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Images flash by in an instant, zooming in on the random minutiae of a life. A cat playing on a fence, the scenic backdrop of a mountain range, a happy couple in wedded matrimony. Laura Mackin’s video “Zoom (Dean 1962-2006)” from her solo exhibition, “120 Years,” splices, edits and reconfigures the personal home videos of a stranger named Dean. Mackin rearranges Dean’s films and edits in zoomed images, creating a disjunctive visual experience. However random or specific the scenes that Dean chooses to zoom in on, they are still oddly familiar. Moments from an anonymous life read like the images we keep in our own memory of blurred impressions, arbitrarily conjoined, resurfacing fleetingly. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Hodge, "Tower of Babel"

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Attending an Apocalypse-themed art show is one way to start the new year, particularly if you follow the Mayan Calendar. Six artists’ responses to the subject are currently on view in “Wipe Out!” at Peanut Gallery.

Upon entering, one is confronted with a large white tree. Made of paper and found materials, the installation runs floor to ceiling along one corner of the gallery. Along the structure, bulbous clear plastic shapes disrupt its trunk. The edges fade into the surrounding walls, but the tree itself invades the gallery space, raising questions about its significance. An explanatory text can be found around the corner, paired with two framed fragments of the tree. This is Andrea Jablonski and Merje Veski’s conceived vision of a post-apocalyptic world: a barren landscape, with what the artists note are “Pompeian-like figures” melted into the body of the tree. Standing alone, the tree left me wanting a larger installation to truly immerse in their imagined world. Read the rest of this entry »

"Autumn with Drawings" by Wyatt Grant

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The title of New York-based artist Lionel Guzman’s light-box sculpture, “Synthetic,” operates in a few registers. First, a single visual impression is created from disparate elements, by arranging cutouts, rotating color filter gels, a microcontroller, a fan and LEDs inside a stereo speaker case and behind a layer of Plexiglas and vintage graph paper. Guzman’s grid-curtained window shows rows of rectangular lights, like glowing flickering screens, receding into an illusory distance. Read the rest of this entry »

Edie Fake

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Every community, nation or subculture, in order to recognize itself, needs a multisensory sign system to serve as a shared identity archive. The growth of gay liberation from women’s liberation is poignantly set forth in the show “Underground” at Woman Made Gallery, not as an indexed historical narrative but as a contemporary cabinet of curiosities, depicting the modern world as a new Eden in which boundaries are forgotten and hybrids bloom forth in abundance. Unabashed aspirations are, as in revolutionary days of old, expressed in the monstrous, the lascivious and the absurd. Conceived in collaboration between Ruby Thorkelson, Spudnik Press and the Chicago Underground Library, the show features a gallery of striking graphic works on fabric, paper, and canvas, as well as a packed library of self-published visual and written work exploring the experience of gender (and identity more broadly), expressed in comics, illustrated journals, fanzines, cookbooks, literary collections and tracts both factual and facetious. Read the rest of this entry »

"WEAR THE BRACELET," 2008.

By Laura Fox

Mark Bradford’s mural-scale “Helter Skelter I” fills nearly an entire wall in his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Complex, competing layers of images, colors, textures and materials are lacerated by overlapping networks of arterial lines streaming endlessly across its expanse. I attempt to follow one line across the plane, trying to absorb particulars despite its nearly hyperbolic immensity. Starting with the faded, upside-down text scrap “King,” the remnant of a merchant poster that Bradford found on the streets in his south Los Angeles neighborhood, my eyes travel to the layers of bubbling silver paper, bright day-glo colors and a half-submerged image of a woman’s face. My singular line disappears, merging with the larger system, so I jump from passageways to smaller alleys navigating my way through Bradford’s landscape.

