In Chicago, Carl Baratta’s latest solo show Light Up and Be Wonderful is now on view at Western Exhibitions until November 15. Carl Baratta drops the viewer into open-ended narratives, primarily landscapes, where winds swirl menacingly, plant tendrils rise up from subterranean depths, rivers bend violently and mutant figures do battle or find themselves in desperate isolation. In addition to Baratta’s paint and color handling, he utilizes glam rock looks from the Seventies and rubber suits from Japanese monster movies to undercut the heaviness. In regard to his paintings Baratta states: “My open-ended narratives never seem to settle down. When each work is looked at in its entirety, it adds up to a simple conclusion: something is wrong. That’s the feeling I want to start with. The clues that are given won’t yield a solution; they are too busy bouncing off each other and only show how far-reaching the wrongness is. As the scene unfolds, this unnerving feeling ensures that each element and its constituent parts add up to a sense of energetic wonder. I depict imaginative worlds in moments of constant transition, creating a tension between static images and dynamic narrative. If things do not become fixed, they cannot be dismissed or forgotten.”

Carl Baratta’s recent shows have included a solo at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and group shows at the Carl Berg Gallery in Los Angeles, Lump Gallery in North Carolina and Green Lantern in Chicago. Baratta received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and currently lives and works in Chicago.

Currently on view In Chicago is Amy Mayfield’s installation Doog Vs. Live at threewalls. Mayfield’s exhibition marks the beginning of threewalls SOLO program for 2008/09, running until November 15th, 2008.

Known for her paintings that depict ecstatic landscapes located between terrifying and medicated, fear and joy, greed and grandeur, Amy Mayfield’s paintings employ personal-world symbolism to inform fantastic landscapes. Here for threewalls, Mayfield has moved off the substrate, turning the gallery into a funhouse that embodies the feminine, ornate and chaotic worlds that she cultivates in her paintings. Employing patchwork colors, decorative black patterning, photo collage, pins, house plants, a stacked wall of books, and sculptural blobs of poured paint, Mayfield manifests here an environment for the audience to enter and occupy. Mayfield will be giving an artist talk at threewalls October 30th at 6pm.

Amy Mayfield has exhibited her paintings throughout Chicago at Gahlberg Gallery, The Hyde Park Art Center, Bucket Rider and Zolla Lieberman Gallery as well as Franklin Parrasch in New York. In 2007 she exhibited in the MCA 12×12 series. Mayfield received her MFA from the The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006 where she was a recipient of several grants and scholarships.

Now on view through November 15, 2008 at Thomas Robertello Gallery is STATE OF THE UNION, an exhibition comprised of works by John Delk, Noelle Mason, and Conor McGrady. The featured artists’ work critically mirrors the current status of the United States as an ideological gun-toting machine whose devotion to global domination and hegemony manifests as thinly disguised totalitarianism.

Among the works featured in the exhibition are Noelle Mason’s window installation of Mag-lites spelling the word SILENCE in Braille, and an illuminated stained glass that projects a surveillance image of 9/11/2001 hijackers passing through security at the Portland airport. Another work by Mason consists of 10 stitcheries that depict x-rays and infrared images of undocumented immigrants crossing the US/Mexico border illegally. Mason collected the images from the US Border Patrol and Minutemen websites, and then sent the images to Brazil where they we embroidered by Bilu Alcantara in exchange for the amount it would cost her to illegally immigrate to the United States. John Delk contributes a candy-coated American flag, and a drain installed in the gallery floor spewing George Bush’s past five State of the Union speeches, which he has edited to consist solely of fear-inducing buzzwords and phrases. For his part, Conor McGrady offers up four new vignettes that are de-contextualized portraits depicting roles played by those at various levels within the political power machine.

John Delk is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work has been exhibited nationally in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. He received an MFA in 2001 from the School of the Art Institute.

Noelle Mason graduated the School of the Art Institute’s MFA program in 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she is a member of the faculty in the University of Houston’s sculpture department.

Conor McGrady has recently exhibited his work in the one-person exhibitions, New Arcadia at M.Y. Art Prospects, New York and Green and Pleasant Land, Saltworks Gallery, Atlanta. In 2002 he was selected to participate in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.