Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 1 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 1, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print on aluminum panel (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24" & Bibiana Suárez, Aves raras (mexicanos) no. 2 / Strange Birds (Mexicans) no. 2, 2005-2011, archival inkjet print (map courtesy of the University of Chicago’s Special Collections), 24 x 24"

2012 has arrived and it can mean only one thing: the apocalypse. Will the End Times be ushered in by the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar reaching its end date? We can’t be sure until late December! What has become painfully certain, however, is that we are in an election year. And, while the economy looms large on the minds of most Americans, immigration is not far behind. Will America eventually choose a candidate who would grant “amnesty” (read: anything resembling legal status or *gasp citizenship!) to the millions of undocumented people living and working in this country, ushering in the likely demise of the U.S.? Or, will we the people elect a man patriotic enough to send all the illegal Cuban, Chinese, Honduran, and Southeast Asian immigrants back to where they came from; namely Mexico? The fate of the country and the soul of freedom hang in the balance!

At least that would seem to be the choice as presented by the Republican candidates during the never-ending cycle of G.O.P. primary debates. The language surrounding immigration, espoused by the candidates as well as other jingoist hardliners, has become so vitriolic and so reduced that hyperbole strategically crowds out any sober dialogue that addresses the complexity of the issue or pathos for the individuals most effected by immigration enforcement.

Bibiana Suárez’s exhibition entitled Memoria (Memory) at the Hyde Park Art Center attempts to catalyze that discussion through playful moderation. Tracing the influence of Latino culture in America, Suárez expresses hope and frustration while eluding anything that would resemble rhetorical bombast. The show is such a disarmingly tempered analysis of themes of Pop culture representations, identity, labor, and the dynamics of integration that it takes all the steam out of this hot button issue.

Bibiana Suárez, Ai pledch aliyens no. 1, 2005-2011, acrylic paint and digital transfer on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

In order to create her large-scale installation of mixed media paintings and ink-jet prints, Suárez borrows the format of the game “Memory” in which players selectively turn over cards placed face down in order to find pairs of matching cards. The gallery walls are filled with one hundred and eight “playing cards” sized 23.5 inches by 23.5 inches with images depicting maps, body parts, historical images, or various phrases in English, Spanish, and Spanglish. Text boxes featuring an assortment of inclusive and derogatory names for the Latino Diaspora are meant to depict the “backs” of the playing cards. The game aspect of the installation invites viewers to seek connections within the available images. It also serves as a metaphor for the ever-shifting boundaries of integration within American culture as well as the gamesmanship of the national debate.

Bibiana Suárez, Mariel 1980, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

Certain matches, such as two images titled Yo quiero no. 1/ I Want no. 1 and Yo quiero no. 2/ I Want no. 2 depicting the Chihuahua from mid-90’s Taco Bell ads, have already been made on the north and south facing walls. Not all of these combinations are identical matches, however. Conceptual matches add nuance to the artist’s themes. For example, Negrita tejaricana/ Black Texarican, an image of a brown faced, dark haired girl is matched with Blanquita tejaricana /White Texarican, the same girl with blonde hair and pink skin. Through these types of expanded connections, Suárez is able to shape a broader conversation about innocence and identity.

The exhibition does a good job of cataloging the checkered history of Latino representation throughout American popular culture, from Desi Arnaz and West Side Story to Speedy Gonzales and the Frito Bandito. These elements are presented dispassionately, as things that exist for better or worse. Their influence on how America understands Latino culture, and the message that is being reverberated back to that culture is left up to the viewer to decide. The more urgent aspects of Latino identity are treated in a similar manner. Two black and white images titled Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 1/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 1 and Campamento de trabajadores emigrantes después del fuego no. 2/ Migrant Labor Camp After Fire no. 2 depict burned bodies lying in the remains of a makeshift labor camp. Suárez acknowledges tragedy and suffering as part of the experience of Latinos without expressing any grand political statements about labor, poverty, or social justice. The artist walks a fine line between making political art and utilizing more conceptual archiving strategies adept at bypassing authoritative editorializing.

