Frank Smith, "Banner for a New Black Nation"

“Black Men – We Need You – Preserve Our Race – Leave White Bitches Alone,” screams the angry text on a silk-screened poster from the early 1970s. Thank goodness Barack Obama Sr. didn’t heed that advice ten years earlier! This is but one of several historical issues that arise when contemplating the AfriCOBRA exhibition at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Gallery.

Why did the young women carry rifles? Why do the colorful graphic designs seem as psychedelic as they do African? And whatever happened to the Chicago-based AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists)? As it turned out, most of the commune artists began or continued careers in academia. Forty years later, all that anger and Afrocentric cultural activism seems gone, especially in the concurrent exhibition of “African American Contemporary Paintings” at the Murphy Hill Gallery in Garfield Park. The skills in graphic design seem gone, too, as Murphy Hill has assembled a hodgepodge of local artists, most of whom lack professional training, have any kind of ideological commitment, and some of whom aren’t even African American (similar to the “post-black” strategy used in “Black Is, Black Ain’t” at the Renaissance Society in 2008). Ethnic boundaries may not be drawn as sharply as they were back in 1970, and, as opposed to relentless ethnic idealism, there’s instead mugshots of relentless despair, as seen in attorney Tim Leeming’s paintings and drawings of young criminals.

Most of the AfriCOBRA people were competent graphic designers who could carry and sugarcoat a message as well as any commercial artist. Some are exceptional artists, like Murry Depillars (1938-2008), who managed a brilliant synthesis of narrative figuration with African-American folk-art quilting in his homage to the imaginary “Queen Candace.” Depillars eventually retired as Dean of the Visual Arts at Virginia Commonwealth University. Frank Smith (b. 1939) took that quilting back and forth with abstract expressionist painting in his “Banner for a New Black Nation,” and later became a professor at Howard University.

At Murphy Hill, Mary Qian’s recent drawings effectively record and celebrate the individual spirit of people she meets on streets and trains. It’s too bad that Murphy Hill could not pull in more good work on African-American themes, and even show local masters like Kerry James Marshall or Robert Guinan. Perhaps, though, only museums can mount that kind of comprehensive exhibition—but would they, and have they? (Chris Miller)

“AfriCOBRA and the Chicago Black Arts Movement” shows at Northwestern University’s Dittmar Memorial Gallery, 1999 Campus Drive, Evanston, though March 17. “Contemporary African American Painting” shows at Murphy Hill Gallery, 3333 W. Arthington, though April 3.

RECOMMENDED

Devening Projects + Editions hosts another group of A-list superstars and other impressive talent, this time taking aim at that hallowed cornerstone of the American straight-and-narrow: the family. Functioning as an enforcer of social order and stability, family life is a primary target for those seeking to challenge or upset this order, a position the artists in this show adopt unanimously.

With a penchant for mayhem and destruction endemic to any healthy 11-year-old boy, and the creative license of a distinguished mid-to-late career artist, the 70-year old Swiss artist Roman Signer presents a collection of twenty-five short films that elaborate wildly on the term “wreckage” in its most literal sense. It is entertaining to watch Signer find imaginative new uses for small-explosives, bottle rockets and a host of miniature flying contraptions. The greater implications of Signer’s actions are not always readily available. Instead, it’s his sheer inventiveness, applied with equal virtuosity to both situation and materials, which deserves our attention and praise. Read the rest of this entry »

