RECOMMENDED

Riding the swelling wave of photography that uses nature as a springboard for enlarging and transforming perception and meaning, Monika Wulfers shoots flowing water and reveals its visual possibilities as we have never seen them before. A believer in “the continuity of the elements,” Wulfers’ most provocative images are negative prints of bow spray viewed from the deck of a boat that appear to be exquisite shoreline landscapes rife with vegetation and dotted with boulders rising up from the sand. Rather than attempting to use the still image to communicate motion, as most water photographers do, Wulfers exploits her medium’s bias toward structure in order to show us that at each moment of ceaseless fluidity there is a definite, albeit interminably complex, form that exists for itself; her involving study of a patch of whitewater presents us with an intricate network of lines and nodes that we are glad will never change. (Michael Weinstein)

Monica Wulfers shows through June 13 at Flatfile Galleries, 217 North Carpenter, (312)491-1190. 

RECOMMENDED

With his fifteen miniature oil paintings that form the better part of the “Small But Mighty” group show at Flatfile Galleries, Milwaukee-born Chicagoan Scott David Johnson continues his meditations on post-millennial American menace and dread (think DeLillo: “White Noise”’s “airborne toxic event,” “Mao II”’s “future belongs to crowds”). They are small—either a foot or eight inches square—with a spare, allusive economy of strokes, but still mightily unsettling. From four distinct but related series, these 2007-2008 works on canvas or linen (all on wood) depict the aftermaths or unfoldings of tragic disasters or civic disturbances, but with the main event—what would usually be the mass-mediated spectacle—“out of the frame.” For the most part, the real story—the spectacular crash, the chemical spill, the explosion, the demonstration, the sudden stunning show of force—is off-stage. We see, often from distant or helicopter-high perspectives, nearly abstracted scenes of emergency vehicles and workers (as in “Holiday Weekend”), hazmat-suited bomb squads, accident victims, cops in riot gear and, more reductively and suggestively, strewn orange-and-white-striped traffic barricades (as in “Presidential Motorcade”). All the figures and objects float context-less on monochromatic (sometimes just black) fields—almost exercises in form and pattern. Although we lack all the details, we know something has happened, is happening, or is about to, making us complicit as we invent dramas involving crowds and social control, mayhem and mob rule. Johnson’s paintings articulate our latent anxiety—nameless, faceless—with the new Security State. (Jeff Huebner)

Through April 11 at Flatfile Galleries, 217 N. Carpenter, (312)491-1190.

RECOMMENDED

Rhonda Wheatley and Lacey Pipher share Flatfile’s main gallery in a show that swirls, fans out and curves from floor to ceiling. Wheatley’s paintings, collaged magazine backgrounds of vibrant color overlayed with an insistent swirling paper cutout pattern take the walls, and Pipher’s sculpture, a significant collection of unlikely materials, takes the floor and pillars. Walking into the gallery, one is immediately struck by a significant contrast – the range of vocabulary of Pipher’s work in comparison to the exploration of one basic idea embodied in a repeating form on Wheatley’s canvases. Wheatley’s swirl does hold some of the power of a universal shape – in being the same, it is never the same

– and the later canvases in this “Recall” series, such as “Recall 31-34,” in which the collaged materials have been painted into a white field, and the swirl has taken on color and character, give the series a sense of progression. However, the swirl can only hold its own for so long against the fascination of works such as Pipher’s small “Warrior,” made from snips of text, red thread, a long piece of curved wood, hinges, clamps, all holding together a structure that resembles some kind of naturalist’s machine, if there is such a thing. And when Pipher takes these wooden curves from being small curiosities of semi-private imaginings to the monumental scale of architecture, in a work like “Morningside,” in which carved strips of poplar are hinged in long, streamlined arcs the height of the gallery, the curve takes on a character all its own. (Michelle Tupko)

Through February 22 at Flatfile Galleries, 217 N. Carpenter, (312)491-1190.

RECOMMENDED

In a welcome and important initiative, curator Susan Aurinko has brought two masterful Indian photographers to Chicago, introducing us to a rising creative center that will surely have an increasing impact on global art. Nandita Raman’s somber black-and-white chiaroscuro images of derelict movie theaters are exquisitely composed and exert a fascination that is heightened by their placement among fresh, glowing and elegantly patterned silk tapestries woven by Haseen Bhai and his family. The same intense sensitivity is evinced in Prabyr Purkyastha’s ultra-precise and complex black-and-white and toned landscapes, which synthesize all the photographic values—light, composition and texture—in scenes that rivet our attention. In their very different ways, Raman and Purkyastha are up to serious business, providing an essential corrective to the wave of conceptual art from East Asia that has captured today’s art world—they provoke us to feel to our depths. (Michael Weinstein)

Through Feb 22 at Flatfile Galleries, 217 N. Carpenter, (312)491-1190.