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A collection of Maya Lin’s recent work, eleven pieces strong, sits in The Arts Club of Chicago. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the obsidian black scar that slices through the National Mall (and mind). That iconic form began with potatoes on a plate—so the story goes. She shaped them like garlic-mashed plasticine and the idea for a thin slab of sculpture glopped into place on the plate in front of her. This genesis story speaks greatly to her career that has since developed, as a sculptor of slick organic shapes.

Strewn across the floor of The Arts Club are perfectly watery blown-glass drops that hint at the feeling of standing on the tip of a blade of dew-covered grass at dawn. Sinuous pins pushed into the wall and a flow of recycled silver suggest a river view from the stars. And a simple, meticulously arranged collection of two-by-fours standing on end melt into lumber waves of spruce, pine, and fir.

Like Andy Goldsworthy, Lin looks at mathematic descriptions of mountain passes and river bends as source texts. She models the liquid quality of water through the use of wood, rhyming spruce grain with waves, which is further informed by Lin’s study of geology, imaging techniques like sonar, and the fluid dynamics of fractal modulations.

The centerpiece is “Blue Lake Pass,” made using sandwiched slices of Duraflake particleboard. Lin splits a mountain range into twenty blocks, carving the bases into the cubic envelope of a skyscraping, overbuilt urban boulevard. Except, instead of crowned towers, the skyline is Rocky Mountain tops. Squeezing between the blocks, viewers weave in and out of mountain chunks that rise as high as your nose and in the traces of machined particleboard grain, there’s a faint echo of something larger than the sublime—a casual suggestion that maybe this is what it feels like when 14,000 feet is only shoulder height. (Ian Epstein)

Through April 23 at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario

Johnny Cash, 1961

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Chicago’s premier photo-journalist through the mid-twentieth century, Art Shay strained the film-noir sensibility of his generation through Chicago’s grit and decidedly anti-decadent vitality, and distilled an edgy and ironical sensibility with which he suffused his images that encompass momentous events such as John F. Kennedy’s presidency, the 1960s anti-war protests and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership of the civil rights movement; along with the street life of our bittersweet home. Always vibrantly alive, Shay’s shots catch the dramatic instants of situations from their dramatic perspectives, as we see in “Burn, Baby Burn,” in which draft cards held aloft by protestors go up in flames in the steel-blue, smoky twilight. Known for his black-and-white images, this show exhibits only Shay’s color work, which is equally bold and insightful, proving that it is not the medium that counts but the eyes and the mind that deploy it. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 15 at Thomas Masters Gallery, 245 W. North Ave.

By Jason Foumberg

On my daily walk I’ve noticed at least three varieties of kale growing in the city’s traffic islands and sidewalk planters, including the crinkle-textured dinosaur kale, which I know to be tasty when sautéed with lemon juice or cooked in an Italian soup. Chicago’s Department of Transportation tends these medians and planters, rotating the shrubs seasonally to upkeep our “city in a garden” motto. Kale can heartily withstand the colder climate, and so it is used decoratively this late autumn. I may have thought little more about the urban kale except I recently read Barbara Demick’s story in the November 2 issue of the New Yorker about a North Korean woman who survived the famine there in the early 1990s by foraging for weeds in her city’s streets and alleys. Communist leader Kim Jong-il could no longer distribute food to his citizens, so many had to get creative with their meals, such as Mrs. Song, who ate barely edible grass and dandelions every day. Read the rest of this entry »

"So Long Maryanne," 2002-2004

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If the mini-retrospective at The Arts Club of Chicago is a good indicator, painter Elizabeth Murray had an oddly uneven career for someone so successful. Most bad art is an acquired taste, like coffee or cigars, that a novice will not instinctively enjoy. If a respected friend praises it beyond measure, though, you may come to know that your mind can veto your gut, that sometimes pain beds with pleasure.

Murray is not like that. Her paintings are deliberate but unrewarding. It has been said that she resuscitated the Modernist tradition by pushing abstraction beyond its feasible end. Some artists played that game by courting the stark monochrome, but Murray turned abstraction into an absurd jumble. Her canvases are intentionally broken and warped, but they are not funny. She placed these shaped canvases into inconsequential groups. The clashes aren’t productive or transcendent. As transcendence is denied, no brute reality or subtle ambivalence is offered in its place. This is to say nothing of her colors, which are tepid and muddy. They are neither abject nor garish. Matte and glossy finishes of the same color are applied as if without difference, side by side. Since I do regularly enjoying painting, I searched the faulty canvases for clues to their existence. They are not ironic. They are not ‘so bad that they are good.’ They are not poignantly jarring, nor nihilistic, nor innovative, nor provisional, nor pleasant. Read the rest of this entry »

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One fascinating aspect of Marie Vickerilla’s art is that it appears to come together with very little effort. Her new paintings, now on view at Thomas Masters Gallery, hold a grace usually reserved for stringed instruments and leaves… falling.

The former glass-blower from upstate New York, Vickerilla has traded annealers and blowpipes for oils and linen canvas. Her works are meditative, minus pathos and mathematics. In “East West,” a deep red background bleeds behind gray paint. It is applied thickly, the artist often using her hands, sans brush. She rubs away images and marks to create the layered effect.

Vickerilla shares, “My quiet shades are intentional. But the shapes just come about. After years you have your own vocabulary. They just kind of arrive.” And that they do, without bringing the viewer into any colliding, close emotional contact. There are oils because the artist “likes the smell.” There is linen “because somebody gave me a bolt of it.” Walking out the door, I gave a final parting glance. The works deserve it. (Jeffery McNary)

Through October 4 at Thomas Masters Gallery, 245 W. North Ave.

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The press release for Elizabeth Weiss’ exhibition at the New York City Gold Coast gallery takes the form of an open book nailed to the wall above gallery co-director Jared Madere’s bed and turned to a page containing three poems by Paul Auster. Just as she upends the press release’s authority by replacing it with a trio of elusive poems, Weiss, a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has made seemingly random personal ephemera into surprisingly weighty objects of aesthetic contemplation. And just as Auster used detective protagonists in his celebrated New York Trilogy novels to investigate the slippery—and perhaps ultimately unknowable—terrain of identity, Weiss has arranged her exhibition in a manner that subtly evokes a crime scene, from the many mirrors with big black X’s drawn on them (one lies shattered on the floor), to the wall of cryptic notebook pages hanging across a row of tiny watercolors. Traces of the artist are everywhere—in her handwriting, in the empty wooden salad bowl that served home-cooked food at the opening, and in the Sharpie-drawn self-portrait executed on yet another mirror propped against a bay window overlooking the city. Brisk spring air wafting in from open windows and circulated by an electric fan provides bracing reminders to ‘be still and know,’ as the artist has written on one of the notes. Weiss conjures some powerful, if fleeting, aesthetic moments from the simplest of materials; the prospect of seeing what she could do with more adds an additional layer of intrigue. (Claudine Isé)

Through April 25 at New York City Gold Coast, 55 W. Chestnut, Apt. 2205. By appointment.

Lenin Del Sol

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Begun in 1913, the Gold Medal Show of the Palette and Chisel Academy has had some distinguished winners, two of whom, Victor Higgins and Rudolph Ingerle, can still be seen at the Art Institute. That was almost a century ago, and much has changed since then, but not the style of painting practiced at the Palette and Chisel. These local artists have no interest in the repressed psychic reality of living in America or the deep disturbance of our time. What the Hell is wrong with them? They just want to paint pretty pictures and, actually, regarding beautiful landscapes, they are not alone. Chicago galleries show several contemporary landscape painters, often of exceptional quality. But regarding the beautiful nude, the Palette and Chisel Gallery is in a world of its own. The figures by Judith McCabe Renner and Lenin Del Sol stand out, but this is also a good show for other traditional genres, notably the florals by Mary Qian and  Diane Rath, the portraits by Lawrence Paulsen and Clayton Beck,  and the still life by Helen Oh. (Chris Miller)

Through February 22 at Palette and Chisel Gallery, 1012 N. Dearborn

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Sometimes artwork takes a conceptual leap of faith to appreciate. In the formal conceptualism of Xavier Jimenez, that leap can be an enjoyable one to make. “Full Quality Beige Without Pink Red, But Blue Gray” is the inaugural exhibition at the apartment-gallery space New York City Gold Coast. The exhibition’s title most makes explicit reference to three paintings in the show in which the artist, in a moment of Gaylen Gerber-esque participation, asked three other painters to mix their version of the color beige. Surprisingly, this is a difficult task yielding three distinct monochromes under the titles “Edmund Chia Beige,” “Jason Dunda Beige,” and “James Kao Beige.” Jimenez’s application of each “beige” color even excites the eye as it relieves the texture of the bedroom/gallery wall on which it hangs.

In a gesture that likewise relishes its setting, “Cinderblock Print” is simply the mark left in the carpet by four heavy cinderblocks. Finding a gesture so economical is a rare occurrence, even if the beauty of the piece relies on the happenstance of art in everyday spaces. It was enough that I left thinking simply about the cultural phenomenon of beige carpet!

Jimenez knows how to take advantage of his surroundings, a style fitting of the alternative space. Other pieces in the show involve subtle gestures throughout the gallery room and the rest of the apartment. Some come off as tropes of conceptual art: found paintings, prescribed vantage points, and overly specific gestures that fail to reveal but nevertheless insist on their own importance. (Tim Ridlen)

Through December 12, by appointment, at New York City Gold Coast, 55 W. Chestnut St., apt. 2205, (860)227-2041

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.

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Timea Tihanyi was trained as a medical doctor in her native Hungary before immigrating to the U.S. in the 1990s and completing an MFA in sculpture at the University of Washington, Seattle. The focus of her biomorphic felt constructions is the attraction and repulsion that defines, in her words, our culture’s binary model of fetishizing or sanitizing the body. There couldn’t be a more appropriate context for this work than the International Museum of Surgical Science, whose exhibitions and displays occupy that exquisite space of unwilling fascination and mesmerizing disgust with our bodies’ viscera. The Museum’s collection of trepanned skulls, thirteenth-century surgery knives and one very unpleasant-looking Roman speculum lend Tihanyi’s sculptures an array of associations with scientific discoveries, anatomical structures and contemporary medical technologies. The central piece, “I’m a Uniter, Not a Divider,” is a looping string of puffy pink felt whose suspended branches and bifurcations suggest nothing so much as that a large mammal has been disemboweled in the gallery. In fact, the long object is a 3D rendering of a map of the Columbia River, depicting its largest estuary (a fat pink pillow) and smallest channels (thin, dangling capillaries). This meeting of geography, medical mapping and twee crafting balances what is otherwise an awkward Annette Messager/Louise Bourgeois hybrid. (Rachel Furnari)

Through July 18 at International Museum of Surgical Science, 1524 North Lake Shore, (312)642-6502.