T.L. Solien

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As guest curator of “Someone Else’s Dream,” John McKinnon acknowledges the history of the Hyde Park Art Center. Works from Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt and Christina Ramberg—who exhibited at HPAC in the 1960s—make appearances. Situating them next to more recent pictures, McKinnon (who operates The Society for Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago) articulates that he wants to “create new associations of the work outside of a predictable historical analysis.” The nature of these associations in the exhibition is open for interpretation, like a series of dreams. Read the rest of this entry »

David Leggett paints while listening to the stand-up comedy of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy, which serve as kindling for his sometimes cartoonish, playfully rendered mixed media artworks. “In the early 1990s when Def Comedy came along, it was extremely popular, but if you listen now, it was horrible,” Leggett says. “They were doing impersonations of Eddie Murphy and Richard Pryor just using the punch lines. Saying ‘dick’ and ‘pussy’ doesn’t make it funny. Those are just words, and that’s kind of how I see some artists—they can say ‘Oh I’m riffing on this,’ but so what?” From his process to his product, Leggett is interested in inauthentic reproductions of 1980s art and hip-hop culture.

Leggett laughed readily, both at himself and his work, discussing his first solo show at Western Exhibitions, titled “It’s getting to the point where nobody respects the dead. Fresh to death.” Leaning back on a small chair in his compact East Garfield Park studio, narrowed further by layers of leaning paintings, Leggett said his work is not a “moral compass.” He treaded lightly on questions of racial or political tension, and when questioned about stamps of men in black face that appear in earlier works, he answered with an incredulous giggle that he bought the stamps on eBay, fascinated by the fact that they existed at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Joakim Ojanen

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In talking about the “Drunk Vs. Stoned” exhibits that Scott Reeder and the General Store in Milwaukee put on at Gavin Brown’s Passerby space in New York in the mid-oughts, art critic Ken Johnson said that while “drunk art” is “impulsive, active, aggressive,” stoned art, on the other hand, “tends to be introverted, tends to focus on details, tends to be repetitive.” The companion psychedelic shows now at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Chris Kerr and Paul Nudd, blow away any such clear symptomatic distinctions. Read the rest of this entry »

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A new twist on the old truth that the photograph, especially when it is meant to flatter a product or a person, or show an ideal situation, has nothing to do with actual life is provided by Aron Gent in his twelve color photos that send up staged and posed images by showing their evil doppelgangers. The most ingenious and successful of Gent’s conceits is to stage a scenario in which a fictitious family that is to be posed for a celebratory dinner portrait is caught before the set-up in a variety of detached postures and expressions. Read the rest of this entry »

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“Messin’ with Texas” at the Hyde Park Art Center is an eclectic group show of eight mid-career artists from Houston, Texas, all recipients of the 2010 Artadia Award. Artadia is a nonprofit organization that awards grants to artists in five U.S. cities, including Chicago. This exhibition was part of an exchange with DiverseWorks in Houston, which recently displayed the work of the 2008 Artadia Awardees from Chicago. It is important to note that Artadia grants are given to individuals and grantees are not selected on the grounds of a cohesive group exhibition. As a result, the works in this show are quite disparate, although some relationships emerge. David Aylsworth’s thickly painted abstractions of floating geometric forms share a surprising lightness and playfulness with Bill Davenport’s sculpture, “Super U,” a giant pink painted plywood “U” that fills the center of the gallery. There is a similar precision and emphasis on systems in Augusto Di Stefano’s drawing, “Plan for History,” as in Jeff Shore and Jon Fisher’s wall-mounted sculpture, “Cliff Hanger,” a grid of wires, hard drives and cameras that feed images to a flat screen TV. These formal similarities create some resonance between the works, but what is most compelling in the show is actually the dissonance between Nestor Topchy’s contemporary take on elaborately painted Ukrainian Easter eggs (pysanky) and Nathaniel Donnett’s gold-foiled objects displayed in a glass case on black velvet shelves with tiny white paper tags on which is simply scrawled “priceless.” Read the rest of this entry »

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Scottish mathematician Hugh Blackburn invented the harmonograph, a device that draws elegant abstractions through the movements of two or more pendulums. Blackburn observed that the visual “harmonies” resulting from intervals of ratio in pendulum height correlated to similar steps in the musical scale. University of Chicago musicologist Larry Zbikowski is exploring the visual patterns of movement made by dancers of the waltz, and correlating these patterns both to the musical scores that accompanied the dancing and to states of emotion and consciousness in the brain. These synchronistic models serve as inspiration for Conrad Freiburg, whose virtual universe, erected in the main gallery at the Hyde Park Art Center, is divided into sections matching the seven notes of the Western major scale with sconce-like chimes affixed to the wall. While Freiburg doesn’t claim adherence to any esoteric system, the number seven recurs throughout occult cosmology; in theosophy, for example, the seven-step “septenary” describes the various “energy envelopes” of the soul that exist in subatomic emptiness. Read the rest of this entry »

"In The Evening," mixed media on synthetic paper.

