On the day I visit Pamela Fraser’s East Garfield Park studio, everything outside is white and cold: a blizzard has just dumped several inches of snow on the ground, on the branches of trees, and on the tops of cars unlucky enough to have had to spend the night outside. Inside, Fraser’s studio is warm and inviting, but the sense of enveloping whiteness remains, thanks to the huge white walls, high ceilings and bright natural light streaming in from a large window at one end. Fraser, who is assistant professor of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the Oak Park domestic art space He Said–She Said with her husband, Randall Szott, has occupied this studio since last June. Like many of Fraser’s paintings, it feels spacious, light and airy—neatly organized, though not obsessively so, and humming with focused energy.

Her current solo exhibition at Golden consists of nine drawings, all of which were executed on the floor over a single month in late ’09 during an inspired burst of energy. Fraser has been investigating color as an aesthetic as well as a cultural construct for several years now, ever since she was asked to teach a class on color theory at UIC. As she immersed herself in countless historical and theoretical texts on the subject she realized the traditional color-theory curriculum needed some serious revamping. “Color is often discussed as if it were an isolated phenomenon, and not in the world,” Fraser explains, citing the Bauhaus school theories (espoused in the writings of Swiss Expressionist painter Johannes Itten) as a primary example. “It presumes a universality that I can’t buy, and I can’t teach.” Read the rest of this entry »

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The white lines of tape on the floor shout CAUTION!, DANGER!, and a low, spraypaint-riddled brick wall straddles the back corner. Ebersmoore is transformed into a construction site to house the distressed and crumbling imagery in Ryan Travis Christian’s post-apocalyptic drawings. “ANTEXPAGNA,” an imaginary word for imaginary worlds, is a celebration of the artist’s surreal personal narratives.

Following Mark Mulroney’s sexually graphic comic-art appropriations (also recently shown at Ebersmoore), Ryan Travis Christian’s drawings reference comic art in a more understated way. The use of pattern and heavy black lines ground the often amorphous, and the graphic zig-zags invoke Charlie Brown’s mournful voice in existential crisis. Examined closely, cartoon hands peek out from amorphous clouds of debris, and melting, frowning faces appear in hazy repetition. Stepping back, the seemingly random explosions in graphite coalesce, and the reason behind the rhythm of the cartoon imagery becomes clear.

Just as the frames of a comic strip imply the passage of time, the stuttering lines in “ANTEXPAGNA” slow down and illuminate a distorted, frame-by-frame sense of perception. We are thrust into the minutiae of destruction, or, perhaps—as a visitor gleefully remarked—Christian’s drawings are our celestial epiphanies immediately followed by a car tire demise. (Julia V. Hendrickson)

“ANTEXPAGNA” shows at Ebersmoore, 213 N Morgan, #3C, (312)772-3021, through March 13.

If you own records from the Sub Pop, Bella Union, Asthmatic Kitty or Brushfire labels, you may be familiar with Nathaniel Russell’s art, whose imagery graces the covers of records by bands such as Vetiver, Neil Halstead and Cryptacize. He also works as a graphic designer, and has redesigned more than 200 reissues of previously released records to date. Alongside these commissions, Russell maintains an active art practice, and a selection of new pen and ink drawings, screenprints and sculptural assemblages are on view at Hyde Park’s Home Gallery.

The vivid, saturated inks, and the 1960s and seventies-era stylized lines immediately stand out in Russell’s images, illustrating lonely blue cowgirls, winsome and innocent gap-toothed smiling mouths, and the (tongue-in-cheek) infinite wonders of the cosmos. The style is reminiscent of the Beatles’ 1968 animated film “The Yellow Submarine,” illustrated by Heinz Edelmann, whose 2009 New York Times obituary described the animations as “mod-psychedelic” and a “stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau”; these are also apt ways to describe Russell’s whimsical style. Read the rest of this entry »

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Punk rock purists will argue that “Epics in Minutes” (2004), the first full-length album by Canadian band Fucked Up, was their best output to date, let alone one of the best punk records of the past decade. With little difficulty, the group became underground scene favorites due to their near-perfect execution of the age-old hardcore-punk paradigm: fast, loud and powerful.

With eccentric lead vocalist Damian Abraham, a.k.a. “Pink Eyes,” at the helm, Fucked Up’s saga began to take a few unforeseen turns following their early underground success. The band continued to gain in popularity; Vice magazine jumped onboard, they signed to Matador Records, became born-again Christians and—as the cumulative result of all three occurrences—saw their punk-rock credibility vaporize. Like the great punk-rock front men of days gone by, Abraham’s solo live performances revel in chaos. The 300-pound lead vocalist routinely strips into the nude, and draws his own blood. More recently, his personal life has become punctuated by unpredictable exploit. In 2009, Abraham began making regular appearances on Fox News’ notoriously conservative program “Red Eye,” as an unofficial liberal color-commentator. Read the rest of this entry »

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

"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.

