Alec Regan

RECOMMENDED

It’s been over six years since Brandon Alvendia and Caleb Lyons put together a Spring Break-themed art show at the Butcher Shop Gallery, a cavernous warehouse on Lake Street, now closed. Featuring over fifty artists (including me), it was primarily and ultimately a formidable bacchanal. Alvendia, who was giving out stenciled spray-tans, was again present for another iteration of the gallery beach party, again in a cavernous warehouse right by Lake Street. Read the rest of this entry »

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Zachary Cahill’s über-conceptual installation at Threewalls is only a partial representation of the artist’s long-term project: his satirical, and inevitably impossible, efforts to found an orphanage on Chicago’s South Side, along with vivid imaginings and permutations of said orphanage explored through seemingly limitless media. The project’s scope as a whole is so big that the word “conceit” seems too understated to encapsulate what Cahill is up to; even a long, dense exhibition essay by Joan Copjec herself, citing everyone from Bourdieu and Lacan to Newt Gingrich, and interweaving arguments about late capitalism and the relationship between museums and orphanages, seems dissatisfied with its own encapsulation with the project. The exhibition, “USSA 2012: The Orphanage Project,” according to only some of the available literature about the show, is rooted in or speaks to notions of art’s use-value, relational aesthetics, 1990s neo-conservatism, various branches of neo-Marxism, governmentality, and the model of the art exhibition itself, all embodied in an overwhelming mass of pseudo-documentation and mixed-media installation riffing off this fictional hyper-institutional orphanage. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Blanchon's “Untitled (aroma/1981),” and “Untitled (drawing horse)”

By Jason Foumberg

In 1998, one year before he died at age 33 of AIDS in Chicago, the artist Robert Blanchon created “Untitled (drawing horse),” a replica of the type of benches that students use in a drawing class, but made entirely of glass panes. Blanchon probably enjoyed the fact that, in order to use the bench properly, an artist had to keep their legs spread wide open in front of their art, like a perpetual flirtation. Indeed, sex and the body were the subjects of much of Blanchon’s art, but as “Untitled (drawing horse)” sits today in Golden gallery, on loan from the Blanchon Estate, the glass bench is present like a ghost, its sitter palpably absent.

Here, the drawing horse faces fifty-five ad clippings from gay sex magazines, pinned to a wall. There are not ads for escorts or dates but from companies selling poppers (a sex drug), dick cream, cock rings, a chest-hair wig and other sexual enhancements—even one from the Tom of Finland studio where men could commission portraits. This collection of clippings is another Blanchon artwork, “Untitled (aroma/1981),” from 1995. (The “1981” in the artwork’s title references the year that HIV first started to reveal itself.) In addition to this collection being an archive of back-page gay graphic design and desire in a pre-AIDS era, it is also a dynamic object. Originally, Blanchon photographed and re-printed these clippings, but he did not complete the crucial final step in the hand-developing process, which is to dip the reproductions in a fixative bath. Therefore, the reproductions, once hung in a gallery, are intended to fade and disappear rather quickly and perceptibly during their exhibition. Likely the original magazines would fade anyway, being printed on cheap paper or newsprint, but Blanchon was aiding their demise. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by John W. Sisson Jr.

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Where Ed Ruscha and Kay Rosen’s text paintings tend to satisfy some autistic word fixation, it is Mark Booth’s text-based work that, for me, finally prompts poetic reverie. And that’s because the work is poetry, and Booth’s own. His drawings on paper, of texturally dense and hand-lettered phrases, may be familiar to Chicago gallery-goers, but for his solo exhibition at Adds Donna, Booth takes an expansive approach, filling the rectangular gallery with hand-cut vinyl sentences that extend over three walls, a sound recording of the artist reading a looping poem, plus several of the drawings. The result is a holistic presentation of Booth’s skill as a writer and a visual thinker.

