December 2011
1 post
“Respect: Thornton Dial and Gee’s Bend” at Russell...
Published in Time Out Chicago, November 23, 2011
Thornton Dial has worked in bricklaying, steelwork and at a cement plant in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama. The 83-year-old artist’s assemblages—held together by industrial sealing compound and wire fencing—draw on his background in industrial manufacturing. What looks like a baseball pitcher in The Man That Can Play Any Game is surrounded...
November 2011
1 post
“Re: Chicago” at the DePaul Art Museum
Published in Time Out Chicago, October 19, 2011
For “Re: Chicago,” the first exhibition in the DePaul Art Museum’s new building, DPAM asked members of the local art scene, “Who are the notable Chicago artists of past and present?”
Historians, podcasters, curators and critics chime in, selecting many familiar artists. The show includes one of Henry Darger’s ubiquitous paintings of the Vivian...
July 2011
1 post
“The World as Text” at the Center for Book and...
Published in Time Out Chicago, July 13, 2011
When you enter “The World as Text” at Columbia College’s Center for Book and Paper Arts, artist John Preus’s reading room vies for your attention with the dozens of artists’ books and zines that it houses.
A collaboration with students at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Preus’s design relates furniture’s tension...
May 2011
1 post
Ellen Lanyon at Printworks
Published in Time Out Chicago, May 4, 2011
Ten years ago, Ellen Lanyon created a series of pen-and-ink drawings to catalog her collection of odds and ends.In 2003, master printer Kip Gresham translated them into fine facsimile prints, publishing them in five large, fold-out books (on view at Printworks).
The artist returned to those prints to make the collages in “Index Extended,” photocopying...
March 2011
1 post
New Art from New Orleans at Western Exhibitions
Published in Time Out Chicago March 16, 2011
If New Orleans doesn’t leap to mind when you’re asked to name a hotbed of contemporary art, Keith Couser might change your perceptions. After working on Prospect New Orleans, the curator brings three of the biennial’s artists to Chicago—and, thankfully, none of them refer to Mardi Gras, Cajun food or jazz.
Stephen Collier’s airbrushed replica of a...
February 2011
1 post
"Off the Beaten Path" at the Chicago Cultural...
Published in Time Out Chicago, February 9 2011
Both a gathering of impressive art and a call to action, this engaging exhibition—subtitled “Violence, Women and Art”—addresses the question of whether art can foment social change without offering a definitive answer.
Nonprofit curator Art Works for Change intersperses pieces by established artists including Yoko Ono and Louise Bourgeois with...
January 2011
1 post
Lilly McElroy at Thomas Robertello Gallery
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 307 : Jan 13–19, 2011
The year 2009 can’t be characterized by a single catastrophic event, such as the ’08 market crash or the BP oil spill of 2010, but according to Lilly McElroy and hundreds of others, it was a rough year all the same. While the Brooklyn-based artist doesn’t explain why 2009 was so awful for her, she invites the public to contribute...
December 2010
2 posts
"The Daley Show"
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 305.306 : Dec 30, 2010–Jan 12, 2010
In 1988, student David K. Nelson Jr. created an uproar when he displayed Mirth & Girth, an unflattering portrait of Mayor Harold Washington in women’s lingerie—painted shortly after Washington’s death—at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
While many portraits in “The Daley Show” portray Mayor...
"Gender Benders"
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 301 : Dec 2–8, 2010
Emanuel Aguilar is the first man whom Woman Made Gallery has asked to curate one of its shows since it was founded 18 years ago—in response to the representational imbalance between men and women in the art world.
Aguilar, WMG’s preparator, and the River West gallery’s former coordinator Kristen Carter selected 20 artists for...
November 2010
1 post
Violence at the Exhibition Agency
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 300 : Nov 25–Dec 1, 2010
There are no bruised bodies or references to war in “Violence.” Cocurated by St. Louis–based gallery Los Caminos, the show has an original take on its subject, juxtaposing pieces that assault viewers with the more subtle, introverted deconstruction of artworks themselves.
