Featured solo-artist Friedhard Kiekeben is a master of new design technique, but not necessarily of message. The artist flirts with old and new printmaking techniques and delivers you in the arms of up-close digital information with at Caro d’Offay Gallery in Wicker Park. The sound artistic digital designs on paper and plates are of no wonder for the seasoned Columbia College Chicago professor. It is the artist’s safer printmaking means that remain his most intriguing factor. His special salt-instead-of-acid technique cuts the setting-time in less than half and is easier on the artist’s health. The technique is best showcased in the focal point of the exhibit, a silver and purple variously paneled wall-sized salt etching. With digital images made of huge vertical panels going every which way, the artist breaks conventions with every step and turn he takes. Far away the silver component is dull. Close up, a diamond-like steady luminance overcomes the mind with irregularities everywhere within contrast of its entirety. Disoriented is an accurate feeling. The other prints, paper tiles, are more regular. However, these pieces show variant and vibrant Easter-egg colors induced with a certain vinegar power-stamped-out forty times over to create a family of design to enjoy, not to mull over. (Stacie Boudros)
Through June 6 at Caro d’Offay Gallery 2204 W. North, (773)235-7400.
Repurposing AI: A Review of Stephanie Dinkins at Stamps Gallery While this show is timely for everyone, I consider its setting within a university art gallery and emerging tech hub like the city of Ann Arbor a subversive provocation which Dinkins invites the greater public—including members of the university community—to consider our own positionality to AI and technology.
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
Weather Patterns: A Review of John Santoro at McCormick Gallery Talking about the weather, as painter John Santoro notes, was once just a mundane space filler. Now, with more than a few “warmest year on record” behind us, the weather has become a significant concern.
