RECOMMENDED

Brian Dettmer is a biblio-sculptor and literary coroner. His book sculptures condense delicate leaves of a tired lexicon into jaw-dropping, articulate worlds.

Dettmer’s ability to salvage the outmoded and abandoned has achieved a level of meticulous sublimation at his recent show at Packer Schopf Gallery, “Adaptations,” a collection composed mostly of gutted and revived books. The fun, life-sized melted audio-cassette skeleton that greets you at the door is a harbinger of things to come: the books inside have been the victims of an autopsy, cavities gutted, save the most vital organs. A junky old set of encyclopedias is ravaged and reincarnated as handsome pictorial Cliff’s Notes, each picture’s wake carved out smooth as pearls. His scrupulous hand responds to images and texts worth remembering by boiling down subjects, like the aggregate scientist and his cloud of terms in “World Science,” or exposing a once-useful compendium of knowledge in a complex glossary of images, as in the boundless “Full Set of Funk,” a 9 1/2 foot long set of dissected encyclopedias.

Dettmer’s video installation, which animates his process with over 10,000 photos, is hindered only by the technology that makes the viewing possible. When the projector showing the video cut out on a Saturday afternoon, guests rushed to press the button that made it work. Even the modern technology that Dettmer’s work resists cannot dissuade the viewer’s curiosity. (Natalie Edwards)

Through May 9 at Packer Schopf Gallery, 942 W. Lake.

Carol Wax, "Writer's Blocks," mezzotint

By Steven Wirth

If you happen to be curious about the current state of affairs in the wide world of printmaking then look no further than the forthcoming Southern Graphics Council’s annual conference hosted by Columbia College and Anchor Graphics from March 25–29. Established in 1972, the Southern Graphics Council, or SGC as it is commonly called, is the largest print organization in North America, and each year its annual conference is the largest celebration of printmaking of its kind.

The conference itself means many different things to many different people: Read the rest of this entry »

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

Chicago artist Michael Dinges is interested in networks—economic, cultural, virtual—and how we mediate them. His new work, in “Dead Reckoning” at Packer Schopf Gallery, includes defunct, cover-engraved Mac books and cast brass replicas of navigational devices. Located at the meeting points between the greater world and ourselves, Dinges’ objects vacillate between use, re-use, engagement and disaffection.

Most of Dinges’ pieces involve graphic work on three-dimensional objects, often done by a modern version of the nineteenth-century scrimshaw process. Used by sailors to carve and ink designs directly onto whalebone, Dinges’ version uses white PVC plastic, a drummel tool and black acrylic paint. After beginning the scrimshaw series around 2003 with gallon buckets and PVC piping as canvas, Dinges was looking forward to the day his Mac died, so he could “do the back of it.” But it occurred to him “to try to source some dead ones” instead. “It’s even better,” he explains, “because they’re anonymous… If it could speak, what would it have to say?”

One answer is imagined in “Cabinet of Curiosities.” Here, modes of knowing, acquisition and identity overlap, as the arranged specimens simultaneously order the world and fabricate a statement of connoisseurial character. Dinges wants to draw a parallel with our own computer desktops, marked as they are by collections of files and folders. The organizational impulse of our modern technology may be similar to seventeenth-century curiosity cabinets, but it seems to remove us even further from direct experience (see the contrast of the over-smooth Apple logo with the bristling textures of the insects and starfish beside it).

In another laptop work, “Data Miner,” an octopus’ menacing tentacles bring to mind an online bot-crawler and the potential capturing of personal data. Text around the border ominously reassures us, “the innocent have nothing to fear from the surveillance of desire.” Dinges cites Thomas Nast as among his influences, and there is certainly something of the dead-on punch and punnery here that you find in political cartoons. Much like the scrimshaw and trench art they reference, these works appear at once fussy and democratic, breezily populist and skillfully, obsessively detailed.

The cast brass sundials and sextants do not reuse ubiquitous materials so much as replicate outdated ones. Like their laptop counterparts, the enigmatic text and decorations on their surfaces underline the “deadness” of their purported measuring function. Creating art from the material detritus of our modern world, Dinges asks us what we want our objects to be: are they points of consumption merely? Modes of understanding? At their most successful, Dinges’ objects act as what he calls “freeze points” in the never-ceasing fluctuations of our capitalist, consumerist economy. Shunning waste and exchange, they reclaim material for medium, at however small a scale. (Emily Warner)

Michael Dinges shows at Packer Schopf Gallery, 942 West Lake, through October 11.

