“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 »

Whether you lament over reading Times New Roman or you find yourself searching for the colophon in the back of a book, you should find yourself at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere this Friday night. “TYPEFORCE: The Annual Chicago Show of Emerging Typographic Allstars” has its opening reception at 7pm and continues through March 14. Though the actual practice of typography is anything but new, its importance cannot be ignored. As local artist and contributor Margot Harrington puts it, “It’s just such a building block, a cornerstone of design history. For me, it really is one of the most basic fundamental parts of my background in graphic design.” Though it is held in high regard within the art world, the public has only really just recently re-embraced typography. “There has been a noticeable wave of lettering in popular culture in the last decade,” says Luke Williams, who will be making his Chicago debut. He posits that the availability of such programs as Adobe Illustrator have pushed typography back into the conversation. With around twenty local artists on display, the show is sure to be varied. Between Williams’ “set of vowels that embody a blend of high-class royalty, with whimsical 1960’s Americana themes” and Harrington’s screen-printed ampersands onto collages of vintage books and found paper, there is bound to be something for every fontophile. (Peter Cavanaugh)

On December 17 of last year an electrical fire destroyed much of Kenneth Morrison’s artist-destination The Whale. No one was hurt, but most of all of Morrison’s possessions—and those of Michelle Faust and Nat Ward, who along with Morrison run the art society Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey—were destroyed. In an effort to rebuild, Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere will be home to a benefit event February 5, featuring musical performances by Black Nag, Thin Man, Son of Cops and more. Tickets are ten bucks, and the evening doubles as a release party for the 114th issue of Lumpen. “In 2007 I came to a Lamprey meeting, and they were all kind of unfailingly generous and welcoming,” says Mairead Case, one of the event’s organizers. “[Morrison] sometimes says he’s met most of the people in the neighborhood in his kitchen.” (Tom Lynch)

Ryan Shultz

“Why have artists chosen to work in a medium that is retrograde at best, and at worst outdated?” This is the question answered by fifty-two MFA candidates or recent graduates, as selected by Sergio Gomez, the in-house curator of the Zhou B. Art Center. Invitations were mailed to over 400 MFA programs in the United States, and 255 artists responded to what might be the first national MFA exhibition devoted exclusively to painting (or, actually, “the embodiment of the idea of painting,” where any materials could be used, as long as paint was among them, and it could be hung on a wall).

This is quite an ambitious project, and unlike most national juried shows, there was no entrance fee. It was funded entirely by sponsors, mostly the industrious Zhou Brothers, who have been very generous to the art community they joined twenty-five years ago, when they moved to Chicago possessing not much more than MFAs from the National Academy of Art and Crafts in Beijing. But an MFA program in a twenty-first century American university is probably quite different. Here, the emphasis is more on art theory than art practice. So, each of the fifty-two paintings on display are accompanied by texts that run the gamut of postmodern art theory, and since both images and texts can be seen online at visualarttoday.com, one might then ask: is this an exhibit that really needs a brick-and-mortar gallery to be seen? Are there any subtle visual relationships that get lost in cyberspace? And, regretfully, I think the answer is no—especially when compared with the vibrant paintings that older, local artists have hung upon the many corridor walls that wind throughout five floors of the Zhou B. Art Center. Except, perhaps, for local MFA Ryan Shultz, whose art theory is as retrograde as his painting: “Painting demands time, pause, reflection—it slows down our techno-pace…and offers a space for contemplation.” More common in this exhibition is a catechism like this one, from Michael Hubbard: “The most effective painting today must involve a rearranging and re-contextualizing of the definitions, qualities and histories of painting.” Hopefully, the next Zhou B national show will focus a bit more on visuality, like the national self-portrait show they’ve been running for six years. What about a national show for landscapes? Or geo-form abstraction? Or—heaven forbid—the human figure? Can’t universities collaborate on their own national MFA shows like they already do with basketball tournaments? (Chris Miller)

“Wet Paint” shows at the Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th Street, through February 28.

