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.

courtesy of the artist

Chicago artist Josue Pellot deploys several mediums and styles in order to examine his Puerto Rican roots as transplanted into the quintessential American experience – that is, as mediated by pop culture and consumerism in his current exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Thus, he displays a photomontage of the iconic fortress El Morro in Puerto Rico in which it is conflated with a supermercado/laundromat/liquor store.  In fact, many architectural structures in the United States do mimic this famous castle, and his neon sculpture of conquistadors and the native population’s revenge, 1493, was originally installed in the windows of La Municipal, a supermarket in Humboldt Park, during the last Puerto Rican Day Parade.

In Temporary Allegiance, the artist has placed in the gallery a flag that is an amalgam of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags, more specifically the remains of what was originally used by the artist in a installation/performance in Puerto Rico, after damage sustained by local police interference.  Sitting limply in the gallery as sculpture, one can only guess at the resonance and tensions encapsulated in its history.

courtesy of the artist

Josue Pellot received a BFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2003 and an MA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2006.  His work has been presented in several exhibitions in the Chicago area and in San Juan, Puerto Rico including a performance at the Museo de Arte de San Juan.

A new Chicago alternative space named Slow, which opened its doors to the public this fall, is presenting the exhibition for the time being featuring new work by Chicago-based artists Benjamin Bellas and C.C. Ann Chen. Artist Benjamin Bellas creates work that connects philosophy, music, language, literature and visual art through the combined media of performance, video and sculpture. Often the work is object-based and becomes activated and complete only through the accompanying text. For this exhibition, one of Bellas’ projects consists of an 11 square foot section of the Pritzker Pavilion Great Lawn from Millenium Park vacuum sealed in a space bag and left to expand. The associated text poetically discusses the relationship between civilization and the land through the eyes of Bellas’ personal interactions. Artist C.C. Ann Chen works through painting, drawing and photography to examine the broad concept of space, both in urban and natural environments.  The artist will focus on universal events in the natural landscape, creating drawings and paintings from memory in an attempt to recreate these observations.

Both artists attended and currently teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before attending SAIC, C. C. Ann Chen received her BA in Architectural History from the University of Maryland and Bellas received his BA from the University of Pittsburgh. The works in for the time being can be viewed at Slow each Saturday from 12-5pm.

Los Angeles-based photographer Melanie Schiff opened her New York solo debut with Horton & Liu gallery last week. The exhibition, titled Mirror and Mastodon, features 8 mid-sized photographs that investigate ideas of spirituality and collective experience through the intersection of man and nature. While the images don’t contain any figures, the influence of man on the landscape is evident. The photograph titled Mastodon features an open field with a mysterious tree and root system that has fallen — twisted, blackened and reclaimed by the land. The photograph Mirror depicts two images simultaneously,  containing both a raw hill or cliff with the image of a graffiti covered concrete embankment.

Melanie Schiff: Mastadon

Schiff was born in Chicago and is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Mirror and Mastodon marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since her inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The artist has exhibited internationally with recent exhibitions at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Uschi Kolb in Karlsruhe in Germany. The artist has forthcoming exhibitions in 2010 at the Seattle Art Museum and P.S.1 MoMA in New York.