The Pilsen art walk used to be the only annual studio crawl where artists flung open their doors, gave spectators cheap, free wine and general revelry was had in secret annexed gardens you couldn’t see from the street. The novelty of the art walk is its yearliness, but now it happens every month on Second Fridays.

This particular February night, the Skylark is too packed to sit, so it is a curmudgeon’s refuge to walk into the Chicago Art Department for respite and feel actual unexpected delight. Read the rest of this entry »

On December 17 of last year an electrical fire destroyed much of Kenneth Morrison’s artist-destination The Whale. No one was hurt, but most of all of Morrison’s possessions—and those of Michelle Faust and Nat Ward, who along with Morrison run the art society Ever-So-Secret Order of the Lamprey—were destroyed. In an effort to rebuild, Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere will be home to a benefit event February 5, featuring musical performances by Black Nag, Thin Man, Son of Cops and more. Tickets are ten bucks, and the evening doubles as a release party for the 114th issue of Lumpen. “In 2007 I came to a Lamprey meeting, and they were all kind of unfailingly generous and welcoming,” says Mairead Case, one of the event’s organizers. “[Morrison] sometimes says he’s met most of the people in the neighborhood in his kitchen.” (Tom Lynch)

Work by Nat Soti

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It’s opening night and the gallery goers at the Chicago Art Department are on their phones. Their iPhones, to be exact. Far from being bad etiquette, this reinforces the show’s argument that the iPhone is a valid artistic tool. Mike Nourse and a group of Chicago artists explore the artistic uses of their new technology, sharing apps and techniques with each other in a five-week class, culminating in an exhibition. Their dialogue grew to include Susan Murtaugh, an established iPhone artist from Wisconsin, as well as international iPhone artists. For many of the “iArtists,” this is their first exhibit in a gallery context. Translating their virtual work into a physical medium results in a variety of subjects and styles, from “fingerpainted” and photographic works printed on aluminum and paper to videos playing on multiple computer screens. Gallery placement and similar presentation methods maintains a sense of unity throughout the show. The sold stickers dotting pieces confirm the work can be considered “real” artwork, at least by commercial gallery standards. The show works well visually, and there’s some great tongue-in-cheek commentary, such as Nourse’s payphone photographs and Nathan Peck’s “iSick,” which incorporates videos of what would be hard-to-reach places with a larger camera; very appropriate when depicting Gingivitis. However, the artwork’s true magic is in the viewer’s knowledge that the pieces were originally created using the same phone in their pockets; easily accessible almost any time, anywhere, turning the everyday world into an artist’s studio. A viewer complimenting an artist expresses a wish to create his own iPhone artwork, but laments he bought a Blackberry two weeks ago. “Two words,” the artist says, “Return it.” (Patrice Connelly)

At Chicago Art Department, 1837 S. Halsted, (312)725-4223, through January 27 by appointment, with a open-to-the-public day on January 23 from 10am-5pm.

Casey McGonagle

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A sense of distance pervades the images of the three young photographers here who are either current students at the School of the Art Institute or recent graduates. Casey McGonagle adds a creepy note in his black-and-white pigment print, “Deadman’s Park,” in which we see the subject sitting stiffly on a bench next to a trash can in the shadows of night, dressed in black and completely hooded in monstrous headgear that sports a hideous long snout. Robin Juan takes the opposite tack in her color portrait of a young woman, in which we see the subject fade into darkness with only the faintest trace of  her face—Caravaggio with only the dimmest illumination, which reveals the woman’s hauntingly beautiful features only on close inspection. Sam Sieger’s highly pixilated digital print, “Splash,” renders the water play in such an attenuated fashion that it threatens to become an abstraction of motion. This slice of the up-and-coming generation shows a decided turn towards alienation, which is only appropriate for our times. As Sieger puts it, “I am skeptical, but I don’t want to be cynical.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 9 at Pentagon Gallery, 961 W. 19th Street