Sex and death are implied everywhere in Kim Piotrowski’s show “Beds and Guns.” Taking the eponymous objects as metonymies for overlapping spectrums of ideas—placidity, power, eroticism and violence; birth, decay and mortality—she creates mixed-media works on paper that range in scale and intensity from the intimate to the nearly overwhelming. Piotrowski’s paintings are rooted in Abstract Expressionism, but her innovative experiments with materials and photojournalistic source images make her paintings a thing all their own. The drag of the brush creates whorls and ridges that lend the paintings some of their intense surface action. Some contour lines are sharp; elsewhere, pools of color bubble and slide. Piotrowski’s techniques evince sober control, but their effect is kinetic, occasionally wild.

Working at the edges of representation, Piotrowski renders her subjects abstract but also particularized. Some of her guns appear as sites of emerging violent energy. In “Arm in Arm in Arm,” the weapon rises monstrously from a lava-like morass, all ensconced within a dense and ragged blue halo that radiates brutal strokes of green. Piotrowski’s beds are every bit as lethal—and seductive—as the guns. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

While you were out for the summer, I took a message. Here’s what you may have missed.

Eleanor Coen, 1916-2010

Deaths in the Family
The West Side gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey reported two deaths via email this summer. Eleanor Coen, wife of artist Max Kahn, experimented with and popularized lithography in Chicago with her contemporaries in the 1930s and 1940s. She graduated from SAIC and later taught there, and continued her printmaking career into the 1950s. She had a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1946. The gallery also announced the passing of James Garrett Faulkner, an artist, teacher and art collector. Faulkner also taught at SAIC and collected the work of Imagist and self-taught artists. Both Coen and Faulkner are represented by the gallery, which sells work by established (and sometimes forgotten) Chicago-based artists. This fall, John Corbett and Jim Dempsey (of the gallery’s namesake) will curate an exhibition about Ray Yoshida’s art legacy in the Chicago community. Yoshida died in January 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

An exhibition opening at 65Grand

Bill Gross has been given thirty days to cease and desist gallery operations in his apartment, on the 1300 block of West Grand Avenue. Named 65Grand after the bus that passes below his third story window, the apartment gallery has operated without intervention from the city since October, 2005, until this recent April, when two representatives from the Department of Business Affairs and Licensing visited for a peaceful shakedown. The current show, a solo exhibition by artist David Ingenthron, will be the gallery’s last at this location.

Gross, himself an artist, started the informal gallery in his living room and kitchen as a way to engage friends and peers in a self-made art community. Soon after, the gallery openings were always crowded, and the shows received attention from critics (with three coveted reviews in Artforum) and collectors, and therein lay the problem. Gross was selling art without a business license, and he could not obtain one in his present location. The restaurant on the first floor is zoned to conduct business, but the apartments above are not. Read the rest of this entry »

Jessica Labatte

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Curated by Jeff Ward and Shannon Stratton, and featuring the work of seven artists (Todd Chilton, Pete Fagundo, Carrie Gundersdorf, Katy Heinlein, Jessica Labatte, Andrea Myers and Tessa Windt), five of whom are from Chicago, “Ps & Qs” posits what a sociable twenty-first-century Formalism might look like. Including painting, drawing, sculpture and photography, and incorporating several of the materials (fabric, Styrofoam, colored pencil) that an older, more traditional Formalism eschewed, these looser but utterly self-possessed images and objects range from pure abstraction (Gundersdorf) to a more minimalist approach (Labatte) and encompass most things in-between.

First exhibited in Houston, in 2006, three artists (Chilton, Meyers and Heinlein) are holdovers, although all works in this present iteration are new. Curators Ward and Stratton see the examination of contemporary art’s conversation with Formalism as endlessly fruitful and, when asked, they suggested the thesis of the show could support a countless number of new artists and artworks, yielding many more results and fresh insights if ever repeated in the future. Following suit, the Hyde Park Art Center’s version sees Ward and Stratton less concerned with an iron-clad curatorial conceit and how works fit into it, and instead delights in the presence of the work itself.

The title of the exhibition, taken from the etiquette imperative to mind your manners, sets the stage for the pleasant politesse of the works on view; they are gracious, and to some extent gendered, hosts and hostesses, and visitors feel welcomed to enjoy them in the intimate exhibition hall, specifically designed to function on a human scale, with works hung low and arranged in suites of three throughout. The intimacy and focus these circuits foster prevents subtler pieces, such as Fagundo’s sculptures constructed from found wooden end tables and painted Styrofoam, from being overlooked, and is counter balanced by the “a-ha!” moments that abound around every corner. (Thea Liberty Nichols)

Through June 6 at the Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Avenue.