While they were still MFA students at the School of the Art Institute, Monica Herrera and Heather Mullins cut a hole in the wall that separated their two sculpture studios. Although this “window” was not condoned by SAIC building management, it represented the artists’ commitment to forms of collaboration and exchange. The opening challenged the sanctity and isolation of studio work with neighborliness more familiar to “I Love Lucy” than a competitive studio-arts program. Unwilling to relinquish their conversation and partnership, Herrera and Mullins teamed up with textile MFAs Rachel Moore and Rana Siegel in search of a space that would accommodate studios for each artist and an initially undefined open area where they could continue to foster collaborations, community-based projects, and creative public programming.
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By Alicia Eler

Art Fairing in a new economy, Chicago blows through the 2008 Miami art fairs

The Western Exhibitions booth

Overall murmurs of low attendance aside, Art Basel Miami Beach reported more registered collectors and cultural institutions than any previous year. The Miami Herald said that almost half of the galleries at Art Basel saw drops in sales, however, and after just two days into the fair, only sixteen percent of galleries at Basel and the satellite fairs saw sales growth. There are fewer visitors roaming the fairs than in years past, but the art world won’t give up.

Of the three Chicago galleries at Art Basel Miami Beach—blue-chippers Richard Gray, Donald Young and Valerie Carberry—I noticed a sprinkling of red dots covering David Hockneys at Richard Gray. During an unstable time, art buyers will invest in artists whose names they already know and trust. Kavi Gupta Gallery led the way at the younger, more casual, Chicago gallery-populated NADA Art Fair, even positioning Tony Tassett’s “Snowman” (2008) by the coveted fair entrance. Within the first hour of the fair, that piece sold for $70,000, which “shocked” Gupta according to reports from Artinfo.com. Red dots covered works by Melanie Schiff—a 2008 Whitney Biennial participant—including her “Untitled” (2008), an exquisite play with light, shadow and circular lens-like mirrors and symbols that are curiously shaped like Schiff’s nipples, recognizable in her other works.

David Lieske at Rowley Kennerk Gallery

Imperfect Articles represented a more affordable slice of Chicago’s art world at NADA, selling t-shirts designed by Andrew Rafacz Gallery’s Cody Hudson, among others. Nearby, Bridgeport-based Proximity Magazine and Pilsen-based Golden Age showed off their print goods. The West Loop’s Western Exhibitions dedicated their entire space to the work of Chicago’s husband art team duo Stan Shellabarger and Dutes Miller, who are quickly becoming the gallery’s art-fair darlings, and included a live knitting performance of their pink umbilical cord-like tube, making early on a $5,000 sale of a book filled with self-portrait silhouettes. Chicago galleries Rowley Kennerk and Shane Campbell Gallery also showed at NADA.

The West Loop contingent was further seen down the street at PULSE, where Monique Meloche Gallery’s booth featuring L.A.-based emerging artist Kendell Carter sold a variety of his works ranging from $1,700–$12,000, including the space’s wainscot wall installation, something that’s certainly more difficult to sell than, say, one of the artist’s shoelace drip paintings. Lake Street’s Packer Schopf Gallery did Bridge for the past three years but switched to PULSE this year; owner Aron Packer says that Michael Dinges’ paintings on deceased Mac computers and Steve Seeley’s whimsical taxidermy drawings were “a hit.” Tony Wight of Tony Wight Gallery smiled from inside his crisp white-walled space, which included a strong selection of work including abstract, kaliediscope-esque photos from NY-based Tamar Halpern’s solo exhibition recently seen in Chicago.

Catherine Edelman Gallery, Douglas Dawson and McCormick Gallery brought work to Art Miami, another of the vast tent fairs. Chicago representation at the poppy young Aqua Wynwood Fair included Kasia Kay Art Projects and Thomas Robertello Gallery, who smartly curated works from Lily McElroy’s “I Throw Myself at Men.” In this series, the artist hand-selected men either from Craigslist or at dive bars in Chicago, and literally threw herself at them, toying with assumptions about male-female power dynamics.

The Chicago born-and-bred Bridge Art Fair led Chicago representation in Miami, bringing ALL RiSE GALLERY, Accomplice Projects, Antena, GARDENfresh, Swimming Pool Project Space to the Miami location, and Aldo Castillo Gallery and Ryan Schulz Projects (of the recently closed NavtaSchulz Gallery on Lake Street) to the new Bridge Wynwood. Emerging artist Mathew Paul Jinks says “I’m seeing a lot of interest—my Web site stats peaked this week, and GRACE, a Brooklyn gallery, asked me to do a performance next year.” Likewise, at Bridge Miami Beach, gallery co-owner Liz Nielsen, of the less-than-one-year-old Swimming Pool Project Space, saw two $500 video art sales of work by Latham Zearfoss and Aspen Mays.

