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Drawn to the recesses of densely wooded public parks, Jennifer Ray seeks out evidence of male sexual encounters—a spent condom, a pair of briefs, a Styrofoam cup—and shoots the tell-tale details in color, so that they are small, yet obtrusive elements of the larger verdant scene. Eric Bessel takes color portraits of women posed in gestures and sporting expressions that betray distress, bitterness or hostility. Helen Maurene Cooper dolls women up in kitschy costumes, places them against decorative mannerist backgrounds, and snaps them in color as they vogue like fashion models, sometimes tough, sometimes dreamy. Grant Ray puts ordinary objects into compositions suggesting “pseudo-scientific experiments,” as when he goes into the wooded glen, plants an electrical gizmo there, and shoots the scene in color, proving that you can do other things in the park than have sex. You can read the artists’ statements if you want an overdose of cultural theory, but their work boils down to crossing the boundary from the illusory world of normal certitude to the wilderness of the seamy psycho-dramas that surround the islands of sanity that we so painfully attempt to construct. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 18 at Barbara & Barbara Gallery, 1021 N. Western

Given that the School of the Art Institute of Chicago served as the breeding grounds for nearly every locally grown artistic movement, from the Monster Roster through the Hairy Who to the Imagists and beyond, it is not unreasonable to consistently anticipate new and interesting developments from its students. So, what’s brewing on Michigan Avenue at the moment? These days we look to the latest outgrowth of apartment-gallery spaces around the city for a reliable answer.

Monument 2 Gallery, the latest example of this locally esteemed phenomenon, appeared this fall on the site of the former Camp Gay space in Logan Square, but like most domestic gallery spaces, don’t expect it to be around long. Acknowledging the tendency of such spaces to appear and disappear with the changing seasons—or in this case, leasing-cycles—the gallery’s proprietor, Michael Thibault, envisioned his endeavor strictly as a one-year operation, having “no interest in owning a sustainable gallery.” When the lease is up next August, he’ll move on to something else, but not without leaving an exhibition history richly colored by his friends and classmates. Read the rest of this entry »

Szu-Han Ho and Jesse Vogler

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For “Exhibition 2.10242009,” directors Daniel Baird, Jamie Keesling and Bret Schneider called upon eight artists to prepare site-specific interventions into the live/work space. This past August, the partners resurrected the apartment gallery formerly known as COMA, or California Occidental Museum of Art. Truly an artist-run space, Mvsevm also holds a concert series, titled Home Listening, and plan to launch a publication for print and web called How Moving.

Joe Cruz’s installation demands the most real estate at Mvsevm. Ravenous taxidermal squirrels pounce onto a burlap sack of ill-gotten fruit cinched by a bird in ten milliseconds; the time it takes for a synapse to fire. Cruz describes the piece as an allegory on the immediate failure of utopia; the polyphony of enterprising wildlife. The fruit mountain bears signage referencing the United Fruit Company, a neo-colonialist empire importing fruit from third-world countries throughout the twentieth-century, eventually becoming the Chiquita Brands International.

A pair of conjoined ceiling fans, titled “Foreclosure,” meets the goals of the exhibition most precisely, as prepared by North Room, a moniker for collaborations between Szu Han Ho and Jesse Vogler. The piece is part of an ongoing series, Home Improvements, a series of domestic sculptures made from household appliances. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside "Stolen" at Garage Spaces

By Jason Foumberg

In the typical scheme of urban gentrification, artists stake out cheap studio space in a so-called bad area, then comes the wave of galleries, condos and boutiques, and voilà, a neighborhood is transformed (to oversimplify the matter). Sometimes, though, this process is reversed. As the economy slips and strong commercial centers lose their tenants, vacancies are produced faster than trinkets from China can fill them, and we end up with ruins in the city center. That’s when the artists move back in.

The artist take-back was staged in Michael Ruglio-Misurell’s installation of a ruined shopping mall reclaimed by squatters, recently closed at Gallery 400. The theatrical ruins fed a certain taste for apocalypse porn, but the real thing is happening in buildings around Chicago right now. More than just a schadenfreude of capitalistic decay, the creative re-imagining of vacant spaces produces a range of effects, from emboldening the DIY spirit to provoking political commentary.

The John Hancock Tower is an unexpected home for one such creative re-use of a ruin. Here, on the twenty-fourth floor in this monument to corporate progress, artist Jan Tichy transforms about a third of a vacated 33,000 square-foot office suite into a sprawling exhibition of video installations. At the elevator’s ding, its doors open to lights out and the low hum of a machine. The carpet has been torn out to reveal concrete, but the walls of private offices and conference rooms, previously home to headset-yapping VPs, remain like ghosts. These rooms are lit only by the glow emanating from Tichy’s projectors and television sets, maximizing the haunted house effect as viewers wander the empty offices. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside the "Knowledge Box" by Ken Isaacs