Bradford’s art seems to welcome these intimate interactions. Although composed on canvas, none of his works are stretched or mounted onto a backing board. Instead, they adhere unceremoniously to the wall; the left-hand corners of “Helter Skelter I” even curl up, implying the limited temporality of its constructed surface. Read the rest of this entry »

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Several weeks ago, at a mock funeral for the death of painting, Charles Mahaffee set up a few amplifiers and drowned the audience in a crushing drone. Had it been a real funeral, the monotone dirge would have been the perfect accompaniment to oblivion’s threshold. The drone makes another forceful appearance in Mahaffee’s solo exhibition, titled “Chorus.” A stacked-television totem sets the mood for the show and greets gallery visitors with open-mouth shouting. Here, the focus is on the artist’s mouth hole as it emits a single, sustained tone that is somewhere between a wail and a meditation, and ultimately uncomfortable to hear. The fleshy air of sound and words is further explored in several wall-sized charcoal drawings. These depict, again, the mouth holes, and repeated words (such as “damn” and “dumb”), in an obsessive, chalkboard style, like a self-punishment. The drawings, akin to the sound pieces, suggest an action without end, and drawn in thick black layers of charcoal, they are stark, serious, and overpowering. The sum pieces in “Chorus” work over viewers in the same way that sacred silence does, opening a portal to a void. Ultimately, Mahaffee’s drone silences the chaos of the mind by obliterating it. Get out of your body and bathe in the unrest, the works seem to say; release your self. (Jason Foumberg) Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

“Social Mobility” is an installation put together by Temporary Services, a group that investigates public space. Their projects represent and raise questions about everyday places and people, rather than the colorful outpourings of privileged individuals. Relational art is not political per se, except that it generally takes place in the city, and simultaneously in the flow of signals we call the internet. Although the people who practice in this area likely have what we might call progressive ideas, their tactics often owe more to Dada, Situationism and punk rock than any theoretical or ideological position. “Social Mobility” centers on projects that challenge accepted (or hegemonic, if you like) channels of distribution of art and information by freely sharing information as pretexts for social exchange. Their current exhibition contains several vitrines of booklets and found ephemera, such as stickers, posters and religious tracts, some bookshelves that hold the Self-Reliance Library, an unpredictable collection of books and references regarding practices like self-publishing, nomadic living, herbals and weapons production.

Despite the aleatory nature and potential for disarray in its divergent collections, the installation seemed antiseptic (like a hospital waiting room) and just a bit too cerebral for the on-the-street strategies usually enacted by the group. Banners designed to call attention to the economic and political forces shaping the ubiquitous and homely personal petrochemical plastic shopping bag make an impact—they were quilted—but for all their admirable labor, they are very neat and drab. Among the banner slogans: “The inexperienced dreamer simply cannot survive alone—The Survivor.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Heidi Norton is the consummate packer, joining experiment with process, conceptual message, reference to art history, and meta-photography, just for starters, in her enigmatic works, which employ multiple forms (photography, painting and, most recently, sculpture and found objects), sometimes separately and sometimes in a mix. No doubt all of this variety is brought together by the motif in which it is packaged—plants and shrubs. Yet they appear in many guises, evoking disparate moods. As a result, none of the works in the show is representative of the whole or epitomizes it; each conveys its own meanings. “Dead Palm Burnt by the Sun” is a still-life photograph of a row of objects, including the wildly forlorn desiccated palm, on tabletop backed by a white sheet that has been put over the window behind it. The objects are attenuated in rough, even dynamic, elegance; a muted range of purple and plum constitutes the palette. It looks like a painting, not a photograph trying to simulate one. However one interprets it, “Dead Palm” makes decay enticingly vital. At Norton’s soft core we find art for art-play’s sake. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 14 at Ebersmoore Gallery, 213 North Morgan, #3C

Joe Grimm, "Blink"

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Community is often formed out of a sense of loss, and this is often the loss of a community. In a piece on artist Bruce Nauman, acclaimed Chicago critic Kathryn Hixson wrote, “If the social contract that staves off mutual murder is our most controllable defense against death, and if death is the most feared fact of our lives, then Bruce Nauman’s work is about the fear of death.” We can see one facet of this social anxiety in the twinkling lights of Jan Tichy’s creepy “Project Cabrini Green,” on display at the MCA. “Public space” nostalgia may focus on an era, like that of the functional social safety net, but the show “No Joke” at LVL3 Gallery focuses on a person: Kathryn Hixson herself, who passed away in November. 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 »