RECOMMENDED

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 »

Charles Van Gilder

RECOMMENDED

It’s a project that any creative art director might dream of: to contact all her favorite artists and ask them to make works related to the words of modern Irish writers: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney and more. When all the paintings, drawings and sculpture came flowing in just two months later, it was a dream come true for Laura Coyle. The forty artists were invited to pick whatever they liked, and they responded with many remarkable works that may or may not have much to do with the lines that are quoted. To help make that assessment, thick notebooks of relevant text are available to each viewer—making the exhibition a literary as much as a visual event—showing not only a wide variety of manual skills, but also just what kind of writing this group of mostly middle-aged, Midwestern art professionals found the most intriguing, from C.S. Lewis to James T. Farrell. As one might expect in a literary project, many of these artists, like Coyle herself, are illustrators. Some are explicit illustrations, like Keith J. Taylor’s comic cartoon for “The Old Men Admiring themselves in the Water,” by William Butler Yeats. Others are more subtle, as when Anne Farley Gaines offers the portrait of a sweet, alert old woman standing on what appears to be a Chicago street in response to “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by Yeats again. There are several ambitious pieces of sculpture here as well, including carvings in stone and wood, and most ambitious of all, a wood/glass/metal/ceramic construction dedicated to Finnegan’s Wake by Charles Van Gilder. What better way to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day—and like many of the artists involved, you don’t have to be Irish. (Chris Miller)

Through April 4 at the Irish American Heritage Center, 4626 N. Knox Ave.

RECOMMENDED

Scott Wolniak, with concurrent shows at 65Grand and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, says his work is “an investigation into how art-making can be a template for examining everyday occurrences and experiences.” It’s about elevating the everyday to aesthetic significance.

For “You Can Lose Your Balance” at 65Grand, Wolniak contorts, tears and twists canvases painted all white. He slices canvas and hangs a brick in a tear to create a ‘balanced’ composition. He punctures the rippling, white surface of a Little River in acrylic using a twig. The paintings, he explains, consist of “dumb acts of wrestling and sabotage” that “occur in lieu of anything remotely resembling technique.” So he splinters the canvases’ wooden frames. He has you believe that the paintings in this show leave more to chance than to the artist’s touch. In the words of Argentine canvas-slasher Lucio Fontana, punctured canvases like Wolniak’s reveal “a dimension beyond the painting” that illustrates “the freedom to conceive art through any means.” But Wolniak takes this a step further when, in ”Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles),” the image of a lightbulb going on and off paired with the switch click, click, clicking on and off becomes mesmeric. The sound takes on a meditative repetition like listening to tap-dancing, typewriting, rain falling on a tin roof and a stream of flighty, illuminating, then extinguished ideas enter and exit the viewer’s mind. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Rhona Hoffman Gallery is presenting the collaborative group Art & Language, with works ranging from 1965 to 2007. Michael Baldwin and Terry Atkinson founded Art & Language in the late sixties in England, and during the following decade the group grew to include other members (and a New York branch). The group is currently comprised of Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden.

Sometimes, we forget that Art & Language is a group of theoretical visual artists, not (plainly) writers or theoreticians. Unlike many of the calcified conceptual art experiments from the sixties, the works on view here are immediately fulfilling and effective visual art. The visual, of course, is still given a textual component. Be sure to consider the take-away writing component of the show provided by the gallery. The texts read as both preparatory sketch and conversational presentation. Through this writing the twenty works in the show—while arranged loosely by date—are given an even, contemporary, presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Ninna Berger, "Venus in Clothes," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Do you remember “USA for Africa”? What about “We Are the World”—those well-intended expressions of the otherwise non-existent Reagan-era social conscience? (Okay, we shouldn’t forget “Hands Across America”). In 1985, composer Quincy Jones, along with stars Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, enlisted the help of dozens of (then popular) recording industry superstars, forming a megalo-group called USA for Africa.  They cut a chart-topping, best-selling single, the results of which—a few million dollars of food-aid—was literally dropped into Africa. In full disclosure, this author was prenatal at the time, and thankfully born to parents in Minnesota, and not Mogadishu.