Bibiana Suárez, Pulmones / Lungs, 2005-2011, acrylic paint on aluminum panel, 24 x 24 inches

And maybe in the end that is the best course for creating a quiet space for contemplation about a decidedly loaded topic. Rather than strive to assemble an artistic broadside capable of matching the grandiosity of the apocalyptic language that surrounds the immigration debate, Suárez offers viewers a place to reassess and possibly heal. Memoria (Memory) may be a sober show, but it is also hopeful. The match for a piece titled Corazón herido/ Wounded Heart is a panel called Corazón cosido/ Sewn Heart.

Memoria (Memory) will be on view at Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, IL through March 25.

The aftermath of the Oakland Police's continued assault on occupiers and demonstrators. #StandWithOakland #OccupyOaklandd

Much of the news coverage of the violence in Oakland stemmed from videos and twitter pictures posted online by the protestors themselves. The New York Times published demonstrator’s twitpics with their original hashtags (The aftermath of the Oakland Police’s continued assault on occupiers and demonstrators. #StandWithOakland #OccupyO http://twitpic.com/75xhe3) insisting on the savagery of the police. Cinéma vérité clips of young people rushing to Olsen’s aid in front of a wall of riot police quickly became available and were broadcast alongside film captured by news crews. Indeed the OWS protests, like the right-wing Tea Party protests before them, are ready-made events for the 24-hour news spectacle.

Viktor Koretsky, Africa Fights, Africa Will Win!, 1971, Poster on paper. Ne boltai! Collection.

The amplified spectacle of the skirmish in Oakland tells a horrifying story of disproportionate police action, a brutal crackdown. Wisely, the protestors did not publish pictures of the bottles, rocks, kitchen utensils, or M-80 explosives O.P.D. officers allege were hurled their way. Nor did their hashtags mention any taunting or instigation, particularly the types of provocations that would prompt standard practice crowd dispersal tactics commonly used by police in urban areas, atrocious as those tactics are known to be. Media savvy demonstrators understand that the populist rhetoric of the movement – their broad message of discontent over institutionalized disparity ingrained within the economic system – is easily distorted by boisterous detractors, and that the messaging battle will be won with resonant images and symbols capable of stirring public sympathies. To that effect, the grievous events in Oakland were remarkably useful.

Coincidentally, it was on the morning of October 25^th that I visited the “Vision and Communism” exposition at the Smart Museum on the University of Chicago campus. While the future luminaries of Classical Economic theory toiled just a few buildings away, and only a few hours before the first images were broadcast from Oakland, I was perusing Communist propaganda posters by mid-Century Soviet illustrator Viktor Koretsky. Like the twitpics and videos that would come later in the day, the images I saw at the Smart Museum were grim, emotional, and easily digestible.

Viktor Koretsky, American Policy (Internal/External), 1970, Poster. Ne boltai! Collection.

The original maquette for a poster titled “American Policy” (1970’s) features two vignettes of uniformed men abusing their respective captives. The image on the left shows cops beating a defenseless black man, while the image on the right shows soldiers standing over a half-naked body in a burning village. These parallel images of suffering are reflected in the lenses of the sunglasses on the tightly cropped face of a scowling “big boss man” character – a symbol of bureaucratic authority. Koretsky was referencing the struggle for civil rights in America and the war in Vietnam in order to vilify America’s ideal of freedom and justice as rhetorical hypocrisy. Outside of their respective contexts, Koretsky’s poster and the images from Oakland bear a striking resemblance.

One of the valuable things about seeing Koretsky’s original maquettes is that they reveal the importance of collage in the process of creating one of the illustrator’s posters. While the rendering of the boss man character in “American Policy” is similar to a cartoon, the vignettes of the police and the soldiers have a certain photographic quality that suggests they may have been sourced from newspaper images. Incorporating photo-journalism into his images allowed Koretsky to manipulate the aura of authenticity contained within the photographs for the purpose of denouncing his country’s ideological enemy. The maquettes reveal how a persuasive partisan argument can be framed around a relatively disinterested document.

Viktor Koretsky. A Solid Peace for the World!, 1965, Poster on paper. Ne boltai! Collection.

