RECOMMENDED

Upon walking in the familiar glass doors of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, one might have the first impression that this will be a show with the usual cast of characters—not that one minds the usual cast of characters, but, well, you know… Beautiful and mysterious Robert Overby rubbings and a cast concrete door leans to the right. “Tree Dance” (1971) by Gordon Matta-Clark plays on a monitor straight ahead. New and fascinating terrain is revealed in the work of Mary Heilman, who pairs photographs with their re-writing in the form of geometric landscape designs read like blueprints for a more regular and orderly social space. Elsewhere, a gigantic woven plaid cube by Jim Isermann sits near colorful—and functional—stacked ceramic dishes and cups by Steve Keister. Venturing beyond a black curtain to the back room of the gallery, one can sit on the floor and watch four video works, including “Ziggurat (Believer)” (2006) and “Disappearer” (2005) by Laura Riboli. Both playfully propose poetic, and technically skillful, uses of everyday materials, while Jennifer West’s digitized 16mm films strongly evoke the ghost of Stan Brakhage as she colorizes and texturizes road-trip footage and a film of Led Zeppelin with such materials as lemon juice, honey, tumbleweed, tire treads, pine needles and energy pills. Overall, this show opens up unexpected new vistas in the minimalist/post-minimalist territory we may have thought we knew, breathing a fresh, stirring wind across the gridded fields. The attention given by curator Terry Meyers to women creating contemporary work in response to this history was particularly appreciated by this reviewer. (Michelle Tupko)

Through October 11 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)455-1990

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

Julia Fish’s current exhibition is an investigation of space rendered visually and conceptually in reference to the east and west staircases of her home. Fish transposes the physical experience of her surroundings, the movement, sound and existence of space into gouache on paper, locking one architectural presence into a new one. No matter how long you stare at these works on paper, you will never experience the space as Fish does. You will never be directly connected to the observation and awareness of her place of residence. Two possibilities are being taken into account here. One consists of private first-hand interaction and insight into this concept of place. The other is a documentation of the place aforementioned that creates an interaction extending to the public, the viewer, filtered through the subjective perspective of the private. (Karissa Lang)

Through May 22 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

Chris Dorland has been painting utopian architecture for several years now, creating pictures that indulge in gorgeously threatening baroque colorations, and that have a strange Piranesi-like splendor. And like most commercial architects’ renderings, they have those tiny little token people often seen going about their business—but in Dorland’s work the little people evoke dread, fear, fleeing crowds. Rhona Hoffman is showing a variation on this body of work in a series of “Simulations.” Appropriated photos are collaged and then painted, painstakingly, in the manner of Gerhard Richter. Complex arrangements of rectangular panels are painted in corrosive colors and bleached images. To call this series of paintings “simulations” nods to Baudrillard’s book of the same name, but this is not a recycled, art-school postmodernism; something different is going on here. These pictures have the aura of a performance, of technical experiments or tests. It is as if the artist has achieved Warhol’s desire of becoming a machine, and we are in the presence of some parody of the occult technical processes that lie behind the everyday world. (David Mark Wise)

At Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, through May 30.

RECOMMENDED

Vintage Works 1964-1973.” Robert Heinecken, who died in 2006, was a “photographist” or manipulator of photographic images, with a taste for postwar American sex and food. He spent his time between Chicago, where he worked at his art, and Los Angeles, where he taught at UCLA (and where a post-Spock Leonard Nimoy was one of his students). Rhona Hoffman Gallery has assembled some of his most important photomontages and collages from his early period, and this show is worth seeing, particularly if you didn’t make it to the retrospective at the MCA some years ago. The series of gelatin silver contact prints “Are You Rea” from 1966-1968 is perhaps his most famous work. Without a camera, a page of a fashion magazine is placed directly on some film: what results is a recording of both sides of the page, bringing together bodies and commodities and ad copy in a ludicrous double image. A lot of people see in these semantic short-circuits a critique of consumerism or capital’s hidden messages, but these double images don’t have to play to one’s cultural knowingness to be effective. “Film Strip #4” from 1972 shows six blown-up negative frames of a nudie film, with a bare tree superimposed. From frame to frame the woman’s body undulates, but the branching tree looks like an angiogram. Many of the appropriations from old pornography turn into beautiful and cold studies of bilateral symmetry. The “Figure Foliage” series places porno film transparencies between layers of plexiglass, creating a small and disturbing creature within a block of amber. Whatever one makes of the sexism here, it suggests what will emerge from the stashes of old porn and the trash of consumer culture: monstrous hybrids and chimeras. Of that, at least, Heinecken will have been a prophet. (David Mark Wise)

Through April 12 at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria.

