A sticker by Alvendia

“I am for an art that embroils itself with the everyday crap & still comes out on top,” wrote Claes Oldenburg, in 1961, in a non-traditional artist statement titled “I am for an art.” Brandon Alvendia would like to see more artists define their practices in light of Oldenberg’s spirited dictums. He reframes Oldenburg’s “everyday crap” into “everyday pragmatism.” It’s a phrase that guides his own work. “How do I make best use of this,” he continually asks himself.

Alvendia re-purposes things at every turn, from bargain-priced floppy discs (gutted, they make good CD cases) to out-of-print books that he photocopies and binds into paperback books for free distribution. Not everything that he re-purposes is an object, though. For example, exhibitions are readymade platforms for the creative presentation of other artists’ work. “Curating is my art practice,” says Alvendia. For the Miami art fairs in 2007, he exhibited the work of ten artists in his wallet, a fitting context for the moneyed affair but also an economic means of exposure for the ten artists.

Alvendia’s latest artistic-slash-curatorial mission is “Fair Use: Information Piracy and Creative Commons in Contemporary Art and Design,” which recently opened at Columbia College, where he teaches part-time. The exhibition features about a dozen artists who test the limits of copyright law. Image appropriation has been a hot topic since the 1980s, but the rules of the game keep changing. As the law adapts to deal with artistic interventions, artists keep pushing the envelope. Read the rest of this entry »

Václav Chochola, "Lamp," 1947

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From 1967 through 2002, Chicago’s Baruch Gallery played a unique role as the only space outside Czechoslovakia that specialized in showcasing that country’s rich photographic tradition. In putting images from the Baruch collection’s deep reserves on public display at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, curator Karen Irvine has performed a service by exposing the Czech modernist tradition’s variety, ranging from the grandmaster Jan Sudek’s emotive studies of cityscapes and intimate landscapes, through Jaroslav Rossler’s cubist abstractions, to Jan Saudek’s kinky and decadent surrealistic scenarios shot in his basement studio during the Communist era. Spanning the period between the first world war and the early post-Communist years, the images here by nine of the most important Czech photographers will convince the viewer of the pertinence of the widespread critical judgment that mid-twentieth century photography was dominated by France, Germany, the United States and Czechoslovakia. Look at Sudek’s deep and clouded study of a strand of trees in the mist and you will know why Anne Baruch embraced and loved the Czech tradition for its “poetic modernism.” (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.

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Elizabeth Shreve, a former psychologist, mines the iconographic unconscious of our culture, tweaking the styles of grocery circulars and shoe-store catalogues. Female figures, birds and desserts predominate in paintings that are nothing if not overindulgent. Previously balancing buffets of glistening cold cuts with decapitated flowers and syrupy pancakes, Shreve mounted a full-frontal assault, turning desire into disgust. The current exhibition, “Fears and Desires Magnifique,” represents a new turn. In contrast to her previous top-heavy nauseating images, the new works offer, instead of indictment, a dreamy vision of bouquets and party hats, color wheels recapitulating Ferris wheels and all feeling playful, pleasurable.

“The pleasures of life were always at her fingertips and needed no explanation or judgment,” Shreve writes in one of the cartoons, “Jidjits,” collected alongside the new paintings, and it is a sentiment that speaks to the new tone in her work. The nude in “Four Birds” is defined by strength of stance and self-determining gaze. Populating a fantastic space brimming with food, flowers, cartoon bugs and a distant circus tent, her attention remains elsewhere. In the lower corner of the painting, at crotch level, a bee rises from a box, likewise undistracted by the chock-a-block visuals. As in its sister painting, “The Smile,” Shreve gives us the experience of pleasure in a world of boundless promise. Excess, after all, need not lead to gluttony. The cornucopias’ contents have been flung onto canvas, but the effect, rather than sickening or shameful, is exhilarating—perhaps best represented by the ever-present color wheels, exemplifications of the potentials of painting itself, the abundance of options to be fingered, tasted, and played with. Read the rest of this entry »

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Whether it is wild spidery branches sprouting from trees in the forests, incredibly gnarled tree trunks, the criss-crossed steel supports of the State Farm building in Bloomington, Illinois, a snow-dusted rural road engraved with sinuous and undulating tire tracks, dilapidated ramshackle sheds or elegant spindly clumps of pine needles, Jon Balke is there with his camera to bring forth in black-and-white images the exquisite ragged geometries around us that defy the eye’s preference for symmetrical order. Balke’s vision hones in on the involvement of networks of lines that are usually anything but straight, revealing endless complications within conjunctures that serve as metaphors for the confused and disorderly lives that inexorably attend the human condition. Among the many stunning images here, Balke’s masterwork is a study from New Orleans of peeling paint that displays such a multi-textured dimensionality and mutual involvement of fissures that even the most gifted abstract-expressionist painter would be tempted to give up the brush for the lens. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 21 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington

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How is a kitchen different from an art gallery? It’s busier, but also more relaxed—because this is the center of somebody’s home, where family mementos are up on the refrigerator door and everyone comes in to chat. It’s the place where all problems get fixed, whether it’s a hurt feeling or a craving for a bologna sandwich. It’s a positive, comfortable, predictable, non-judgmental place unlike, say, an art gallery. Which is just to say, I don’t think Deborah Maris Lader’s work especially belongs in one. But then neither do good contemporary statues of Buddha or the Virgin Mary. Lader’s “teeny etchings” are windows onto a happy, if harried domestic world, and unlike so many artists, Lader does seem to have a healthy, happy life that she expresses in song as well as prints and paintings. She has been performing and recording with her alt-folk trio Sons of the Never Wrong for ten years now, with the same kind of playful whimsy. She is clearly highly skilled as a printmaker and she ingeniously incorporates photographs into her multimedia, dreamlike images of birds and people swinging through space. But the most enjoyable art has a sense that the artist, not the just the subject, is performing a high-wire act, and Deborah Maris Lader is just too darned comfortable. (Chris Miller)

Through March 15 at Chicago Art Matrix Gallery, Zhou B. Art Center, 1029 W. 35th, 3rd floor.

