RECOMMENDED

Appropriating photographs of scenes of devastation from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and further afield that she finds on the internet; tweaking the images in the computer; and then painting elegant bits of “restorations” into them, Susanne Slavick presents yet another variant of the ubiquitous project of redeeming the ruins. Slavick’s most effective photo-works feature the gutted and twisted hulks of bomb-blasted cars that she has decorated with designs and figures from ancient civilizations. In “Hemorrhage,” Slavick serves up a hopeless wreck from a car bombing in Sri Lanka that she has surrounded and filled with sinuous patterns derived from an illustration in Firdawsi’s fourteenth-century Book of Kings. Although Slavick’s intent is to begin a “healing” process and to slam imperialism on the way, the effect of her images is to fix the viewer in contemplation of aestheticized brutality which arrests and satisfies the eye with its striking juxtapositions and self-sufficient beauty. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

There’s that one movie about love that just opened. It’s still too cold for a romantic walk along the lake. There’s always the failsafe of cooking for that special someone. Or there’s that new happening that’s been popping up in various cities: scavenger hunts.

Inside the Art Institute on this Valentine’s Day, about ten teams of two go over their scavenger-hunt clues atop the grand staircase. Ella, one of the hunt’s guides, briefs the participants. She laughs after the word “competition,” and judging from the teams’ expressions, this is one of those “it’s the journey not the destination” events.

At 11am, the teams go in their separate directions as part of the “Naked at the Art Museum Scavenger Hunt.” No one runs and, in fact, Team Wicked Art makes a quick stop at the coat check before heading off to the African collection. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Obsessed with photographing the interiors of mausoleums, John Allan Faier comes up with large-format color images in which the spaces that he shoots when they are unpopulated exude an overwhelming sense of lonely gloom, although they invariably contain stained-glass, uplifting religious statuary and various and sundry spiritual incitements. The mood of heavy oppression comes from the fact that the rooms are often dimly lit, but for pools of light cast by lamps; and from the modest, sometimes tacky, chairs and sofas for living visitors to the houses of the dead. Far from the site of a celebratory wake, the mausoleum, with its steel vaults, is a place that is dominated by the shades and that seems to exist for them rather than for full-blooded interlopers. Faier documents a culture that is determined to be somber about death; his images recall the uncomfortable feelings that some of us experience when we are called upon to “say something” to the bereaved and are impelled to feign piety. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

RECOMMENDED

Showing work that lacks even a hint of anger or disgust, this is a painter who does not especially belong in Chicago, and so, indeed, this youthful retrospective marks the end of Angel Otero’s stay in the city where he has spent the last six years as a student at the Art Institute. He’s a very old-school kind of painter—all about nostalgia and beauty and evident craftsmanship. His still-lifes belong in the seventeenth-century, except that he uses materials in such unlikely ways, and his sense of despair feels less cosmic/eternal and more personal/fragile.  Even when his still-life escapes the painted surface and pours out onto an actual table, it’s still composed with great care and beauty, although these installations do seem unbearably, even morbidly vulnerable to cobwebs and dust. Like other masters of the Spanish school, he can turn black into a rich, delicious color. “With paint, I want to give a sense of abundance, unbalance, ambition, courage and persistence within form, color and texture in every painting,” he says. Perhaps he’ll end up back in Puerto Rico, like the painter who first inspired him to become an artist, Arnoldo Roche Rabell, who graduated from the Art Institute thirty years ago. But hopefully, this will not be the last time he has a major show in Chicago. From the Union League Club to Kavi Gupta Gallery to the Cultural Center, he certainly has gotten a lot of support here in a short amount of time. (Chris Miller)

Through March 28 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph

RECOMMENDED

Why would anyone spend thirty-five years teaching art at Wheaton College? It’s an Evangelical institution that, until recently, forbade drinking, dancing, extra-marital sex, the teaching of evolutionary biology, and all such sinful behavior. Throughout those thirty-five years, Joel Sheesley has continued to develop his painting, with one theme following another, every five years or so. His current theme is puddles, and this seems to be his most transcendent series of all. Gone are the well-dressed but painfully tense suburbanites who populated his earlier work, and all that’s left are puddles of water on the city pavement, the blue sky they reflect, and an old, wooden ladder that might connect the one to the other, echoing the words of an old Negro spiritual. Everything in Sheesley’s  paintings is done so well: the textures of the pavement, the luminosity of the sky, the dramatic design of the whole, and the occasional foot or reflected silhouette of a human figure who still seems a bit uncomfortable in the majesty of God’s creation. But that’s Protestant Christianity, isn’t it? And please note: Sheesley is not making hokey illustrations for Sunday School textbooks or religious tracts. Outside a place like Wheaton College, where else could this kind of spiritual art be developed?  (Chris Miller)

Through April 4 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Randolph

RECOMMENDED

Dedicated fashionista Helen Maurene Cooper has turned her considerable talents with the camera to shooting lush and vibrant flashing color studies of the “Chicago-centered trends in synthetic nail design.” Cooper’s compositions, despite her description of her subject, are at the antipodes of the photographic fare of the style magazine; going up close, her images are stunning nearly abstract visions of exquisitely involved multi-colored patterns extending from real fingers and placed on glowing settings of flowers and jewels. The Chicago school of nail adornment stresses interlocking swirls and curves that flare into wildness, yet remain disciplined by an underlying design. Indirect references to fauna and flora heighten the overall sense of vitality and dynamism. Cooper here is an art photographer, creating a total visual construction in her images in which the nails are only a component, albeit an essential one. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 26 at Harold Washington College President’s Gallery, 30 E. Lake, room 1105.

