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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 »

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897, Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

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Nan Goldin, whose photographs of her friends revealed a twilight world of entertainers, addicts and melancholy lovers, has nothing on Albert Besnard, whose 1887 etching of two morphine addicts is on display in the exhibition “The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850-1900. This beguiling show of prints, illustrated books, drawings and small, fluid, mysterious bronzes, traverses not only dark private states of mind connected with reveries, madness, love, suicide, domestic violence and rape, it contains prints which express intimate reactions to the public tumult of the age. A view of Paris in which the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1865 sail off in the ill-wind of a terrible human cloud by Nicolas Chifflart and a grieving weaver, her loom and wool waiting in the background, watches a dying child in a dark lithograph titled “Need” by the German Kathe Kollwitz. The print is part of a suit documenting the sorrows associated with the Weaver’s Rebellion of 1897 in Germany.

Curators from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where the exhibition originated, assemble these works to shed light on media and imagery during a period where there was a reorganization of the boundaries between what we think of as public and private life. Because of their size, discursive or contemplative nature, collectors often stored prints and studied them in private rather than displaying them. The entire cycle of Max Klinger’s wonderfully strange symbolist saga “The Glove or Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove,” narrating the finding of a woman’s glove in ten fantastic, subtly erotic and non-linear etchings, hangs in the dimly-lit galleries among other intimate, variously decadent, symbolist and realist prints. Etching and lithography build subjects out of inky layers of dark tangled or cross hatched lines, drypoints are perfect for creating atmospheric grays, the medium, in turn, is predisposed to the subjects of obsession, possession and describing the low light of the sick room or the ill-lit corners of the fin de siècle urban world. (Janina Ciezadlo)

Through June 13 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

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In her exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, “From the Offices of Scientists,” Aspen Mays assembles a set of installations inspired by science office spaces. Reminiscent of a theatrical set, her installations “Jellybean Universe,” “Boom!” and “You’re Next” use office materials such as a dry-erase board and cardboard boxes to re-create a scientist’s office. Looming at the center of her exhibition is a giant 850-pound boulder, “Boulder Desk,” mysteriously at the mercy of a weak desk, behind which an encased sign on the wall reads, “If you think you found a meteorite bring it here and we’ll check it out.” Playful and witty, the installation is a diversion from the process-driven photographs that characterize May’s solo exhibition currently on display at the MCA 12 x 12 gallery.

Meticulous, even obsessive in the methodical approach to her photography, May subjects the viewer to the prevailing process in science research by collecting and categorizing information. In “Every Leaf,” the artist attempts to photograph every leaf of a tree, a process that takes May nearly nine hours to accomplish. Providing the viewer with a kind of visual index and a display of 900 snapshots recognizing leaves of various sizes and hues. In “Einstein’s Rainbow,” May borrows every book on Einstein from the inter-library loan system, nearly 1,500 in all, which the artist organizes by color on in various rainbow arches. In the tremendous magnitude of materials from her study of these subjects, Mays’ scrutiny and categorization provides an overwhelming but moving display on the nature of investigation and a curious attempt at making sense of the wealth of information. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Aspen Mays shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art through February 28, and at the Hyde Park Art Center though April 25.

If you own records from the Sub Pop, Bella Union, Asthmatic Kitty or Brushfire labels, you may be familiar with Nathaniel Russell’s art, whose imagery graces the covers of records by bands such as Vetiver, Neil Halstead and Cryptacize. He also works as a graphic designer, and has redesigned more than 200 reissues of previously released records to date. Alongside these commissions, Russell maintains an active art practice, and a selection of new pen and ink drawings, screenprints and sculptural assemblages are on view at Hyde Park’s Home Gallery.

