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Founder of the Institute of Design, which for a brief moment in the mid-twentieth century made Chicago the center of world photography, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was the great experimenter, addicted to the idea of a purely photographic vision that would develop his medium’s possibilities for transforming human sensibility so that people would be fit to survive and prevail in an industrial environment. Although he has been shown in his adopted home many times, this lavish exhibition, which covers five galleries and is accompanied by informative wall text and handouts, finally—through the efforts of curator Carol Ehlers—gives Moholy his due and allows us to appreciate his many facets whole. From his straight shots of cityscapes from unfamiliar angles (now part of the visual vernacular) to his “light paintings” and photograms in which directed light and objects play on photo-sensitive media without the mediation of a lens, Moholy was ever breaking new ground in technique; yet, in retrospect, a look at the light paintings, which were his boldest endeavors, reveals that the forms of those haunting astral abstractions are photographic versions of the contemporary paintings of the era that are most kindred to the works of Joan Miro and Paul Klee. Rather than being ahead of his time, as he wished to be, Moholy was of them as a genuine creator. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 9 at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan.

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Whether it is wild spidery branches sprouting from trees in the forests, incredibly gnarled tree trunks, the criss-crossed steel supports of the State Farm building in Bloomington, Illinois, a snow-dusted rural road engraved with sinuous and undulating tire tracks, dilapidated ramshackle sheds or elegant spindly clumps of pine needles, Jon Balke is there with his camera to bring forth in black-and-white images the exquisite ragged geometries around us that defy the eye’s preference for symmetrical order. Balke’s vision hones in on the involvement of networks of lines that are usually anything but straight, revealing endless complications within conjunctures that serve as metaphors for the confused and disorderly lives that inexorably attend the human condition. Among the many stunning images here, Balke’s masterwork is a study from New Orleans of peeling paint that displays such a multi-textured dimensionality and mutual involvement of fissures that even the most gifted abstract-expressionist painter would be tempted to give up the brush for the lens. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 21 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

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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.

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 »

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“Expect the Unexpected,” a survey of paintings and works on paper by the late Hollis Sigler (1948-2001), organized by the Rockford Art Museum, is now on view at the Chicago Cultural Center. Adroitly curated by Patty Rhea, the volume of works by Sigler helps reveal their lasting value.

A Chicagoan by way of graduate school, Sigler was one of the founding members of the feminist art collective and alternative gallery Artemisia (1973-2003). She found critical success in the early 1980s, and showed at the 1981 Whitney Biennial. The current retrospective contains twenty years of her work.

The lack of irony in Sigler’s work instantly identifies her as part of a previous generation. Domestic scenes heightened with symbolic narratives pulse with energy in van Gogh-esque staccato brushstrokes, dots and dashes. Shallow, warped spaces and cartoon-like representations betray Sigler’s heavy reliance on the traditions of outsider art, complete with apocalyptic imagery and populist religious overtones. These tropes are employed to an emotional end, repurposed to address the nature of feminine and queer desire. “Desire Released,” from 1983, shows a woman backlit by the moon as she dances in an earthen valley that is subtly erotic. Much of Sigler’s work focuses on the liberation of desire, whether just beyond the valley, outside of a window or rising to heaven.

Sigler was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1985, which recurred in 1991. She created the “Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of My Grandmothers” series in response. An artist who makes work specifically about the cancer experience may face marginalization in the survivor story genre, but Sigler’s art transcends such easy shelving. The current retrospective reveals Sigler’s intense engagement with culture. While she certainly positioned herself as a passionate advocate for women’s health issues, her painted legacy suggests a larger project of self-actualization. (Dan Gunn)

Hollis Sigler shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 W. Washington, through April 4.

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

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Consider for a moment the holiday sweater, that painfully trite accent of the lowbrow winter wardrobe. If it wasn’t an obvious faux-pas to begin with, it has now become a striking cliché, developing its own cult of ironic re-appropriation and parody among the fashionable and the aloof. Rather than relish in this idle mockery, Tyson Reeder, an artist with a penchant for unusual creative situations, has decided to use the holiday-sweater phenomenon as the basis for a collaborative work of art.