Mathew Paul Jinks’s Sheer Vanishing (Inversion)...
October 2010
1 post
Lewis Baltz at the Art Institute of Chicago
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 293 : Oct 7–13, 2010
Early in his career, Lewis Baltz commented on the bland architecture that went viral in mid-20th-century America. So did the other photographers in the seminal 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape.” Though the 65-year-old artist is still best known as a New Topographics photographer, this...
September 2010
3 posts
Dan Gunn at Lloyd Dobler Gallery
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 292 : Sep 30–Oct 6, 2010
A disappointing sense of nostalgia and lack of critical inquiry have pervaded this year’s local painting exhibitions, such as Columbia College’s “Let There Be Geo,” making Dan Gunn’s self-aware reassessment of the medium most welcome. Unlike many Chicago artists, Gunn simultaneously makes a case for painting’s relevancy...
Quite Strong feminist Chicago design collaborative
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 290 : Sep 16–22, 2010
In 2006, McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers, graphic designer Milton Glaser and superstar book-cover designer Chip Kidd were on a panel, “The Art of the Book,” at New York’s 92nd Street Y. One of the questions they took from the audience, paraphrased by moderator Michael Bierut, was simply, “Why is it that you guys up there are...
Millas y Kilómetros at the National Museum of...
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 287 : Aug 26–Sep 1, 2010
As he drives a delivery truck around Chiapas in Go Colorada (2009), Amin “Katun” Gutierrez carries Chicago with him—literally, in the form of a three-foot-high steel replica of the skyline. The sharp-edged sculpture’s presence suggests both dislocation and its flip side: the occupation of two places at once through the...
August 2010
1 post
"Almost There" at Intuit
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 282 : Jul 22–28, 2010
Peter Anton was painting portraits at the 2005 Pierogi Fest when he met filmmakers Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden. Impressed by the 78-year-old artist’s work, the duo visited him at his East Chicago, Indiana, home and were blown away when they found the daily journals and scrapbooks that Anton had kept for 60 years.
...
July 2010
4 posts
Preserving neon in paint
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 280 : Jul 8–14, 2010
“If the sign designer did their job, all I have to do is really look for the right angle for my composition,” says painter Eric Mecum, 42, who has been documenting the city’s disappearing neon signs on canvas since 2003.
Each painting starts with one of the hundreds of photographs the artist has taken over the years whenever he...
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Daniel Albrigo at...
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 280 : Jul 8–14, 2010
When Genesis Breyer P-Orridge removed all of h/er teeth and replaced them with gold casts of the originals, it was just the latest iteration of a decades-long project: P-Orridge manipulates h/er physical appearance to blur the lines of gender and self, something the Throbbing Gristle cofounder—born Neil Megson—describes as...
Sex meets art in Johalla Projects’ “In a Plain...
Published on the Time Out Chicago Blog, July 3rd, 2010
The Johalla Projects website is quick to mention that “In a Plain Brown Wrapper” is “not an event for the prude”—nor for under-18s. During the June 26 opening, attempts to maintain an objective gaze were met by a sweaty guy in Calvin Klein underwear stuffed with dollar bills grinding against the wall (Emerson Granillo’s three-hour...
"Sound and Vision" at the Art Institute of Chicago
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 279 : Jul 1–7, 2010
The first sight “Sound and Vision” presents is a blank screen accompanied by a droning, metallic scrape and clatter. As you imagine what the sound’s source might be, artist David Hammons suddenly appears onscreen, kicking a bucket down the street. Though Hammons’s video, Phat Free, speaks to the way our senses often operate on...
June 2010
1 post
Desire Market
Published in Proximity #007
It’s mid-afternoon in Bywater, a neighborhood of New Orleans’ 9th ward, and I’m standing in the street with a can of High Life while James Brown accompanies the top of a river boat’s smokestack poking up over the levee as it chugs down the Mississippi. I’m at the Desire Market. I’m having one of the best Sundays in a long awhile.
...
