RECOMMENDED

This exhibition of work from the group El Stitch y Bitch reminded me of the essentially “relational” aims of feminist work of the 1970s and eighties, specifically Judy Chicago’s Birth Project, a series of embroidered depictions of birth stitched by women, non-artists, from all over the country. While the work on display at Antena in Pilsen looks good, the process out of which the work arises—groups of women stitching, sharing stories, discovering common traditions and discussing the impact on their lives created by the issues of the day—is key. Read the rest of this entry »

Tessa Siddle

RECOMMENDED

I didn’t expect a youthful art show to represent sex, as did Quentin Crisp, to be “the last refuge of the miserable.” But the libidinal charge driving recent utopian art seems, at least in the group show “Splay” now on view at Roxaboxen, to have fizzled. Elise Goldstein hung a series of twenty-four cotton handkerchiefs that physically record the artist’s act of forcing herself to cum once per hour over the span of a day. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Representational accuracy is a severe challenge to pictorial composition that usually results in the prosaic rather than the poetic. There are plenty of textbooks on perspective and anatomy, but passionate sensitivity seems to be a rare, unsolicited gift from the gods. So rare that when it happens, a painting screams for attention, as the work of Elsa Muñoz did when noticed by distinguished Chicago painter Marcos Raya in 2009 at the now-defunct Around the Coyote art fair. Raya introduced her to the Dubhe Carreño Gallery, which gave her a show the following summer. That show was seen by Cesáreo Moreno, visual arts director of the National Museum of Mexican Art, and he gave her a six-month one-person show this summer. Isn’t that the way an art community is supposed to work? And all this began just three years after Muñoz got a bachelor’s degree from the American Academy of Art, which is mostly known as a commercial art school. Read the rest of this entry »

Copyright 2011 Paul E. Germanos

RECOMMENDED

The uncanny potential of domestic objects is key to the art-world appeal of Steven Spielberg’s 1982 sitcomesque horror classic “Poltergeist.” Twenty years later, Paul Pfeiffer’s series of sculptures by that name recreated the tower of chairs stacked on the kitchen table by Spielberg’s ghost. In “Renovation Creep,” Antena gallery’s current show, Daniel Bruttig, Joseph Cassan and Erin Thurlow remake the gallery as a dysfunctional domestic environment of desiccated ephemera (perhaps a foreclosed hoarder home) similarly inhabited by ambient menace. Echoing the Reagan-era TV through whose static the ghosts communicate in the film, a hulking monitor encased in veneer and sitting on a mat of lush pile plays Bruttig’s “Carpet Master,” a video featuring black-and-white carpet textures. One delicately painted stain on the wall evokes an absent staircase, and another suggests recently removed tile. Atop sits Bruttig’s “Glass Stack,” a precarious nonsensical tower of jars, dripping rainbow hues like a psychedelic candle and topped by a casserole dish and a marble. Jagged shards of glass protrude upwards from various sculptures, some painted as trompe-l’oeil mirrors. Read the rest of this entry »

Chiara Ghalimberti

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What makes much contemporary art successful, whether “political” by intention or by accident, is that it comes as the result of an effort not focused on making something that looks like art. This describes well what happened with Anne Dodge’s “66 Motels” project, on display in the show “In A Strange Land” at the Calles Y Sueños space in Pilsen, organized by Rozalinda Borcila in conjunction with the upcoming AREA Chicago issue on “Im/migration.” Dodge, a researcher who doesn’t identify as an artist, has been interviewing owners of motels along Route 66 that advertise themselves as “American-owned,” which at one point really meant “white-owned.” But these signs remain on many motels now owned by non-white immigrants and, while the jingoistic fine print in Dodge’s postcard-type photos of motel facades inspires a chill, reading her interviews with current motel owners makes “American” seem like a redeemable term. Along those lines, Fereshteh Toosi’s free calling cards, which say “The Only Reason You Are A CITIZEN Today Is Because Your Ancestors Believed and Practiced IMMIGRATION,” are based on an old KKK card that replaced “A CITIZEN” with “WHITE,” and “IMMIGRATION” with “SEGREGATION.”  Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Appropriately sited next to Pilsen’s Salvation Army store, a group of outdoor sculptures composed of found objects took shape under the moniker “While All Such Things End,” or WASTE. Some colored strips of rag were tied to chain-link. A yard of fabric with an ambiguous, body-sized shape cutout lay on the dirt. These discards were selected by Kyle Schlie for their formal potential, as found geometries and abstractions. It is likely that these impromptu sculptures no longer exist today, just days after their assembly, for many were propped in an active and muddy driveway and on the outside wall of a small warehouse. As far as Scatter Art goes, it was great to finally not see it in a gallery setting. Instead, these pieces retained the urgency of the city. The WASTE sculptures were born of the city’s excretions and returned to it, one and the same with the rattling elevated train, the decrepit brick wall, the Latina transsexual with exaggerated makeup passing on Western Avenue. In essence, these sculptures were successful as experiential, rather than contemplative, like past great street sculptures by Cody Hudson and Juan Angel Chavez. The effect is altogether different than tagging or murals. The unexpected objects on the street were clearly constructed with the combined senses of active curiosity and aesthetic imagination. (Jason Foumberg)

“While All Such Things End” was located at 2014 South Western. Read the rest of this entry »