Whether you lament over reading Times New Roman or you find yourself searching for the colophon in the back of a book, you should find yourself at Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere this Friday night. “TYPEFORCE: The Annual Chicago Show of Emerging Typographic Allstars” has its opening reception at 7pm and continues through March 14. Though the actual practice of typography is anything but new, its importance cannot be ignored. As local artist and contributor Margot Harrington puts it, “It’s just such a building block, a cornerstone of design history. For me, it really is one of the most basic fundamental parts of my background in graphic design.” Though it is held in high regard within the art world, the public has only really just recently re-embraced typography. “There has been a noticeable wave of lettering in popular culture in the last decade,” says Luke Williams, who will be making his Chicago debut. He posits that the availability of such programs as Adobe Illustrator have pushed typography back into the conversation. With around twenty local artists on display, the show is sure to be varied. Between Williams’ “set of vowels that embody a blend of high-class royalty, with whimsical 1960’s Americana themes” and Harrington’s screen-printed ampersands onto collages of vintage books and found paper, there is bound to be something for every fontophile. (Peter Cavanaugh)

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 »

On the day I visit Pamela Fraser’s East Garfield Park studio, everything outside is white and cold: a blizzard has just dumped several inches of snow on the ground, on the branches of trees, and on the tops of cars unlucky enough to have had to spend the night outside. Inside, Fraser’s studio is warm and inviting, but the sense of enveloping whiteness remains, thanks to the huge white walls, high ceilings and bright natural light streaming in from a large window at one end. Fraser, who is assistant professor of studio arts at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-director of the Oak Park domestic art space He Said–She Said with her husband, Randall Szott, has occupied this studio since last June. Like many of Fraser’s paintings, it feels spacious, light and airy—neatly organized, though not obsessively so, and humming with focused energy.

Her current solo exhibition at Golden consists of nine drawings, all of which were executed on the floor over a single month in late ’09 during an inspired burst of energy. Fraser has been investigating color as an aesthetic as well as a cultural construct for several years now, ever since she was asked to teach a class on color theory at UIC. As she immersed herself in countless historical and theoretical texts on the subject she realized the traditional color-theory curriculum needed some serious revamping. “Color is often discussed as if it were an isolated phenomenon, and not in the world,” Fraser explains, citing the Bauhaus school theories (espoused in the writings of Swiss Expressionist painter Johannes Itten) as a primary example. “It presumes a universality that I can’t buy, and I can’t teach.” Read the rest of this entry »

Eugène Carrière, Sleep, 1897, Lithograph. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Rosenwald Collection.

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Nan Goldin, whose photographs of her friends revealed a twilight world of entertainers, addicts and melancholy lovers, has nothing on Albert Besnard, whose 1887 etching of two morphine addicts is on display in the exhibition “The Darker Side of Light: Arts of Privacy 1850-1900. This beguiling show of prints, illustrated books, drawings and small, fluid, mysterious bronzes, traverses not only dark private states of mind connected with reveries, madness, love, suicide, domestic violence and rape, it contains prints which express intimate reactions to the public tumult of the age. A view of Paris in which the victims of a cholera epidemic of 1865 sail off in the ill-wind of a terrible human cloud by Nicolas Chifflart and a grieving weaver, her loom and wool waiting in the background, watches a dying child in a dark lithograph titled “Need” by the German Kathe Kollwitz. The print is part of a suit documenting the sorrows associated with the Weaver’s Rebellion of 1897 in Germany.

Curators from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, where the exhibition originated, assemble these works to shed light on media and imagery during a period where there was a reorganization of the boundaries between what we think of as public and private life. Because of their size, discursive or contemplative nature, collectors often stored prints and studied them in private rather than displaying them. The entire cycle of Max Klinger’s wonderfully strange symbolist saga “The Glove or Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove,” narrating the finding of a woman’s glove in ten fantastic, subtly erotic and non-linear etchings, hangs in the dimly-lit galleries among other intimate, variously decadent, symbolist and realist prints. Etching and lithography build subjects out of inky layers of dark tangled or cross hatched lines, drypoints are perfect for creating atmospheric grays, the medium, in turn, is predisposed to the subjects of obsession, possession and describing the low light of the sick room or the ill-lit corners of the fin de siècle urban world. (Janina Ciezadlo)

Through June 13 at the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.

Štepán Grygar, Street (Prague), 2002.

RECOMMENDED

Tenaciously resistant to postmodern cultural play, the six contemporary Prague-based Czech photographers who have been brought together here by curators Karel Cisar and Karen Irvine continue their country’s poetic modernist tradition with evocative black-and-white and color images of ordinary objects, moody spaces and mild constructivist angle shots that exude worn, tired and poignant emotions that are mirrored in their subjects. Although the curators advise  that the show “represents a small, very specific slice of photography in the  Czech Republic today,” it remains that such works are rarely being made elsewhere at the present time and are a throwback to the golden age of Czech photography between the two world wars. The restrained mundane sensibility, in which decay is never so rife as to resemble ruins, is most perfectly captured in Marketa Othova’s study of a shiny tiled floor littered with a few dispersed scraps of foam board that appear to have fallen from the ceiling, signaling disrepair that has not come anywhere near the brink of destruction. While the world outside Western Europe forges ahead with bold experiments, these artists look backwards and are frozen into pillars of the past. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan.