Ryan Gander Felix provides a stage #8-(Eleven sketches for 'A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor'), 2008

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s current exhibition, Production Site: The Artist’s studio Inside-Out takes a look at the studio not only as a location for production but also as a place where experimentation, performance, failure, and meditation can occur. Organized by Domonic Molon, this exhibition is in connection with the yearlong city wide Studio Chicago project which brings forth the studio as a site and subject. The show consists of a diverse group of artists that work both locally and internationally including; Andrea Zittel, Amanda Ross-Ho, Bruce Nauman, Deb Sokolow, Justin Cooper, Kerry James Marshall, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Nikhil Chopra, Rodney Graham, Ryan Gander, Tactia Dean and William Kentridge.

An overarching playfulness is found throughout many of the works in the gallery; most noticeably in the works of William Kentridge, Justin Cooper, and Amanda Ross-Ho. Kentridge’s video installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003) shows the artist working in his studio in seven different projections. Referencing the French filmmaker Kentridge plays with early special effects and stop motion as he paints, destroys, and interacts with his own creations.

Amanda Ross-Ho, Frauds for an inside job, 2008

Amanda Ross-Ho’s installation, Frauds for an Inside Job (2008) is in fact her former studio. Cut apart and reassembled as leaning “paintings”, a presentation that she often uses, Ross-Ho presents the objects that are often found on her studio walls. A poster of Puff Daddy and Notorious B.I.G., paint splatters, buttons, a basket, and a Beijing Opera Mask are all disclosed as references and inspiration.

Justin Cooper’s Studio Visit (2007),shot while the artist was in residency at Skoheagen, is shown through the perspective of the artist in a state of frenzy. As Cooper attempts to create a still life and fails, miserably might I add, we are shown a vulnerable side of the artist as they create. The studio becomes a site of private failure.

Kerry James Marshall, 7am Sunday Morning, 2003

Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out will on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art
Chicago until May 30th.

Up for the Down Stroke is the title of a new exhibition of paintings by artist David Leggett. The exhibition, which is on view at 65GRAND in Chicago, makes use of humorous yet irreverent imagery and text that confronts everyday issues of race, class, sexuality and religion. While the paintings hardly offer any solution to these issues, they do provide a tension between humor and disgust that demands engagement from the viewer. Leggett’s social observations of the commonplace shed light on cultural byproducts such as lyrics from rap songs and contemporary and historical cartoons to reveal certain absurdities in our daily lives which often are so widely accepted that they become rarely examined.

The Chicago-based artist was born in Massachusetts and is a graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Up for the Down Stroke marks the first solo exhibition for the artist, who recently completed group shows at the Hyde Part Art Center and the Zolla Lieberman Gallery, both in Chicago.

On view at the Art Institute of Chicago until May 23 is Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s work Always After (The Glass House).  Ovalle has gained international recognition for a diverse, conceptually rigorous body of work-both activist-inspired public art and studio-based objects-that consist of formally arresting, often technically complex, poetic meditations on aesthetics, nature, and modernity.

His 2006 work Always After (The Glass House) is the fifth installment in a series of film-based works—created between 2000 and 2006—that directly engage the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. The architect serves as a stage from which Manglano-Ovalle conducts a self-reflexive critique of prevailing notions of “failed modernity.” Despite the many broken promises of modernity, the artist has said, “So much has actually come to fruition….We do live in glass houses.” Shot entirely on location at Crown Hall, van der Rohe’s 1950 school of architecture at the IIT campus in Chicago, the film documents the 2005 ceremonial dedication of the building’s renovation during which the architect’s own grandson broke the windows with a sledgehammer. Manglano-Ovalle captured the entirety of the action and its aftermath on high-speed film, which when played back at normal speed, appears protracted. This combined with the decision to edit all direct indications of the original event from the final display-and an atmospheric soundtrack strategically intercut with periods of silence, resulted in a pared down, nearly abstract image. Panning close-ups show the crystalline shards of broken glass being pushed with a wide broom alongside the feet of anonymous passers-by. Lacking the specificity of context, viewers are left to interpret the scene for themselves.

Manglano-Ovalle has exhibited his work at acclaimed institutions both nationally and internationally.  Currently Manglano-Ovalle is presenting a new work at Documenta 12, Kassel, Germany (2007).  He is represented by Max Protetch Gallery, New York.

Now at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Production Site reexamines the artist’s studio as subject, presenting work that documents, depicts, reconstructs, or otherwise invokes that space, revealing how the studio functions as a place where research, experimentation, production, and social activity intersect.

