Catherine Maize

A variety of annual, national juried exhibitions have been emerging in Chicago over the past few years, and now Chuck Gniech, of the Illinois Institute of Art, has mounted his second “Human” exhibition, intending to explore “the human form as well as the human condition.” Ninety artists responded to his nationwide call, and twenty were chosen to participate: painters, sculptors, graphic artists and photographers. As one might expect from artists of our time, the human condition is considered problematic. If there’s any joie de vivre, it’s an occasional enthusiasm for being confused and disoriented, which makes for an art that’s not especially enjoyable to view. Most spectacular is E. Thurston Belmer’s wall size, triple-view of “Jean Porter Green” which the artist calls a “presentation of embodied trauma,” but why should we care about Ms. Green’s problems? She seems to be an aspiring actress auditioning for a role in which she’s not very convincing. I can’t work up a concern for any of the characters on display, despite how tastefully photographed (Ted Preuss), well painted (Brandon Briggs) or well drawn (Marisa Andropolis) they may be. Most of these characters feel depressed, and I’m wondering whether our bleak Chicago winter needs any more discouragement. Read the rest of this entry »

Marta Kubrak, "Resistance to Snares," 2011, silkscreen

RECOMMENDED

Looking at Chicago Cultural Center’s exhibition of the Wroclaw School of Printmaking, one gets the sense that there might be more time in Wroclaw, Poland, than we have here. Three galleries filled with large, complex, detailed and technically brilliant prints provide evidence that artists in Poland have time to concentrate on dense, romantic images. Printmaking is a traditional form which, despite the rigors of its pre-twentieth-century technology, continues to speak to the present. Like glassblowing or textiles, both taught at the Academy where these artists are faculty, reproducing images somehow seems essential to human life. The craft of printmaking shifts and expands to absorb technical innovations over time, like photo and digital applications and modernist design sensibilities, but retains its connection with traditional forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Heather Rasmussen, "Untitled (New Orleans, Louisiana, September 10, 2005)," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Fascinated by the colorful and ruthlessly rectangular shipping crates that festoon California ports, Heather Rasmussen took to making miniature paper replicas of them; arranged her constructions to simulate documented accidents in which piles of containers crashed into each other, collapsed, or scattered in a mess; and shot her scenarios in color, leaving out any trace of context. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Between 1990 and 2001, Chicago’s gifted and gutsy documentary photographer Lloyd DeGrane went on the adventure of his life, going inside the walls of Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, shooting the entire world of incarceration from beginning to end, from the captors to the captives, and from the grinding oppressive tedium to the specks of creativity and wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »

Damon Shell

RECOMMENDED

Among the eighteen accomplished Chicago photographers displaying their “favorite images” here in a variety of straight genres, the most abstract pieces are the standouts, preparing us to take some comfort and even joy in the blustery days that loom ahead. Remember last February’s blizzard. Damon Shell lets us relive it blissfully with his color studies of cars thickly coated with fresh white snow from which a taillight, windshield wiper or the hint of a windshield sometimes peeks through to create an entrancing composition. Then turn to Alan Teller’s dense and involving color abstractions of shards of ice amid bare twigs, dead leaves, and brown grass at the Ryerson Conservation Area near Deerfield, and you will find some redemption for all of the slips and stumbles of outrageous winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Dennis Oppenheim, "Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.," 1970.

By Monica Westin

In my notes for the exhibition “Light Years,” I scrawled to myself that of the multitude of photographs and other lens-based work in the Art Institute’s ambitious show of photo-conceptualism, half a dozen or more involve scenes of beaches. Jan Dibbets’ careful formal studies of tides and waves in photography and film bookend the show. Beaches also appear in more playful work like John Baldessari’s “California Map Project” and Eleanor Antin’s “100 Boots.” And Dennis Oppenheim’s “Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.” documents the artist self-inducing a sunburn with a book on his chest while lying in the sand, treating his body like a kind of raw photographic plate to be exposed by the sunlight. A consideration of these images alone suggests not only the scope of this show but also this reviewer’s psychological need to focus, at times, on a single motif so as to keep from feeling utterly overwhelmed by an exhibition this big, which makes a strong argument about a decisive watershed moment in art history. Read the rest of this entry »

"Virginia City Mine, Cave-in," ca. 1867-1868.

RECOMMENDED

Between 1867 and 1869, the U.S. government sponsored a survey of the wondrous lands between the California border and Cheyenne, Wyoming, including in the team photographer Timothy H. O’Sullivan, who set about shooting intriguing rock formations of various and undreamt of kinds, views from above of budding towns, a vista here and there, and—the gems of the show—studies of the gold and silver mines and miners that are worthy of Lewis Hine’s famous twentieth-century takes on industrial work. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

In a fanciful postmodern project filled with ridiculous pathos, Philip Hartigan appropriated photos of Lucerne, Switzerland, to which he has never been; enlarged them so as to decompose their details; drew over them with softly colored squiggly lines recalling aerosol art, graffiti and tags; printed them at postcard size; joined them to each other so that they fold out like an accordion; and accompanied the resulting work with his diary of a fictitious visit there. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Albeit largely monochromatic, there’s a lot to enjoy in the fanatically perverse visuals issuing from the unholy twenty-year legacy of Scandinavian black metal. There are the band logos, which incorporate traditional Nordic and Celtic design elements with expressionistic lightning cracks and blood splatters; there’s the album art, featuring epic landscapes, cryptic pagan diagrams and shadowy photos of musicians made up in ghostly black-and-white “corpsepaint,” contorted rapturously under the weight of medieval accessories. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Following its tradition of mounting thematic group shows, the Collective comes up with its best effort to date in its decidedly adult paean to Halloween and horror. All eleven contributing photographers cut deeply and tellingly, with featured artist Rosemary Warner taking the existential honors with her layered and ominously dull brown-toned photo-works that combine images of a ubiquitous skeleton melded with or conjoined to shots of people who are still bedecked in their flesh. In Warner’s most grisly piece, “One Eyed Jack,” we see a figure straight on; its head is bisected into a stony skull and the face of a man with a grim expression on his lips. Read the rest of this entry »