The exhibtion contains a handful of more classic examples of what might be expected from a show about Soviet propaganda (also quite a few unexpectedly powerful posters expressing solidarity with black South Africans during apartheid), though a surprising number of posters speak knowingly of the conflicts that challenged mid-century America, i.e. foreign war, social and economic justice, and the growth of the military industrial complex. Koretsky’s posters rouse an emotional reaction not only because he was a master propagandist, but also because there are elements of truth behind what he produced. That is what makes these posters more difficult to ignore than the rote images of hypernationalistic sacrifice, happy-faced factory workers, or benevolently smiling political leaders that were typical of the Socialist Realism canon.

But even the truthfulness of the posters does not make them true. They are still works of propaganda and propaganda always manipulates facts for political ends. As I watched the images from Oakland flood the airwaves on October 25, I saw a movement documenting an ugly episode in its brief history, and simultaneously intensifying the construction of an argument.

“Vision and Communism will be on view at Smart Museum at the University of Chicago in Chicago, IL until January 22, 2012.

Daniel Baird’s video piece, “And Ever,” images a crowd of people looking up at the sky in awe. The tape is clearly found footage, as the characters’ fashions are obviously dated, 1980’s. We observe the group, standing on risers, watching a spectacle up above them. Their expressions are of reverence and giddy excitement as the camera pans through the masses, from one face to another in groups of 5-6 people at a time, a boyscout troop, an older couple. Something big and amazing is happening.

Daniel Baird, still from "And Ever", video, 2011, courtesy of the artist.

And then as they wait, eyes to the sky in anticipation, the emotions on their faces transform gradually into concern and confusion. Yes, something big is happening here, but it isn’t what we expected to occur. People cry and cover their mouths, or they look away, some collapse in despair. Something big happened indeed. And finally the crowd begins to disperse, some in bewilderment, some in tears, some evidently just speechless.

We never catch a glimpse of the disaster itself, only the players’ reactions to it. Though this viewer certainly has a hunch about the nature of the tragedy (the Challenger explosion, maybe?), it remains a subtlety. The real action is the human drama. The spectacle of the unknown catastrophe becomes the spectacle of the varied human responses to it. We empathize with these affectations, even to the point of wondering how we might perform in such a situation. What’s a normal human reaction to tragedy?

Daniel Baird, still from "And Ever", video, 2011, courtesy of the artist.

Baird really nailed it with this piece, showing at Hungryman Gallery in Chicago among the delights of the exhibition, “Ruins,” on view through October 23. Check out some of Baird’s other video works, including the Endymion pieces, as well as his installation work. They are accompanied in the show by the paintings of Russell Leng.

Additionally, Baird is featured in upcoming exhibitions in Maastricht, Netherlands; Missoula, Montana; and Chicago. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more work from this up-and-comer.

Alison Ruttan, Mullet, ballpoint pen on inkjet print, 2006, courtesy of the artis

In the increasingly rigorous quest for knowledge acquisition and verification, photography and science are uneasy bedfellows. Allison Grant‘s curatorial statement for Our Origins, showing at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, puts it so: “Like science, photography offers arrangements of information, pulled out of the complexity of the world as a whole, presented with seemingly impartial clarity.” Sure, data in visual form can aid us in more fully analyzing and authenticating abstract concepts; it can contribute to a collectively shared, reproducible, foundational knowledge base.

But, after years of convenient digital manipulation built upon decades more of tediously produced and often lo-fi, though no less convincing, visual fictions–from spirit photography to Stalin’s ‘retouched’ propaganda–if there’s one thing we’ve learned about photography, if not yet science, it’s that seeming ‘evidence’ can be deceiving. That’s not even to mention the now relatively widespread practice of illustrating, and claiming new if sometimes unfounded comprehensibility in, sophisticated hypotheses by way of compelling pieces of information design. (GOOD Magazine, I’m talking to you.) In this, it’s clear that images, not only in their contents, but in their arrangements and relationships to one another, can tell a misleading story.

