RECOMMENDED Having cut his photographic teeth on the steel bars of raw and dreary prisons, Scott Fortino now shows his meditative side in color images of lonely vistas of Lake Michigan, soft-focused flowers, and empty and spare modernist interiors, all peaceful, yet replete with flourishes of bold hues and edgy composition that save them from the pages of a glossy magazine. Fortino’s images arrest attention by virtue of the play that he sets up between dreamy contexts of earth, air and water, and the spiky details within them. In Fortino’s most striking image, we see a pier jutting out from the lake shore under a deep blue-black night sky that is streaked by jagged wiry white-light lines that look like aggressive scratches vandalizing the print; with Fortino, disruption is always close to hand. (Michael Weinstein)
Through February 1 at City Gallery, 806 N. Michigan, (312)742-2783.
Life Forms: A Review of Scott Wolniak’s “Crosscurrents” at Goldfinch Scott Wolniak expounds upon the natural world and the effect it has on him—going so far as to invoke the collocation “life-force” to describe the style of his art—in his latest transcendental exhibition at Goldfinch.
Symbols of Life: A Review of Theaster Gates at the New Museum in New York City Gates unites his artistic beginnings as a ceramics sculptor with the impressive amount of objects that he has acquired as an archivist. Titled “Young Lords and Their Traces” it follows the lineage of his artistic and archival practice through multiple times and histories.
Sounding the City: How Experimental Sound Studio Reaches New Audiences Newcity spoke with Olivia Junell, development and outreach director of ESS, about accessibility of sound art, plans for future iterations of the festival and how the main mission of ESS has shifted to accommodate the needs of artists today.
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