RECOMMENDED

Anne Wilson’s success is the meticulous and elegant execution of her complicated conceptual project. The term “theoretical architecture” seems to be used in reference to sculpture pretty gratuitously these days, but Wilson makes it mean something through the visual specificity and internal coherence of her varied body of work. Three of her current projects are on display at Rhona Hoffman, and all involve a continual exchange between the intimate physical process and materials of her object-making and the conceptual structure and built environment of social and political space. “Portable City” is a fantastical field of forty-eight shallow, horizontal vitrines filled with small experimental structures of thread or wire, held together or in tension with small pins. Some are mesh canopies suspended above the white ground or tiny, airy, knitted domes. There are collapsed piles of threads, tightly wound linear networks and tense spring forms. This intricate handwork results in a powerful sense of the potential for portable architecture in a global scene dominated by a need for temporary, efficient and inexpensive housing—without ever losing a sense of the domesticity of the piece’s construction. Wilson extends the principle of “Portable City” with “Wind-up,” the product of a five-day performance during which she and her collaborators wove bright nylon thread across a 17’ x 7’ warping frame. The finished sculpture presents itself as an index of their labor, but it holds its own as an object, and its optical effects capture the simultaneous solidity and eerie openness of “Portable City.” (Rachel Furnari)

Anne Wilson, “Portable City, Notations, Wind Up,” shows at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)455-1990, through March 1.

By Michelle Tupko

Chris Garofalo is not all that interested in the fine art aspect of her work. “I never really thought of what I was doing as being ‘art’ in the high-minded sense at all,” she says with a smile. “It was mostly just entertaining myself.” Garofalo’s ceramic pieces are crossbreeds of plant, animal, sea, land and fleshy creatures. They arise from an intersection between a naturalist’s field book and a dreamer’s internal intuitions—objects of imagination Garofalo would like to see remain personal. “You can put it on the back of your toilet, I don’t care. Just put it some place where you’re going to see it and enjoy it. It doesn’t have to have its own special light or its own little stand. I prefer it to be something that catches your eye while you’re moving through your life.”

Indeed, the intriguing hybrid beings hanging on the wall at Rhona Hoffman Gallery may have all begun with early pieces Garofalo made for her own garden. Wanting some birdbaths, pots and functional outdoor items, Garofalo created clay objects that could serve their function while hiding their own construction. They became a part of the garden itself, like strange animals beneath the leaves or alien buds sprouting. Early on, she displayed her pieces in friends’ bars, a neighbor’s backyard art sale and, eventually, in more established art venues such as Chicago’s Lill Street Art Center and the Wells Street Air Fair.           

These earlier pieces were cruder, using a low-fire technique, meaning they were even more fragile than they are now and had brighter, punchier colors. But these didn’t look natural enough for Garofalo’s intentions; they weren’t plausible as part of a natural system. “I was becoming more and more interested in having the work look like I didn’t make it; like it made itself, like it was growing,’’ she says, and this pushed her toward using high-fire gas ovens, a process with a subtler color range, allowing her to create textures that looked less painted, and more like fur or freckles, animal attributes and plant matter.

It was at an art fair that someone put a copy of Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life” in her hands. The book sparked a deep reflection on evolution and biological relationships that informs Garofalo’s work to this day. Her life forms began growing into what she often calls “ecosystems,” and a political-ecological message crept into her work, though she’s quite clear that this message is not the only reading her work invites. “Everything grows from something very small. We all, in theory, come from the same place. Everything that’s alive comes from the same source—stuff under a microscope, stuff underwater, stuff in the desert, stuff in your backyard, all looks related.”

Though she doesn’t call herself an animist, Garofalo has inherited her mother’s talent for assigning personalities to…everything. “Do you name things?” I ask. “No,” Garofalo laughs, “I’m not that squirrely.” But as she rightly points out, it’s simply true that everything is, technically, alive. Solid surfaces, she reminds me, are made of moving particles. The maple table on which we’re resting our elbows is still expanding. Nothing is ever at rest. “I love the idea of just seeing a plant get up and walk…saying, ‘oh, the sun’s over here…’” In my mind, I see my oregano plant scooting on its little legs closer to the sunlight on my computer desk.

Garofalo’s first encounter with ceramics occurred while pursuing a BFA in printmaking from Saint Mary’s, Notre Dame. Surprisingly, though, ceramics just “didn’t take.” At that time, Garofalo was more of an image-maker than an object-maker, studying graphic design, and even a little bit of business, in addition to printmaking. It wasn’t until a number of years later, when she moved to Chicago from her hometown of Springfield, Illinois, where she, along with two of her five siblings, were working as graphic designers that she returned to clay. Unable to find adequate printmaking facilities, and looking for a way to make more organic shapes than she could with the plywood work she was doing at the time, she signed up for a ceramics class. This second time around, Garofalo found a whole new relationship to clay as a material. “Something clicked,” she says.

She builds her pieces up spontaneously, “slapping down a slab of clay” and folding it up into shape. “It has everything to do with the shape,” she says, intuiting through her graphic designer’s sense of strong visual essence.

Ultimately, there’s no question that Garofalo could imagine living closer to plants and animals. The desert seems to be the place most on her mind. She says she could imagine retiring out there one day when she doesn’t need the city any longer “to survive.” “I could live out in the desert really easily. I sometimes feel like I’ve been reincarnated and I might have spent a lifetime out there. It just feels so much like home.”

Chris Garofalo shows at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)455-1990, through January 19.