RECOMMENDED

Parents often show love by giving us too many things, so even after we’ve grown older, nothing can be quite so comforting as the clutter of useless junk. And unlike everything that’s always changing, clutter can be permanent and reliable. Which may explain Mary Lou Zelazny’s pictorial world, where, as the “Cake Lady” herself, she offers up an armful of comfort food. We all know that the manufactured pastry, whose garish advertising images she has cut and pasted, is not very healthy, so one might conclude that she is also offering up a pointed critique of modern American life. But if eating chocolate cake makes you feel good about yourself, why stop? And feeling good about yourself seems to be this artist’s mission, especially in this exhibit of recent paintings that focus so often on the female face and body, not so much how it looks on the outside, but how it feels from within. Read the rest of this entry »

"Rubber Boy," 1998

RECOMMENDED

Now that he has devoted his talents for upwards of four decades to taking absurdly humorous color photos of his Weimaraner dogs in various and sundry settings, you would think that William Wegman would have run that shtick into the pound. Think again. In his latest shaggy-dog romp, Wegman borrowed a passel of vintage sideshow posters from gallerist Carl Hammer, placed the pooches in front of them in appropriate dress, and posed them as—yes—the cutest sad-sack freaks this side of P.T. Barnum. Just imagine the bliss that the long-gone scaly-skinned Alligator Girl would have felt had she actually had one of those winsome Weimaraners, complete with an alligator snout, as her faithful consort. Wegman does that for her image posthumously. One can never accuse Wegman of being a one-trick puppy. He went to the dogs when postmodern photography seduced him and he never came back. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 26 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 North Wells

Joseph Yoakum, "Pleasure and Club House on Lake Placid near Sebring Florida on Indian Prairie Canal," 1964, ink and colored pencil on paper

By Jason Foumberg

In the 1990s, a huge range of contemporary art was categorized into some simple themes. There was a quick consensus that “the body” and “identity,” “memory” and “home” defined the queries and struggles of our contemporary era, as if the big world was so complex—and overburdened by art theory—that we needed to recompose ourselves using these basic building blocks of human life. These efforts at categorization promoted some excellent art works. In the “home” or “place” thematic category, Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 “House” and Gregor Schneider’s “Totes Haus ur” (1985-2003, in various iterations) defined a new genre of residential manipulation, with roots stretching back to Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1974 “Splitting” of a suburban home right in half, although Whiteread’s and Schneider’s large-scale installations were more of an effort to reconstruct the single-family home rather than destroy it.

The symbolism of the single-family home is resurging amid the American real estate bust, and a particular derivation is on view today in Chicago galleries. Where Whiteread and Schneider (and a host of others, including Do Ho Suh) investigated the site-specific qualities of “home,” the houses of today are generic and reduced to icons in the style drawn by children: a square with a triangle roof. As symbols, these houses are reductions to a universal essence of “home”; they speak about the safety of familiar objects, the comfort of domestic rituals and the fantasy of contained happiness. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

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 »

Photomicrograph, c. 1883-1931

RECOMMENDED

Snowflakes are inimitable, as we have always been told, and if we need proof, turn-of-the-twentieth-century photographer Wilson Bentley provides it in his exquisite black-and-white studies of the ephemeral crystals. Micro-photography of nature always reveals unsuspected alluring organized detail, yet snowflakes take the lead, just because their symmetric perfection stands against their inherent transiency. How did Bentley consummate his feat? He would shovel up some of a fresh Vermont snowfall, put it on a table, search for beautiful crystals, isolate them with a broom bristle, put them on glass plates and shoot them quick as a bunny through a photomicroscope. Without the offices of contemporary technology, Bentley’s passion and discipline give us visual evidence of the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s dictum that the value of things is not dependent on their duration. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 30 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 N. Wells

C.J. Pyle, "Flora Dora," pencil and colored pencil on verso of album cover, 2008

RECOMMENDED

When it comes to drawing, a couple of clichés are often evident. The first is that drawing is more immediate than other media and is therefore better at revealing the “essential self.” The second says that self-taught artists hold greater claim to authentic self-expression simply because they are outsiders. When combined, these assumptions form a seductive narrative mythos that can be hard to resist. Such fictions certainly inform the outstanding selection of works in “Primal: Drawing as the Mirror of Self,” but for the most part that selection (consisting mostly of gallery artists) serves to unpack the myths at least as often as it plays to them.

Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s 2008 exhibition “Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing,” which sought a common visual language among the seemingly Babel-like incoherency of styles, methods, and approaches in contemporary drawing, “Primal” includes better-known outsider artists like Henry Darger, Bill Traylor and Joseph E. Yoakum (who were also featured in the MoMA show) along with Lee Godie and Frank Jones. It also mixes in a few interesting up-and-comers like Orly Cogan and painter Marc Dennis alongside artists with substantial exhibition histories like Phyllis Bramson, David Sharpe and graphic novelist Chris Ware. Read the rest of this entry »

Marc Dennis’ photorealistic paintings seem not so much to appropriate or impersonate the images that litter smut magazines as to imitate them. Women’s naked bodies, in poses straight out of Hustler, are displayed against backgrounds that are at first somewhat jarring; one woman shoves her breasts out of her tiny tank top in front of a Sistine Chapel mural, while another is featured from behind on her knees against a nighttime cityscape, and one stands next to a dog in a sort of twisted family portrait. The majority of the paintings, however, simply feature naked women spread on beds in hotel rooms, with tacky bedspreads and trashy poses so that Dennis might as well have been staging a pornographic photo shoot while he composed them. There’s some sense that Dennis is trying to provoke an affective response, however visceral, as testament to what the artist statement calls the power the women in the images know their bodies have. However, as graphic as the paintings are, they ultimately don’t shock or even provoke simply because they don’t make use of the images in any new aesthetic or rhetorical way, and there’s no obvious evidence that the artist is doing much more than profiteering from the old discourse surrounding female nudes and the relationship between pornography and art. (Monica Westin)

Through May 30 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 N. Wells.