May 2010
1 post
Jessica Labatte at GOLDEN
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 273 : May 20–26, 2010
As we browse her work, we can imagine Jessica Labatte browsing supermarket aisles. The Chicago artist has an eye for ordinary objects overflowing with color—rolls of rainbow duct tape, crinkled plastic wrap—as well as trashy materials such as a matte gray plastic lawn chair and bland carpeting.
“Lazy Shadows” reflects...
April 2010
1 post
"Bad Boys" at Thomas Robertello
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 270 : Apr 29–May 5, 2010
Noelle Mason’s risky choice to flirt with shock art pays off in “Bad Boys,” which investigates, through craft, where violence and masculinity overlap.
Mason spent four years examining an iconic surveillance image of Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to produce the 32”-by-40” cross-stitch Nothing...
March 2010
2 posts
"Let There Be Geo"
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 265 : Mar 25–31, 2010
Leviton A+D Gallery, through Apr 24.
Geometric shapes can propel us out of our bodies via the eye, Newcity critic Jason Foumberg suggests in the essay accompanying “Let There Be Geo.” That ability is what keeps the art in this show from getting too wrapped up in its own nostalgia, as we get lost in works such as Archer Prewitt’s...
Joseph Noderer at Linda Warren Gallery
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 264 : Mar 18–24, 2010
Joseph Noderer’s recent landscapes don’t just map his transition from Chicago to Austin, Texas. The paintings also reflect a clear shift in mood for the artist, who received his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. The work created in his old Chicago neighborhood is darker, highlighting dead trees...
February 2010
2 posts
Modern in America at the Art Institute of Chicago
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 261 : Feb 25–Mar 3, 2010
This is one of the most effective exhibitions we’ve seen at the Art Institute of Chicago in some time—one that suggests early-20th-century American art is what the museum does best.
“Modern in America: Works on Paper, 1900–50s” highlights prints, drawings and watercolors from the Art Institute’s permanent collection....
Laura Letinsky at moniquemeloche
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 259 : Feb 11–17, 2010
The title of Laura Letinsky’s series “The Dog and the Wolf” evokes the space between civilization and the natural world. Like her four photographs, the phrase suggests that space is narrower than we want to admit.
The Canadian-born artist, who’s taught at the University of Chicago since 1994, frequently photographs the...
January 2010
1 post
"Alter Tyson Reeder's Sweater"
Posted on the TOC Blog, January 19th, 2010
SubCity Projects feels like stumbling on a secret. The 6′ x 5′ x 8′ gallery is tucked into artist Candida Alvarez’s tenth-floor studio in the historic Fine Arts Building. It’s viewable only through a window in its door. This month, Tyson Reeder and Andrew Greene take over the closet-like space with an “evolving exhibition.” On Thursday 21 and Friday 22,...
December 2009
1 post
Margo Hoff at Corbett vs. Dempsey
Published in Time Out Chicago / Issue 253 : Dec 31, 2009–Jan 6, 2010
Margo Hoff (1910–2008) was one of the American women artists, often overlooked today, who worked through the same aesthetic and conceptual issues as their more famous male counterparts in the mid-20th century. While in Chicago, from 1933–60, Hoff attended SAIC, exhibited with up-and-coming local art dealers and created work...
November 2009
2 posts
"Artist: Unemployed" Shawnee Barton at LivingRoom...
posted at Chicago Art Map on November 23rd, 2009
In the Great Recession of 2009, real estate brokers turn to curating and artists to making art about being unemployed. Shawnee Barton’s current show at LivingRoom Gallery, “Artist: Unemployed,” puts a 21st century spin on the myth of the starving artist, advocating cheap therapy via photo booths and offering job-hunting advice through fortune...
Dagmar Varady at devening projects + editions
Published in Time Out Chicago, Issue 246 : Nov 12–18, 2009
Beneath Dagmar Varady’s slightly nerdy but refreshing fascination with science is an understanding of its potential to answer metaphysical questions.
Varady has exhibited her work throughout central Europe for several years, presenting concept pieces at expected venues such as Art Basel while collaborating with institutions...