In its approach, Eric William Carroll’s G.U.T. Feeling series featured in the show, is reminiscent of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, one of the original masters of the beguilingly incomplete visual account. Carroll gathers found scientific documents and his original drawings and photos in a classification that seeks a coherent grand narrative, while also taking humorous comfort in its impossibility.

Penelope Umbrico, Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, inkjet prints, 2006-ongoing, courtesy of the artist

More often than deliberate misdirection, though, both science and photography engage in presenting a purportedly complete picture as a culturally or biologically shared phenomenon while removing it from its context. Though I haven’t seen Penelope Umbrico‘s 7,626,056 Suns From Flickr in it’s entirety—like most installations of the work, the partial in this show only exhibits a grid of a couple hundred of them—I already feel like it’s everywhere. Haven’t seen the suns yet? Sure you have. Each of these few million snapshots pulled from the popular photo-sharing website, feature our nearest star as the main character. You’ve already experienced multitudes of these sun shining/setting images, just like in Umbrico’s collection. What you haven’t experienced, and the absence of which her obsessive compilation emphasizes for us, is each of the unique circumstances in which those photos were captured.

Aspen Mays, Punched Out Stars 2, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Golden Gallery

While Aspen Mays’s Punched Out Stars highlight their vacancies much more aggressively. Rather than depicting the suns of other galaxies in her images of night skies, Mays chooses to redact them, literally removing them with a hole punch, precisely asserting the lack of information present. And here the show highlights the use of photography in pursuits of scientific endeavor as both powerfully illuminating and uneasily incomplete, while also articulating the insufficiency of the scientific effort itself. There are just so many gaps in our knowledge and thus gaps in our ability to accurately represent that knowledge.

Our Origins is on view at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography through October 15.

Theaster Gates, Love Seat, cement, wood, fabric and glass, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

Outmoded by street festivals, public music events, movies in the parks, and trips to the beach, Chicago’s summertime visual art scene is a desert of options. Dominated by loosely-themed group shows and limited gallery hours, art spaces choose to focus on scheduling studio visits and re-strategizing programming, all but closing their doors to the public.

Kavi Gupta is arguably no exception, but the lure of the gallery artists in their simply and straightforwardly-titled group show, Summer, up through September 3, was enough to draw my interest. Stepping out of the 104 degree, 100% humid exuberance of a Chicago August, into the stark, air-conditioned quiet of the gallery space, the works in this show reflect a shared, and for me mutual, sense of wildness contained.

Theaster Gates‘s sculptural pieces, uniform stacks of plates entombed in box-shaped cement, yearn to be unpacked, freed from their confinement. While Loveseat, the tattered, decripit, side-view of a sofa also encased in cement speaks more to times past, loss, decay, and eventual interment, but with a nod toward the savage process of decomposition controlled.

Antonia Gurkovska Untitled (AG12) oil, acrylic, enamel paint, staples on canvas, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

A large painting, Untitled, by Antonia Gurkovska unexpectedly reveals itself. Upon approach, pastel pours give way to vague art historically familiar figures undulating on a background of meticulous rows of staples. Something about it is both primitive and prim in a juxtaposition that evokes a feeling of being let in on a secret–whispers devious yet restrained.

Curtis Mann, Night Sky, chemically altered chromogenic development print, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

Curtis Mann reliably delivers with his Night Sky, a mural grid of chemically treated photos, as, moving up off the horizon line, stars become tiny explosions, become splatters of light. It is spectacular and disturbing in its dazzling and subsequent collapsing of the image.

Nathaniel Donnett, Treason in the Land of Melanosites, mixed media, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

And finally, Nathaniel Donnett‘s collage-drawing, a boy, his head enigmatically composed of a black trash bag, carrying a giant, obviously burdensome chess piece. I don’t quite have it all figured out, but the title, Treason in the Land of Melanosites, makes a nod to skin pigmentation somehow gone awry, the child’s t-shirt references Tutenkhamen and (Michael?) Jackson, among others, with a prominent gold necklace stating “King” hanging around the chess piece’s de-facto neck. I struggle to put together pieces of a puzzle that isn’t yet complete, but one thing’s sure: wherever this kid is going with the strain of his gamepiece, it feels strangely hopeful. Donnett’s work will be featured in a solo show at Kavi Gupta in September, an opportunity to pick up more clues from this sphinx.

