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The theatricality of peeling back the red curtains, which drape the entrance to Diane Christiansen and Shoshana Utchenik’s first collaborative work, sets the tone for their multimedia wonderland currently occupying Gallery One and its flanking catwalk at the Hyde Park Art Center.

Imbued with a whimsical sense of play, this artist environment, which incorporates elements of collage, painting, drawing, sewing, linocut prints, sound art, animation and sculpture, is a winsome accumulation of objects and ideas that explores the dichotomies of internal and external relationships.

The journey begins amidst the coniferous trees of the Ego Forest, complete with a canopy of stylized, Buddhist-inspired swirling paper clouds suspended overhead. The sprawling tentacles of a softly glowing paper-mâché octopus dominate the Relationship Bardo, and the two-dimensional pup tent in the Teacher Garden is a sort of Potemkin pit stop. The viewer’s quest ends in the Meditation Clubhouse, constructed of re-proposed wooden doors and boards, if one is brave enough to walk the narrow plank up it. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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In her exhibition at the Hyde Park Art Center, “From the Offices of Scientists,” Aspen Mays assembles a set of installations inspired by science office spaces. Reminiscent of a theatrical set, her installations “Jellybean Universe,” “Boom!” and “You’re Next” use office materials such as a dry-erase board and cardboard boxes to re-create a scientist’s office. Looming at the center of her exhibition is a giant 850-pound boulder, “Boulder Desk,” mysteriously at the mercy of a weak desk, behind which an encased sign on the wall reads, “If you think you found a meteorite bring it here and we’ll check it out.” Playful and witty, the installation is a diversion from the process-driven photographs that characterize May’s solo exhibition currently on display at the MCA 12 x 12 gallery.

Meticulous, even obsessive in the methodical approach to her photography, May subjects the viewer to the prevailing process in science research by collecting and categorizing information. In “Every Leaf,” the artist attempts to photograph every leaf of a tree, a process that takes May nearly nine hours to accomplish. Providing the viewer with a kind of visual index and a display of 900 snapshots recognizing leaves of various sizes and hues. In “Einstein’s Rainbow,” May borrows every book on Einstein from the inter-library loan system, nearly 1,500 in all, which the artist organizes by color on in various rainbow arches. In the tremendous magnitude of materials from her study of these subjects, Mays’ scrutiny and categorization provides an overwhelming but moving display on the nature of investigation and a curious attempt at making sense of the wealth of information. (Beatrice Smigasiewicz)

Aspen Mays shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art through February 28, and at the Hyde Park Art Center though April 25.

William Kentridge, Video still of "Tabula Rasa," 2003. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

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Fresh on the heels of Liam Gillick’s recently closed exhibition, which showed how unfulfilling a post-studio practice can be, the Museum of Contemporary Art opened “Production Site,” their contribution to the yearlong, citywide Studio Chicago project, which seeks to re-energize the city’s artists to get back in the studio to make stuff. While so many artists today use digital technologies, contract outside fabricators and expand the role of art beyond the studio-to-gallery system, “Production Site” proves that museums still need studio artists. Curator Dominic Molon charts the transformation that objects undergo between their private creation and their public reception. Some of the mythical, magical heat that bubbles over in the artist’s studio then dissipates in transport to the gallery or museum, but more often than not, the thirteen artists in this presentation tend to reveal that they can conjure stunning effects regardless of place. So, we end up with an engaging, visually vibrant show that nominally tries to link artists around this theme, but the artists take such markedly different turns on this journey that we ultimately get the impression that “the studio” means markedly different things to different artists. Read the rest of this entry »

“Pothole City! It looks like the streets of Chicago in here!” an Art Institute guard jokes to a co-worker stationed inside Monica Bonvicini’s new Focus exhibition. He’s looking down at the cratered surface of a floor that’s been covered with polystyrene foam and plasterboard and then broken (by the museum’s own staff) in numerous places. Titled “Plastered,” the piece has been reconfigured twenty-three times around the globe since it was first shown in 1999. It sits beneath an enormous hanging light sculpture composed of white fluorescent tubes. Blindingly bright, the lights are too painful to stare at directly for more than a few seconds.

