Kayce Bayer

RECOMMENDED

Kayce Bayer and Kristin Miller Hopkins’ show at the ARC is titled “Home Page,” and the work sensitively embodies modes of habitation as it uncannily performs the kinds of interactivity and embedded layering that characterize a tricked-out website. Bayer and Hopkins are clearly engaged in conversation, and their pieces are strongly complementary. Bayer’s delicate diorama-like boxes of interior and exterior spaces are animated by a series of gears/automata that make virtual rainfalls and moving clouds, with an especially beautiful snowing machine. These pieces are presented with small drawings of homes and landscapes, and with a stop-animation video of her weather systems to create a multimedia system that’s richly embodied if borderline-precious. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Mexican filmmakers Jorge Estrada and Daniela Paasch reverse field here and offer us miniature and radically still meditative photographs of places and things in the small towns of their home country, through which they hope that “the relevance of a memory is subjugated by the aesthetic of a moment.” Like haiku poetry, Estrada’s color and Paasch’s toned images are all about emotion, using their subjects to trigger humor, poignancy and, most of all, that sense of intense absorption that we feel when we find ourselves contemplating an object or scene that has no special meaning, yet has attracted our unaware gaze. That mood is captured most exquisitely in Paasch’s sepia-toned studies of “forgotten” things, such as two metal chemical drums, one of them on its side, resting abandoned on a cracked and pitted street. In a film, no frame is self-sufficient; Estrada and Paasch understand that there is another mode of time than succession. (Michael Weinstein)

Through March 28 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

Kerry James Marshall, untitled, 2008. Courtesy the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

By Jason Foumberg

This week I found a very similar image in two different exhibitions. The perspective is from the beach, looking seaward. There, against a cloudy horizon, a large wave breaks dramatically causing a frothy white cloud to rise up. In one image, by Kerry James Marshall, the wave splashes against a bracing figure who stands thigh-deep in the water; in the other image, a promo card for the exhibition “Women Get Fucked,” the wave crashes against a large rock. This image of unbridled nature could variously serve as an inspirational poster or as a romance novel cover, but here they’re positioned to speak about race in one exhibition and gender in another.

Just when you think you’ve shelved the history book on identity politics, chalked it up as a style that climaxed in the 1990s, and after Kara Walker has exorcised her demons, and black art is now post-black, they return and ask to be “reconsidered”—again. Just last April the Renaissance Society rolled out “Black Is, Black Ain’t,” a large group show that explored representations of African American race. One of its strengths was the inclusion of non-black artists, providing a thesis that ‘blackness’ is available to anyone willing to grapple with its history. Today, we have a new exhibition that opens much of the same dialogue. “Across the Divide: Reconsidering the Other” is on view at the Illinois State Museum. Read the rest of this entry »

Jill Jeannides, "Trading Games"

Tasked with considering “the personal, political and economic issues pertaining to the cultural currency of money,” the artists in “Money Money Money” present money as aesthetic object, money as karmic reward/retribution, money as palimpsest. A suitcase stuffed with twenties and a Wall Street Journal critical of the bailout is titled “Oops.” A bald eagle formed from dimes and pennies hangs above a birdseed altar. The phrase Buy or Die bathes a wall in blood-red neon light.

There are some compelling images here that get diluted by an over-reliance on parodic manipulations of dollar bills and other hard currency. The preponderance of rebus-like collage paintings combining various national currencies with other charged symbols quickly grow tiresome, especially when the “message” they impart isn’t especially insightful. The problem that faces juror Mary Jane Jacob and selected artists lies partly with the dematerialization of money itself. Paper money doesn’t hold the symbolic power it once did; today, invisible lines of credit seem more determinative of our fates. The U.S.’s shift away from a productive economy toward a purely speculative one tilts the concept of money even further towards the phantasmagoric, yet much of the work in the show feels ploddingly literal. Its most successful offerings—Daniel Mellis’ conjuring of signed artworks out of $20 cash, and Cheri Reif Naselli’s doomed attempts to reconstruct $10,000 worth of shredded currency, for example—rouse anxieties inherent in a multifarious global economy that may well have surpassed our ability to comprehend it. Performances by Mellis and Naselli occur every Saturday through the show’s run. (Claudine Isé)

Through January 31 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior St. #204

RECOMMENDED

Revolutionary socialism lives on the gallery walls in Fred Lonidier’s full-frontal attack-installation denouncing capitalist globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement that is composed of photographs, graphics and copious text in Spanish and English taken from articles on “Imperialist Corporations” that appeared in the old-left Monthly Review. Maybe, as it becomes excruciatingly obvious that capitalism is the last thing from a panacea, a jolt of intellectualized rage decorated with inspiring images of the Mexican wretched of the earth rising in protest against their abysmal working conditions is just what we need. In any case, Lonidier proves that no ideology ever dies and that even a way of thinking and seeing in which plodding and tendentious theory cohabits with passionate uplift can still find adherents in a cool and fragmentary electronic mediascape. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 31 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior St. #204

