RECOMMENDED

Seamlessly merging single color images into panoramic “constructed landscapes,” Kevin Malella comes up with compelling scenes that could be taken as straight shots featuring brilliant juxtapositions. Sheer beauty is Malella’s strong suit, as when he offers up a study in which railroad tracks dusted with a fresh carpet of snow foreground a tract of suburban duplexes abutting the towers of Chicago rising in the distance on a soft partly sunny day. Guillermo Srodek-Hart moves inside and shoots cluttered old shops in rural Argentina, delivering rich and subtly lit color photos that combine complex composition with densely overflowing content, as in his study of shelving in a general store on which cases full of gaucho knives vie for attention with crates of vegetables, spools of twine, bags of dog food and fertilizer, and a stuffed wildcat and falcon, not to mention most of the rest of the stock. Evincing perfect complementarity, Malella and Srodek-Hart, each in their own ways, achieve rare marriages of form and fact. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 8 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Ever writhing in his ever-expanding tortured dance around the finalities of the human condition—vulnerability and death—globalized Guatemalan photo-artist Luis Gonzalez Palma has now reached the point at which our beautiful weakness confronts our need for protection, which always carries with it devastating costs. The centerpiece of this show is Gonzalez Palma’s suite of miniature framed photographs of “Bodyguards”—severe men in ruffs who project ruthlessness with more than a hint of brutality. Who are they protecting? We get an idea when we see five miniatures of bucolic scenes with children at ease, empty chairs and empty tables, all in streams, that are shielded from the horrors that the world doles out, yet are still cut with apprehension, isolation and vacancy. When will Gonzalez Palma accept and admit fully his root insight that life is a losing proposition? If he ever does, his work will be at an end. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 28 AT Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

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 »

Birth of Telepathy

RECOMMENDED

Extravagant fancy goes free in Jamie Baldridge’s color scenario photographic portraits that never fail to provoke the irrepressible smile of absurd humor. In “The Birth of Telepathy,” Baldridge introduces us to a bearded man in a brown suit with a huge red and white magnet strapped to his head with a leather belt, who sits leaning forward over a table as he stares intensely at a bare and humble twig resting on a white china plate. Not to be outdone in the race for the ridiculous, Sergio Fasola offers up a color scenario shot of a female dwarf sitting in the woods on an easy chair as she pets a black-and-white-dappled milk cow straight out of a Ben and Jerry’s sign; two stone cats in the background stand guard over the touching relationship between brunette and beast. As in show after show this season, the artists are enjoining us to stop making sense, relax and enjoy the human tragic-comedy. (Michael Weinstein)

Through January 2 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Proving, if that needs to be done after scores of examples, that Chinese photography is today’s avant-garde, performance artist Liu Bolin has himself painted, places himself in cityscapes where he nearly “disappears,” and then has an assistant shoot him in color, faded into the environment. Bolin’s ghostly presence haunts the drainage pipes, propaganda posters, stockade fences, public buildings, and construction sites with which he chooses to fuse, always standing stoically expressionless to drive home a reminder that the individual is still standing despite the overwhelming onslaught of (post)modern life. Nowhere does Bolin achieve his concept more perfectly than in his “Provisional Wall,” where his spectral figure ethereally fills a narrow opening in a stockade fence that is foregrounded by unkempt vegetation and bald dirt patches; above and behind the fence, modern towers rise, bathed in a haze, as though they belonged to a fantasy city that denies the disordered reality that artifice will never tame, and the flesh-and-blood human being who has not yet been effaced. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 31 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

John Metoyer, "Curse of Eleusis"

RECOMMENDED

Women with undelineated white faces and closed eyes nearly vanish in a pinkish-white mist in Lou Raizin’s ultra-muted photographic images. Helmut Horn presents his color sculptural nudes in chiaroscuro, with their textured, illuminated and softened bodies bathed by shadows. Ian van Coller offers up segmented color portraits of hyper-dignified South African domestic workers at their places of employment. Always the sly deconstructionist, John Metoyer upends this meditative show with his “Curse of Eleusis,” where we are confronted by an old-fashioned kallitype print of a zombie in a stately dress staring at us through empty eye sockets, garnishing the visual buffet with the spice of a frisson. The four photo-artists here are emotional aestheticists, sharing an absence of pretensions to realism and evoking sentiments ranging from romantic idealism through mystery to sheer gothic horror. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 22 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Provocative Lalla is back in town, having deepened her project of clearing a space for representing Arab women as self-possessed individuals who yet are enveloped in the texts of their culture. Lalla knows whereof she visualizes; a thoroughly postmodern and globalized Moroccan, she injects piercing emotion into her rich color-scenario photographic portraits by covering her subjects in flowing fabrics that she inscribes with precise and elegant Arabic script while at the same time leaving their inscribed faces sharply conspicuous and unmistakably differentiated in feeling. The juxtaposition between culture and personality is not dissonant or strident; whether her subjects are sorrowful, meditative or gently seductive, they seem to be at home within their culturescape. In this new series, Lalla has transcended cultural criticism and has entered a domain of intense subjectivity in which complaints dissolve into troubled tranquility—the end of an era of her life. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 20 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

German photo-artist Gordon Muehle chooses to pay homage to his “Heroes”—the people who have influenced his life (presumably for the better)—by running them through a postmodern photographic mill in which he takes close-up color Polaroid images of aspects of their faces, composes them into more-or-less coherent headshots, places those into settings that are presumably meaningful to his subjects, and then—as the finishing touch—places the photo-works behind a white grid that looks like super-elegant prison bars. The facial deformations attendant on Muehle’s practice call our attention to them, depersonalizing his subjects; putting them in virtual jail begs for psychoanalysis: Is he trying to capture his friends or punish them? In one case, Muehle is admirably direct; a bearded young man in a truck-driver’s t-shirt holds up his handcuffed wrists as he stares at us with an intense luminescent gaze. We can only imagine what the back story might be. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 28 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

RECOMMENDED

Continuing its celebration of Argentinean photography’s mordant sense of life, the gallery offers up the color photographic scenarios of Jorge Martin, who is partial to damsels in distress but is not above showing us a decrepit bathroom in which a sink filled with brackish water holds a plastic human head. Martin puts his models through their paces, having one of them lie sprawled on her back, dead on an ash heap; another walking blindfolded on a ledge in a filthy basement; and another kneeling in the woods holding up in front of her a flowered dress that is disposed in such a way that it appears as though it contains a headless child. The lady in the woods also gets a portrait in which she stares at us with a complex expression mingling sadness, bitterness and defiance; cry for me Argentina, if you dare. (Michael Weinstein)

Through February 28 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior

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