"Form with Suggested Content"

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In the exhibition “Object Lesson,” John Fraser treats his own oeuvre, spanning twenty-something years, like a series of found objects from which to assemble a collage, offering a palimpsest of his career, revisiting past trends and former concerns in linen, mosaic and book-binding fragments. There is a haunting quality to many pieces—puttied-over traces of pulled staples, mottled glue along an eviscerated book spine)—but the show centers around “Form with Suggested Content,” a framed collage featuring a closed envelope. Here we have the unspoken enticement of narrative inherent in a found object, the jarring balance of collage, the shades of bottomless neutral washing from monochrome into subtle color play and, of course, the inlaid envelope itself, waiting for our response.

Fraser’s pieces sometimes pull optical tricks, oscillating positive and negative space. The inner edges of otherwise blank pages float to the foreground in “Westport Island Memory” while in “Composition with Similar Forms I” the sense of the immediately physical fades, leaving work more akin to landscape painting than collage. “(In The) Absense of Rhetoric,” a diptych of aligned canvas panels, achieves tricks through the stitching and asymmetry of affixed pieces of fabric. But this piece, with its weeping pigment and ghostly squares, striped in slate-blue, transfixes also because it is so elusively allusive. Is this a reference to the uniforms of the death camps or swatches of aprons from a lost childhood? The absence, here, of “sense,” of anything like “rhetoric” casts a heavy presence. A quiet painting, it whispers insistently.

“Object Lesson,” as a whole, tantalizes, like an unexpected letter of such promise, such possibility, that one keeps it sealed as long as possible, just to increase the anticipation. (Spencer Dew)

Through March 2 at Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 N. Wells.

Chad Kouri, "Concoction"

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The storefront Rotofugi, which does not carry ceramic one-eyed cats smoking, now holds around eighty original works by Chad Kouri and David “Netherland” van Alphen. Kouri, a member of local design collective Post Family, got off his computer and made a large body of collage work for this, his first solo exhibition. “Concoction” is a man’s drink, Kouri’s imagery calling me back to the pages of my father’s Playboys. Index cards tiled on handcrafted panels lay ground for cocktails of mid-century advertisements. An assortment of pin-up girls snuggle up to packs of Chesterfields and other products of yesteryear, clear references to Kouri’s source materials and other commercial-cum-fine artists like James Rosenquist or Tom Wesselman. The instruments of Kouri’s mash-ups also find a corner in the gallery, three sampling Casio keyboards and a dozen pairs of scissors, no doubt his weapon in mining through fifties Life magazines. Meanwhile a cluster of found-framed work encourages us to ‘slow down,’ literally in eight silkscreen letters, to investigate some smaller formal studies, while sections of library records seduce us with $20 price tags. Rotofugi gallery curator David van Alphen also offers us a bit of nostalgia. In the front gallery we find a series of leisure-suited vintage stereo equipment, collaged behind heavy resin or varnish, mounted alongside hand-painted skateboards. Their execution is super-human, candy-coated surfaces relegating them to the world of objects manufactured by machines, in some ways blurring the distinction from the anime wonderland in the shop next door. (Joe Jeffers)

Through January 24 at Rotofugi, 1953-55 W. Chicago.

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Assuming it’s possible to distinguish an artist from a layperson based on abstract theoretical concerns alone: what cachet does an artist carry to distinguish them as such? An unaffected and unremitting tendency to indulge in one’s personal fancy—fantasy—must be it. In concert, Canadian-born, now Paris-based artist Scott Treleaven’s body of work traffics in strains of the fantastic wed inseparably to the individual. His earliest collages appealed to the steamiest type of fantasy, offering candid shots of young punk-rock boys, as if Penelope Spheeris’ seminal documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981) were set into homoerotic overdrive. Instead of watching a shirtless Darby Crash recounting his personal philosophies—or lack thereof—we see Treleaven seeing this scene, with the same somewhat-iconic figures played by a cast of anonymous young men.

His latest body of work, on display in his third solo show with trans-local dealer Kavi Gupta, indulges in less-sultry, but perhaps more imaginative fantasies, trading the punk rockers for romantically elaborated visions of Paris and worlds beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

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Armed with paper-cutting knives, watercolor palettes and sticky pots of glue, the proper Victorian ladies who spent their leisure hours pasting cut-up family portraits into pointedly subjective new contexts were forces to be reckoned with. “Playing With Pictures” is a persuasively argued and richly engaging new exhibition that’s among the first to explore their activities in depth, showing how many of the era’s female aristocrats used photocollage not just as a creative outlet but as a canny form of autobiography that functioned as a tool for social advancement.

Many of the photocollages depict upper-class forms of recreation: fox hunts and garden parties, card games and chess matches played out in well-appointed drawing rooms. The background settings of these works were often drawn or painted by hand and populated with cutout photographs of friends and family, whose placement within the composition was always carefully considered. Read the rest of this entry »