Review: “The Grammar of Landscape”/Illinois State Museum

RECOMMENDED
Take as your purview the urban and rural Illinois landscape, choose nine of the most intense and individualized contemporary photographers to depict it and arrange their bodies of work in a pulsing flow that contracts and expands in a meditative spiral. That is what Judith Lloyd Kawba has done in her inspired curation of this powerful show in which the acute impacts of the successive images build to a feeling a pensive vitality. Viewers are advised to journey through the entire show; each series merits an exhibit of its own, yet none stands out from the others, which signals the triumph of the curator’s art. For something to ponder at length and be drawn into after a first walk through, study Bob Thall’s new large-format black-and-white update of his persistent theme of the existential wanderer in sterile corporate cityscapes—postmodern Atget with brilliant composition. (Michael Weinstein) Through January 25 at ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM

The Craft of Reparations: DePaul Art Museum Connects Local and International State Violence “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo” at the DePaul Art Museum examines the question of reparations by tackling two cases: the well-documented tragedy of Chicago police torture and the ongoing international scandal of Guantánamo Bay.
Framing the Landscape: A Review of Joel Sheesley at Barnsworth Gallery Sheesley began a three-year project in 2017 with The Conservation Foundation to paint landscapes of the Fox River Valley, including the Farnsworth House’s relationship to the Fox River.
The Mastery of Painting: A Review of Fugue State at Victor Armendariz In this timely exhibition of recent painting on that theme, a fugue state is best invoked by the painted digitalizations of Jan Pieter Fokkens.
Finding A Lost Landscape: Edra Soto is Everywhere Right Now Her artistic practice is defined by archiving the history of a place and finding a story in the landscape.
Embodied Landscape: Brittney Leeanne Williams at Monique Meloche Contrary to the female nudes that are often seen in the Western art history canon, Williams challenges the passive nature of this genre.
Sovereign State: Monaco Provides Space For Connections and Community in St. Louis As one of only a handful of truly contemporary, artist-run spaces in the city, Monaco is well-positioned to stage ambitious work and to garner attention from larger institutional spaces.

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