Amalia Pica, “BABBLE, BLABBER, CHATTER, GIBBER, JABBER, PATTER, RATTLE, YAMMER, YADA, YADA, YADA,” 2010.

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Artist Amalia Pica operates within our communications-saturated milieu. In her first large-scale solo exhibition in the U.S., Pica presents observers with sculptures, installations, drawings and films that explore the intricacies, failures and challenges of communication.

Some of these efforts are carried off with the subtlety and grace of a ballerina on benzodiazepines; “Babble, Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada, Yada, Yada,” with its carousel slides of semaphore flags spelling the work’s title, is a touch on the nose—literal visual communication! Image as language, ponderous, slow and practically unreadable in its esoteric nature!—but isn’t that the intrinsic fate of messages about messages? Read the rest of this entry »

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Joseph Beuys once declared that Holland’s unique light had lost its radiance around the 1950s, thus ending a signature period of visual culture immortalized in the artworks of Vermeer and Rembrandt. It’s debatable whether Beuys’ comment was a sociopolitical allegory (Holland drastically modified its landscape at the time) or he seriously contended that a change in the chemical content of the Dutch atmosphere had adversely affected the quality of Dutch art. Jeroen Nelemans seems to have rediscovered the glow. In his first solo exhibition at The Mission, the Chicago-based artist of Dutch heritage presents four series of works that deal with a twenty-first-century lighting design: LEDs, computer screens, interior bulbs, and the strange effects of their admixture. Read the rest of this entry »

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Watching Paige Cunningham and Anna Kunz’s performance, “One Careless Gesture Away From Destruction,” was like getting a six-course dinner when you’re expecting just an entrée. It was a feast of varied cultural forms that held together as a kind of conversation about creative production.

There were essentially three distinct shows on view: a sculptural tableau with a video component, situated right in the middle of Industry of the Ordinary’s (IOTO) retrospective exhibition; a vogue-ballet mash-up choreographed by Cunningham; and a voguing presentation and workshop, led by the Chicago chapter of the House of Ninja, a local queer dance collective, or “house,” in the parlance of the voguing community. Read the rest of this entry »

from “Endless Set,” 2007-ongoing. Appliqué on pieced pillowcases.

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Comprising works from over fifteen years, Karen Reimer’s solo exhibition “Endless Set” locates the artist’s work squarely between the intimacy of craft and the more impersonal systems of production. The exhibition’s breadth allows for subtle dichotomies to arise: in Reimer’s poetically redacted newspapers, we find her working text and subtext; in her meticulously rendered textbook pages, we cut between function and decoration; and in her most recent body of work (from which the exhibition takes its name), we see Reimer’s exhaustive exploration of systematic production and formal obliteration. Read the rest of this entry »

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If not for one offhand mention of Marcel Duchamp, I wouldn’t be sure that Eric Felten, the Wall Street Journal art critic who wrote a pooh-poohing preview on August 9 of Industry of the Ordinary’s retrospective, titled “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” had heard of conceptual art. Which is fair, since until then I hadn’t heard of art criticism in the Wall Street Journal. “We long to be astonished,” Felten writes, echoing the Ayn Rand ethos of his masthead. A participatory fishing tank, photographs of urine, pfaugh! Felten doesn’t want ordinary, he wants winners. Like a Bernini sculpture, he suggests, or the Olympics. Sadly for him, the Chicago Cultural Center show promotes group effort over individual excellence. Not only is Industry of the Ordinary a collaboration between Adam Brooks and Matthew Wilson, with the bulk of their lighthearted, ephemeral work based on interacting, borrowing, cooperating, or delegating, but the exhibition itself consists of dozens of objects, projects and events from creators throughout the local art world. The success of their populist approach was evident at the opening, which was the most thronged affair I’ve ever attended at the Chicago Cultural Center. Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Thompson

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Curators Karen Hanmer and Vera Scekic conceived “Night Sky” as a meditation on the current relationship between humankind and the cosmos. We have never before been able to observe stars and planets with more granularity and precision, and dozens of mobile apps exist to facilitate stargazing. Even the most astronomically illiterate person can identify the major planets with ease, as Jason Judd illustrates with “Night Songs,” a compilation of amateur YouTube videos of planets. The exhibition asks: now that people can freely and easily travel the galaxy on their computers, has the night sky lost some of its stirring appeal?

In response, most selected artists address the more carnal, raw and emotive response evoked by the idea of billions of nuclear fireballs strewn across incalculable distances. While many of the literal, representational approaches fall short of capturing the night’s grandiosity, Kate Friedman’s installation “Returning to the Stars Someday” captures the solemn majesty of the heavens well, particularly considering that the artist did return to the stars and Sarah Krepp realized the final presentation. Hanging mylar sheets filled with Friedman’s complex and rich layering of intricate drawings, acrylic, ink, photography, and lasercut elements envelop the viewer like the wrap of darkness. On the summer solstice, an interactive component will mark the year’s shortest night. Read the rest of this entry »

Mark Moleski, “I’ll Get You My Pretty,” acrylic and newsprint on canvas

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The Contemporary Arts Council selected Tempestt Hazel to curate their annual exhibition invitational. Hazel runs Sixty Inches from Center, a Chicago-based website that highlights underexposed artists. Both critiquing and extending her online project, the group exhibition, titled “The Tipping Point of Me and We,” centers on the idea that in this era of hyper-globalization and constant connectivity, we’re losing sight of that which makes each of us distinctly human.

This is well-trodden territory, and any exhibition dealing with such themes has to understand the importance of underscoring a unique point-of-view. Because by now, I think we all get it: technology erodes empathy, capitalism is soulless, connection is disconnection, and so on, but in the show, these points never quite seem to resonate as strongly as they could. This is because each piece, considered in isolation, makes its own impact, but taken together they feel as numbing as the digitized, monetized, and globalized culture it critiques. But perhaps that’s the point. Read the rest of this entry »

In Real Life

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We’re familiar with the notion that context dictates whether a fan is an appliance or an objet d’art—whether a desktop background image could hang in an art gallery. Erik Wenzel’s solo exhibition, titled “Fresh Fat,” complexly applies e-commerce, digital dissemination, and the language of social networks to these distinctions. At bottom, he’s asking how the artist should adapt to new technologies of creation and distribution at the level of everyday practice. On the gallery’s east wall, he’s lightly penciled the characters #IRL—online parlance for “in real life”—to serve as a hesitant and tentatively small affirmation of the physical world, composed in Twitterese. Read the rest of this entry »

I'm So Turned On Right Now

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The question at the heart of Matthew Hoffman’s exhibition, “I Made This For You,” is what, exactly, is the artist’s relationship to his messages? These include “It’s OK” and “Go Easy On Life” and “Be a Human Being,” as well as flowcharts of romantic relationships and twee Venn diagrams—the funniest has the word “it” in the middle, with “fake” and “make” in their flanking crescents—in primary colors and frames. These are perfectly simple and pointedly unpretentious (think upside down smiley faces). And while “I Made This For You” claims to be acting as a “tide break against the world’s rolling waves of negativity,” says the artist, the show also evokes the darkness of Jenny Holzer’s truisms through the banal and affectless: “Knit a sweater out of that last thread of hope” is as much a passive-aggressive fuck-off as it is an inspirational message. Read the rest of this entry »

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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 »