Top 5 Exhibitions

Anne Wilson, Rhona Hoffman Gallery

Watercolors by Winslow Homer, Art Institute of Chicago

“Adaptation,” Smart Museum

Chuck Walker, Hyde Park Art Center

Mark Wagner, Western Exhibitions

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Shows

Jenny Holzer, “Protect, Protect,” Museum of Contemporary Art

Edra Soto, “The Soto-Chacon Show,” Rowland Contemporary Gallery

Alan Lerner, Art on Armitage

“Made in Chicago: Portraits form the Bank of America,” LaSalle Collection/Chicago Cultural Center

“Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria,” Art Institute of Chicago

—Marla Seidell

Top Five Photography Shows

Delilah Montoya, La Llorona Gallery

Jowhara Alsaud, Schneider Gallery

Frederic Chaubin, Chicago Architecture Foundation

Jill Frank, Golden Gallery

Carla Gannis, Kasia Kay Art Projects

—Michael Weinstein

Top 5 Museum Shows

“The Smart Home: Green + Wired,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Chic Chicago,” Chicago History Museum

“The Glass Experience,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Soul Soldiers: African Americans and the Vietnam War,” DuSable Museum

“Nature Unleashed: Inside Natural Disasters,” Field Museum

—Laura Hawbaker

Top 5 Museum Shows

Edward Hopper, Art Institute

“Twisted Into Recognition: Clichés of Jews and Others,” Spertus Museum

“Watercolors by Winslow Homer: The Color of Light,” Art Institute

“Earth From Space,” Museum of Science and Industry

“Benin—Kings and Rituals: Court Arts from Nigeria,” Art Institute

—Dennis Polkow

Top 5 Freshest Art Spaces

Swimming Pool Project Space

Old Gold

Hyde Park Art Center

65 Grand

No Coast

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Spaces We’ll Miss

Alfedena

Gescheidle

Garden Fresh

Contemporary Art Workshop

32nd & Urban

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Contemporary Art Exhibitions about Nature

“Biological Agents” at Gallery 400

Lora Fosberg at Linda Warren Gallery

“The Leaf and the Page,” Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery

“Future Farmers,” Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum

Claire Sherman, Kavi Gupta Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Art Exhibitions About Food

Maria Tomasula, Zolla/Lieberman Gallery

“Portraying Food in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Walsh Gallery

“Sugarcraft,” Kasia Kay Art Projects Gallery

Pamela Michelle Johnson, Urbanest

Isabelle du Toit, Byron Roche Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Feminist Art Exhibitions

“Ladylike,” Gosia Koscielak Gallery

“Henbane: Dialectics of the Feminine Sublime,” Medicine Park

“Are We There Yet? 40 Years of Feminism,” ARC Gallery

Amelia Falk, ARC Gallery

“A Minyan Without Men,” Woman Made Gallery

—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Exhibitions/Events at Alt-Art Spaces

“Tomorrow,” Vega Estates

“The Baby,” Knock Knock Gallery

“Pere Portabella’s Masterpiece Vampir-Cuadecuc,” White Light Cinema

Sumi Ink Club and Lucky Dragons, Golden Age

“Zummer Tapez: Jim Trainor,” Roots and Culture

 —Tim Ridlen

With her color and sepia-toned portraits of nude women in buoyantly affirmative poses, Amelia Falk takes us back to the days when Helen Reddy sang “I am Woman” and made an anthem of feminist strength and self-possession. Still pressing on with the decades-old project of “encouraging young women to love themselves and the body they were born with,” and challenging the voyeuristic “male gaze,” Falk presents her subjects reveling in their own ways of celebrating physicality. One of them, a buxom older woman, adopts a prize fighter’s pose, ready to stand toe-to-toe with all comers and announcing in the wall text: “I’m glad to know I’m a grandmother and I survived to get here!” Ironically, in a world that has witnessed Riot and Power Puff Girls, and Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, Falk’s images now seem tame and far more feminine than feminist, although there is no doubt that the message “our bodies, ourselves” still has a good deal of resonating force. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 3 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Just inside the gallery, posters by the Guerrilla Girls and the SisterSerpents are perfect introductions to the work within—an exhibition of Feminist art past and present—spelling out inequalities between the sexes, demanding equal rights and abortion rights. Iconic videos illustrate the extremes of the representation of women’s bodies being celebrated, and the opposite, being commodified and examined like a strange species, as in Martha Rosler’s “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained.” The juried section of work by contemporary women artists is a strong collection of various media, powerful images in photography, artists’ books that challenge the language applied to men and women, like Nava Atlas’s “Sluts and Studs,” and that tell-tale mark of the woman’s world, subverted: hand-sewn cloth. A silk organza apron by Mary Babcock is appliquéd with images of war; Seema Dhond’s piece hangs in a plastic bag—a small pair of underpants with a zipper across the crotch, hairs growing out like adolescence incapable of being contained. Unfortunately the answer to “Are we there yet?” is made pretty clear by the work, but the wit and wisdom in this show at ARC Gallery, a women-artist-run cooperative, displays a common theme of strength and perseverance with an attitude similar to the SisterSerpents’ proclamation, “Our art is merely and marvelously our weapon.” (Kelly Roarke)

At ARC Gallery, 832 West Superior #204, (312)733-2787, through March 29.