On the day I visit Pamela Fraser’s East Garfield Park studio, everything outside is white and cold: a blizzard has just dumped several inches of snow on the ground, on the branches of trees, and on the tops of cars unlucky enough to have had to spend the night outside. Inside, Fraser’s studio is warm and inviting, but the sense of enveloping whiteness remains, thanks to the huge white walls, high ceilings and bright natural light streaming in from a large window at one end. Fraser, who is assistant professor of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the Oak Park domestic art space He Said–She Said with her husband, Randall Szott, has occupied this studio since last June. Like many of Fraser’s paintings, it feels spacious, light and airy—neatly organized, though not obsessively so, and humming with focused energy.

Her current solo exhibition at Golden consists of nine drawings, all of which were executed on the floor over a single month in late ’09 during an inspired burst of energy. Fraser has been investigating color as an aesthetic as well as a cultural construct for several years now, ever since she was asked to teach a class on color theory at UIC. As she immersed herself in countless historical and theoretical texts on the subject she realized the traditional color-theory curriculum needed some serious revamping. “Color is often discussed as if it were an isolated phenomenon, and not in the world,” Fraser explains, citing the Bauhaus school theories (espoused in the writings of Swiss Expressionist painter Johannes Itten) as a primary example. “It presumes a universality that I can’t buy, and I can’t teach.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s about seven degrees outside, yet a handful of people are making no motion to go up the new escalators at the Belmont CTA station. Alderman Tom Tunney, along with State Rep. Sara Feigenholtz and artists David Csicsko and Erin Adams, welcome press and friends to the new face of the Red Line Belmont CTA station. The trains overhead and buses across the street cause Tunney to halt his speech several times, but the traffic is seen as a positive, as it acts to reinforce his hopes of revitalizing the economy around Belmont Avenue. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Sculptor Tony Tasset’s hard-edged, smart-assed esthetic has for years provided Chicago’s answer to similar high-craft pseudo-lowbrow snark conceptualists Charles Ray and Maurizio Cattelan. Tasset’s icy satirical influence is certainly in evidence at Joseph Cassan’s dazzling show at Golden, which continues to provide Lakeview with crowd-pleasers other than baseball, improv and latex boutiques. While echoing his UIC mentor’s naturalistic deployment of artificial materials (resin, epoxy, silicone, acrylic), Cassan makes a unique formal statement by incorporating delicate handicraft, selected “real” materials and implied invisible forms. The latter is exemplified in a floating pair of gorgeous lace panties with the title “Venus Inferred.” Another brilliant moniker is applied to a painted basswood bar of soap with hand-cut glass bubbles: “Minimalist Construct.” The most heroic pieces are a swan perched atop its own distorted reflection as a pedestal, “The End of the End,” and a disembodied human nervous system, “Nothing More Than Feelings.” Less monumental but equally pleasurable is “Dedicated to All Human Beings,” a low pedestal featuring a wadded paper towel as the bed for a bloody Band-Aid woven from fine copper thread. Historical nods to Minimalism and Earth Art are provided in a painting-sized section of cut out wall, “A Moment of Clarity,” and “Small Section of the World,” a clear plastic puddle in a small gravel depression; as low-key monochromes these offered relief in an otherwise eye-popping parade of fine-motor virtuosity. (Bert Stabler)

Through February 20 at Golden, 816 W. Newport

RECOMMENDED

Through fifteen color photographic portraits, John Cotter achieves his two aims of showing that being HIV positive does not necessarily lead to panic or despair, but can also provoke affirmation of the days left to live; and of calling attention to the truth that HIV is still around, working its stealthy way and wreaking its havoc. Cotter gets close up and shows us men who have faced the music and have come out of their rude awakening seemingly stronger and more reflective than they were before the bad news hit. Confidence and sometimes exuberant smiles are rife, and the subjects’ statements in the wall texts sound a common theme that knowing that one has a terminal illness can engender a sense of proportion and a change of values. The model father, Jay, who sits next to his son, Daniel, beams broadly, as Daniel smiles wisely, lovingly and supportively. Jay reports that “Daniel knows how to lift me up with a hug or a kiss.” Do not expect irony, victimology, or pity here; Cotter is after inspiration. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 13, 2010, at Center on Halsted, 3656 N. Halsted