And with that, I head back out into the heat.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 5. They meant for it to fail., 2011, graphite and acrylic on paper mounted to panel, 30x22", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

“People don’t like to read art.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating, tongue in cheek, slightly hipster-ish title you’d expect from a show featuring just such a group of young artists. “We acknowledge not everyone will enjoy this text+art stuff. And we don’t care, because we say it’s important.” But taken a bit less literally, as I had initially interpreted the title, it gets at the idea that people don’t like to derive meaning, to decipher, art. So in this way, perhaps the language in these text-based pieces helps us derive meaning more concretely; the verbage helps us “read” the works more deeply.

Kirsten Stoltmann, You Will Never Be Punk, 2011, oil paint Sharpie on magazine pages, 10x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

The offering in Western Exhibition’s group show sweeps the spectrum in terms of media—collage, drawing, sculpture, video, artist books. And in terms of voice as well. The labored, meditative collages of Meg Hitchcock, each one fashioned from thousands of tiny cut-out squares of individual type are juxtaposed against Kirsten Stoltmann’s loud, sharply funny, colorful sharpie drawings on pages from fashion magazines. One of her models declares, “To fart or not to fart.,” as she looks oh so forlorn with her hand to her cheek. Cat Glennon’s “Fuck This” spelled out with cigarette butts and her “You Don’t Need to Read It” in which the words “you don’t need to read into it, you just need to read it” overlaid with a check from a greasy spoon, dead matches, and playing cards, speak of grungy coffee shop angst.

Meg Hitchcock, detail of In the Day of My Trouble (Psalm 86), 2009, letters cut from the Chandogya Upanishad, 12x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Simon Evans’s pyramid-shaped sculpture, “Monument for Sun Related Events,” is one of the most startlingly intimate pieces in the exhibit. Lined, yellow legal paper covers the pyramid, affixed to which are snippets of hand-written text. An inner world emerges in sentence fragments. Somehow these thoughts, memories really, are a stream-of-consciousness confessional, and at the same time, they’re so familiar you can almost recall, from your own past, the moments he spins forth. It was such a guilty pleasure to read, as if peeking into someone’s diary.

Simon Evans, Monument for Sun Related Events, 2008, pyramidal sculpture covered in lined yellow legal paper with blue and red ball point pen, 28x20x20", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Whatever an art lover’s appetite for “reading,” whether compelled by a quick glance that packs a punch aesthetically or by more of an in-depth verbal communion with the pieces, from bubble gum beach fiction to heavy tomes of autobiography, the work in this show provides for all preferences, except of course for those people who really don’t like to read art.

“People don’t like to read art” is on view at Western Exhibitions in Chicago through August 13.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

Seth Curcio: So Mike, its been almost a year and half since you participated in the DailyServing  1000 DAYS exhibition at the Scion Installation gallery space in LA. What have you been up to lately? Tell me a little about the projects that you have been working on?

Michael Rea: After LA, I was out in San Francisco for a solo show at a down town office building 101 California.  After that, I was a group show at Western Exhibitions where I showed the Tasvo Maneaters Part 1 which later went on to show at Next art fair in Chicago.  Last spring, my work was exhibited in a group show at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. The show was curated by Vallerie Cassel-Oliver and was titled Hand+Made The Performative Impluse in Art and Craft. For the show at CAMH, I rebuilt the instruments for my 2004-05 performance piece I Yell Because I Care. The Instruments were displayed along with a video of the performance. After returning for the show in Houston, I began work on a solo show at Ebersmoore Gallery. Around August I took a break and traveled to Darmstadt, Germany to build a site specific sculpture as part of a residency/exhibition called Forest Art. After returning in September I seem to have spent every waking moment in the studio preparing for the show at Ebersmoore Gallery.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: In addition to your exhibition at Ebersmoore, you are included in the exhibition Inside Out at the Northern Illinois University’s Art Museum. Tell me a little about what is on view at each show.