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The “Artists Run Chicago” showcase, which opened at the Hyde Park Art Center last month, shed a reifying light upon a phenomena that nearly all parties involved in the Chicago art world consider second nature—the artist-run space. What the “Artists Run” show at HPAC manages to convey is the immense and varying breadth of sophistication, from the spotlessly clean, to the hopelessly beer-soaked, which such spaces collectively display. Dan Devening’s studio-turned-exhibition space represents the most pristine commercial-like end of the artist-run spectrum. Likewise, Devening lays claim to an attractive reservoir of talent. Recently, he turned over the reins, and responsibilities, of his role as curator (not to mention his last remaining morsel of personal studio space) to gallery assistant Thomas Roach and recent SAIC graduate Xavier Jimenez, who have put together an impressive conglomeration of work from the Devening database.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Currently on view at Julius Caesar—the artist-run space housed in one of the West Carroll Avenue studio buildings—is Deirdre O’Dwyer’s “Stranger,” an exhibition of ten small paintings with an accompanying floor stack of free-for-the-taking burned CDs. Nine of the paintings hang together on one wall and one painting hangs near the corner of the adjacent wall, as though the person doing the hanging had intended for all to be grouped together, but had miscalculated and run out of room. Several of the nine paintings hang slightly askew and lean against the others, reinforcing this sense of casual, messy haste, but also suggesting a kind of intimacy, as though the line of paintings have somehow linked arms with one another. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

For “MAN MAN MAN,” his first solo exhibition in Chicago, Los Angeles-based artist Christopher Michlig continues his investigation of language and its myriad public vessels. On view are nearly a dozen framed fluorescent collage posters created from found advertisements; Michlig painstakingly cuts and pastes rectangular strips of cannibalized posters to alternately erase or abstract the advertisement’s original meaning, converting blocks of text into blocks of subtly undulating form and color. Most of the pieces in this particular grouping of collages retain a single word or phrase held in tense limbo among a vibrating mass of blips, punctuation marks, and concealed context, imbuing the language that is left with a spare and often wry poeticism. Among these works, however, I am most drawn to those that veer closest to abstraction and the complete obliteration of their original literal meaning. With the exception of “Lecterne”—a podium-esque wooden structure turned on its side, littered by three crumpled styrene “paper” wads, rectangular sections excised from its tablet-like top—the wooden sculptures occupying the center of the gallery are a bit less successful than the collages, and crowd the space. Presumably, the (over)abundance of work on display—sculpture and collage both—refers to “the notion that repetition simply indexes without achieving substantive order and understanding,” as cited in the gallery’s press release. There is a certain Pop sensibility at work here that is in some ways very effective, but the excess of work dulls the exhibition’s ambition as a formally sharp, severely selective, and subtly poetic simulation of a streetscape, ironically shifting focus back to the glut of advertising each of us encounters daily, and the way in which that bombardment leaves us numb and unsure of what to believe. (Kathryn Scanlan)

Through May 12 at Dan Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll

George C. Clark, "Winter Afternoon, Cocoa Beach, Florida," acrylic on panel

RECOMMENDED

Exhibits at the spacious Murphy Hill Gallery are assembled more by chance than by design, but that doesn’t mean that a trip out to the recycled Sears & Roebuck factory on Chicago’s West Side isn’t worth the short drive from the Loop. The masterly George Clark is the artist who stands out in this exhibit, showing works that span several decades of his life as a painter. Like Edward Hopper, he takes us to streets where the mysterious meets the ordinary, and his attention to detail will keep those streets alive long after he has stopped walking them. The large-scale photographs of John Sagami have a similar, mysterious feeling,  but they are black-and-white, as in film noir, and invite the viewer walk down the back streets of his dark, urban dream-world that feels so much like a novel set in Shanghai. Then Pat Rose takes us back into the sunlight and lets us pretend that even the neglected margins of urbanity are only there to please the eye. Indeed, each of these artists has struck out in a different direction, and since they are all showing some skill,  it’s usually enjoyable to follow them. (Chris Miller)

Through February 28 at Murphy Hill Gallery, 3333 W. Arthington St.

RECOMMENDED

Dana Carter understands that if you stand still for long enough, the atmosphere around you will put on a show—however subtle, however ephemeral. But how might one capture it, collaborate with it or represent it as artwork?

The collection of mixed-media artworks Carter has on display at Devening Projects and Editions are largely shaped by her experiences during a residency in the desert of Carizozo, New Mexico. There, Carter experimented with light, landscape, fabric, minerals (salt and chalk) and their corrosive and generative traces.