"Open Spaces," 2008

RECOMMENDED

Susan Clinard is one of those sculptors who are strong on optical and weak on conceptual—which is to say that the emotional content of her figures is instantly recognizable, and her themes are so ancient, they predate literacy, much less the last 200 years of art theory and criticism. Especially now as she returns to Chicago with an exhibit of many pieces that relate to her life as a new mother, as well as her more youthful concerns with body awareness and stranger anxiety. So, regardless of virtuosity, her pieces will never be shown in the new ModernWing of the Art Institute, but they might belong a few miles south, in the “Ancient Americas” exhibit at the Field Museum, where she seems to pick up where the sculptors of Nayarit and Quimbaya left off. Though the ancient artists are a very tough act to follow, because the best examples have been gleaned from generations of sculptors working the same style, while a modern sculptor, like Clinard, must be a solo act, responsible for inventing as well as mastering and marketing her own work, which now involves wire, as well as terra cotta and wood. As ancient artists had to the right to say, “this is us,” contemporary artists (especially those found in the Zhou Brothers Art Center) can only say “this is me—me, me, me” (Chris Miller)

Through January 31 at the Chicago Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St.

RECOMMENDED

Spatially, Medicine Cabinet occupies a grand total of Bridgeport resident Chris Smith’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Given the amount of available space, exhibiting artists are rather limited from the get-go, though Jesse Mclean finds an interesting solution by converting the usually reflective veneer of the gallery space (i.e., the cabinet’s mirror) into a white surface on which she projects a short video loop featuring every type of garishly “serene” imagery imaginable including: a wild horse charging through a meadow of wildflowers, a pair of logs quietly burning and a meandering mountain brook. The images promote an all-too-easy sense of calm; the same sense of calm the pharmaceutical advertisements from which they are loosely derived attempt to cultivate in order to hawk their products; but, as the accompanying audio track reminds us, such products “may cause” anything but calm.

A host of voices recite medical side effects ranging from the mild: stomachache and abdominal pain, to the penultimately severe: blindness, rounded out by the ultimate side effect: death. Cumulatively, “Side Effects” is a restatement of the now infamous dictum uttered by Mick Jagger, which once tore at the designed surface of the pharmaceutical industry more than forty years ago: though we may go “running” to the medicine cabinet “for the shelter of mommy’s little helper,” we should obviously read the warning label before ingesting such potentially dangerous substances. But things are different today, and many harbor at least some skepticism regarding pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in the wake of hundreds of deaths directly linked to the premature market availability of drugs like Fen-Phen and Vioxx; drugs made available in a push for quicker profit before the full scope of their side effects could be completely determined. The skepticism this work posits would seem so pervasive as to prompt an eye-roll were the images and voices not so charming and sarcastically funny. (Nate Lee)

Through November at Medicine Cabinet, 3216 S. Morgan, apartment 4R

RECOMMENDED

In New York in the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein turned dynamic Constructivist abstractions and the vitalistic paint drips of Abstract Expressionism into flat, print-ready graphics, and the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto sought to eliminate artistic hierarchies by combining classical art objects with rag scraps and other common detritus. By the 1980s, graphic paint drips were on every day-glo bandanna, graffiti artists had gallery shows, and urban decay was a stock backdrop for Hollywood movies and punk album covers. Thaddeus Kellstadt’s post-everything installation at Second Bedroom, appropriately titled “After Effects,” uses a cheerful palette to comment bemusedly on the anti-grandiose ethos in contemporary object-making. The wall of his installation room features a lovely blue and pinkish-orange painting of a cracked brick wall, and a torn-out phone booth constructed from paint and cardboard. A dead plant made from plaster, wire and a disassembled plastic pot-leaf necklace swoons on the floor, and in a corner behind and above the door one discovers a drop-ceiling tile punctured by a rainbow forest of pencils. Outside the room, and across the nature-culture divide, is a set of six small paintings of leafless trees whose twigs are shimmering streaks across a simple sky made strange by Kellstadt’s intuitive use of color. There may be no possibility of epic poetry after the advent of steam power, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but Kellstadt’s work implies that sifting through the ruins of modernity doesn’t need to bum us out. (Bert Stabler)