RECOMMENDED

“Big Women, Bigger Heads,” painting. The sight of people staring at you can be unnerving, but in Jane Fisher’s show at Packer Schopf the gaze is the draw of the exhibit. One wall of the gallery is lined with portraits of two different men reacting to something we cannot see. The way the man sits within the canvas makes it difficult to pinpoint what is prompting his facial contortions. The expressions are more comical than intriguing, and they do not call for anything more than a casual glance. The series of “bigger heads” seem more like novelty pieces than analytical art pieces. However, the “big women” series is much stronger in context. Each painting on the opposite wall features women posing in full scale and facing the audience. Most of the women are scantily clad but aren’t ashamed of their bodies, the younger women even looking proud or smug of our stares. Their gazes hold more depth than those of the male heads as if they have something to express, and their attitude soars where the men simply contain all the emotion of a driver’s license photo. Despite the difference in messages, Fisher’s technical painting ability is fantastic across the board. The male faces approach realism while retaining a painterly touch. A younger woman’s muscles appear taut while an older woman’s wrinkles contain crevices and shadow. Fisher’s constant talent makes the show worth the visit. (Amy Dittmeier)

Through August 16 at PACKER SCHOPF GALLERY, 942 W. Lake Street, (312)-226-8984.

RECOMMENDED

Though normally operating behind the scenes at Packer Schopf Gallery, Dominic Paul Moore has moved into the limelight with his newest collection of paintings and drawings, “You’re Gonna Love it Here.” The assortment of gouache and graphite drawings, pulled from vintage medical guides, are striking in their honesty, ranging in size and jumbled together in an eclectic collage of images. In their whittled simplicity, Moore’s graphite renderings feature a sinister, cynical feel, suggesting our safe havens are rarely as benign as we presume. In “Shhhhhhh, It’s Ok,” a medic looms over an unconscious woman who, in her docility, implies a certain level of victimization, leaving one to wonder whether it was the man by her side or some other exterior force which brought her to this point. In a peculiar turn, Moore juxtaposes the medical drawings with replications of old Boys Life magazine ads and MySpace pages. The ads, though remarkable in their technical execution, are more spiteful than cynical, made even more so with callow titles such as “We Are The Whiteys The Mighty Mighty Whiteys.” The Web pages, though as gaudy as the real thing, make up what they lack in aesthetic appeal through theory, pulled together by Moore’s interrogation of space, both social and personal. Such disparate images can be irritating at first, but Moore’s concept is impressive, inviting a peek into the artist’s world—and demanding a reevaluation of one’s own. (Jaime Calder)

Through June 21 at Aron Packer Gallery, 942 W. Lake.

RECOMMENDED

Clive Barker’s sketches and paintings are similar to something a surly teenage boy would doodle on his TrapperKeeper in between equally well thought-out drawings of Metallica album covers. Barker’s work uses a palette primarily consisting of reds and yellows, laid out boldly over depictions of monsters, trippy landscapes and other things that would look equally bitchin’ under a black light. Best known for writing the horror novel “Hellraiser,” then later overseeing its franchise of feature adaptations, Barker took up painting in the early 1990s. The exhibit shows the artist’s love for shining beautiful light onto hideous things. His standout painting, an oil piece titled “Two Forests,” is the best example of the message Barker is trying to convey with his work. A washed out grouping of trees reaches up to a mustard yellow sky, while beneath the surface a blackness of brambles looms. His smaller sketches point toward the lighter side of darkness as well, such as an untitled piece showing a woman, legs spread wide, with a massive vagina that looks like a fireplace of some sort. This piece is marked as sold. Given his background in novels and films, Barker brings with him a built-in audience with an ingrained appreciation for whatever he does. Without this in his favor, the work shown in his exhibit would not be nearly as impressive. But again, black lights always help. (Kelly McClure)

Through Feb 16 at Packer Schopf Gallery, 942 W. Lake Street, (312)-226-8984.