By Jason Foumberg

After three mixed drinks nothing was firing and I realized the bartender must’ve been pouring water instead of vodka, so I switched to unadulterated beer in bottles, which made for frequent trips to the toilet. It was there, in line for the restroom at an all-male strip bar called Lucky Horseshoe, that I made niceties with my queue-mate. “It’s quite an art form, isn’t it?” she said to me, jagging her thumb in the direction of a dancing sack of muscles. “An art form?” I smirked questioningly. “Oh yeah,” she explained, “It commands such attention.” My instinct was to scoff—stripping is no modern dance—but I remembered I was there with three artists, and if stripping wasn’t an art form, then it was surely an inspiration, so I kept an open mind, but what the hell was this lady doing in a gay strip joint, anyway?

Among the usual clientele of touchy-feely, bearded gentlemen and the half-naked hustlers, there were gaggles of women here, all giddy and grabby while shaved-chest, jock-strapped young lads humped their legs. Easy money. We sank back into the darkness and watched the show. The strip at this club consists of two layers of underwear. It’s not much of a tease and, as far as art forms go, it’s pretty easy to enjoy, accessible all the way down the line. A bulge in the shorts isn’t a complex metaphor, but insiders find their own points of connection. My friend nodded toward the guy wearing a silver chain collar. “That means he’s a power bottom.” The ass-up gymnastics could have given it away, but like the handkerchief codes of yore, there’s a deeper layer of communication for the initiated. You don’t have to go to art school to understand it; one is just born into it. These secrets build complicity, without which there would be no community. What about the guy with the cowboy boots, what does that mean? Oh, that’s just machismo, totally hot. Read the rest of this entry »

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A devotee of road trips through the hinterlands, Michael Wayne shoots digital photos of the landscape—earth, trees and sky—as he speeds along; applies beeswax and acrylic varnishes to his straight prints with the aid of his collaborator Marco Logsdon; and produces an effect that freezes his subjects in dense entangled forms drenched in seductive colors that bleed into one another. Although he claims that he is documenting “passing,” Wayne has, instead, transmuted motion into integral and lively compositions with an impressionist surface that concentrates our gaze. It is the materials that Wayne has applied that do the trick by removing the sense of indefinition and forward thrust from his images while leaving a vibrant yet static blur. Wayne’s small cyano-toned set of five studies of strands of ink-blue trees takes us away from nature and delivers us to a distinctive, compelling and decidedly aesthetic sensibility—almost art for art’s sake. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 5 at Logsdon 1909, 1909 S. Halsted

Garage installation. Photo by Cole Pierce.

When artists run out of things to make art about—that’s the day I’ll no longer have a job writing about art. The moment of mutually assured destruction came close to fruition last Saturday evening in a collaborative exhibition by Chelsea Culp and Ben Foch. The venue was Vega Estates, literally a garage and a basement serving as temporary sites for art. The freestanding two-car garage contained a perfectly flat white wall ringing its interior. Perhaps two or three feet in height, the wall reached neither the floor nor the ceiling, but floated around the perimeter like an elegant Minimal sculpture. The unfinished basement, moldering and dark, featured a museum-quality vitrine, or display case, ominously lit in a corner. The case contained several faux-primitive voodoo doll-like items. Read the rest of this entry »

Mind Map detail, by Robin Cameron

By Jason Foumberg

It was a night where anything was possible. The warm sky and the short-shorts were new, but the crowd seemed familiar. Like islands of misadventure where castaways crawl up to cough crumpled air were the paintings and sculptures amid a sea of drunks. Someone threw up on a painting of their own making, which was entirely scripted, but it got me thinking that if art is a forced excrescence of the soul (or the mind, whatever), then whither the laxative? A tantrum? A philosophy? No, the best lubricant is a laugh. This being the art crowd, though, we smirk and blow air through our noses because the stuff isn’t really hilarious; it’s just cutesy or cynical—fun but not funny.