By Jason Foumberg

It’s telling that no paintings are included in “Learning Modern,” an exhibition conceived to honor and update the twentieth century’s greatest artistic project. Modernism bloomed on canvas, its essences distilled via paint. But any office worker in downtown Chicago knows that Modernism also found expression in concrete, steel and glass. Despite its force and thrust, Modernism was (and remains) people friendly. It’s interactive. By inhabiting Modernist structures we carry its legacy, and we can barely ignore it; we can, however, shelve a crackly old canvas out of view. The persistence, and insistence, of Modern architecture may be one reason why painting was excluded from “Learning Modern.” Another reason may be that Wellington Reiter is an architect and urban planner, and the current president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where “Learning Modern” is held. For Reiter, renewed attention to architecture and design signals a reorientation of the artist’s role in the world. Whereas painters work in private, their coded dialogue trained toward other painters, architects and designers mold human activity. Being relevant is back in style. It’s an ideal even the classical Modernists would abide. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

Despite the attention paid to the New Museum survey show “Unmonumental” at the beginning of 2008, the conception of modernism as a deflation of Wagnerian pomposity can be traced to any number of cerebral twentieth-century artists and thinkers, from Duchamp and Adorno to Debord and Venturi. Eel Space director Patrick Holbrook reflects this modest respectability in a concise summary of his curatorial approach, “I take pleasure in finding common threads among diverse strategies.” And, indeed, the works shown since March in this fledgling first-floor nook tend to be fragmented gestures employing the contingency of everyday symbols, found materials and simple craft. May’s “Gained in Translation” group exhibit was largely text-based work, and Val Snobeck’s audio walking tour of the gallery’s Humboldt Park environs dispensed completely with the specificity of objects. Read the rest of this entry »

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Titled “Pavilion 7,” Sebastian Craig’s instantly intriguing architectural installation confronts viewers with what looks like a dance-floor light show or a lair of crisscrossed light beams. As a techno-ish soundtrack composed and performed by the artist blasts from a large sound system at the back of the room, hot-pink rays appear to bounce off the walls, inviting viewers to dance through them or play secret agent. Closer inspection shows the lines to be a single strand of cord stretched tautly across two facing walls and secured at different heights and angles so as to spell the word DERMA. DERMA is also the title of a video at the back of the room that can be reached only by walking through the installation. Stepping over and under lines of cord, visitors unwittingly “dance” to Craig’s beat. The video—a series of bucolic images displayed on a tiny Sony Walkman screen—is sort of like Hitchcock’s MacGuffin, driving us forward through a tangled web for the sole purpose of getting to the big reveal. One wonders if the video’s banality is intentional, meant to revert our attention back to the physical act of getting there or to point out that the real significance of a space lies in the idiosyncratic associations it has for individual users. Regardless, Craig’s pavilion neatly illustrates the ways in which architecture lies close to the skin, sculpting the body’s movements and living on in cellular memory long after we’ve exited the building. (Claudine Isé)

Through March 15 at Old Gold, 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd., basement entrance

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The exhibition “Tank Traps and Hijackings” presents the sculptures and photographic collages of Kendrick Shackleford on the offensive. What appear to be two distinct sets of work are tied together superficially in their materials and essentially in their posture. Drawn from news and advertising imagery, the photographic collages are an attempt to hijack the meaning of the culturally pervasive and generic imagery found in the media at large. Flattened through digital process, the end result of Shackleford’s collages is a muddled portrait of everyday life. Far from banal, however, the marks made before rendered photographically show the hand of the artist and the reaction of the individual to the indifferent yet manipulative face of the image. The surroundings of this wood-paneled basement gallery only bring out what already lies beneath the surface of Shackleford’s images, and ultimately beneath the ulterior motives of his source material. In one example taken from an advertisement for Orbit gum, “Little Stinker” reads as both a child’s portrait and a still life, revealing the bizarre conformity imposed on domestic and consumer living.

The space is overtaken with the large wood and spray enamel sculptures that become the “tank traps” of the show’s title. What first reads as formal and quite traditional sculptural objects take on a similarly aggressive stance when considered under this moniker, but one wishes it did not take such a linguistic directive to notice how they function as disruptions to the space. (Tim Ridlen)

Through February 8 at Old Gold, 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd, basement entrance

RECOMMENDED

Selina Trepp is keenly interested in presence, from our presence in the vast world around us to how we are present with art and the viewing experience before us; from awareness of the moment art is made to the fleeting moment in which it exists to each of us individually. Trepp’s fractured, wondrous and borderless visions have been seen from Switzerland to Chicago, and are currently on exhibit at Old Gold in “Private Dancer,” a collaboration with intuitive dancer Ayako Kato, in which Kato is filmed interpreting the once-popular Tina Turner song of the same name. The filmed dance is then projected against a disco ball, reflected and deconstructed into tiny pieces of light thrown about the room in a slow-turning and broken dance of their own, glimpses of body parts touching every surface of the room, defying gravity in ways that dancers can only dream. The hypnotic performance puts us in mind of where we are and how we fit in that space, as spectator or as part of the performance, dancers ourselves, pirouetting in time with the projected images of Kato as we follow them from floor to ceiling to wall and back again. Trepp’s immersive kaleidoscope allows you to lose yourself in sound and movement, possibly even forgetting that you are in a specific place seeing a specific show at all. Simply existing within the moment, with upsurging self-awareness, becomes the art itself. (Damien James)

Selina Trepp shows at Old Gold, 2022 N. Humboldt Blvd., (773)653-9956, though December 21.