Carol Hummel, “Lichen it”

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As its name suggests, the Morton Arboretum is more about science than aesthetics. It’s a better destination to learn about trees than to enjoy magnificent views.  So, it’s an appropriate setting for conceptual art, where the information on the label is at least as important as the artworks.

Whereas the exhibits of trees and eco-systems teach us about the variety of life on our planet, just what can be learned from this collection of art installations interspersed throughout the Arboretum’s grounds? The target audience seems to be eight-year-olds. A stack of logs is wrapped with a giant bow ribbon and the brochure asks us, “What is the best gift trees give us?” A large kaleidoscope is installed facing a shoreline and we are asked, “How do the colors and shapes make you feel?” The artists, of course, have put their ideas into artspeak. Writes Letha Wilson, “My work creates relationships between architecture and nature, and the gallery space and the American wilderness.”  But has that really told us anything more? Read the rest of this entry »

"Convalescent Home"

“I’ve been to IKEA ten, maybe twelve times, for this project,” remarks Jeff Carter as we survey his current installation arching across the western corner of Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His gaze drifts over the modified IKEA products, and a small smile splays open his lips as he reflects on those trips, “I now know that modernist mecca far better than anyone should.”

While his current work, “The Common Citizenship of Forms,” isn’t Carter’s first use of the mega-store’s materials, it may be his most thoughtful. Carter establishes a formal dialogue between common representatives of modernist design—IKEA and the Bauhaus—through a series of large-scale architectural models, composing a microenvironment that represents the layout of demolished buildings from the Michael Reese Hospital Campus. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius had created a master plan for its 28-building campus in 1946 as part of a post-war urban renewal effort to revitalize its surrounding Bronzeville neighborhood, as well as designed the eight structures that Carter chose to recreate. Read the rest of this entry »

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The impulse to sort and classify William J. O’Brien’s 100 vessels, urns, plates, masks, heads, fragments and geometric constructions in his current exhibition should be suppressed, at least momentarily, for the power of this display is in its collective glut, as a chorus of many shouting, horrible and sick faces and visceral sculptures, raw or glazed, in densely textured and richly colored patinas. After this exhibition, the 100 sculptures will be removed to their respective homes and propped onto shelves or pedestals like the good trophies that they are, but for now, these goblins of taste are presented buffet-style like the feast of some pagan ceremony.

The mostly ceramic sculptures tickle the line between natural-history-museum artifacts and Tiki mug souvenirs, not as a critique of ethnographic cultural consumerism and exoticism but as a way for O’Brien to articulate a spectrum of symbols on the cusp of original feeling and mainstream sentiment, like a parade organized by James Ensor. The crowd of objects expresses a dynamic psychology: there are things buried and prematurely unearthed; there are freshly bundled and hoarded piles of waste; there are plenty of finger-sized orifices. Most importantly, the urns, vessels, heads and totems burn with internal tension, reliquaries of ashen and neutered desire. Like Freud’s tchotchke shelf, some things seem grotesque because they are so familiar. (Jason Foumberg)

Through June 26 at the Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis, Cobb Hall 418, University of Chicago, (773)702-8670.

Jno Cook, "Readings from the Book," 1993

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Two absorbing retrospectives of two important but overlooked artists is more than worth the drive to Valparaiso. In Jno Cook’s 1990 kinetic sculpture, “A Slackening of Creation,” a title borrowed from Pliny, a da Vinci-esque model of a Copernican solar system revs itself up, with a furiously spinning globe swinging on a counterweighted arm around a blazing 1000-watt light bulb. As Cook puts it, the piece “condenses 30 billion years to 3 minutes,” with the globe decelerating, the arm slowing, and the bulb fading to darkness—all atop an antique surveying tripod, before starting back up again. “Readings From the Book,” a 1993 Cook contraption, features a skull with a moving jaw, posed in perusal of Janson’s “Art History” textbook, opened to a chapter on the Renaissance and reciting aloud a list of overheard art sales pitches, such as, “The work is selling like crazy in Europe,” and “There was a show on PBS about this.” Cook’s ingenious photographic machines include the 1978 “Half-frame Motordrive Camera,” which Cook positioned directly over his bed and set to shoot flash pictures once per hour; four prints of contact sheets are on view as well, in which he and his wife’s bed fits perfectly into the half-sized field of view, and their cycles of presence and absence duly recorded. Read the rest of this entry »

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The title of Mary Ellen’s Croteau’s eight-by-seven-foot bottle-cap mosaic self-portrait is “Close,” a reference to Chuck Close, whose giant gridded portraits captivate museum-goers with their scale and verisimilitude. In this case, however, the medium is the message, as Croteau’s clever repurposing of seven thousand multicolored bottle caps not only captivates us with its sleight of hand and representational skill, it embodies and envisions a green worldview. Croteau produced a complex shifting texture out of these lowly materials by nesting the bottle caps to create depth and nuances of color. The portrait gazing out at passersby on Armitage Avenue is direct and at the same time lacking a sense of presence: it seems to be an image transposed from a photograph. Hovering at the edge of art and craft, like a giant needlepoint in its display of patience and meticulous skill, but without needlepoint’s connotations of luxury calling up a lost upper class feminine world of handmade textiles, her portrait evokes nothing so much as human condition on the northwest side of Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

"System of Display, X (EXTENEDED/Jean-Luc Godard, Le Grand Escroc, episode from Les Plus Belles Escroqueries du Monde, 1964)," 2011, silkscreen on glass and mirror

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Adam Pendleton isn’t afraid to cut, copy, erase or mark other people’s artwork, whether it’s a Jean-Luc Godard film still or a documentary photograph of the Congolese revolution. Shane Campbell Gallery shows selections from Pendleton’s recent work, “System of Display,” a series of three-inch-deep black shadowboxes that present this bold approach to appropriating and revising visual culture.