It’s by perfect chance that any visitor to Booth’s show, titled “God is represented by the sea,” must first pass eight derelict wooden church pews crammed in the corridor by the gallery’s entrance. The pews are a non sequitur prelude to Booth’s own chain of figurative associations that begin God. The recorded poem, “God is represented by the sea,” which is broadcast over the gallery’s speaker, has little to do with God or even religion, except to be of use as an open abstraction, breeding metaphor after metaphor in a hall-of-mirrors game of compact visual phrases. Read the rest of this entry »

Installation view, "Lowlands," Glasgow International 2010.

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There is some fine situational irony in Scottish artist Susan Philipsz appropriating the words from the international worker’s hymn “We have been naught, we shall be all” as sound art at a time when working people in the Midwest are being stripped of their pensions and health benefits, and labor union participation is at an all-time low. The new “We Shall Be All” and an earlier work, “Internationale,” play in the halls of the MCA, and a companion piece, titled “Pledge,” plays at Jane Addams Hull House, a landmark of Chicago’s working-class history. Chicago’s rich radical labor history might be better known and valued outside the country in places like Philipsz’s own industrial working-class city of Glasgow and elsewhere around the world where Chicago’s Haymarket affair is celebrated on International Worker’s Day (May Day) every May first. Read the rest of this entry »

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In the statement for his installation “Negative Matter,” Dayton Castleman claims inspiration from the industrial light and magic of James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, Anish Kapoor and Disneyland. An enjoyable grouping, but the oddball in that list is not the Magic Kingdom, but Castleman himself. While I could easily imagine Turrell and his airport-rave ilk doing lighting design for the recent Disney remake of “Tron,” the imaginary movie “Negative Matter” calls to mind would perhaps be a David Lynch joint.

The viewer approaches a shed that emits a hum of activity and a soft movement of air. The wind gains in noise and intensity as one weaves in darkness around a couple of light-baffling walls and comes to face a dim spotlight on a giant standing fan. From the direction of the fan comes a steady blast of air, but its unplugged cord is visible on the floor, and its shining blades, free of any protective cage, are slowly shifting back and forth, as if being pushed by gentle, indecisive breezes. There is a black line on the ground and a boundary cable in front of the fan, and a sign at the entrance commanding viewers not to touch the art, but no posted explanation for the piece—so, spoiler alert: the secret is a lighting trick. The spotlight is a high-speed strobe that makes the blades on the high-speed fan (which is plugged in—the other cord is a dummy) appear to barely turn. Read the rest of this entry »

By Kristine Sherred

A full year past, we reflect on that which once was, that which persists, that which may be. Lilly McElroy’s second solo exhibition at Thomas Robertello Gallery honors 2009, a year that, for many, typifies economic unrest, unemployment and home loss. Even for those of us unscathed, a new year carries new possibilities, new responsibilities, and McElroy urges us to reflect on a year’s worth of hardships with the quips of another. She set up a website (aroughyear.com) to solicit others’ images, stories and jokes that epitomize their most painful moment, or in some cases, their triumphant reclamation.

McElroy describes her artistic mission as an interactive attempt to make a connection with her audience, and she is accustomed to participatory art. Her inspiration for soliciting photographs, she says, may have emanated from a past project for which she asked her mother to photograph twenty-four reasons why she loves her, using nothing more than a disposable camera.

User-generated content leaves the end result a bit, well, open-ended: “I was expecting so many more images of home and job loss,” McElroy says, “but I was actually really surprised about [the stories of] heartbreak. For people who weren’t experiencing those economic stresses, [2009] was equally rough but in a very different way. It made the project much more interesting and much more complicated.”

McElroy spread the word of her developing project by posting ads in Craigslist and Coffee News, distributing flyers to cafes, “emailing anybody who had ever emailed me about anything,” she laughs, and even snail-mailing strangers chosen at random from old phone books. “I got a lot of responses asking who I was,” but her breadth of personal connections and that of friends and family catalyzed the project’s dissemination, fashioning a potent spiderweb chronicling a year in the life. Read the rest of this entry »

3-D digital reconstruction from east wall altar, South Cave, Northern Xiangtangshan, with missing fragments shown in yellow. Image by Jason Salavon and Travis Saul.