Renzo Piano has described his Modern Wing as “a temple of light…a building about light and lightness.” Bonvicini’s installation offers a deconstructive counterpoint to these celebrated ethereal qualities—theoretically, anyway. Just days after the exhibition opened, and the false floor theatrically pre-broken, visitors attempted to aid its deconstruction by stomping new holes in its surface. The rowdy kids jackhammered with their feet while museum guards looked on nervously, unsure if the “rules” for this particular work of interactive art allowed for such behavior or not. (Note that it’s usually the guards, not the viewing public, who must bear the conceptual burdens of artistic “interventions” like these.) The floor soon boasted quite a few more indentations than before, but the detritus was cleaned up in favor of a more groomed messiness. Read the rest of this entry »

Gabriele Basilico, Contact (Bertoia), 1984

By Jason Foumberg

James Joyce wrote that Rome reminded him of a “man who lives by exhibiting to travelers his grandmother’s corpse.” Ruins literally form the modern city’s foundation, and it is the ruins of Rome that draw tourists there by the millions. Rome, and Italy by extension, is known like a tourist’s postcard, the picturesque culture a never-empty bottle of heady red wine. Like the ruin-seeker, the curator of “Italics,” a survey of Italian art from the last forty years, is a self-described “explorer, anthropologist, and archeologist of the present.” That would be Francesco Bonami, former curator of the MCA, a man with an extended itinerary (curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale, curator of the 2010 Whitney Biennial), and whose sprawling 2005 MCA exhibition “Universal Experience” explored the theme of global tourism. As a proponent of the global style, Bonami sometimes gets criticized for his jet-setting VIP checklists, his career disconnected from the finer points of a locale, for instance, when he was a resident in Chicago. One should expect, then, that the Italian-born Bonami could deftly articulate the Italian point of view. And he does. “Italics” not only makes a case for contemporary Italian art but also affirms Bonami’s eye for selecting great objects, a basic curatorial trait not consistently heeded at the MCA (see my recent review of Liam Gillick’s concurrent show).

All this is to say that the MCA is back doing what it does best—exhibiting objects worthy of exhibition at a major museum, and proposing a new historical narrative in the process. This is a show of objects—well-made, formal, experiential and engaging objects. Although objects are out of fashion right now, supplanted by community-based relational happenings, it is objects that profit best from an institutional setting. Perhaps objects are old-world, too traditional, or dead on arrival, but I think it is the lure of objects that got us all interested in art-making in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

It’s not a mystery why Liam Gillick is so well liked. The British-born artist embodies a freewheeling creative pursuit: at turns he is an installation artist, graphic designer, writer, thinker, filmmaker, collaborator and anything else he feels like doing. Meanwhile, he’s wrapped all these various activities into a professional and successful career. Also, he dresses like a gentleman but isn’t afraid to use a lot of color in his sculptures, both of which can be pretty disarming—who doesn’t appreciate a colorful gentleman?

But it’s also not a mystery why Gillick is so disliked. Visitors to the MCA, where Gillick’s show recently opened, “run the risk of being completely alienated” by the art, writes Monica LaBelle in a recent review. “Prepare to be totally confused,” warns her  headline. Such responses exemplify the fear that black magic runs the art world, transforming bullshit into billionaires, with Gillick as its posterboy. Why are his Minimalist-flavored plexiglass cubes better than any others? (And I think they are more CB2 than Ikea.) LaBelle advises visitors to “do their homework” on Gillick before they attend the show, which means watching his lectures on YouTube. But LaBelle never followed her own advice. Her public declaration is final: Gillick is alienating and confusing.

Gillick’s problem isn’t merely his critical reception, but also, and mostly, his presentation. Oddly, viewing a Gillick exhibition doesn’t seem to be the best way to understand the fullness of his artistic position. Since he’s so multifaceted, the exhibition is just one component among many others. In 2004 the MCA presented a show by German artist Kai Althoff who, like Gillick, dips his hands in many creative jars. The show was full of art, objects, ephemera and music, and it dramatized the artist’s life and scene in a way that I was surprised a museum exhibition could. So, what happened here? In Gillick’s exhibition visitors find out he is a writer with many books published, and this is a major part of his practice. These books are arranged, covers closed, beneath glass in a case, and totally inaccessible. They are not digitized and available for viewing nearby. This may explain, in part, a viewer’s frustration with the art. Read the rest of this entry »