MR: Well the show at the NIU art museum is a group show curated by Karen Brown, a faculty member in NIU’s art department. All of the  work in the show has a connection in some way to clothing/garments. There is a real nice variety of work in the the show. The two pieces that I am showing are Olympia and a Prosthetic Suit for Stephen Hawking W/ Japanese Steel. While Olympia seems to fit into the show a little more traditionally due to the use fabric and latch-hooking, It was really nice to show the the Stephen Hawking suit in this context.

The exhibition at Ebersmoore Gallery consists of work I made over the last year. In the main gallery space there is a large cannon like structure titled Benita. The cannon begins in the gallery and penetrates through the gallery wall and the living space adjacent to the galley pointing towards an exterior window.  Surrounding the cannon are multiple kegs, a bong, and a collar and chain tethered to the gun. There is also a scope a top the cannon, which has a video loop of a shower scene taken from the film Stripes. Oddly enough the video’s composition is rather similar to that of Les demoiselles D’avion. Viewers are invited to climb up and sit in the cockpit of the cannon. In the living space along with the 20′ barrel I have a few works on paper, which I have worked on throughout the last year.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Much of your work is derived from, or abstractly references specific films. Constructing these objects out of wood essentially renders them useless, and they become stand-ins for real and imagined forms. So, I’ve got to ask, if you could activate these sculptures who would you like to see tethered to a death star-like ray gun surrounded by multiple kegs and a bong, and what would he or she being doing?

MR: Well I was considering using a muscular young man at the opening, but did not have time to place and filter the Craig’s List ad.  I wanted my friend’s brother to do it, but he moved away from Chicago.  He would have been perfect. Stylish, bitchy, young, works out all the time, and parties when he is not at work or in the gym. I figure I would have had him wear an outfit he would have normally worn to work at Sidetracks, and just had him drink, flirt and pout.

Images Courtesy of Ebersmoore Gallery

SC: Since you have had such a productive year culminating in the residency in Darnstadt and then these concurrent exhibitions in Chicago, what do you think will be the next object that you will tackle in the studio?

MR: Well I have been talking about making a video. A short remake of the pottery scene from Ghost. The pottery wheel will be replaced with a table saw. I suspect the dust sticking to flesh, respirators, and ear protection may spice things up in an aesthetically pleasing fashion.   I have also been thinking about making a pin ball machine.

On view now at Kavi Gupta in Chicago is everything after, Curtis Mann’s first U.S. exhibition since his inclusion in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.  For this exhibition, Mann presents a selection of new works, including large chemically altered mural grids, panoramic landscapes and haunting distorted figures.

In Mann’s most recent works, found photographs of conflicted and historically complex places throughout the Middle East are subjected to a process of selection and erasure. By painting on portions of enlarged color photographs with a clear varnish and then bleaching away unprotected portions of the image, new and abstract meanings are sought from appropriated snapshots, travel photographs, and casual documentations. The photograph is physically and contextually altered; as a result, the work oscillates between image and object, photography and painting, real and imagined.

Exemplifying this approach best perhaps within this exhibition is the work new hole (sky).  Installed apart from the main gallery of works, it is  a modestly sized C-print by comparison to the included mural grids.  In it, a starfield above the illuminated horizon is interrupted by a fireball, or possibly wormhole, that has been introduced into the landscape via Mann’s painterly chemical alteration.

In a recent interview Mann states, “I am constantly trying to force these found images to function outside of their initial utility and use photography’s inherent, malleable nature as a way of coming to an ulterior understanding of the complex and the unfamiliar. Coming from a mechanical engineering background, I have always been curious about the paper, the chemicals and the inks used to produce photographic images. They are the birth of the image and their manipulation holds a lot of potential for disrupting the powers of the flat, conventional image.”

Curtis Mann was born in 1979 in Dayton, Ohio, he lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Recent exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2010, curated by Francesco Bonami, something after, Galerie Almine Rech, Brussels, Altered Sates, Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art Kansas City, MO and New Artists/New Work, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

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.