October 2009
4 posts
"Australia" at Concertina Gallery
Posted at Chicago Art Map on October 31st, 2009
When director Baz Luhrmann set out to create a motion picture of a “mythologized Australia,” he probably should have thought twice about introducing any more mythology into a country that, from the perspective of this outside observer, seems somewhat confused on how to approach its own history. The story of Australia cannot be so easily boiled down...
Robert Motherwell at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum...
“An Attitude Toward Reality”
in Time Out Chicago / Issue 243 : Oct 22–28, 2009
American artist Robert Motherwell (1915–91) left a massive body of work ranging from Cubism to Surrealism to Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art—all admirably presented by “An Attitude Toward Reality,” which supports prints, paintings and collages from Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center with just the right...
FLAT 3 at Floor Length and Tux
posted on October 2, 2009 at Chicago Art Map
Light (or the lack of it) brought together the pieces in Floor Length and Tux’s third FLAT show, in which the gallery’s proprietors, artists Catie Olson and EC Brown, cooperate with two or three other artists to create an evening of new work. The loop of simple animated actions or grainy video projections also wove its way throughout the night. The...
"No More Worlds"
Concertina Gallery
Time Out Chicago/Issue 240: Oct 1-7, 2009
It’s exciting to witness the start of an apartment gallery with so much promise. Concertina Gallery occupies the second floor of a building where concertinas (accordion-like instruments) were once manufactured. Some of its first exhibition’s seven artists specifically engage its unconventional space. Madeleine Bailey discreetly embeds...
September 2009
5 posts
A Critical Assessment of the "Twitter Art"...
posted on September 30, 2009 at Art Talk Chicago
A recent portrait of the former Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin brought together images of fluffy clouds, rainbows, cute animals, and a perplexing shot of a Menorah. The artist credited with such a likeness: Portwiture, one of many new Twitter “mash-up” websites creating a portrait of any Twitter-user by mashing up their most frequently...
"I Just Go" at The Elastic Arts Foundation
posted on September 27th, 2009 at Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Map
On December 31st 1986, Tehching Hsieh announced the beginning of a thirteen year-long art project, then stopped making art. On January 1st 2000, he issued a single statement: “I kept myself alive. I passed the December 31st, 1999, Earth.”
Hsieh’s work tests the limits of what many people are willing to call...
Hiroshi Watanabe at Catherine Edelman
posted on September 10th, 2009 at Art Talk Chicago
Catherine Edelman Gallery presents their first showing of photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe, pulling from three of his portfolios: Findings, Suo Sarumawashi, and Kabuki Players.
Watanabe’s prints are certainly well crafted and well displayed, but it’s a shame none from his portrait series were included in this show. Watanabe is a...
"EveryBody! Visual Resistance in Feminist Health...
posted on September 6th, 2009 at Art Talk Chicago and Chicago Art Map
Bonnie Fortune and I-Space, the Chicago gallery of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have put together an impressive exhibition of visual resistance in the women’s health movement that encompasses activist posters, video, performance, and the work of feminist artists both emerging and established.
...
Proust Copied in Graphite: Molly Springfield's...
posted on September 6th, 2009 at Art Talk Chicago
Molly Springfield’s 28 graphite reproductions of the first chapter of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time open the fall season at Thomas Robertello gallery.
To achieve her “translation,” Springfield photocopied pages from every English translation available of Proust’s epic novel and meticulously reproduced the...
July 2009
2 posts
"Pop Sizzle Hum" and "Single Channels
Tony Wight Gallery
Time Out Chicago / Issue 227 : Jul 2–8, 2009
It’s easy to imagine floating through the midnight-blue sky and twisted flora of Dutch artist Jacco Olivier’s Van Gogh–like scenery in Wood (2007), which transcribes the heady experience of post-Impressionist landscape painting into video.
In “Single Channels,” experiments in animation by Olivier, Timothy Hutchings and Allison...
