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Mannequins, grocery-store checkout belts, paintings and an assortment of domestic detritus are a few of the items in Cathy Wilkes’ mixed-media installation, “I Give You All My Money,” at the Renaissance Society. Most of these items have undergone some form of decay: ash-covered pierrot mannequins, jars of encrusted baby food, tattered bits of cotton, flower petals and a rusted basket.

The death of a child imbues the overall theme and tone of the exhibition. Macabre traces and remnants of this child—an empty stroller and empty jars of baby food, bowls with baby spoons and a knee-high table that suggests a child’s accessibility—imbue the installation with maternal mourning. Wilkes’ installation, in total, is a still-life arrangement that remarks on the fragility of life. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeroen Nelemans

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Susan Giles’ site-specific sculpture of the unbuilt Calatrava tower, toppled over inside The Mission, is a model of something unrealized. Although it might refer to the economic crash that scuttled the plans for the building, Giles’ “Crumpled Spire,” deftly built of wood, rests gracefully in the space, echoing the shapes of the windows, lighting grids and setting off the tin ceiling. Downstairs in the basement project room is an alluring and incisive set of photographs by Jeroen Nelemans that look beautiful at first glance but quickly assert a complex critical project that eludes the more poetic sculpture, upstairs. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Cynic” seems an unfair label for the uncompromising Diogenes, who carried a lantern during daylight in search of an honest man. At bottom, Dada was similarly nostalgic for art as a lost ideal, an end in itself rather than a vehicle for reflection. This starry-eyed hopelessness applies to an evolving exhibition now in its third iteration at ADDS DONNA, whose title, “Wish You Were Here,” underscores the theme of glibness thinly masking absence and loss. Read the rest of this entry »

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The perverse enjoyment I get from looking at the assemblages of found organic detritus (leaves, icicles, rocks) in Andy Goldsworthy’s photographed interventions in natural settings is digestive—the way he takes an otherwise lovely bucolic scene and vandalizes it by, as humans do, taking something perfect and making it (look like) crap. He might as well just litter. I had something of an inverse, but still perverse, response to “Mountains and Matter,” Bob Jones’ great solo show at 65Grand. What his floor sculptures and wall pieces did to the pristine white gallery was similar to what one does to a pristine white sheet of toilet paper. Recoil if you must, but, for my money, there’s a lot more to look at “after,” as opposed to “before.”

Smeared with tar, pebbles and spray paint, mired in concrete, grout and latex, bound in filthy rubber and canvas, festooned with hay and twigs, these pieces operate for me as thoroughly enjoyable riffs on psychedelic-pastoral art of the 2000s. Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: The gallery is temporarily closed due to an electrical fire.

Way back before the millennium, the Art Institute of Chicago hosted an exhibition of French artist Annette Messager’s amazing textile-based installations. I wandered among hanging forests of plush organs, taxidermied birds wearing crocheted sweaters and perched/impaled on rebar, tangled webs of yarn and crayons, and ceremonial dresses laid out in long glass coffin-like cases. And, like the opening reception for Karen Reimer’s show at Monique Meloche Gallery, the space was sunk in a twilight gloom. Negotiating Reimer’s hanging pillowcases adorned with ornate text, the sense of being in an upside-down cemetery was only enhanced by the fact that Reimer was selling rubbings of the embroideries, one of which hung framed near the gallery entrance. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

It was the last place in the world I wanted to be on a sunny autumn afternoon, but the thrill of discovery pulled me into this cavern of moldering garbage. The warehouses of William H. Cooper Co. in West Humboldt Park have no electricity but plenty of running water, dripping from the ceilings and collecting in dank puddles at your feet. Light streams through the urine-tinted windows and cracked skylights to illuminate the wasteland that stretches before you. This is the site of “Two Histories of the World,” a temporary exhibition featuring four artists who were asked to create art from the rotting salvaged objects in the warehouse, which are exhibited on-site among the wreckage from whence they came. The artworks, if you can find them, are quietly subsumed back into the ruinous piles of debris by scavenging shoppers and fresh shipments of junk from newly dying industries. Read the rest of this entry »

Jackie Ferrara, "Stacked Pyramid," 1972

After a year that’s been rich in lively shows and discussion about the relevance and legacy of Minimalism—the Gerard Byrne show and accompanying panels at the Renaissance Society, for one—this fall’s big Minimalism-then-and-now show at the MCA is a bit of a theoretical letdown. The first major show by chief curator Michael Darling, who joined the MCA last summer, “The Language of Less (Then and Now)” betrays a serious anxiety about the inaccessibility of Minimalism that seems out of place in a museum city like Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

Amy Honchell

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As fiber-based artists Amy Honchell and Young Cho reveal in statements about their respective practices, their works are shot through with personal meanings and associations: Honchell recalls the mountainous Pennsylvania landscapes of her childhood, and Cho elaborates an intimate mythology revolving around a recurring imaginary character. But the private origins of the pieces in “Fictional Landscapes,” now up at Dominican University’s O’Connor Gallery, are given over to something immediately accessible to viewers, thanks in part to the manner in which both artists use narrative elements to solicit audience engagement.

In one series of drawings, Honchell creates studies in postindustrial abstraction that exhibit an insectile elegance, the dark lineaments of skeletal machineries contrasting with brightly colored backgrounds. “Murmur, Sigh, Whisper,” meanwhile, is a sophisticated gesture of childhood delight in which the artist shapes ultrafine glitter into a scintillating hill topped by an ethereal structure—a dreamy vision of shimmering, granular materiality. Cho’s precisely rendered pencil drawings are spare, delicate and minutely detailed. The childlike figure that inhabits them—an intimidated everyman whose face is always hidden—engages in private rituals of loneliness against a vacuous white background. Read the rest of this entry »

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During the 1980s, artists who produced anxious or enigmatic objects gave up the responsibility to be serious, or at least they shed some of the trappings of the high seriousness characterized by Minimalism. Dan Gunn’s “Patchwork Plateau,” on view at the MCA, is an object resembling a room-dividing screen and is placed on its side. It has many attributes whose ambiguity could be unsettling, except that it is painted a cheerful shade of green. Many of the parts of “Patchwork Plateau”—the name must refer to its table-like orientation, although the geographical connotations linger—seem to be found and not found at the same time. Read the rest of this entry »

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The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, a core text of Renaissance alchemy, describes the structure of the cosmos thusly: “That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above corresponds to that which is Below, to accomplish the miracle of the One Thing.” In the case of the show “Calculated Aesthetic” by Stephen Coorlas and Dominic Peternel at Alderman Exhibitions, the One Thing is a geometric form that looks kind of like an asymmetrical space-age boomerang made from jet wings, quite possibly balanced according to the Golden Mean. The gallery features two identical cardboard models that viewers can handle, a larger aluminum model that stands about five feet tall, and a monochromatic painting running around all four walls that is intended to suggest a view of the form from within, an image which made me think of what it might look like if Ellsworth Kelly did a mural for the Death Star airport. Read the rest of this entry »