As any of us tromping about the sidewalks of Chicago these days knows, salt crystallizes onto material, producing its own forms on your boots. Carter channels this phenomenon for “Extract from seven days in search of Orion Nebula” (2008), a heavy-duty black cloth treated with salt water that evokes a subtly gleaming mountain scene.

The exhibition’s keystone work is “Looking at you from the Very Large Array” (2008), an ode to New Mexico’s radio astronomy observatory. Carter re-presents footage from a sunlight-drawing experiment as a projected stop-motion digital film—just one element to the larger installation that includes a glass box on the floor to reflects images of radio telescopes. The piece offers a curious comment on the dissonance between human perception and imaging technologies, both artistic and scientific.

Carter’s concept is certainly compelling, but it’s difficult to fully perceive the artist’s interest in experimenting with the atmosphere while present in the gallery’s white-box, windowless exhibition space. This, ironically, may turn out to be the point. (Danny Orendorff)

Through February 9 at Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll

Julius Caesar is a studio space turned gallery located in a Garfield Park warehouse. Newcity sat down with the five artists who make up Julius Caesar to find out more.

Why Julius Caesar as a name?
It was a Dadaist gesture. Everybody picked up a book and pointed to a page. We could’ve been cheese soup gallery! We liked the anonymity of the name and we’re wary of the joke of personality whereby gallerists give their spaces their own name, and those names accumulate this kind of grandiosity.

There are five of you, how do you make decisions?
We made a decision early on to meet in person, so things don’t actually get tense, if somebody is like “this is upsetting me” we talk about it and there is a new level of understanding that is reached (within the group). We all have ideas and a mutual respect for each other.

We had feigned attempts at a manifesto or an agenda but that wasn’t going to function. That’s the advantage of Caesar being this character. We are all the little limbs and organs of Caesar this benevolent dictator that we’ve made up. What would Caesar do or not do? He ends up being demonstrative of our own best desires for showing local people or abstraction or whatever. Caesar is an actual person that has a one-year history of being. Maybe in the future we can look back and say what Caesar is like. Then we can ask questions like “Do we like how it’s been or do we want to change it?”

How do you choose who gets to show?
For us there is a real conviction that people that we’re interested in here are as good as anything that we want to see (elsewhere). The more that we build Caesar the more that we’ll be able to platform people that we respect in other circles.

Is there any conflict in showing your own art?
No, I think it’s a great opportunity to show in an environment that we feel is experimental, free, sane, permissive and supportive and there is an expectation of openness on the part of people of who go there. We don’t know what the motives behind other galleries are, whereas we know that the motive behind Caesar is pretty vague if nonexistent, it feels transparent. We’re artists and we’re trying to make art. That’s all we’re trying to do. Being a gallerist is not our career option. We’re interested in making art, in other people making art and in seeing art. It’s taking a long time to figure out what Caesar is; it’s not a garage, an arena for commercial exhibits or an avant-garde forum. It’s a space.

(Dan Gunn)

Julius Caesar is Dana DeGuilio, Diego Leclery, Colby Shaft, Hans Sundquist and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung. 3144 West Carroll Avenue, 2G

RECOMMENDED

The utterance takes the forefront in the sounds and images of Charles Mahafee. His exhibition at the artist-run space Julius Caesar speaks volumes in just three small pieces that compete for attention but nonetheless sound in unison. Among all the witticisms, I noticed a tinge of cynicism if not desperation in phrases such as, “I get a kick out of being depressed” and “I destroy everything that I love and will systematically destroy everything in my path,” from the video “Seven Sentences Starting with I.” Here the emphasis on first-person subjective complements the image of the lips that struggle to speak these words while spitting out a mouthful of screws. When considered with another piece in the exhibition—a spinning crotch in the video “Ridiculous”—there is something deeply psychological at work, not unlike a disturbing dream that fails to reveal its troubled meaning. I find no flaw in the familiarity of Mahafee’s scenarios due equally to the world of disturbed imagery and to the inner workings of the human mind. Most redeeming is the balance found in a piece such as “Pet Idiot” that asks for little interpretation and seems to just rejoice in the sounds the body makes outside of their concrete meaning. To quote Mahafee’s work, “Arguments are ridiculous and it is ridiculous of me to argue that arguments are ridiculous.” Somehow this strikes me again as a dead-end line of reasoning, but Mahafee never gives up. (Tim Ridlen)

Charles Mahafee shows at Julius Caesar, 3144 West Carroll Avenue, 2G, through December 28.

