RECOMMENDED

Duncan Anderson’s newest exhibition at Kasia Kay Art Projects, a continuation of his miniature sculptural tableaus and fantastical figurines, is fascinating in its meticulous storytelling. Anderson toys with train-set men and dollhouse furniture, creating architectural-style models of strange worlds and fantasy narratives. The titles invoke mysterious stories of tiny, mundane heroes and heroines. An amputee octopus with little-girl legs clutches a harp on the first day of school. A policeman and his dog are locked in a face-off with another officer, trapped in a desolate landscape.

Resting on mismatched shelves, columns and pedestals, Anderson’s characters huddle together in the small gallery space like a forgotten back room of Grecian statuary. Yet, instead of marble, the common materials are cheap plastic and gift-shop souvenir porcelain. Working on such a miniature scale allows for a play between the charming and the strange, but the crushed velvet and tacky painted surfaces are slightly repulsive. The size, as it draws one closer, begs for a kind of craftsmanship that is lost beneath a plastic pallor.

Within the individual sculptures lie arresting juxtapositions of familiar and alien worlds. However, viewed as a whole, the exhibit is less coherent because the range in the sizes of the characters is wildly varied. Anderson’s experiment—and his problem—is scale.  (Julia V. Hendrickson)

Through March 20 at Kasia Kay Art Projects, 215 N. Aberdeen St.

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 »

RECOMMENDED

Using three-dimensional computer models, Troy Richards created a virtual place—a modernist home high above a field—and crashed a virtual plane into it. The simulation allowed him to survey the wreckage from various angles, views he then reduced to two-dimensional “drawings” and replicated in white vinyl on black Plexiglas panels.

These are images of disaster, but with no visible suffering. Indeed, there are no people, only their traces (fashionable chairs, an art collection including a wavy Bridget Riley painting and, notably, the broken fuselage impaled through the porch). In one nocturnal view, looking back at the house and the wrecked plane, stars in the sky above, it is as if the Rapture has come and solved the problem of the human once and for all. Winking from a wall of the house is Christopher Wool’s text painting “Apocalypse Now,” quoting the last letter home from a soldier who deserted to Colonel Kurtz’s side: “SELL THE HOUSE SELL THE CAR SELL THE KIDS.” Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Despite a plethora of rhinestones and gold paint, “The Treasure of Ulysses Davis” really is a trove, with more than a hundred woodcarvings by Ulysses Davis (1914-1990), the self-employed barber of Savannah, Georgia, who whittled away his free time reflecting on storefront church theology and whatever other culture and American history he had picked up from grade school, magazine advertisements, talkative customers, and even a few books on African art. He was a hard-working man, and probably his biggest job was raising nine children with his wife in the house behind the barber shop. The best part is the bestiary of monsters, lovingly and obsessively crafted, the frisky kinds that inhabit the margins of medieval manuscripts and seem to bedevil the lives of anyone who tries to walk the straight and narrow path in a world constantly under attack by the Devil. These little beasties are never absent, but still, the salvation of the world can proceed through faith and hard work, and so the largest carving in this exhibit is a gentle but determined Christ upon his cross, bleeding for mankind. Read the rest of this entry »

Richard Rezac

There’s a trend practiced by some of Chicago’s established and regarded sculptors that, while not new, resurges every few years like a scheduled comet passing overhead, illuminating the heaps of unsorted recyclables that calls itself “contemporary sculpture,” for a brief flashing reminder that we can trust our eyes, not just our minds. In short, formalist tendencies persist. City of grime and grit and gut this is not. This city was built on beauty, so it’s no surprise that spirituality or mysticism or whatever unnamable eternal thing creeps in from time to time.

Christine Tarkowski (born 1967), Susan Giles (born 1967), and Richard Rezac (born 1952) all stoke a formalist eroticism, as their sculptures pierce right through to the core of perceptual understanding, without having to busy the mind. There’s an ease of access partly provided by familiar materials—cherry wood, polished and rustic cast metals, cardboard and tape—but each also favors architectonic forms: Giles plays with minarets and crenellations, Tarkowski breaks and re-circuits parking-garage ramps and the geodesic dome, and Rezac’s sculptures evoke knobs, nooks and floorboards. There’s a logic to each construction but the direct response is pleasure. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

A collection of Maya Lin’s recent work, eleven pieces strong, sits in The Arts Club of Chicago. Lin is best known for designing the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the obsidian black scar that slices through the National Mall (and mind). That iconic form began with potatoes on a plate—so the story goes. She shaped them like garlic-mashed plasticine and the idea for a thin slab of sculpture glopped into place on the plate in front of her. This genesis story speaks greatly to her career that has since developed, as a sculptor of slick organic shapes.

Strewn across the floor of The Arts Club are perfectly watery blown-glass drops that hint at the feeling of standing on the tip of a blade of dew-covered grass at dawn. Sinuous pins pushed into the wall and a flow of recycled silver suggest a river view from the stars. And a simple, meticulously arranged collection of two-by-fours standing on end melt into lumber waves of spruce, pine, and fir.

Like Andy Goldsworthy, Lin looks at mathematic descriptions of mountain passes and river bends as source texts. She models the liquid quality of water through the use of wood, rhyming spruce grain with waves, which is further informed by Lin’s study of geology, imaging techniques like sonar, and the fluid dynamics of fractal modulations.

