RECOMMENDED JUDITH BROTMAN, “White Lies, Delicate Matters,” installation. Walls can talk, or at least they can whisper in your ear a word that can’t be clearly discerned, but puts you in mind of something, though you can’t quite remember what. That name you can’t call to your lips, the song you know four bars of—this uncertainty of language is the effect of Brotman’s “Yesterday, Today, and a Couple of Tomorrows,” a cascading wall of paper circles cut from books, maps, bits of sheet music, wallpaper and gray felt, hung intuitively upon one another, blowing lightly in the wind from the ceiling vents. The work in this show, often sutured together with thin threads and tacked up with specimen pins, plays with language even when there is no explicit text. Tentative masses of yarn and glittery strands act like whimsical speech trembling across a wall. It’s as if you’re floating in white space while a half-audible poem is being played on a tape recorder in the next room—certainly pleasant, though at times all you want is to hear the poem loud and clear, and to be able to reflect on its meaning. “Natural Selections,” from 2005, in which Brotman sutures dead leaves together, making new and surprising forms while maintaining the pleasure of the nearly invisible and the extremely delicate, is a more successful linguistic limbo. (Michelle Tupko) Through January 6 at Chicago Cultural Center
For Us: A Review of "Something from Something" at Engage Projects Kushala Vora and Adia Sykes’ collaboration "Something from Something" tells us as viewers that knowledge, art, creation, inspiration, love—really anything you can think of—has a place of origin.
Women Behind the Lens: A Review of "From Her to Eternity" Courtney Love curates on the street. Just west of Wabash on the corner of Eighth Street, there is a wall of stellar rock star images that includes a special collection made by women photographers over the years.
Looking Down: A Review of Bob Tanner at Perspective After the loss of his wife, Bob Tanner made two photography series, “At Ocean’s Edge” and “At Winter’s Edge,” that are shown in this meditative show filled with graceful visual poetry.
Microcosm: A Review of “Dialogues” at Patron Through each artist-relationship, "Dialogues" offers the viewer a rare opportunity to witness the direct connections that flow through the electric nervous system that both infiltrates and generates Chicago's art world.