By Jason Foumberg

Our eyes, so careful to speak the mind’s intelligence, can easily regress to bestial instincts. They slim to a predatory shape, scan and hone. The café-set call it people-watching, but really it’s just a form of animal intelligence. When you walk down a busy sidewalk and set your eyes on another, then look away, then look again, away, and eyes brush past each other, it’s like dogs tracking fear, sex, competitors. The optic nerve stabs through the brain’s pearly pith, darting straight for the primitive core. Yes, it’s base, but even the most refined prepared meal satisfies the gurgling stomach.

It’s with these eyes that I went looking for art with my teeth bared, and found Michael Wolf. The Museum of Contemporary Photography, which recently opened an exhibition by the German artist, paints him as a jet-setting photographer of serious architecture who could respectfully represent our city to itself. The work in the show tells another story. Wolf got caught up with what’s inside the buildings—people, alone, unaware that they’re being photographed, making dinner, working on a computer, languishing in their solitude. It’s as if Wolf were combing the beach for beautiful seashells, and dug his snout into something meaty. He discovered that buildings are the decorative shells within which people take off their clothes, lie down and sleep. Welcome to the big city, Michael.

Now, it’s the unwritten rule of living in proximity to so many people, fishbowl style, that you don’t look at them and they don’t look at you. The point is hammered home in Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” where the hero has a hobby of spying on his neighbors with a telephoto lens, and assumes he witnesses a murder. Wolf is very aware that he’s enjoying the same pastime. In one grid of windows Wolf sees someone watching this very same film on a big-screen TV. By staging this act of recognition, Wolf hopes to undercut any criticism of scopophilia—the joy of peeping. It’s as if his creepy intrusion is undercut by an awareness of it, but self-consciousness is no excuse for animal desires.

A dog can understand you, in its own way, simply by smelling you. Bypassing any sort of refinement, if they have any, dogs go straight for the ass, which seems to be the ID spout. Humans, too, pick up traits about others in a glance or even using periphery vision. How do you choose which stranger to sit next to on the train? The decision is made in a split-second. Threat level or even date-ability is calculated. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre; but then why the hell do we care what other people look like when they think they’re not being looked at—as in Wolf’s photographs?

These drooling eyes hit the road for other toothsome sport. At the Suburban in Oak Park, author Jonathan Safran Foer’s friend, Sam Messer, exhibited portraits of the writer. Expressionist profiles of Safran Foer were punctuated with scribbles about the sitter’s receding hair, dry skin and an intellectually couth but self-deprecating ‘look’ that made him seem twenty-five years older than he really is. There was no sport to be found here.

“There is even something absolutely inhuman about the face,” wrote philosophers Deleuze and Guattari in teaching us about faciality, or face perception, one of the few instincts attributed to humans (it is said that there are no true human instincts, or actions that we follow irresistibly). Such inhuman faces are to be found in Iv Toshain’s drawings at Dan Devening’s gallery. Here, beautiful people—the idea of which is questioned by the artist—have horrific devils grafted onto their faces. Toshain uses transparencies on top of drawings, effectively having the demons and beasts emerge X-Ray-like from the smooth skin and groomed hair. I prefer not to see these images as commentaries on beauty or ugliness as manufactured by fashion magazines, for beauty and ugliness need as few words as possible to make their strongest statement, but rather these are illustrations (in that they’re not realistic), like anatomical charts or Freud’s funny little drawings of the ego, of the primeval tar pits and genetic cesspools that distance humans only several degrees from hirsute wolves. It’s kind of scary.

Michael Wolf shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, through January 31. Iv Toshain shows at Dan Devening Projects + Editions, 3039 W. Carroll, through January 4.