photo by Jane J. Gaspar

By Jason Foumberg

There is a room. It is filled with salt. It is the “Salt Room.” Doug Fogelson’s latest exhibition pairs photograms made from salt with 3,000 pounds of rock salt spread on the floor, wall to wall, of a storefront gallery. Fogelson founded and directs Front Forty Press, an art-book publisher based in Chicago, and he often exhibits his own photographic prints and sculptural installations. “Salt Room (Winter on the Moon)” is his first publicly exhibited ground covering.

The salted layer of floor here evokes many things: the luminous snow right outside; a moonscape, wasteland or other no man’s land; a crystal palace’s ashes. It is a gravel aquarium for humans to frolic while passersby peer in through the large street-level display windows. The overall effect is crunchy and cold. Read the rest of this entry »

The Flat Iron Arts Building opens at six on “First Fridays,” and by seven a small line has formed at the gallery’s entrance. It’s a donation affair, and considering you’re bound to spend twenty dollars on cheap beer or a cab at some point later in the night, giving the girl at the door five dollars doesn’t sound like a waste. She hands out maps and points people up to the stairs.

The early gallery crowd is comprised mostly of adults over 30. They’ve got their standard-issue clear-plastic wine cups and smart glances. The wood floor creaks as a woman goes in to hug an artist. She points at a mural behind him. It is an abstract piece full of greens, yellows and oranges. It is also the main focus for the night. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Always possessed of a sensibility directed towards decay, disorder and ultimately death, Laura Letinsky has at last reached the limit in her latest series of tabletop color still-life photographs, which take the leap into the abyss of memento mori. Shot at dusk, when French folk wisdom has it that dogs transform into feral wolves, Letinsky’s shadowed images serve up surfaces scattered with the detritus of life, as when we are treated to an array that includes a gruesome dead bird, cigarette butts, a fragment of an orange peel, a plastic candy wrapper, and some black globules of uncertain origin—all placed on an oblong piece of sadly wrinkled paper. Proof that Letinsky has come a long way down the highway to hell hangs in the gallery’s back room, where an earlier study of a kitchen table counter, replete with a dirty beaker, soiled butter knives, a folded sponge, and a wilting plant was shot in the morning and still carries the promise of a return to neatness and intelligibility. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 13 at Monique Meloche Gallery, 2154 W. Division

Michael Smith

RECOMMENDED

Memories lost and only imperfectly recovered, drenched in pathos and poignancy, permeate Michael Smith’s multiple-exposure black-and-white photographs of the rubble left by the demolition of buildings backgrounded by partially standing edifices (“Deconstruction Series”), and the interiors of his father’s house, blurred and rendered distant by double vision. As visual poetry, Smith’s images concentrate emotion and radiate the age-old wistful theme that everything that is shall pass, as much as we might wish to hold it fast. Nowhere is Smith’s message more deeply projected than in “In the Bedroom, Haunting Memories,” in which the modest room is wreathed in shadows but for a circle of light, in which the faded figure of a boy appears in a clouded mirror over a dresser. For relief from tristesse, look at Jennifer Bisbing’s miniature black-and-white photos of finely etched weeds in Humboldt Park, soaring to the heavens like stately trees; and Julian Gordon’s color macro-studies, cut into squares and then rejoined into “mosaics,” of softly focused bees feasting on lush flowers. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 20 at Coalition Gallery, 2010 W. Pierce

RECOMMENDED

The signs of these times seem to be predominantly distress signals. At Monique Meloche Gallery’s new location in Wicker Park, six artists from various regions of the United States of America weigh in to qualify recession blues in two and three dimensions. Let’s start in the middle, De Moines, where Michael Patterson-Carver renders average Americans voicing now ubiquitous concerns. A place where Boteroesque Iowans gather in watercolor to lobby for healthcare and employment may also be a place ripe with vacant commercial real estate.

Kim Beck dominates the façade of the Division Street location, with monumental signage simply soliciting space. Part of an ongoing project, “Everything Must Go,” is comprised of hand-drawn signage announcing liquidation. Beck turns the lens to the employees pronouncing impending vacancies, affirming that the work is intended to speak to “the more personal repercussions of the economic collapse.” Carrie Schneider seems equally entranced by the ghosts of retail past. “Recession,” the inspiration for “Sign of the Times,” is a self-portrait of the artist as exasperated consumer doing some recession-style window shopping, her torso flaccid, gracing the surface of an empty storefront. (In December, Schneider will address the MCA 12×12 space with “Slowdance,” a short film made in Helsinki.) Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Doran

The West Town gallery Roots & Culture has shown a wide variety of work over the last three years, but, as with most good independent spaces, there’s a house style. It is a recognizable look, the folksy RISD-style psychedelic expressionism promulgated in the wider culture by macramé owls with twig antlers and Day-Glo silk-screen posters with misspelled words arranged on mountains made of diamond shapes. As we reach the turn of the next decade, this faux-primitive handmade aesthetic has, on the one hand, consolidated into a formal surface of ready signifiers that can be freely manipulated like beats and samples and, on the other, deepened into a legitimate if intuitive conceptual approach.

This former aesthetic hedonism teeters on the boundary of self-awareness and pure shamanic design in the works of Rob Doran, now on display. Hot colors in gradient discs sit amidst thick and muddy zigzag brushstrokes. There are, in fact, twigs, mountains, diamond shapes and misspelled words, both handwritten and printed, not to mention dirty white backgrounds and handmade frames. The moment of self-awareness for me comes with a small outsider-esque sculpture sitting on a found plank, in which a braided white snake peers up at the viewer through a miniature wild-haired African mask, flouting the last forty-odd years of scathing critique directed at Picasso-style colonial appropriation. If we are in a truly post-colonial (if not post-racial) universe, then these pieces deliver evocative atavism with breezy aplomb. If we are not, then there’s more of a kick here, though it might be directed at Doran rather than (or as well as) from him. Read the rest of this entry »

Inside the "Knowledge Box" by Ken Isaacs

By Jason Foumberg

It’s telling that no paintings are included in “Learning Modern,” an exhibition conceived to honor and update the twentieth century’s greatest artistic project. Modernism bloomed on canvas, its essences distilled via paint. But any office worker in downtown Chicago knows that Modernism also found expression in concrete, steel and glass. Despite its force and thrust, Modernism was (and remains) people friendly. It’s interactive. By inhabiting Modernist structures we carry its legacy, and we can barely ignore it; we can, however, shelve a crackly old canvas out of view. The persistence, and insistence, of Modern architecture may be one reason why painting was excluded from “Learning Modern.” Another reason may be that Wellington Reiter is an architect and urban planner, and the current president of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where “Learning Modern” is held. For Reiter, renewed attention to architecture and design signals a reorientation of the artist’s role in the world. Whereas painters work in private, their coded dialogue trained toward other painters, architects and designers mold human activity. Being relevant is back in style. It’s an ideal even the classical Modernists would abide. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

We are often told to expect the unexpected; artist Trevor Reese creates it. Reese, from Brooklyn, exhibits nine small installations in a series of new work at Believe Inn, the final show in this summer-only art space. He says he aims to “create instances when the familiar generates hopeful opportunities and reverie.” Reese’s pieces are refined kitsch that manipulate found objects into surprising new objects. Taking everyday stuff such as turntables, images from books, and sticks, Reese changes their appearance and function. With movable parts, many make use of the fourth dimension. One wall-bound sculpture consists of fake-wood paneling with a pasted landscape scene atop it. A small circle rotates on the surface, slowly spinning the landscape in and out of alignment. For just a split second it appears normal, then the landscape cycles around again like the earth’s seasonal rotation or a time machine. (Shiloh Aderhold)

Through October 31 at Believe Inn, 2043 N. Winchester.

Helen Maurene Cooper, in the exhibition Faking It?

As digital cameras and their cell-phone-affixed counterparts continue to grow in ubiquity and facility, and as more and more people use these devices to transmit daily personal updates, in the form of pictures of themselves and their activities to personal Web-based facades like Flickr and Facebook, a new technologically informed obsession with personhood—either one’s own or someone else’s—dubbed “egocasting” by cultural critic Christine Rosen, has taken hold in our culture. It resonates particularly well with the young, overly self-aware members of society. An apt art theorist should remain attentive for signs of this new phenomena reemerging in the work of young contemporary artists; the lay art theorist may claim that portraiture is, by now, a pervasive and eternal tendency.

The Co-Prosperity Sphere, Bridgeport’s hip and somewhat secluded multi-purpose alt-space, recently hosted nine artists in an exclusively portrait-based exhibition titled “Transplant Reflect.” The work is unusually divided between two different approaches: technically refined photography and Pop-surrealist street art. Anna Shteynshleyger updates Man Ray’s photograms using the camera-less photographic process to capture images of individual hairstyles, suggesting that an entire personality may be reduced to the shape of a haircut.  At a moment when self-design has become the norm and conformity is unequivocally shunned, we are perhaps nothing more than our outward appearances. Read the rest of this entry »

William S. Burroughs, "Portrait of Aleister Crowley," 1988.

By Jason Foumberg

Aleister Crowley, occult philosopher and mystic, is best remembered for his precept: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” This phrase is often misinterpreted as an excuse for a hedonistic lifestyle because Crowley himself engaged in taboo sexual exploits and drug experimentation, edifying some to pursue individual, anarchic freedom. Really, though, Crowley promised desires fulfilled by one’s destiny, prefiguring “The Secret,” the bestselling New Age self-help book, by about a century.

Crowley was never one to water down his thinking in pursuit of popularity. Instead, his strange writings, including instructions for pagan rituals, appealed mostly to fringe thinkers. William S. Burroughs, beat poet and author of “Naked Lunch,” picked up on Crowley’s philosophy with zeal, distorting its lessons to accommodate his own blatant drug use and sexuality demonized by mid-century American morality. In a 1978 interview, Burroughs misquoted Crowley, effectively reversing the dictum: “What you want to do is, of course, eventually what you will do anyway. Sooner or Later.” His interviewer accused him of being “amoral.”

Burroughs’ “Portrait of Aleister Crowley,” a painting on paper from 1988, is now on view at Th!nkArt Salon, in Wicker Park, along with a dozen or so of his other works. Read the rest of this entry »