The exhibition reflects and addresses the pivotal role of the studio in artists’ practice while alluding to its enduring status in the popular imagination. The works that comprise Production Site include multi-channel video projections, photographic light-boxes and installations, and life-sized fabrications of artists’ studios — real and imagined — that either extol the virtues of the studio or problematize the preconceived and often highly romanticized notions associated with it. The exhibition provides the viewer with a look at how some of the most compelling artists of our time have demystified, remystified, and reconsidered this site within the physical and conjectured space of the work of art.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, February 9 and 10, Mumbai-based Nikhil Chopra performed Yog Raj Chitrakar: Memory Drawing XI in the MCA galleries. Chopra brought the artist’s studio into the gallery using a variety of costumes and props, and wall drawings that he created during the performance. These will remain in the gallery as an installation for the duration of the Production Site exhibition. During his performance, Chopra assumed the fictional persona of a Victorian-era figure named Yog Raj Chitrakar, who is based loosely on his grandfather. His last name, Chitrikar, literally translates into picture- or mask-maker in Sanskrit. Chopra inhabited this character for the two days, changing into masculine and feminine costumes that challenge assumptions about race and gender. While performing, Chopra made drawings that reflect on Production Site, blackening the walls with his obsessive charcoal drawings to emphasize the studio as a place where an artist’s internal anxieties and struggles are confronted and resolved.

The exhibition is organized by MCA Curator Dominic Molon, and features the work of Nikhil Chopra, Deb Sokolow, Justin Cooper, Tacita Dean, Amanda Ross-Ho, William Kentridge, Andrea Zittel, Kerry James Marshall, Rodney Graham, Ryan Gander, Bruce Nauman, and John Neff.  Production Site is presented as part of Studio Chicago, a year-long collaborative project that focuses on the artist’s studio through October 2010.

Western Exhibitions in Chicago is currently presenting The Power of Selection (Part I), the first in a series of three exhibitions organized by Chicago-based artist and independent curator Ryan Travis Christian. The exhibition, which features works by Alika Cooper, Mike Rea, Allison Schulnik, Marissa Textor, and Eric Yahnker, loosely explores the idea of contemporary figuration. Works in the exhibition range from a massive anthropomorphic wooden sculpture by Mike Rea, who also exhibited in DailyServing.com’s 1000 DAYS exhibition in Los Angeles last May, to new video work by recent DailyServing.com interviewee, Allison Schulnik.

The exhibition series is designed to bring new creative talent to the Chicago area by artist who rarely exhibit in that region. Curator Ryan Travis Christian works diligently, as he has noted, “to increase the circulation of contemporary artwork”, not only in Chicago, but also as a correspondent for Fecalface.com and through his daily artist selection through Facebook and Beautiful/Decay.com. The young artist and curator has organized recent exhibition including West, Wester, Westest at FFDG, San Francisco, SPORTS at Synchronicity, Los Angeles, and Control C, Control V at EbersMoore Gallery in Chicago.

In it’s final week at  Thomas Robertello Gallery is an exhibition of new photographs and video by Chicago-based artist Adam Ekberg.  Continuing with the use of lens-based phenomena, humble celebratory gestures, and primitive constructs, Ekberg further develops two distinct bodies of work; images created in the woods or nature, and images using his apartment as stage set.

While similar to the performative aspects of Ekberg’s interiors, the outdoor imagery, boundless in many ways, allows the artist to abandon certain restrictive elements and celebrate a personal communion with nature. The positioning of a flashlight on the ground creating an illogically placed beacon of light on the horizon, a duet of balloons in Precise Equilibrium; one helium and one filed with the artist’s breath, and a thrown handful of glitter all point toward self-portraiture minus the actual subject. In his video of a fuse slowly burning on the pavement, the gnarled line gradually disintegrates staining the pavement with a residue of gunpowder, evoking a whole life with beginning, end, unexpected twists, a past, present, and future.

Adam Ekberg resides in Chicago and graduated the School of the Art Institute’s MFA Photography program in 2006. Concurrently with this exhibition, he is participating in Elements of Photography at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, organized by Michael Green and (Re)Collect at the Hyde Park Art Center, curated by Francesca Wilmott.

Weatherbee’s Revenge is the title of a new exhibition featuring works by Mark Mulroney, which opened last night at Chicago’s Ebersmoore Gallery. When the artist was a child, his mother gave him a book titled “What’s Happening To Me?” in hopes of answering all of his questions concerning puberty and sex. For the show, Mulroney continues his irreverent imagery through a new series of works on paper which explore his youthful and naive understanding of sex as an adolescent. The book’s illustrations and texts proved to be completely misleading and altered the artist’s understanding of sex. As a response to the comedy and horror that ensued, the artist has created the work in Weatherbee’s Revenge.

Last spring, Mulroney participated in DailyServing’s 1000 Days exhibition in Los Angeles. The artist has also exhibited with Mixed Greens in New York City, Gregory Lind Gallery in San Francisco and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. The artist received his MFA from University of California at Santa Barbara, and currently lives and works in Rochester, NY.