Through November at Second Bedroom, 3216 S. Morgan St, apartment 4R

RECOMMENDED

When engaged in a particular endeavor, it is always encouraging, if not simply enjoyable, to encounter others similarly engaged. While traveling abroad last summer, Proximity Magazine’s publishers and local non-profit gallery managers Ed and Rachel Marszewski met Helsinki-based artist, publisher and gallery manager Jenni Rope. Discovering their mutual interests, the two parties immediately bonded—a bond that has recently borne an exhibition here in Chicago; including works by Rope, her publishing company Napa Books and a few Finnish compatriots.

The show centers around its namesake work, “My Forest,” an installation of thirty-two paintings in various media on panel. The appealing paintings attract in the same way a neat, well-designed package can send us clamoring for the products—at least the quality—supposedly manifest by the products contained therein (an attractiveness Scandinavians seem to generate with unsurpassed facility). In this respect they resemble endeavors by Chicago designer and artist Cody Hudson. Like some of his work, Rope’s paintings rely more upon the shapes of their supports, and their relationships to each other, than whatever in particular may be happening inside. The term ‘installation’ is not used arbitrarily here; it would be awkward to call any given painting a picture. Instead, they function cumulatively as components of a much larger “picture” while, ultimately, any sense of representation remains a matter for the individual imagination. (Nate Lee)

Through November 1 at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan.

Helen Maurene Cooper, in the exhibition Faking It?

As digital cameras and their cell-phone-affixed counterparts continue to grow in ubiquity and facility, and as more and more people use these devices to transmit daily personal updates, in the form of pictures of themselves and their activities to personal Web-based facades like Flickr and Facebook, a new technologically informed obsession with personhood—either one’s own or someone else’s—dubbed “egocasting” by cultural critic Christine Rosen, has taken hold in our culture. It resonates particularly well with the young, overly self-aware members of society. An apt art theorist should remain attentive for signs of this new phenomena reemerging in the work of young contemporary artists; the lay art theorist may claim that portraiture is, by now, a pervasive and eternal tendency.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere, Bridgeport’s hip and somewhat secluded multi-purpose alt-space, recently hosted nine artists in an exclusively portrait-based exhibition titled “Transplant Reflect.” The work is unusually divided between two different approaches: technically refined photography and Pop-surrealist street art. Anna Shteynshleyger updates Man Ray’s photograms using the camera-less photographic process to capture images of individual hairstyles, suggesting that an entire personality may be reduced to the shape of a haircut.  At a moment when self-design has become the norm and conformity is unequivocally shunned, we are perhaps nothing more than our outward appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

Version>09, or simply Version, could be aptly described by the instructions for artist Ashley Metcalf’s installation at NFO XPO: “Please look through the wormhole to our parallel universe.” And Version will take you down the worm’s hole, to a sprawling alternate art world of friendly artists, affordable art and beer. Parts of the Version festival are timed to precede Art Chicago, with a small overlap, and upcoming events are posted on their website.

Taking a cue from Chicago’s 2016 bid for the Olympics, Version partnered with several art groups to organize events examining Chicago’s historical international event, the 1893 Columbian Exposition. On April 25 there was a walking tour titled “A Working Man’s Guide to the Columbian Exposition,” which allowed attendees to learn about the laborers of the Exposition. The tour ended next to the Experimental Station, which is hosting King Ludd’s Analog Arcade through the first weekend in May. Physically close to the Midway Plaissance, the site of the 1893 carnival games and rides, King Ludd’s also consists of carnival-style games, made by artists. Following their Luddite title, the games are low-tech and emphatically use recycled materials in their construction. The most ambitious of these was a bike-powered air-hockey table, the actual functioning of which was uncertain at the time of my visit, though that suited the Experimental Station perfectly.
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