RECOMMENDED

Leonard Koscianski’s solo exhibition is far more nuanced and impenetrable than it claims to be. In his artist statement, Koscianski fashions his line of attack on postmodern art and society. The series of paintings is described as a comment on the dark side of suburban American life, where wild animals exude primitive bloodlust against rows of identical houses and claustrophobia-inducing forests as a representation of postmodern man’s frustrations and fears. However, identifying the paintings as transparent critiques of the predatory nature of the postmodern world is hardly as evocative as the actual painted content. The artist’s overly complex criticism denies several other artistic systems that he seems either to be citing or unconsciously invoking. The overwhelmingly resonant colors, vibrant as early Technicolor and equally off-putting, evoke pornography, and in fact, the snarling dogs and sinister claws of eagles against washes of teal and magenta seem just as sexual in presentation as they are threatening; is the fear of the suburbs not a fear of violation and rape that might thrill as much as it frightens? Simultaneously, the contrast of such intensity against sinister black figures of trees and the dull sides of houses evokes Gothic stained-glass cathedral windows. Seeing the paintings in this light, as a new kind of religious imagery, reveals an altogether more provocative iconography. (Monica Westin)

Through March 14 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 N. Wells.

“Don Baum: In Memoriam” is a shout-out to one of the greatest promoters of Chicago art. Ephemera from his curatorial career include documents from the 1969 exhibition “Don Baum says: Chicago Needs Famous Artists.” A press release describes the exhibition area, held at the MCA’s then-recently refinished basement, as “a homey Chicago basement atmosphere.” A newspaper clipping depicts a determined-looking Baum, wearing his familiar dark, round-framed glasses in the basement with a large, prominent furnace. Behind him stands an equally determined-looking group of artists.

As a curator and exhibition leader, Baum mounted shows that championed Chicago artists, both formally trained and “outsider” artists alike. Reading through the catalogue, familiar names pop out of that have since become immortalized in Chicago Art lore: Ed Paschke, Roger Brown, H.C. Westermann. Other artists feature members of Chicago “Imagists” groups, who were known for their surrealist pop art representations: the Non-plussed Some, False Image, and the Hairy Who. These were not intentional groups, but artists brought together in shows curated by Baum. Their rather grotesque pop art style can be seen in a few Hairy Who posters included in the exhibit.

Baum also contributed to the Chicago art scene in the roles of teacher and artist. He taught at the Art Institute and Roosevelt University, and served as former chairman for the latter’s art department. In addition, he continued to develop his own art. Baum originally studied art history at the University of Chicago in the 1940s, but found himself drawn to painting. He later turned his attention to assemblage art, often using found objects with reoccurring themes, including baby dolls and sculptures in the basic shape of Western-style houses. Many of these works incorporate “paint-by-numbers” kits that have been mutilated, rearranged and juxtaposed to create new images with social, sexual, and religious connotations.

"L.B.J." 1968

Unfortunately, only two pieces by Baum are on display from the MCA’s permanent collection. Both are from Baum’s “Baby Doll” period: “LBJ” and “Babies of Della Robbia.” “LBJ” is particularly engaging—a chubby-cheeked baby head and upper torso, just fitting into a tight wooden box, is decorated with a cut-out of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s face, creating a grimacing visage. Decals of cobras, coiled and ready to strike, decorate his forehead. Similar decals of eagles in flight, talons outstretched, cover the box.

Baum died in October 2008 at the age of 86, believing to the very end that Chicago had a vibrant and passionate art culture, one which he helped cultivate. After stopping by the MCA, check out more of Baum’s work at the Carl Hammer Gallery. It may inspire you to make an impact of your own in the Chicago art community. (Patrice Connelly)

Through January 25 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.

RECOMMENDED

In an over-the-top plunge into invented visual history, replete with absurdity and hilarity and doubling as a cautionary tale, the photographic comedy team of Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick serve up color panoramic scenarios documenting the “Iceberg Free State,” which they tell us was created in 1923 when an iceberg washed ashore near a Baltic town and was made a free-trade zone in the best tradition of rampant frontier capitalism. In their most shaggy-dog take, Kahn and Selesnick present their heavily clothed subjects playing an extravagant game of cards while the world around them transmutes into a battle field in wintry wastes. According to the artists, the “free state” met an untimely end, which can only make us laugh at greed and vanity until we remember that just recently Iceland was saved from bankruptcy due to grossly irresponsible lending practices by a Russian bailout loan. (Michael Weinstein)

Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick show at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 North Wells, through December 6.