RECOMMENDED

Back in the day, a quarter century ago, the long-gone rocks at Belmont and the lake shore were a preferred summertime hangout for gay men who disported themselves unabashedly, partaking of the ordinary pleasures of a day at the beach, along with more intimate pursuits. Working within the tradition of ambient social photography, Doug Ischar documented the scene in color photos that get close up and project the sense of sweet lassitude that we are wont to feel on those crazy, lazy days. In Ischar’s shots, bodies cluster in unplanned statuesque formations—living sculpture gardens—in which each member is oblivious to the composition and ever ready to shift its configuration at will and whim. In Ischar’s banner image, an empty bottle of vodka on a beach towel rests next to a man lying prone as another man sits and places his hand on the first one’s head; between them, a third man lies on his back in deep contentment, wedged tightly between the other two—ménage-a-trois was never so blissful. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 17 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport

RECOMMENDED

"Untitled (Fireflies inside the body of my camera, 8:37 - 8:39PM, June 26, 2008)," 2008

RECOMMENDED

Whichever one of the wildly varied photographic experiments that she undertakes, Aspen Mays always takes us into an unfamiliar world that is constructed out of the most humble and common things transmuted into eerie impressions. Possessed of the desire to see a “photograph of the whole universe,” Mays ends up shooting out in any direction that tickles her fancy and zooms to its outer limits. Put some fireflies into your camera and you will end up with a glossy, gaudy and glowing patch of color that abstracts from its subject so much that it looks like a precise photograph of a color-field painting. Through all Mays’ endeavors runs a play between absence–indeed vacancy and lack of distinction–and an audacious fullness that makes us keenly aware of what is left out at the same time that we are drawn into the subject. In sync with our improbable age, Mays is a postmodern mystic. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 2 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport

RECOMMENDED

The Center’s winter exhibit follows tradition by showcasing seven young photographers working in diverse modernist genres, including abstraction, street shooting, nature studies, ambient social photography and the documentary in black and white and color. For sheer conceptual precision, creative imagination, passion and technical skill, Nathalie Marroquin steals the show with her black-and-white series, “Life in the 1940s,” in which she set herself up in a tacky vintage flat and proceeded to make herself the star in a drama of everyday domesticity with the aim of showing what she had learned from a study of an era of war on the domestic front–the refusal to “give up” in the face of adversity. A sense of meditative loneliness suffuses Marroquin’s sensitive shadowed images, as we see her cleaning a glass cabinet with a feather duster or cranking a mechanical egg beater in a mixing bowl. Marroquin confesses that she gets a “rush” when she performs these humble tasks before the camera, and we will experience the same when we watch her suspended in a time she never knew. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 30 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

RECOMMENDED

Three compelling photographic portraitists—each with a distinctive signature style—dominate the Center’s fall show. Amber Ricciardi’s cheeky and almost-over-the-top approach captures her subjects at ordinary odd moments when their expressions are exaggerated, like putting on makeup. Luca Angeli is relaxed and warm-hearted, portraying his Argentine subjects at ease and at pleasure, adding some hedonism to the family-of-man tradition. Lucian Cioata makes everyone a tough guy, each in his or her own way, with a credibility that is nearly convincing; he has gotten his subjects to reduce to their bare minimum their irony about his experiment. In his point of tangency with Ricciardi, Cioata serves up a dude leaning provocatively against a parking meter and sporting a t-shirt on which is written: “let’s hug it out bitch.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 31 at Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln, (773)549-1631.

RECOMMENDED

Peter Cardone’s color photograph of a young woman in a cranberry hoodie exquisitely represents what a Sarah Palin voter’s reaction might be to the works of the other four emerging Finnish and Chicago artists, working in various pure and mixed media, in this energetic and cutting show. Cardone’s subject, shot against a white aluminum-sided house, stares at us with gaping eyes and a radically bemused expression on her lips. What else is she supposed to feel when she looks at Riiko Sakkinen’s slide show of appropriated ads mixed in with animation cels in Japanese kitsch style that sends up smarmy commercial culture? Indeed, it seems like everyone is turning Japanese; Melanie Schiff’s photo of an aging Sonic Youth poster, in which the band has dressed up as jolly space warriors, has a Gen X self-ironic laugh at the expense of a Japanese comic-book cover. Postmodernism is alive and well, even if some of us are still dumbfounded. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 14 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport, (773)559-5850.