Imperfect Articles

Talk of sales was still on everyone’s lips until Art Basel Miami Beach closed their doors on Sunday, December 7, at 6pm sharp. As the power went out on Donald Young Gallery’s four-channel Gary Hill video piece, guests streamed out of the convention center. When the Art Basel Miami Beach closing party began at the newly renovated Fontainebleau Hotel at 41st and Collins, which was recently renovated in line with Morris Lapidus’s original design, the food and wine flowed as if someone had just won the lottery and was treating thousands of close friends. Guests ate little slices of decadence, like grilled jumbo shrimp, succulent beef polenta, fresh cherry tomatoes and finger-food desserts of soft sweet cakes, rich chocolate morsels and creamy puddings. Free champagne, wine and mixed drinks flowed endlessly at the bars, some of which were crafted entirely from ice. And as the party meandered into the hotel’s new LIV Lounge, where shiny stairs led the way into a lounge-like pit of sweaty bodies dancing against one another, Art Basel Miami Beach Co-Director Annette Schönholzer smiled, sliding alongside collectors and exhibitors. No one was thinking about unsold paintings needing to be shipped home.

Newcity’s daily coverage from Miami can be found here: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four

Diana Guerrero-Macia

As we consider the fall lineup in the West Loop gallery district, it’s probably best to start with a roundup of a few changes that took place over the summer while the rest of us were off educating our palettes with Old Style, PBR and brats. First, the bad news: Lisa Boyle Gallery and Gescheidle closed. Both proprietors are continuing to work with their artists, but are abandoning their permanent spaces to become members of the aspirational class of wily independents. Gardenfresh is shuttering its doors at the end of the month after a final group exhibition, transforming itself into a vaguely defined “nomadic curatorial collective.” All of this is making me wonder if Chicago’s art market will ever be able to sustain a diverse gallery scene, or if it’s time to stop complaining and acknowledge that Chicago (at its best) is about short-term interventions whose benefits are innovation and a DIY ethic where anything goes. Some, however, are adapting. ThreeWalls downsized, eliminating its Solo gallery while maintaining its larger exhibition space and residency program. Not one to waste time, Scott Speh has moved his Western Exhibitions into the vacant spot, pleasing everyone who enjoys centralization. Finally, Bodybuilder & Sportsman and BucketRider have both changed their names to reflect the identities of their owners: Tony Wight Gallery and Andrew Rafacz Gallery, respectively.

The West Loop is busy this September and a few standouts deserve special attention. Two galleries, Kavi Gupta and Rhona Hoffman, are featuring independently curated exhibitions. At Hoffman, art critic and curator Terry Myers continues his theme of “ambient materialism” in “Angles in America.” Despite the precious title, the show is a broad and well-conceived treatment of geometry and angularity that spans forty years of American art. Myers’ focus on what Siegfried Kracauer called “surface-level expressions,” in contrast to grand historical statements, leads to a varied group of artists working in almost every medium. This is not your father’s modernism—Mary Heilmann’s 1980s bright abstractions interact with a Robert Overby post-Minimalist cast door and contemporary films by Jennifer West and Laura Riboli.

Curator, critic and ex-Chicagoan Marc Leblanc has put together a show of metaphysical, neo-Romantic Los Angeles artists at Kavi Gupta. Go for a crash course in form and formlessness. Rashid Johnson is also returning home for a double feature at Monique Meloche and Richard Gray. At Meloche, Johnson is creating “a creolized orgy between Sun Ra, Paul Gaugin, Kazmir Malevich, Debra Dickerson and Eldridge Cleaver (if his soul were no longer on ice).” Sound fun? Try the shea butter. Across the street, Diana Guerrero-Maciá has new work at Tony Wight; her combinations of text and image in large-scale collages underscore the arbitrariness and absurdity of symbolic representation, while experienced veterans Josiah McElheny and Cristina Iglesias present new work at Donald Young. Punk-rocker Patrick Berran’s abstract paintings at Thomas Robertello are at once more serene and dirty than expected. So fans, it’s a new season. Pull out the pompoms and grab your free beers, it’s game time. (Rachel Furnari)