Pendleton encloses the top of each squared object with a glass surface imprinted with a simple letterform. These characters are remnants of words—such as “N” from “ancient” and “S” from “sullied”—Pendleton culled from poems. Removed from their original meaning, the letters become markers, seemingly signifying a defined logic to the object-forms hung in neat rows across the gallery space.

Inside each box, Pendleton placed a mirror displaying a grainy, blurred image of a female subject. Pendleton selected the women from film and photo sources, isolated the figures from their original settings, and then repeatedly Xeroxed each image to strip out details. In “G,” “C,” “E,” “U” and “X,” Pendleton telescopes on a solitary woman with her face partially concealed by the book she’s reading. Each iteration reinterprets the scene, alternately revealing the title of the book, more of her facial features, or fingers clasping the book’s corners. It’s unclear whether Pendleton intends to highlight minute stylistic manipulations, or a shifting voyeuristic gaze cast upon this unknowing subject’s private moment. Read the rest of this entry »

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Impressionism never caught on with sculpture the way it did with painting, probably because spontaneity is so much more problematic in three dimensions. The tempestuous surface of Rodin is still much admired but very difficult to imitate, while the sentimental, soft-focus wax surfaces of his contemporary Medardo Rosso went almost immediately out of fashion in an era that was responding to the power of archaic classical and primitive art, and reviving direct carving. But former Chicago sculptor Susan Clinard is bringing Medardo’s style back with a number of small, well-modeled clay figures framed within the wunderkammers that she has built for them.

The nooks within these cabinets of curiosities seem to reflect the compartmentalization of the artist’s own body as well as her life as mother, wife and artist, while also feeling like a display of odd relics in a very remote, rustic museum. They contain pieces of wood, stone and metal, as well as small, wax-covered clay figures, and the entire effect is the sadness of something lost before it was ever quite understood.

By themselves, many of the figures express a joyous and remarkable facility of modeling.  Clinard has a magic touch for making lumps of clay come alive as human heads, hands and postures. A dozen or more small portrait caricatures have escaped the cabinets and are displayed on a table beside them. One wishes that more figures would break free from their compartments, slough off the sentimentality of the soft-focus wax, and defiantly command the space of a room. (Chris Miller)

Through May 15 at Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 West 35th.

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn invented the harmonograph, a device that draws elegant abstractions through the movements of two or more pendulums. Blackburn observed that the visual “harmonies” resulting from intervals of ratio in pendulum height correlated to similar steps in the musical scale. University of Chicago musicologist Larry Zbikowski is exploring the visual patterns of movement made by dancers of the waltz, and correlating these patterns both to the musical scores that accompanied the dancing and to states of emotion and consciousness in the brain. These synchronistic models serve as inspiration for Conrad Freiburg, whose virtual universe, erected in the main gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center, is divided into sections matching the seven notes of the Western major scale with sconce-like chimes affixed to the wall. While Freiburg doesn’t claim adherence to any esoteric system, the number seven recurs throughout occult cosmology; in theosophy, for example, the seven-step “septenary” describes the various “energy envelopes” of the soul that exist in subatomic emptiness. Read the rest of this entry »

photo by Paul Germanos

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In what has turned out to be domestic art space He Said She Said’s last exhibition, Sheila Pepe presents the ongoing project “Common Sense.” In it Pepe exhibits an especially sensitive intervention into the living space. Her work suspends looping strands of crochet and shoelace from the living room, entryway and dining room. The low-hanging web physically connects the spaces with its languid gesture. In her recent projects, the artist has involved the participants in the creation of the work. For He Said She Said, part of the looping installation links up with a collection of playful art objects created by the child of the house.

Elsewhere, the shoelace and crochet intersect in connections that support, uphold and create the structure of the form. These connections are frequently tied in ways similar to shoes, where it is apparent that a single pull would release the tension and collapse the shape. As such, there is an air of contingency in the work, aside from its corporeal, weighted quality. Adding to this transient feeling, Pepe encourages participants at the end of each installation of “Common Sense” to unravel part of the work and take away the material for their own purposes.

Drawing significant inspiration from an artistic matrilineage that includes works like Faith Wilding’s crocheted environments, Sheila Pepe’s architectural intervention updates and extends their concerns. Here the notion of communal connectivity, of material poised sympathetically amongst spaces inhabited by living bodies, yet without the rising to the coercive force of solidified architecture, is posited as an ideal. What better way to celebrate (though perhaps unintentionally on the artist’s part) the life of an exhibition and conversation space that was itself temporary, inhabited and bred new forms of connectivity across disciplinary boundaries. (Dan Gunn)

Through May 14 at He Said She Said, 216 North Harvey, Oak Park. Open by appointment.

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Huma Bhabha’s sculptures and collages at Rhona Hoffman Gallery seem like untimely ruins of contemporary culture. Although best known for her sculptures, it is Bhabha’s collages on display here that chiefly create this sense of dislocation between past and present. The foundations of Bhabha’s collages are photographs of abandoned construction projects in the desert landscape of the artist’s hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The landscapes in Bhabha’s photographs appear stretched and twisted, an effect attenuated by streaks of ink lapping over the images. Bhabha’s collages are grungy and frenetic. The conflict between man-made development and nature is vividly rendered: the sun-drenched landscapes are awash in hot pink and neon orange better suited to billboards than pastoral scenes. The spontaneity and density of Bhabha’s collages speak to the upheaval of the landscape depicted in the underlying photographs. Read the rest of this entry »