The vivid, saturated inks, and the 1960s and seventies-era stylized lines immediately stand out in Russell’s images, illustrating lonely blue cowgirls, winsome and innocent gap-toothed smiling mouths, and the (tongue-in-cheek) infinite wonders of the cosmos. The style is reminiscent of the Beatles’ 1968 animated film “The Yellow Submarine,” illustrated by Heinz Edelmann, whose 2009 New York Times obituary described the animations as “mod-psychedelic” and a “stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau”; these are also apt ways to describe Russell’s whimsical style. Read the rest of this entry »

"Esther"

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“I want to make work about biography, but I don’t want to talk about myself,” Anna Shteynshleyger explained when asked about the apparent emotional disjunction of the biographical work currently on exhibition at the Renaissance Society. Twenty large photographs (most forty by fifty inches), portraits and landscapes from the series “City of Destiny,” examine the artist’s relationship to the orthodox Jewish community and landscape in which she has grown to be a part.

Spiritual allusions are embedded in each image allowing the photographs to be “read,” in a manner similar to religious allegories. In “Father and Son,” a father holds a sapling while his son is looking out into the woods though a video camera, symbolically “learning” to see the world from his own perspective, he is awaiting the tree that will one day become material for his house.

“Portrait With Mordechai” nods to the biblical story of Esther and Mordechai, with Shteynshleyger herself cast as the pregnant Esther, looking emotionlessly at the camera. Although biographical in nature, her identity seems inseparable from the intricate social and religious web she weaves into the composition of her photographs. Shteynshleyger is not interested in depicting individual experience, but rather a collective, even spiritual engagement

Shteynshleyger’s portraits focus on couples, youths, families and vacant-if-not-abandoned slumbering landscapes that document the vanishing vestige of human presence. The exhibition paints an emotionally alienated world that to outsiders (maybe even more specifically, non-believers) is bound by laws that are difficult to access, but easily assumed to be isolating or oppressive. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Through February 14 at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis.

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The people of Poland have endured the absence of a tangible nation-state and the ensuing dislocation, either psychological or corporeal, for so long, or at such lengthy intervals, that it becomes problematic to characterize them as such. Given this situation, Polonia, the imaginary home that isn’t quite, makes a worthy substitute. For photographer Allan Sekula, himself a resident of Polonia, the term has become a description of a complicated history of marginalization, a geographically dispersed population and a startling encounter with neo-liberal economic forces, while altogether an expression of the significance of calling oneself Polish.

Irksome for anyone concerned with the last forty-odd years of discussion surrounding photography’s once-solid claim to objective agency, Seklula’s latest collection of photographs seek to document—this term being the source of most of the trouble—the current state of this equally troublesome notion of Polonia. Collectively, the photographs offer a web of narrative underpinnings that will fascinate history and geopolitics buffs alike. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Hocking, "Ziggurat—East, Summer, Fisher Body Plant #21," 2008, archival digital print.

By Jason Foumberg

The CIA used art—yes, visual art!—as a strategy during the Cold War. Abstract Expressionism at first, then Rauschenberg and Johns, were exported to European venues in a power play of cultural might. What could be more impressive than those giant, domineering canvases oozing self-expression and painterly freedom? With the help of the CIA, Americans won prizes and audiences abroad, including the prestigious Biennale.

If cultural colonialism is what it takes to be heard the world over, then so be it. “Heartland,” an exhibition of contemporary Midwestern art, co-organized by Chicago’s Smart Museum and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, proves the method still viable in 2009. If the scene in Los Angeles can get a retrospective at Paris’ Centre Pompidou, in 2006, then the Dutch can surely claim the Midwest. “Heartland” opened overseas first, and is now on view here. It was an unexpected collaboration, but one that bore fruit. Midwestern art got to strut on the international stage and European artists, in turn, produced art inspired by the Midwestern spirit.