Vanessa Bell, "Virginia Woolf," ca. 1912, oil on paper board. Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, gift of Ann Safford Mandel, class of 1953.

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Intimate portraits of well-loved Bloomsbury-era British artists and writers in their cozy interiors and idyllic exteriors are sure to please. Artists in this remarkable group—Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, Dora Carrington, E.M. Forster—gathered around the creative hub of the sisters Vanessa and Virginia in the Bloomsbury district of London or various country cottages for creative stimulation or conversation about “art, sex or religion” freely (as Woolf said). Carrington’s charming, cartoonish drawings are an unexpected surprise. Crockery, decorative arts and household goods display the good intentions of the Omega Workshop, Roger Fry’s brainchild to create high-quality, handcrafted goods by anonymous artists. However short-lived, the workshop’s principles still inspire. Tantalizing explanations of the group’s romantic relationships may inspire visitors to do some googling of their own. (Kelly Roark)

Through March 14 at the Block Museum of Art, Arts Circle Drive, Northwestern University

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Of all the cock-centric collages on exhibit this past year in Chicago (and there have been surprisingly a lot), Mark Mulroney’s hyper-sexualized reworking of old Archie comics are perhaps the most successful. Mulroney’s collages excise potent facial expressions from the lovable characters and then use those captured looks as springboards to inspire a slew of naughty dramas. The various mise-en-scenes employed range from the surreally sexual (Archie in gym socks with a giant penis exploding through a dog house, while the dog rushes to clean up) to the grotesque (Betty in panties and a tight sweater that hugs her engorged breasts trying to beat off a rat who has eaten through her leg). The tie that binds all of these representations together is an adolescent pop sensibility that keeps everything cute, far from the shock one might anticipate from a collusion of pop and porn. Read the rest of this entry »

"Yellow Pile," oil on panel, 2009

“Why doesn’t anyone want to talk to me about Jesus?!” shouted a man at the crowded opening for Gregory Jacobsen’s last solo show at Zg Gallery, in 2007. Gallery co-owner Meg Sheehy reports that no such Jesus freaks have yet haunted the artist’s current show, his fifth at the gallery, although such righteous proselytizing provides good counterpoint to Jacobsen’s indulgent, hyper-sexed and ultra-violent paintings. Indeed, the works would find pride of place in any Satanist’s home, above the taxidermied goat’s head sofa or in a rapist’s rumpus room, and yet it’s not surprising that only religious extremists take issue with Jacobsen’s immoral fantasy paintings. The art world is well-prepared to handle the artist’s vision of filth and moral disorder, locating historical precedents in Dutch still-life, the paintings of Bosch, Gericault and Francis Bacon, and local talents such as Ivan Albright and the Imagists, with many critics and observers calling Jacobsen’s depictions of rot and decay “beautiful,” even “pretty,” and delighting in the wealth of adjectives that the paintings provoke. Perhaps, for the art world, shock isn’t offensive or shocking—it’s not that we’re jaded, but that we’ve come to enjoy it. Read the rest of this entry »

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Robert Guinan (born 1934) has had a storybook life as an artist. Plucked from the obscurity of teaching art at a suburban Chicago high school, he was picked up by Gallerie  Albert Loeb, 12 Rue de Beaux Arts, Paris. France, which bought everything that he made for the following thirty-five years, selling him as “un peintre en marge du reve Americain.” Freed from the burden of a day job, as well as having to market his work, he could spend the rest of his life doing what he does best: wandering the streets of Chicago and sketching the folks in bars, especially blues bars, and especially those from the African diaspora, all of which apparently fascinates the French bourgeoisie. But what can we Chicagoans make of it?  I think he’s really nailed what some of these dives feel like, with that combination of despair, neglect, desire and perseverance. And Guinan makes some of the best pencil life-sketches I’ve ever seen. But if you’re going to distinguish between illustration and painting, I don’t think he’s made that transition. Like his boyhood hero, Herbert Morton Stoops, his images belong on magazine covers rather than walls. They reward curiosity more than sensuality. Nearly forty years ago, critic Hilton Kramer wrote, “’He strikes this observer as an artist of distinctly limited gifts who makes his impression primarily on the basis of his timely and dramatic subject matter.”  But now that the great age of American illustration has passed, perhaps we can better appreciate the gift of forcefully presenting dramatic subject matter, which was, perhaps, a bit more forceful in his early years, when he was more excited about street musicians, whores and derelicts. His recent work has grown “more careful.” as he would say, and he’s begun to illustrate stories from the bible: Noah, Daniel and Jonah. They’re pleasant, but still don’t present any kind of “reve Americain” that this American would like to pursue. (Chris Miller)

Through February 15 at Ann Nathan Gallery, 212 W. Superior