Steven Bernas

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From Jean-Robert Franco’s black-and-white large-format full–frontal female nudes, standing and staring straight at us impassively; through Elena Elbe’s color studies of overlapping exposures of the same nude woman that illustrate the conceit of “Me, MYSELF, and I,” and Steven Bernas’ crazy-colored, distorted and ghoulish figures—constructed by projecting snippets of pornography and his own handiwork on images of nudes—who inhabit “tactile territory;” to Francoise Anger’s atmospheric, astral color abstractions of volatilized figures, we run a gamut of the wildly contrasting ways in which the human body can be represented to evoke whatever sense of existence with which an artist might like to conjure. Read the rest of this entry »

"System of Display, X (EXTENEDED/Jean-Luc Godard, Le Grand Escroc, episode from Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, 1964)," 2011, silkscreen on glass and mirror

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Adam Pendleton isn’t afraid to cut, copy, erase or mark other people’s artwork, whether it’s a Jean-Luc Godard film still or a documentary photograph of the Congolese revolution. Shane Campbell Gallery shows selections from Pendleton’s recent work, “System of Display,” a series of three-inch-deep black shadowboxes that present this bold approach to appropriating and revising visual culture.

Pendleton encloses the top of each squared object with a glass surface imprinted with a simple letterform. These characters are remnants of words—such as “N” from “ancient” and “S” from “sullied”—Pendleton culled from poems. Removed from their original meaning, the letters become markers, seemingly signifying a defined logic to the object-forms hung in neat rows across the gallery space.

Inside each box, Pendleton placed a mirror displaying a grainy, blurred image of a female subject. Pendleton selected the women from film and photo sources, isolated the figures from their original settings, and then repeatedly Xeroxed each image to strip out details. In “G,” “C,” “E,” “U” and “X,” Pendleton telescopes on a solitary woman with her face partially concealed by the book she’s reading. Each iteration reinterprets the scene, alternately revealing the title of the book, more of her facial features, or fingers clasping the book’s corners. It’s unclear whether Pendleton intends to highlight minute stylistic manipulations, or a shifting voyeuristic gaze cast upon this unknowing subject’s private moment. Read the rest of this entry »

"Untitled (Coloma to Covert: Sandwich)," 1993/2006, archival pigment print

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At 83 years old, Barbara Crane has achieved the rank of one of the leading photographic modernists of the second half of the twentieth century, but she is unwilling to rest on her laurels and has ventured forth into new and unfamiliar realms, transposing her love of nature into a digital key and producing color pictorialist images of flowers and leaves that sometimes burn with an orange ember glow, and sometimes embed us into green and pink bowers redolent of the Easter season. Once, by turns, an assertive provocateur showing various and sundry Israelis with Uzis, and the quintessence of Zen precision revealing the details of animal and vegetable forms, Crane has now surrendered to the siren song of imagined beauty, made objective through the offices of Photoshop enhancement (though not, at least, outright transformation). Crane had always been precise; now she is hazy and suggestive. Yet her edge peeks through, especially when she consumes the woodlands in an autumnal blaze. (Michael Weinsten)

Through April 30 at Think Art Salon, 670 West Hubbard

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Chris Bradley has created a Robert Gober-style sculptural constellation where common objects (pretzel sticks, potato chips, paint rollers) are cast in bronze, painted as real fakes, and presented as fractured icons extracted from a personal narrative. Where Gober’s icons are weighted with psychosexual trauma and Catholic guilt, Bradley’s objects are simply the products of boredom. Not that boredom is bad—Gober has shown us that we all have cages, and that we can dream ourselves out of them. Bradley’s cage is probably his studio, the home of his beer and chip stash. He balances the chips, beer, avocados, chewing gum and other foodstuffs onto lumber armatures and tops them with palm trees so that the shacks punctuate the gray-and-white gallery like little deserted islands. A line of pretzel sticks on the far wall form a horizon line, and there’s a piddling sound of trickling water from a makeshift fountain in a beverage cooler. The sense of a provisional existence is successful, but lacking any foreshadow of risk, magic, fear or fatality just compounds empty upon empty. Junk food totems—sculptural doodles, really—signal somebody captive within, and captivated by, their own life. (Jason Foumberg)

Through April 2 at Shane Campbell Gallery, 673 North Milwaukee.