RECOMMENDED

In collaboration with the work of over twenty other artists, the Burtonwood and Holmes duo have created an installation situated at the intersection of war, patriotism and materialism. They have painted images of warfare and ruin on the wall of the gallery, and invited collaborating artists to hang their works over the images. The scene evokes the proximity between acts of war and cultural production that are normally kept at more of a distance. Though art-making may seem remote from the complex industry of war, Burtonwood and Holmes reframe the work of the artist in direct dialogue with the nation’s state of war. The other part of the Burtonwood and Holmes’ installation is, in a sense, an inversion of the first part of the show. The walls are covered in sales ads and junk mail, and the diorama figures placed in the space are also covered with similar fliers. Whereas the first part of the installation places the subjective production of art in the context of wartime, the second part allows the viewer to see products as a homogenizing force on the consumer, and a mask on the objects of war in the scene. This leads the viewer to the notion that materialism and marketing are very much mechanism of war themselves. Burtonwood and Holmes have created two environments that question the implication of producing and consuming in a time of war. With the directness of their images and associations, the installation mimics the coloration that war has on the creation, marketing and distribution of goods that we are prone to ignore in our everyday systems of valuation. (Marisa Plumb)

Through June 28 at GARDENfresh Gallery, 119 N. Peoria.

Monkeys! Chimps and fighting baboons have come to Gardenfresh gallery, posing and screaming with delicate flowers and a bloody, half-eaten gazelle. Emily Roz’s large colored-pencil drawings, which also include a leopard killing an impala, are vivid and deft portraits that evoke both Francis Bacon and Planet of the Apes. There is inevitable anthropomorphizing here, especially in a drawing of a mama chimp and baby, but the dangerous teeth, dark red mouths and exquisitely rendered coats of the baboons supersede the impulse to humanize, filling the gallery with an equal sense of our distance from the wild kingdom. Roz’s skill ensures that even the most violent image is continually engrossing. Roz’s fellow Brooklynite Cammi Climaco has chosen a befuddling set of works for this exhibition. A Jenny Holzer-style faux-neon sign reads “Giving increases treasures in heaven,” while a soft black cloud dangles above the space from an arched pole. To the right is a witty work on paper—the word “Solitude” is writ in gangster gothic script with the poignant title “Study for Matching Tattoos.” Unfortunately, these different elements never come together as cohesive installation and each work suffers from the impact of that incongruity. (Rachel Furnari)

Through April 5 at GARDENfresh Gallery, 119 N. Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

Pop phenomena, double entendres and skewered common mistruths make up Mike Lash’s latest work, with an array of paintings and prints that range from pleasantly sarcastic to painfully insightful. Linguistic and textual interpretations are played up in the “Sexy” triptych, with stenciled letters on separate panels either saying the phrase, “I think your sexy,” “I think you’re sexy” or “I think your sexier.” The distinctions create a dialogue about textual meaning in contrast with an aural sexual message that is mostly one-dimensional. Several pieces comically observe objectification and free association of everyday objects. The word “Food” lingers over a bull painted in the primitive style of the Cave of Lascaux. A pair of breasts is featured amidst scribblings of “blah, blah, blah.” Another piece simply says in multicolored writing, “Tanks, bombs and shit get me off.” Other pieces taken from his forthcoming book, “Lies for Leo,” caricature common, mistruths assumed by children, such as “Columbus discovered America” or “The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.” With more of a focus on ideas than imagery or aesthetic, Lash’s text-based works seem at times crudely rendered. But humor and multi-faceted meaning show how seemingly crude and common things are worth obsessing over. (Ben Broeren)

Through March 1 at GARDENfresh Gallery, 119 N. Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

Holly Holmes’ exhibition, “Distress,” highlights the contrasts between nature and industry, between utopia and ruin, and how destruction is both grimly and playfully portrayed. Rolling green hills and a mountain’s dark shadow contrast with a bright orange sunset, while lava-spewing volcanoes, a rust-colored factory and several skyscrapers interrupt the idyllic scene. Disproportionate spacing between objects purposefully accentuates the unnatural forces at work. Even more apocalyptic is a cluster of nuclear cooling towers sitting on a dark brown landscape. Industrial pollution fills the turquoise sky with specks of gray and black, while pea green and burgundy hues line the inside of the tower. In other paintings, nature takes on ironic, artificial and human characteristics. Knots in tree stumps look like polka dots, particularly when shaded violet or green. Fish swimming above oil drums and beer bottles appear to wear lipstick. White herons wearing red-haired wigs stand with legs crossed atop melting icebergs. Holmes’ plunge into dystopia proves to be oddly comical. Illustrated interruptions of ideal landscapes relate anxiety about the real world. (Ben Broeren)

Through March 1 at GARDENfresh Gallery, 119 N. Peoria.