Cover art by Andre Guichard

By Jason Foumberg

A chronic criticism of Chicago’s art landscape is that, for a thriving urban center, its art venues and exhibitions spaces are too farflung across the city’s grid, and therefore largely inaccessible. A Chelsea-type stroll just isn’t possible in Chicago, and even if there are concentrated gallery districts in River North and the West Loop, they scarcely represent the full spectrum of the city’s visual art production. Our art scene has multiple centers with as many margins, and therefore many frontiers. Diane Grams’ new book, “Producing Local Color: Art Networks in Ethnic Chicago,” argues that Chicago’s island neighborhoods benefit from autonomous art production and consumption. The book offers three case studies—the Chicago neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Pilsen and Rogers Park—to describe how locally cultivated art scenes exist in relation to specific local issues, from real estate to crime, and to larger concerns of politics, civil rights and economic access.

A common tactic in Chicago, especially today, is the domestic gallery. In 1961, several people decided to start a “home-based museum” on the South Side and called it the Ebony Museum to represent black history in Chicago. Twelve years later they moved locations and changed the name to the DuSable Museum of African American History. This boldly innovative museum only became culturally legitimate and publicly influential, writes Grams, when the institution was relocated into the city’s parkland alongside other major cultural institutions. Read the rest of this entry »

Jason Dunda's "Portrait of Paul Hopkin as the most Beautiful Effigy in the World"

By Jason Foumberg

Paul Hopkin is an artist who opened Slow gallery in August 2009 in a west Pilsen storefront. Slow is a curatorial project where Hopkin pairs two (and sometimes three) artists in an exhibition to see a conversation emerge. We chatted about his practice and vision for the gallery.

Tell me about the name Slow.

I am really interested in food, and have been forever. I used to automatically mistrust any artist who didn’t know their way around a kitchen. The connection of slow food and slow art is not coincidental.

Can you explain the practice of curating two-person shows, rather than solo shows?

Solo shows always “work,” but they seem to encourage the dreaded like/dislike response. It is hard to get someone to look at a show of a single artist and encourage them to think about what they are seeing at the same time. Pairing work in ways that are less obvious can draw out tensions, illuminate peculiarities in an artist’s point of view. That content often makes itself apparent as tension or a giggle rather than as a concise answer. Theme shows can dumb down too—they can simply generate an internal checklist—yup, that one is about robots too.

I fell for art because it was introduced to me as a way to change the way people see. I am still in love with the power and problems that that offers. The way I put shows together allows me to put something out in the world that is my take on things, but still keeps the artist’s work front and center. Read the rest of this entry »

If you walked into the Kunsthalle New gallery in Pilsen at around 8pm last Saturday, the first thing you would have noticed was a group of people standing and staring at the ceiling. Above them, what looked like a pile of rags jumped and rustled, like a cat wandering under a pile of clothes. It was artist Chris Collins’ contribution to the thirty-some projections at Chicago’s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), a one-night exhibition by Chicago-based internet artists.

BYOB is the brainchild of Rafaël Rozendaal, a Berlin artist who started the event as a way to bring net artists together in a seamlessly adaptable exhibition. Because the only stipulations are that artists must attend and they must bring their own projectors (they’re known as beamers in Europe), BYOBs were meant to be exported far and wide. Since its first incarnation in Berlin in July 2010, there have been more than ten BYOBs in cities across the globe. Nicholas O’Brien and Brian Khek, both SAIC-affiliated artists who do internet and computer-based art, organized the Chicago version. “It’s really about coming together and saying, yes, this is kind of one community, even if it’s not in one geographical location,” O’Brien says. “Also, being able to share with others in the physical space and not having to be limited by the typical channels of communication on the internet. Like, you don’t have to have a certain number of ‘likes’ to engage with the space, which can really dictate the online traffic of certain projects.” Read the rest of this entry »

Peter V. Walsh, Jason Thompson, Clarke Canedy, Dana Schmidt

With more than two-dozen art galleries located in one neighborhood it can be difficult for the new kid on the block to stand out from the crowd. Throw in an economy slowly climbing its way out of recession, let alone it being February in Chicago—not exactly the most conducive environment to foot traffic—and it’s hard to imagine a new art space hanging on, let alone thriving. Yet that’s what The Black Cloud Gallery of East Pilsen (1909 South Halsted, blackcloudgallery.net) has managed to do. Since opening in October, the fledgling gallery has gone from six contributing artists to nearly thirty, and says it is currently turning a profit every month.

“We represent artists, not just display them,” says gallery co-founder Clarke Canedy. “When we show an artist, we don’t just put work up and hope people come in on 2nd Fridays, we curate the work to strengthen it. We hang work at local businesses; the artists are being exhibited out of the gallery for more exposure. We rent our space for all sorts of private events; classes are taught here. We try to get as many people in front of the art as possible in different ways.”

Some of those different ways have included hosting charity events, a birthday party, baby shower, wedding reception, jewelry show, sewing classes, comedy shows, and drawing sessions with live models starting in March (and they’re looking into yoga). Their latest hook: an “Art Bazaar,” with more than ninety pieces from more than thirty different artists set at $200, all through February, kicking off with a gala event February 4 from 7pm-10:30pm. Read the rest of this entry »