arrests and satisfies the eye with its striking juxtapositions and self-sufficient beauty. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

Chicago turns a spritely 173 this year, and to celebrate Casey Cortez and Anthony Spina are throwing a party. To help the celebration, the two paired a photographer and DJ from Wicker Park, Pilsen and Wrigleyville to document their own neighborhood. “I want people to walk into this event and discover things about the city and say, ‘Wow, this is my city,’” says Spina. The impetus of the party, it seems, is to shrink Chicago down; to help people understand how close we really are. “You have these dynamic themes going on in the city,” says Cortez, “and a lot of times they don’t interact with each other.” The birthday party is as much a call for collaboration as it is a celebration, and that’s exactly what the pairing of photographers and DJs show. Cortez and Spina talk of how people become comfortable in their neighborhood, and it’s a sentiment echoed by photographer and the party’s Pilsen representative, Kyle LeMere. “We [he and DJ Baby Magdalene] both live on sort of opposite ends of Pilsen, so it was great to show each other parts of our neighborhood we haven’t yet been exposed to.” And what’s a birthday without a cake? Bleeding Heart Bakery will provide, as Cortez puts it, “a 3-D, three-layer Willis Tower/Old Style-can cake.” The party starts at 7pm March 4 at 1837 South Halsted. (Peter Cavanaugh)