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Unframed and tacked unpretentiously on the gallery wall, Carleen Clifton Bragg’s black-and-white street portraits—mostly candid—of down-and-out African Americans and wasted whites who live amongst us forswear indulgence in patronization, humanization or victimization; her subjects are for the most part depressed, as we see them when we venture into their neighborhoods. Sometimes homeless and holding signs, Bragg’s subjects are epitomized by a young man standing slumped under the weight of a backpack and bundled in a hoodie, with his head bowed and eyes closed—asleep on his feet—as he holds an outstretched Styrofoam cup in one hand and an appeal in the other in faded lettering that reads: “Please Help Me I Have Nothing.” An engaging, straightforward and thoughtful individual, Bragg says that she is “elated” when she takes her shots, because she loves “naturalness.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 26 at ARC Gallery, 832 West Superiorar

Anthony Pearson, "Untitled (Tablet)," 2010. Bronze sculpture with silver nitrate patina. Courtesy of the artist; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York

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Small is beautiful in Anthony Pearson’s show at Shane Campbell’s new gallery space on Milwaukee Avenue. This sparse exhibition consists mainly of Pearson’s abstract untitled photographs that are actually pictures of ink drawings the artist made on aluminum surfaces and then discarded. Pearson’s original drawings are also abstract with layered grids crisscrossed by quick brush strokes. By transforming these ink-wash drawings into photographs, Pearson reminds the viewer of the watery darkroom origins of his shimmering silver gelatin prints. The photographs are more than simply a reproduction of his drawings because Pearson solarizes his negatives, reversing the lights and darks, distancing the photographs from the original drawings. The result of this entire process is that Pearson supplants the tactile, textured drawings with their visual record—the relatively flat, low-contrast photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

I met artist Peter Anton just as he was about to have a life-long wish reach fruition: seeing his work installed for the very first time in a formal gallery space. This dream was a long time coming for Anton, who is now 78. His reaction revealed that the wait was worth it. Anton, who is wheelchair-bound, gazed up at his paintings and the photos of his work, grinning unabashedly, his eyes wide behind plastic-framed glasses. His first words were “Wow, wow, wow!”

For someone who has experienced many personal struggles (nearly dying from pneumonia at age 3, mourning his brother’s childhood death, being removed from his decaying home by social services), Anton is a rarity—affectionate, outrageously funny, unpretentious, and humbled by his own life and experiences.

“I promised God, until I’m finished, for my life to have purpose, to serve people,” Anton says. “I’ve had perseverance, you know what that is? You have to keep trying, keep trying.” Read the rest of this entry »

Wes Carson, “201004240121”

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Ending up somewhere in a liquid world of surreal fantasy tinged with New Age, Wes Carson gets there by putting his willowy model through various paces, shooting her in the act of performing so that the resulting photo will be blurred, and then printing the image digitally in blue tones to make it look like a nineteenth-century cyanotype. Although we can discern her features—and then barely—in only one image, Carson’s subject is clearly a lithe and tough beauty who can stand up to any assignment, such as appearing to take off into the misty sky like a Greek goddess turned angel. What saves Carson from hackneyed sentimentality is the woman, whose strength dominates his images; etherealized as he mightily strives to make her, she will never morph into a water nymph radiating the incredible lightness of being or a foamy sprite. The model rises to her ultimate level of power when she appears emerging from an arch formed by two enormous wrench-like hands sprouting from the earth; her black garment and legs attenuated to shreds, she casts a ghostly overmastering presence. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 17 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

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Another of the army of redeemers of the ruins, Shane Prine shoots the interiors of derelict houses, finding in the copious rubble and refuse forms that—but for the fact that they are filthy—could pass for modernist sculptures and assemblages. Prine renders his subjects in black-and-white chiaroscuro, taking advantage of shadows and pools of light to show them forth in their ramshackle backgrounds. At an extreme pole of the photographic proclivity to alert us to the unrecognized beauty that lurks in the most unexpected places, Prine’s work insures that we will never look at a pile of construction trash the same way again—or at modernist sculpture. In Prine’s most powerful shot, he offers a view of the side of a chair looming up from the litter, its back lost in black, its upholstery torn and mended with duct tape, and a weathered board propped against its front—a gangplank to the throne. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 24 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

Self portrait, courtesy of the National Academy Museum

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The most surprising thing about this retrospective of an American Impressionist is that it happened at all. The genre hasn’t exactly fallen out of popularity, as it’s still highly collectable and collected. However, along with all the other non-French varieties (Russian, Spanish, Scandinavian, etc.), art history has deemed it tangential to the story of Modernism. It was only when the Terra Museum opened in 1978 that solo exhibitions of American Impressionists were consistently mounted in Chicago (with the exception of Sargent and Whistler).

Now that the Terra has closed, only a very ambitious private gallery will spend the big money and years of work necessary to borrow pieces from museums around the country and commission a professionally produced catalog—as Madron Gallery has just done for Robert Vonnoh (1858-1933), in only the second retrospective since his death.

This is a small show—about a dozen pieces that span thirty years and the many styles of Vonnoh’s career, reflecting the serious, careful drawing of the Boston school and the French academy where he studied, as well as the Impressionist and post-impressionist movements that followed. Read the rest of this entry »