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 »

RECOMMENDED

Sculptor Tony Tasset’s hard-edged, smart-assed esthetic has for years provided Chicago’s answer to similar high-craft pseudo-lowbrow snark conceptualists Charles Ray and Maurizio Cattelan. Tasset’s icy satirical influence is certainly in evidence at Joseph Cassan’s dazzling show at Golden, which continues to provide Lakeview with crowd-pleasers other than baseball, improv and latex boutiques. While echoing his UIC mentor’s naturalistic deployment of artificial materials (resin, epoxy, silicone, acrylic), Cassan makes a unique formal statement by incorporating delicate handicraft, selected “real” materials and implied invisible forms. The latter is exemplified in a floating pair of gorgeous lace panties with the title “Venus Inferred.” Another brilliant moniker is applied to a painted basswood bar of soap with hand-cut glass bubbles: “Minimalist Construct.” The most heroic pieces are a swan perched atop its own distorted reflection as a pedestal, “The End of the End,” and a disembodied human nervous system, “Nothing More Than Feelings.” Less monumental but equally pleasurable is “Dedicated to All Human Beings,” a low pedestal featuring a wadded paper towel as the bed for a bloody Band-Aid woven from fine copper thread. Historical nods to Minimalism and Earth Art are provided in a painting-sized section of cut out wall, “A Moment of Clarity,” and “Small Section of the World,” a clear plastic puddle in a small gravel depression; as low-key monochromes these offered relief in an otherwise eye-popping parade of fine-motor virtuosity. (Bert Stabler)

Through February 20 at Golden, 816 W. Newport

Top 5 Museum Shows
Olafur Eliasson, Museum of Contemporary Art
Your Pal, Cliff: Selections from the H.C. Westermann Study Collection, Smart Museum
Paul Chan, Renaissance Society
Mary Lou Zelazny, Hyde Park Art Center
James Castle: A Retrospective, Art Institute of Chicago
—Jason Foumberg

Top 5 Gallery Shows
Rob Carter, Ebersmoore Gallery
Big Youth, Corbett vs. Dempsey
Sarah Krepp, Roy Boyd Gallery
Everybody! Visual resistance in feminist health movements, 1969-2009, I Space
Ali Bailey, Golden Gallery
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Back in the day, a quarter century ago, the long-gone rocks at Belmont and the lake shore were a preferred summertime hangout for gay men who disported themselves unabashedly, partaking of the ordinary pleasures of a day at the beach, along with more intimate pursuits. Working within the tradition of ambient social photography, Doug Ischar documented the scene in color photos that get close up and project the sense of sweet lassitude that we are wont to feel on those crazy, lazy days. In Ischar’s shots, bodies cluster in unplanned statuesque formations—living sculpture gardens—in which each member is oblivious to the composition and ever ready to shift its configuration at will and whim. In Ischar’s banner image, an empty bottle of vodka on a beach towel rests next to a man lying prone as another man sits and places his hand on the first one’s head; between them, a third man lies on his back in deep contentment, wedged tightly between the other two—ménage-a-trois was never so blissful. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 17 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport

"Untitled (Fireflies inside the body of my camera, 8:37 - 8:39PM, June 26, 2008)," 2008

RECOMMENDED

Whichever one of the wildly varied photographic experiments that she undertakes, Aspen Mays always takes us into an unfamiliar world that is constructed out of the most humble and common things transmuted into eerie impressions. Possessed of the desire to see a “photograph of the whole universe,” Mays ends up shooting out in any direction that tickles her fancy and zooms to its outer limits. Put some fireflies into your camera and you will end up with a glossy, gaudy and glowing patch of color that abstracts from its subject so much that it looks like a precise photograph of a color-field painting. Through all Mays’ endeavors runs a play between absence–indeed vacancy and lack of distinction–and an audacious fullness that makes us keenly aware of what is left out at the same time that we are drawn into the subject. In sync with our improbable age, Mays is a postmodern mystic. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 2 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport

Ali (short for Alastair) Bailey is a recent transplant to Chicago, having moved here from London last July to be with his wife, Kavi Gupta Gallery director Kristen VanDeventer. The sense of personal dislocation Bailey experienced upon his arrival suited his work well, for much of “You Are Young,” his first solo show at Golden, involves a quirkily subjective displacement of the familiar.

Bailey thinks of his sculptures holistically, as individual aspects of an encompassing field of vision. At Golden, we see a sprout poking through a tear in an old baseball, and a pair of moldy helmet liners placed atop two crushed water bottles like mushroom caps. In the hallway, a glistening replica of a dropped ice cream cone evokes a child’s chagrin and an adult’s crestfallen impotence. Looming over it all is a creepily faceless figure, its head formed from a deflated basketball, its body a sleeping bag held upright by a hidden pole. Read the rest of this entry »

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

RECOMMENDED

Peter Cardone’s color photograph of a young woman in a cranberry hoodie exquisitely represents what a Sarah Palin voter’s reaction might be to the works of the other four emerging Finnish and Chicago artists, working in various pure and mixed media, in this energetic and cutting show. Cardone’s subject, shot against a white aluminum-sided house, stares at us with gaping eyes and a radically bemused expression on her lips. What else is she supposed to feel when she looks at Riiko Sakkinen’s slide show of appropriated ads mixed in with animation cels in Japanese kitsch style that sends up smarmy commercial culture? Indeed, it seems like everyone is turning Japanese; Melanie Schiff’s photo of an aging Sonic Youth poster, in which the band has dressed up as jolly space warriors, has a Gen X self-ironic laugh at the expense of a Japanese comic-book cover. Postmodernism is alive and well, even if some of us are still dumbfounded. (Michael Weinstein)

Through December 14 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport, (773)559-5850.

RECOMMENDED

In a bold and novel venture into conceptual photography, Jill Frank has persuaded her subjects to re-enact traumatic moments from their pasts, approximating as far as possible the scenes in which they occurred, and then shooting the “psychodramas” in deep clear color. As we all know, moments of extreme emotional or physical pain, and fear can wound a life thereafter, and Frank and her subjects show us how that happens effectively and accurately, with no ironic distance and a refreshing absence of excess. Choose your trauma. Frank will show you bullying torture, sadistic adult control, animals on the loose, aggression with the camera and any number of ways that people visit evil on others in an already adverse world. Frank is to be congratulated for bringing it home to us that the glass is often nearly empty, and her subjects are to be honored for their courage and considerable and credible performances. (Michael Weinstein)

Through November 1 at Golden Gallery, 816 W. Newport, (773)559-5850