Rendering of Cloud Gate

RECOMMENDED

If you want to eat the sausage, don’t visit the sausage factory, so the old adage goes. The same might apply to viewing this exhibit of color construction photos that show the building of the admittedly alluring postmodern structures that dot Millennium Park. The show is dominated by the raising of the seamless, sheer and shiny bean-shaped Cloud Gate to which the magnetized multitudes flock to shoot photos that capture their subjects and their reflections, with the added bonus of the photographer’s reflection—meta-photography for the masses or simply a mirror for the cameraless. When we see the guts of the Gate take shape, we are confronted with huge masses of support beams that are anything but sparkling, and intimidate rather than invite. This is not to demean the Gate or its skeleton or the photos, but just to say that only when we go beneath the surface do we see the whole picture, which is something that is not surprising when we think of what is under our own skins. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 17 at Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State.

Rodney Graham, "The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th, 1962," 2007. Courtesy of the artist, Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and the Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada.

By Jason Foumberg

The artist is standing contrapposto in silk pajamas. He carefully pours yellow house paint from a kitchen bowl onto a sloped canvas propped on a chair in his living room. It is an experiment in gravity and inertia, and the unprimed canvas grips the drips, soon to be congealed as a picture. The artist is at ease. He smokes barefoot atop the day’s newspaper, spread about the parquet floor to catch paint splatters. Time seems to have stopped here, or else slowed to the speed of honey.

There’s something comforting about this image, as photographed by Rodney Graham. It shows the artist’s work as a leisure activity, serene and safe and tidy, but also distant from the world, and private. Is this how art gets made? The scene nods to the American Modernist painter Morris Louis and his followers, and many paintings on view in galleries and museums were birthed in similarly calm settings, but Graham’s photograph, “The Gifted Amateur, Nov 10th, 1962,” from 2007, is a fiction, more a record of a mood than an actual event.

The art studio is the image-maker’s terrain, but not all artists use a studio. As a piece of real estate, its existence is intricately tied to exhibition spaces, or the white-cube style. The twentieth-century saw artists expand their practices outdoors, into the streets and the deserts, taking on the roles of writer, curator and critic, organizing collectives and engaging publics. Artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Francis Alÿs embody this post-studio practice, and their work is the subject of large contemporary museum exhibitions and doctoral theses. So why is Studio Chicago, a multi-venue, year-long series of events and exhibitions, looking back to a time before post-studio, when artists worked alone in their quiet cubbyholes? Why is Rodney Graham mining the suburban esthetic? The answer is that artist studios continue to exist, and that “post-studio” is not a pure designation. Orozco does in fact return to the studio to make paintings. Christo and Jeanne-Claude do sell drawings of their public interventions. Studio and post-studio co-exist. Read the rest of this entry »

Eaters, 1981

RECOMMENDED

Promiscuous in her choice of subjects and ever experimenting with photographic techniques, Barbara Crane has represented the culmination of photographic modernism through her six-decade career. In this lavish exhibit honoring her life’s work that began when Chicago was, for a brief moment, the world center of photography, we get to see the dizzying array of the genres that she practiced, from informal street photography through the most disciplined and precise renditions of objects from nature, such as driftwood. Throughout all her myriad projects, Crane has adhered to the rules of respecting her processes and putting her subjects above any indulgence of her own subjective tastes and prejudices, seeking to connect with the world on its terms rather than to impose meaning on it. Among the many series on display here, the most intriguing are experiments that were never widely shown, such as “Wipe Outs,” in which Crane transferred transparencies to Polaroid negatives, producing ghostly, indeed ghastly, portraits that are intensely expressive of emotion. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 10 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

RECOMMENDED

Celebrating the heartwarming people and places of the Sweet Home, Chicago Tribune writer Rick Kogan’s column, “Sidewalks,” and former Trib photog Charles Osgood’s accompanying color photos introduce us to a frozen version of WGN TV’s old segment “Chicago’s Very Own,” which featured mini-bios of the special-yet-humble good folk whom we might like to think represent our nitty-gritty city. Reproduced in this exhibit as wall text, the columns are dwarfed by the pictures, which are self-explanatory even when we do not know who their subjects are by name or particular virtue and accomplishment. From boxing clubs to barber shops, from buskers to bikers, it is all so feel-good that the images and stories threaten to bring on a molasses high. For a rare dollop of bizarre cute fallen off the cliff into absurd grotesquerie, glom on to Osgood’s shot of a polar bear caught underwater earnestly addressing a battery of nightly-news microphones at Lincoln Park Zoo on the day of a conference on global warming. Where are Nelson Algren and Art Shay when we need them? (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 28 at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 E. Randolph