The press image for the group show “Now That’s What I Call Painting” was designed to mimic the “Now That’s What I Call Music” pop compilation (the 72nd volume was just released on CD), which is an excellent design tactic because the paintings on view are catchy, blasted on repeat until the hook that gets you every time becomes worn to a nub, here today and maybe gone tomorrow. One painting looked like a Funfetti sheet cake. Unlike its peers, the cake painting leaned against a wall for no other reason than it could, looking great because that’s what we do these days. Feeling similarly dispassionate, I toasted my plastic cup of beer to it. Someone (name withheld) said that “fun is the Chicago style” (or maybe they said “esthetic”), and I couldn’t help agreeing that, although some of the paintings in “Now That’s What I Call Painting” may have been made with serious or painterly or artistic intentions in mind, here among the crowd they just came to party, hot messes among hot messes.
Read the rest of this entry »

Hector Duarte, mural in Naperville, 1998

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Three special exhibitions are now running at the National Museum of Mexican Art (in addition to the regular collection). Many historic and contemporary artists are included, but it is especially interesting to find a lineage of three painters whose careers span the history of modern Mexican art. The Bank of America Collection of paintings, photography, and prints includes a great gouache painting, “The Prisoner,” by Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1871-1946), who is sometimes called the father of modern Mexican painting. That show also includes several lively lithographs by his famous student, the great muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974). Across the hall, we find Hector Durarte (b. 1952), a Siqueiros student who is working right here in Chicago. Indeed, Duarte has been painting within the museum itself, designing a 150-foot mural that wraps around all four walls of a gallery. It’s all a bit breath-taking—especially the Duarte mural that is as enjoyably decorative as a fine woven fabric, but does not fail to deliver an overwhelming emotional punch. Mexican art is so much about the immediacy of heartfelt love that it’s hard to imagine an art form more different from the irony, disgust, anger, alienation or cool aestheticism of the Anglo art worlds. (Chris Miller)

Through August 30 at the National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. 19th St.

As the Pilsen arts community continues to sprawl in all directions, quietly worming its way into obscure garage venues like Vega Estates and makeshift attic galleries like Brown Triangle, it’s no surprise that a storefront operation at 17th and Laflin called No Coast is already making steady ground since its recent opening in October. With its token attributes being a graffitied newspaper box-turned-free-book-exchange and quirky green awning still advertising goods from a past entrepreneur, the corner facade has already become both a beacon to the creative class and a curiosity to the locals.

Inside, the storefront portion of the space consists of tables lined with screen-printed books, flanked by shelves and racks housing clothing, homemade jewelry, records, cassette tapes and more printed matter. The walls are packed with printed posters, all of which seem to possess the sort of throwback, fuck-off, homespun approach and lo-fi attitude found in a post-punk American mainstream in search of something to bitch about. Look deeper, however, and you’ll find that the members of this collective are actually doing something, taking action in a time when thankless bleating at openings and spineless imperiousness on art blogs have become status quo.

Walking through the storefront into the No Coast’s upstairs “clean zone,” it immediately becomes evident that hard work, substance, discipline and realism set the tone at the collective. The backroom of the ground floor operates as a workshop, studio and expansion of the storefront during events including sometimes music venue and the recent Lock-In, a twenty-four-hour session of screen-printing, book-binding and shadow puppet classes. In the back area, members of the collective can be observed working on projects like designing and manufacturing organic clothing, while, on a recent visit, pleasant music and a quiet chess game takes place in the front of the shop. A welcoming harmony exists between the front of the house and workshop, which is precisely what the members of the collective—all makers—strive to attain.

No Coast was formed after its members splintered from Golden Age, which formerly occupied the Pilsen storefront, and relocated to 18th Street. No Coast and Golden Age brings the artist bookstore tally to two in Pilsen, and No Coast’s next event is a book release party hosted by Eye Rocket to showcase a fantasy zine and gay porn collector cards, on December 11 at 7pm. (Andrew Loughnane)

No Coast is located at 1500 W. 17th Street.