By Chris Miller

In 1909, distinguished poet and orientalist Victor Segalen, author of “La Grande Statuaire chinoise,” found himself and a colleague alone with a splendid statue of the Buddha in a remote shrine in China. Despite some damage to the torso, “its profile had retained its nobility, its eyes their gaze, the smile of its mouth its generous sweetness and a kind of irony.” Immediately they knew what they had to do. “This statue, we must have it! We will not leave without it!” Removing an axe from their luggage, Segalen began chopping at the neck. The noise attracted the attention of two locals, who showed Segalen how to apply wedges and wooden blocks to make the work so much easier.

Imagine that process repeated tens of thousands of times in grottos and temples throughout China in the early twentieth century. Plunderers carted off entire shrines, servicing the hot European market for world art. The chopped-off heads, hands, whatever, eventually entered the collections of far-flung museums, including American.

But times have changed. The pioneering scholar of Japanese Buddhist art, Ernest Fenellosa (1853-1908) believed that “we are approaching the time when the art work of all the world of man may be looked upon as one, as infinite variations in a single kind of mental and social effort.” Modern scholars, though, are more likely to agree with Sir Edmund Leach (1910-1989): “Works of art are not just things in themselves, they are objects carrying moral implications. What the moral implication is depends upon where they are.” Read the rest of this entry »

Derek Chan, "Daily Practice," 2010.

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Derek Chan is no stranger to the “monastic residency”; at the invitation of Theaster Gates earlier this year, he performed one as part of the Whitney Biennal. For his current solo exhibition, however, he was not contained within a courtyard as he was at the Whitney, and instead headed West, embarking on a trip to the four corners.

His travels are the fodder for this show and his trip across the sacred Salt Song Trail also inspired the publishing of a book, in conjunction with Golden Age, on view within the exhibition. It compiles the text and images from his journey.

Chan transforms the gallery space into a gathering place. The peaceful residue of his performed rituals (Chan performs here each Tuesday in November from noon to 4pm) clings to the meditative, process-oriented paintings, collage and works on paper.

The shapes, patterns and repetitive mark-making they display are drawn from a mixture of Eastern religious symbolism and Western Modernism, with the new addition of Navajo and Hopi imagery and objects bubbling to the surface. The recurring grid matrix, evocative of the warp and weft of a loom, frame many of these individuated marks like relics stowed within the cubby holes of a desert shrine. Read the rest of this entry »

Christine Perri. photo by Henry Berry

RECOMMENDED

Christine Perri’s sui generis installation, “Story Forest, or the Progress of Narrative: A Sculptural Diorama,” located in the eight floor North Exhibit Case of the Harold Washington Library Center, tells an elliptical yet engaging story about story making and telling.

The Chicago artist uses figurative carved-wood sculptures and reliefs (in themselves finely wrought), various tree parts, drawings and paintings as well as books (both of wood and paper) to craft a fractured fairy-tale-like tableau on how the primal sources of nature are transformed into cultural expression—primarily, into the kinds of human experiences represented and discoverable in books. Think Field Museum displays meet the Daphne-Apollo myth meets the Painted Forest folk-art museum of Valton, Wisconsin.

Besides a number of carved-wood pieces, the fifteen-foot-long Story Forest (it really is behind glass) includes logs, stumps and branches that Perri salvaged from the street and sometimes painted, all on a bed of wood chips, as well as elements like the backdrop of large-scale forest drawings.

The diorama relates how trees become art, how trees become books, how creators (like Perri herself) shape figures and characters in visual art and literature, transforming the raw materials of life (and nature) into stories, myths, imagination and knowledge. This self-reflexive web of connections is intuitively apprehended rather than conceptually art-referential, one of the work’s strengths. It is perhaps because of Perri’s self-taught art background—though she has an MA in English from UCLA, organized the intriguing if patchy “Chicago Does Wood” group exhibition at the Hull House Center for Arts in 2005, and later was juried into a Brooklyn outdoor sculpture show—that this almost-sequestered library installation looks like nothing else around. (Jeff Huebner)

Through December 31 at the Harold Washington Library Center, 400 South State