The centerpiece is “Blue Lake Pass,” made using sandwiched slices of Duraflake particleboard. Lin splits a mountain range into twenty blocks, carving the bases into the cubic envelope of a skyscraping, overbuilt urban boulevard. Except, instead of crowned towers, the skyline is Rocky Mountain tops. Squeezing between the blocks, viewers weave in and out of mountain chunks that rise as high as your nose and in the traces of machined particleboard grain, there’s a faint echo of something larger than the sublime—a casual suggestion that maybe this is what it feels like when 14,000 feet is only shoulder height. (Ian Epstein)

Through April 23 at The Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario

Upon attending the opening of Richard Rezac’s third solo show at Rhona Hoffman, I remembered how old I am.

Like many of my peers, I consider Rezac’s work inseparable from the mythology of Minimalism, a period of art history we simply did not experience, born too late. While our pilgrimages to Marfa may help us to feel more acquainted with this period, Minimalism is our ornery grandfather whose offspring founded IKEA and gave birth to a breed of infidels with limited concern for geometry. By the time we came to cognition, people weren’t arguing about rectangles anymore. Everyone seemed so worried about AIDS, crack and the Gulf War, that splitting hairs over formalism didn’t seem to make sense anymore. Recently, we found credence in a group of artists dubbed “Unmonumental,” or post-Minimalism part two, precisely because it contaminated the sensibilities of a generation of artists we never fully understood.

Richard Rezac, however, grew up during the height of most monumental of all Minimalism; Carl Andre and Walter De Maria surely became Apollonian idols of the artist as a young man, but his work over the last three decades is not a mere placeholder in this clearly living history. Between works newly installed in the Art Institute’s Modern Wing and the solo show at Rhona Hoffman, Rezac demonstrates an ongoing inquiry into the geometries of environments ranging from Baroque cathedrals to a child’s bedroom.   Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Sculptor Tony Tasset’s hard-edged, smart-assed esthetic has for years provided Chicago’s answer to similar high-craft pseudo-lowbrow snark conceptualists Charles Ray and Maurizio Cattelan. Tasset’s icy satirical influence is certainly in evidence at Joseph Cassan’s dazzling show at Golden, which continues to provide Lakeview with crowd-pleasers other than baseball, improv and latex boutiques. While echoing his UIC mentor’s naturalistic deployment of artificial materials (resin, epoxy, silicone, acrylic), Cassan makes a unique formal statement by incorporating delicate handicraft, selected “real” materials and implied invisible forms. The latter is exemplified in a floating pair of gorgeous lace panties with the title “Venus Inferred.” Another brilliant moniker is applied to a painted basswood bar of soap with hand-cut glass bubbles: “Minimalist Construct.” The most heroic pieces are a swan perched atop its own distorted reflection as a pedestal, “The End of the End,” and a disembodied human nervous system, “Nothing More Than Feelings.” Less monumental but equally pleasurable is “Dedicated to All Human Beings,” a low pedestal featuring a wadded paper towel as the bed for a bloody Band-Aid woven from fine copper thread. Historical nods to Minimalism and Earth Art are provided in a painting-sized section of cut out wall, “A Moment of Clarity,” and “Small Section of the World,” a clear plastic puddle in a small gravel depression; as low-key monochromes these offered relief in an otherwise eye-popping parade of fine-motor virtuosity. (Bert Stabler)

Through February 20 at Golden, 816 W. Newport

"Open Spaces," 2008

RECOMMENDED

Susan Clinard is one of those sculptors who are strong on optical and weak on conceptual—which is to say that the emotional content of her figures is instantly recognizable, and her themes are so ancient, they predate literacy, much less the last 200 years of art theory and criticism. Especially now as she returns to Chicago with an exhibit of many pieces that relate to her life as a new mother, as well as her more youthful concerns with body awareness and stranger anxiety. So, regardless of virtuosity, her pieces will never be shown in the new ModernWing of the Art Institute, but they might belong a few miles south, in the “Ancient Americas” exhibit at the Field Museum, where she seems to pick up where the sculptors of Nayarit and Quimbaya left off. Though the ancient artists are a very tough act to follow, because the best examples have been gleaned from generations of sculptors working the same style, while a modern sculptor, like Clinard, must be a solo act, responsible for inventing as well as mastering and marketing her own work, which now involves wire, as well as terra cotta and wood. As ancient artists had to the right to say, “this is us,” contemporary artists (especially those found in the Zhou Brothers Art Center) can only say “this is me—me, me, me” (Chris Miller)

Through January 31 at the Chicago Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B Art Center, 1029 W. 35th St.

Edra Soto, "Light Within The Dark," 2009.

RECOMMENDED

Brian McNearny and Edra Soto’s two-person show, “Forever Vegetal,” treats the themes of birth and death with mythological import. On the birth side, McNearny’s “Bog” is the place where life begins—in a thick, heavily textured oil painting. The primordial Dagobah sends forth the figure of “Glob,” the vaguely mutant form surfaced from oil paint on a found desert-camo-looking banner, giving the work a vaguely sci-fi militaristic tinge.

Edra Soto’s explorations are more geared toward the end than the beginning, though “forever” could probably nest in either camp. Stuffed animals covered in shit-like sod occupy the floor of a too-dark gallery, parked around an illuminated square—think Billie Jean. The light is certainly transcendent, and the animals are appropriately reverent, despite their recent unearthing. The question remains which way the light will take whatever beleaguered soul decides to step on, up or down? In the same corner lives “Light Within the Dark,” where baby Jesus rests upon a charcoal mountain range like Christ the Redeemer surveys a sinning Rio. Tucked behind the miniature range are a string of Christmas lights, the light most directly behind the Jesus figure blinking like a beckoning landing beacon. Crash ye planes unto me, the tot says, in the ultimate come-to-Jesus moment. Merry Christmas. (Erik Wennermark)

Through January 16 at Roots & Culture Contemporary Art Center, 1034 North Milwaukee Avenue