Dutes Miller and “they will not ruin us…”
Western Expeditions
Time Out Chicago / Issue 227 : Jul 2–8, 2009
It takes a moment for unaccustomed eyes to adjust to Dutes Miller’s collages of gay porn, which cover an entire wall of his show “The Ecstasyist.” Their fractured limbs and skin amplify pornography’s attempts to fulfill an insatiable desire. The awkward humor inherent in all porn (artificially splayed bodies, comically intense...
June 2009
1 post
Jesse McLean
“Invisible Tracks,” ThreeWalls
Time Out Chicago / Issue 223 : Jun 4–10, 2009
At a time when even liberal authorities are reluctant to let the world see certain photographs from Iraq, Jesse McLean draws on the power of images from the war there—and the intersection among instant communication, censorship and global conflict.
McLean’s video Clone centers on an image of American...
April 2009
3 posts
M.Ho and The Front Room
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Proximity #4 - Spring 2009
The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis debuted a new exhibition space in early 2008, housed entirely within their Brad Cloepfil-designed 25,200-sq.ft. facilities. Dubbed the “The Front Room,” this space-within-a-space hosts a unique exhibition schedule thrown wide to a variety of projects, groups, and artists,...
Spencer Finch
“Light, Time, Chemistry,” Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Time Out Chicago / Issue 215 : Apr 9–15, 2009
A chilly breeze flows over your face as you stand at the mouth of Spencer Finch’s periscope to view a reflection of the Chicago sky. Ventilation ducts connect the world outside—the light from the overcast sun, the smell and sounds of the street—to the enclosed environment of Rhona...
"Internally Displaced"
at Leviton A+D Gallery
Time Out Chicago / Issue 214 : Apr 2–8, 2009
Enrique Chagoya sees the world through the eyes of the Bush administration in his 2003 lithograph Road Map. The size of the U.S. is grossly distorted, and the map is covered with symbols of economic, military and cultural conquest: dead whales, warships, dynamite, oil rigs—and Uncle Sam idly picking his nose.
Even though...
March 2009
1 post
Nicole Gorden
“Saligia,” Linda Warren Gallery
(this was requested for Proximity Magazine’s website, but they never got it up there)
Just in case we didn’t know that we’re all guilty bystanders in a world stripped bare by a ruling financial elite, Nicole Gordon has luckily dredged up the moralistic allegories of the Netherlandish Renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder to tell us...
December 2008
1 post
Joseph Grigely
“St. Cecilia,” Museum of Contemporary Art
Time Out Chicago / Issue 198 : Dec 11–17, 2008
A sign-language interpreter at a concert must communicate expression, sound and lyrics to fans who can’t hear a single note. Deaf artist Joseph Grigely’s poignant, playful pieces enable hearing viewers to imagine what it’s like to experience music this way, bridging the gap between seeing...
October 2008
1 post
Rodney Graham
at Donald Young Gallery
Time Out Chicago / Issue 192 : Oct 30–Nov 5, 2008
You’ll need to bring a friend to Rodney Graham’s show to activate the Rotary Psycho-Opticon. When someone pedals the attached bicycle, the spotted, starred and swirling contraption spins its circles like a hypno-disc. Yet you may be underwhelmed by the Opticon’s “psycho” impact—or lack thereof.
The Canadian artist...
September 2008
3 posts
"Looks Like Freedom"
at DOVA Temporary Gallery
Time Out Chicago / Issue 185 : Sep 11–17, 2008
AfriCOBRA steals this show. Formed on the South Side in the 1960s to provide a visual manifestation of the Black Power movement, the black artists’ collective created brilliant, African-inspired graphic designs with militant messages. In one of Barbara Jones-Hogu’s vibrant silk-screened posters, a mother and her...
"Transfusion"
at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian
Time Out Chicago / Issue 184 : Sep 4–10, 2008
Evanston’s Mitchell Museum of the American Indian touts itself as the only museum of its kind in Chicagoland. But you’ve seen exhibits like its permanent displays before: They isolate Native objects of the past—empty headdresses, teepee dioramas—under glass, diminishing their cultural, spiritual and...