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In New York in the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein turned dynamic Constructivist abstractions and the vitalistic paint drips of Abstract Expressionism into flat, print-ready graphics, and the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto sought to eliminate artistic hierarchies by combining classical art objects with rag scraps and other common detritus. By the 1980s, graphic paint drips were on every day-glo bandanna, graffiti artists had gallery shows, and urban decay was a stock backdrop for Hollywood movies and punk album covers. Thaddeus Kellstadt’s post-everything installation at Second Bedroom, appropriately titled “After Effects,” uses a cheerful palette to comment bemusedly on the anti-grandiose ethos in contemporary object-making. The wall of his installation room features a lovely blue and pinkish-orange painting of a cracked brick wall, and a torn-out phone booth constructed from paint and cardboard. A dead plant made from plaster, wire and a disassembled plastic pot-leaf necklace swoons on the floor, and in a corner behind and above the door one discovers a drop-ceiling tile punctured by a rainbow forest of pencils. Outside the room, and across the nature-culture divide, is a set of six small paintings of leafless trees whose twigs are shimmering streaks across a simple sky made strange by Kellstadt’s intuitive use of color. There may be no possibility of epic poetry after the advent of steam power, to paraphrase Karl Marx, but Kellstadt’s work implies that sifting through the ruins of modernity doesn’t need to bum us out. (Bert Stabler)

Through November at Second Bedroom, 3216 S. Morgan St, apartment 4R

RECOMMENDED

When engaged in a particular endeavor, it is always encouraging, if not simply enjoyable, to encounter others similarly engaged. While traveling abroad last summer, Proximity Magazine’s publishers and local non-profit gallery managers Ed and Rachel Marszewski met Helsinki-based artist, publisher and gallery manager Jenni Rope. Discovering their mutual interests, the two parties immediately bonded—a bond that has recently borne an exhibition here in Chicago; including works by Rope, her publishing company Napa Books and a few Finnish compatriots.

The show centers around its namesake work, “My Forest,” an installation of thirty-two paintings in various media on panel. The appealing paintings attract in the same way a neat, well-designed package can send us clamoring for the products—at least the quality—supposedly manifest by the products contained therein (an attractiveness Scandinavians seem to generate with unsurpassed facility). In this respect they resemble endeavors by Chicago designer and artist Cody Hudson. Like some of his work, Rope’s paintings rely more upon the shapes of their supports, and their relationships to each other, than whatever in particular may be happening inside. The term ‘installation’ is not used arbitrarily here; it would be awkward to call any given painting a picture. Instead, they function cumulatively as components of a much larger “picture” while, ultimately, any sense of representation remains a matter for the individual imagination. (Nate Lee)

Through November 1 at Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S. Morgan.

Inside "Stolen" at Garage Spaces

By Jason Foumberg

In the typical scheme of urban gentrification, artists stake out cheap studio space in a so-called bad area, then comes the wave of galleries, condos and boutiques, and voilà, a neighborhood is transformed (to oversimplify the matter). Sometimes, though, this process is reversed. As the economy slips and strong commercial centers lose their tenants, vacancies are produced faster than trinkets from China can fill them, and we end up with ruins in the city center. That’s when the artists move back in.

The artist take-back was staged in Michael Ruglio-Misurell’s installation of a ruined shopping mall reclaimed by squatters, recently closed at Gallery 400. The theatrical ruins fed a certain taste for apocalypse porn, but the real thing is happening in buildings around Chicago right now. More than just a schadenfreude of capitalistic decay, the creative re-imagining of vacant spaces produces a range of effects, from emboldening the DIY spirit to provoking political commentary.

The John Hancock Tower is an unexpected home for one such creative re-use of a ruin. Here, on the twenty-fourth floor in this monument to corporate progress, artist Jan Tichy transforms about a third of a vacated 33,000 square-foot office suite into a sprawling exhibition of video installations. At the elevator’s ding, its doors open to lights out and the low hum of a machine. The carpet has been torn out to reveal concrete, but the walls of private offices and conference rooms, previously home to headset-yapping VPs, remain like ghosts. These rooms are lit only by the glow emanating from Tichy’s projectors and television sets, maximizing the haunted house effect as viewers wander the empty offices. Read the rest of this entry »