Though the holidays have drawn to a close, for the next month Reeder will be offering willing participants the chance to gradually contribute to the relatively amorphous design of an imaginary sweater taking shape, in paint, on a single canvas. Beginning last week, Reeder converted SubCity Projects—an artist-run, micro-exhibition-space—into a participatory public painting studio. He began the basic under-painting of the sweater-in-question himself, but anyone interested in making a subsequent contribution can stop by SubCity Projects—which is normally locked, though the makeshift studio, and painting in progress, remains visible—to schedule a thirty-minute painting session. It is unclear, as of yet, whether plans have been made to exhibit the finished product, but it already seems that it is not necessarily the most important part of the endeavor, which is sure to result in a sweater—albeit imaginary and only existing in representation—more elaborate than anything you will find at a thrift-store or shopping mall. (Nate Lee)

Through January 30 at SubCity Projects, in the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan, Room 1036.

RECOMMENDED

If we ever needed proof that straight photography always presents the world through a specific sensibility, we can find it in extremis in Sarah Hadley’s sepia-pigmented studies of Venice, Italy on misty evenings, seemingly frozen in time in the nineteenth-century. Whether she has fixed on details of statues, back alleys, the fabled canals, footpaths, grand cathedrals with spires soaring to the sky among the birds, or humble abodes hugging the ground, Hadley always casts a pictorialist spell, placing us alone in the fog, observing a world transfigured by a grand poignancy. Hadley is most effective in depicting seductive distance when she allows a faceless human figure into the scene, as in “Ascension,” where we see a man from behind, blackened to a shadow by the fog, walking up a flight of concrete stairs by the side of a vaporous canal. The only fruitful response is to surrender to the mood of bittersweet loneliness that Hadley consistently projects and evokes, and to forget that Venice is also a sinking twenty-first century city. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 17 at Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 N. Michigan.

RECOMMENDED

To accompany her video, where we see her dancing with a man in a bar, Carrie Schneider has placed a color scenario photo, “Still Life,” of barflies in a tavern – a man slumped over, a couple kissing, a man taking a swig of whiskey, two detached women, and a man staring off into the distance as he holds his beer bottle limply. This, says Schneider, is a slice of “bar culture,” which is also the basis of the video. By all appearances, “Still Life” depicts bar culture as a failed social form in which people are lost in their own worlds, with boozing their only principle of solidarity. We are reminded of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” played in the key of despair rather than mere desperation. Schneider says that she is inspired by Brassai, photographer of the French inter-war demimonde—the documentarian of decadence. Schneider’s performance video, “Slow Dance,” begins with a pan of the scene that she panoramically encapsulated in her photograph, but then we see her look at a man across the room; their eyes meet, she advances on him and seduces him into a lascivious dance as the barmaid looks on with fascinated indifference. The dance morphs into an undulating ménage-a-trois and then, at last, the two partners are once again alone together, at which point they separate, turn their backs on each other definitively, and re-enter their solipsistic detachment, receding among the barflies. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 3 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

RECOMMENDED

It’s not surprising that the strong, simple woodblock prints of Unichi Hiratsuka (1895-1997) would appeal so much to Chicago structural engineer Theodore Van Zelst (1923-2009) whose family just donated his collection to the Art Institute. The artist’s grandfather was an architect, and the sense of gravity weighs heavily on the grandson’s bold depictions of earth and buildings, while the collector innovated the study of soil for its load-bearing potential. Hiratsuka was an innovator as well, being among the founders of Sosaku Hanga and the first teacher of wood block printing at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1935. Sosaku Hanga is the modern version of Japanese woodblock printing that unites design, wood-cutting, and printing into the hands of one skilled artist instead of three. What is lost in delicacy is gained in boldness. But beyond that technical aspect, everything else is open to the widest variety of expression. Many Sosaku Hanga artists rose to prominence in the postwar era for their abstract or neo-primitive designs, but Hiratsuka’s work seems more like a simplified version of the nineteenth-century, with a love of landscapes and occasionally young, naked women. And he lived a very long time—allowing him two almost separate lives, with his last thirty years spent with his daughter in Washington D.C., patronized by presidents and making images of national monuments. His strong, cheerful, extensive oeuvre is something of a monument itself—a monument to a life well spent in the catastrophic twentieth century. (Chris Miller)

Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.