What, exactly, is the contemporary Midwestern aesthetic? Don’t say American Gothic. Don’t draw corn and cows. “Heartland” thankfully plows through these stereotypes. When the topics of farming (Marjetica Potrc) and cow hides (Carol Jackson) inevitably arise, though, the artists cleverly treat them as ready-built canvases upon which to elaborate sociological projects. Otherwise, the curators have taken great care to expand the definition of “the Midwest.” From Minneapolis to Detroit, down the Mississippi to New Orleans (a geography traced by the curators), and in locales rural and urban, the Midwest of today encapsulates America’s complexities: boom and bust, political profiteering and progress, community can-do-ism and unfettered violence, homestead pride and gang turf wars, urban decay and renewal. Maybe more than a little bit of that inventive pioneering spirit does survive. Read the rest of this entry »

Bu Hua, "Savage Grow," 2008

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Video programs provide curators with an economical means of packing a lot of content into a relatively small amount of gallery real estate. For audiences, however, the task of watching what may well add up to several continuous hours of video without the ability to pause, rewind or skip can be daunting. Inevitably (or more precisely sometime around the second hour) individual works begin to bleed into one another, and thus any lengthy video program’s success must be judged on the program’s overall thematic flow as well as the strength of each work individually. Luckily, those who take the time to sit through the three-hour endurance test that is “Shanghype!” are apt to feel enriched by the experience rather than drained. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday I did the unthinkable—I went to Hyde Park to look at some art that wasn’t at the south side holy trinity (Hyde Park Art Center, Renaissance Society, Smart Museum). Sure, I could have headed over to the West Loop or River North art districts, but I heard about this diorama show, and there was no way I was going to miss it. Dioramas, although they have historically theatrical beginnings, are today mainly done by grade-school kids in shoe boxes. In the hands of a competent artist, though, a diorama is a form with almost endless imaginative qualities. In a show with a list of artists so long that I could really only scan it—twenty-seven in total—it seems the smaller the space, the greater the possibilities.

Home Gallery, where “The Diorama Show” opened on July 18, is everything the name suggests: a home being used as a gallery. To walk into this space is to seriously walk into someone’s house, as in, please wipe your feet. Unlike most live/work studio shows, there was very little living space separated from the public during an opening. Art is displayed in the bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and everywhere else (except the kids’ room, who apparently put a stop to that last year).

Curated by Laura Shaeffer, co-owner and inhabitant of Home Gallery, “The Diorama Show” exists in-between, as well as beyond, the bookshelves and the front and rear screen doors. The show, as I am sure all of Home Gallery’s shows are, interacts with a real living space. People live here, there is art on the wall, and in the front porch, and next to the A+ report on the praying mantis; art is everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Nicola Verlato, "Mothers II"

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Eschatology is the area of theology that refers to the destiny of the soul after death, and the destiny of humanity at the end of time. From all eras of Western religious art to current Hollywood holocausts, eschatology has manifested visually in numerous explicit tableaux of unambiguous mass carnage. Curated by Front Forty Press, the show now at Hyde Park Art Center purports to provide visions of the end times, both apocalyptic and redemptive. But, as with other exhibitions attempting this theme (such as the morbid 2008 Torino Triennale, titled “50 Moons of Saturn”), the options available in terms of secular modern imagery appear tragically limited, despite the imminent catastrophes we allegedly face from weapons of mass destruction, nature, credit defaults, what have you.   Nonetheless, the show features some lovely ominous landscapes, including Jean-Pierre Roy’s science-fictionoid oil painting “The Black Damp,” Richard Misrach’s fairly self-descriptive photograph, “Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana,” and, next to it, a drawing by David Opdyke of a field empty save for several air vents emerging from the earth, titled “Undisclosed Location.” A series of chaotic abstract paintings and drawings are splattered throughout, including works by Nina Bovasso, Ricky Allman, Emilio Pere and Andrew Schoultz (who also did a striking mural outside the main gallery), not to mention the poster girl of hard-edged abstract explosions, Julie Mehretu. The figurative pieces and the quieter abstractions were less successful; while they strive for a ravishing atmosphere of hypnotic emotional depth, this is a difficult effect to achieve without risking lurid or precious sentimentality. The “rapture” aspect of the title may have originally denoted the collective millennial redemption of the blessed, or the individual mystical ecstasy expressed in Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa, but, maybe even more than the pessimism of Armageddon, salvation imagery requires dramatic content to awaken our reluctant relationship to the cosmos. (Bert Stabler)

Through September 20 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell.