"Can we get vertical?" Yarn and powder coated steel

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The word “ravel” is ambivalent, meaning both “to become tangled” and “to untangle.” The term captures something about what makes the work of Mike Andrews so compelling. Andrews creates raveling works in which opposing elements—handicraft and machine fabrication, the industrial and the organic, sloppiness and precision, drawn surfaces and sculptural spaces—are materially entangled and conceptually intertwined.

In Golden Gallery’s showroom on Newport Avenue, one is greeted by “Can We Get Vertical?” At seventy eight-inches tall, the scale of this sculpture’s steel armature evokes human dimensions and depths, an impression bolstered by the knotty, intestinal bundles of multicolored knitted yarn enwrapping and spilling from the steel joints. One drooping tubular tendril reaches the floor in an overflowing display of handicraft. The slender strands of steel evoke the hand-drawn line, a fact made all the more salient by juxtaposition with Andrews’ exuberantly messy collage-drawings, also on display. But here the lines are made dimensional and elegant, with any trace of the hand erased; the joints are seamless and the paint smooth. Read the rest of this entry »

Sarah Hadley, "My sister's dresser"

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In a tour-de-force of color photographic aesthetics, Sarah Hadley ranges from muted and finely blurred pictorialism, through standard realism in varied light, to sharp graphic precision in her quest to reveal the significance and quiet beauty of the most humble and familiar things. By diversifying her styles of presentation, Hadley insures that we are aware that the way in which we see the world determines our response to it. It is, indeed delightful to contemplate Hadley’s soft and nuanced image depicting a vase in her spattered sink, so reminiscent of a delicate impressionist painting. It is indisputably energizing to behold her bold representation of a blazing campfire at Indian Lake, Ohio. The most telling image in the exhibit is a straight-on still-life—after Vermeer—of a decaying pocked Golden Delicious apple appearing from the shadows on her sister’s dresser. All of Hadley’s photographs stir memories; the ones taken with an unprepossessing approach bring us back directly to what we felt when we glimpsed what she has seen fit to show us again. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 3 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln

Consummating an improbable marriage between the ubiquitous trash photography and the modernist abstraction, Jessica Labatte serves up color shots of constructions of ordinary objects, either arranged in jumbled patterns reminiscent of Cubist paintings, or disposed into Minimalist forms. The calculated messes are the attention grabbers, adding an injection of Dada nonsense to the images, as when we see a room in which torn mats and bedclothes hang from the ceiling, under which a carrot rests on the arm of a plastic chair and some rolls of bread on its seat; the chair itself has been stacked on a pile of bedrolls, not to mention the tire on the floor next to a luminous abstract painting on plexiglass, and a pair of scissors and roll of duct tape—and that is only the beginning. Entitled “Chasing the Carrot,” this image transforms the art of stacking up junk into the act of sending up Modernist pretensions. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 12 at Golden, 816 West Newport

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Mike Schuh’s work is quiet and unobtrusive, and seamlessly integrated into the apartment-gallery architecture of Golden. It’s so seamless, in fact, that a first-time visitor would be hard-pressed to pick out all of Schuh’s pieces. His works, mostly site-specific, were created to emphasize the fact that Golden, while currently un-lived in, began as a residential apartment. Schuh implies a domestic space, and his installations hover between residential function and household decoration. For an artist who professes an interest in objects in his artist statement, there are remarkably few objects on display, but the very sparseness of the exhibit brings attention to all of the elements of domestic life that would normally fill the space if someone made Golden Gallery their home. Read the rest of this entry »

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One of the most gifted and accomplished street photographers still plying the trade, Susan Aurinko exploits the possibilities of such subjects as multi-layered peeling wall posters and mannequins shot through shop windows to produce intriguing complex images—mainly in traditional black and white—that finely balance the aesthetic power of abstraction with political and cultural meaning. Whereas most wall and window photographers today go for bold color that heightens hype and emotion, Aurinko’s studies are muted and nuanced, making us explore details that escape us in ordinary perception, and impelling us into a meditative mood. Aurinko demonstrates that she can also be thoroughly postmodern with two digital color prints depicting advertising posters of sultry insouciant women that are suffused with reflections from the street. Here she also strikes a balance, this time between her native subtlety and the assertiveness of her medium. Whatever Aurinko does, there is always a play of opposites expressed in layered involvement. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 15 at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 N. Lincoln

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 »

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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

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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