Nearly twenty-five years after the original release of “We Are the World,” a young generation of artistic talent has decided to unite around the glib spirit of this bygone phenomenon with a similar (modest) proposal of their own, in “We Are the World,” at Roots & Culture Gallery. In truth, the group of artists, hailing from places as diverse as Oslo, San Francisco and Chicago, configure themselves around the title of the eighties charity single in name only, taking from it what they will, and ultimately relating to the “We Are the World” phenomenon as the mutual beginning of their collectively lived-experiences. In fact, the entire show is essentially a subtle rumination on the paradoxical conflation of collective and subjective experience endemic to this generation, resulting from its complete and total immersion in post-industrial societies in which consumerism proliferates as a (nearly) unquestionable doctrine. Read the rest of this entry »

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

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Marlene Alt

RECOMMENDED

The catalog essay that accompanies the exhibition “The Object of Nostalgia” opens with a lengthy Oscar Wilde quote, who insists that we must pay for our emotions, and despite post-modernism’s refutation of the sentimental, it is challenging at best to believe that we are personally paying for anything more than the technologies we hold in our hands to distract us from everything outside the purview of a screen.

Which is why this show caught my attention. Perhaps you, too, will disappear from the catastrophe of human existence and return to the bliss of a time when everyone you knew didn’t tweet their minutiae into space. You can remember how it felt to first understand that you had the ability to make a mark; that your hand could control this marvel, this tool called the “pencil.” You can recall the round-edged family photos which always appeared to be drowning in browns, yellows, drab greens and blues, and frequented by hairstyles you hoped would never resurface. Or maybe it’s just me, and because I’ve reflected—maybe longingly at times—on my own youth, I’ve been able to better gauge my adulthood. You can nearly smell the mothballs of your grandmother’s antique hope chest filled with blankets hand-knitted by relatives from the old country. You can experience how moments of perceptual history float up behind your eyes, a virtual “best” and “worst” greatest-hits of your life. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

RECOMMENDED

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

Work by Nat Soti

RECOMMENDED

It’s opening night and the gallery goers at the Chicago Art Department are on their phones. Their iPhones, to be exact. Far from being bad etiquette, this reinforces the show’s argument that the iPhone is a valid artistic tool. Mike Nourse and a group of Chicago artists explore the artistic uses of their new technology, sharing apps and techniques with each other in a five-week class, culminating in an exhibition. Their dialogue grew to include Susan Murtaugh, an established iPhone artist from Wisconsin, as well as international iPhone artists. For many of the “iArtists,” this is their first exhibit in a gallery context. Translating their virtual work into a physical medium results in a variety of subjects and styles, from “fingerpainted” and photographic works printed on aluminum and paper to videos playing on multiple computer screens. Gallery placement and similar presentation methods maintains a sense of unity throughout the show. The sold stickers dotting pieces confirm the work can be considered “real” artwork, at least by commercial gallery standards. The show works well visually, and there’s some great tongue-in-cheek commentary, such as Nourse’s payphone photographs and Nathan Peck’s “iSick,” which incorporates videos of what would be hard-to-reach places with a larger camera; very appropriate when depicting Gingivitis. However, the artwork’s true magic is in the viewer’s knowledge that the pieces were originally created using the same phone in their pockets; easily accessible almost any time, anywhere, turning the everyday world into an artist’s studio. A viewer complimenting an artist expresses a wish to create his own iPhone artwork, but laments he bought a Blackberry two weeks ago. “Two words,” the artist says, “Return it.” (Patrice Connelly)

At Chicago Art Department, 1837 S. Halsted, (312)725-4223, through January 27 by appointment, with a open-to-the-public day on January 23 from 10am-5pm.

By Nate Lee

It has been forty years since the murder of Fred Hampton, and the 2300 block of West Monroe Street has since become as insignificant as any other on Chicago’s West Side. The two shots that ended the life of the Deputy Chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party punctuated just one episode in a much larger saga of turmoil, short-lived triumph and eventual tragedy surrounding this notorious group of political activists.

The more insolent and hostile of the Panther’s activities, like their public brandishing of automatic firearms, have been burned into our collective memory, while their grassroots efforts to internally organize black communities for the benefit of said communities—which was, as everyone remembers, one of the main bullet points on Obama’s resume during his run to the White House—are astonishing given the success of their efforts in areas where government had, by the 1960s and seventies, simply resigned itself to failure. That the Panther’s self-organized “free breakfast” programs were more successful at feeding poverty-stricken school children than the entire State of California poses an alarming paradox to anyone seeking to simply eschew radicalism for its unconstructive violence. Now, as time places us at a safe distance from the threat—of both violent destruction and substantial change—associated with the Party’s platform, the tenders of our cultural legacies have begun to revisit the forty-year-old Panther phenomenon. Read the rest of this entry »