Eric Holubow "Downstaging Uptown"; 2009; Uptown Theater; Chicago, IL; 33 in. x 60 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Walking through Chicago Cultural Center – past the Doric columns of the Grand Entrance, beneath the 38-foot wide Tiffany Dome, and beside the ornate marble of Preston Bradley Hall – to the gallery featuring Eric Holubow’s photographs is like a visual confrontation of the before and after effects of society’s collapse. Displayed within the vast Neo-Classical halls of the Cultural Center, Holubow’s highly aestheticized images of crumbling opulence are a weary reminder that America’s hard times are far from over.

The show, titled “In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins,” contains images of grand architectural interiors; cavernous theaters, expansive churches and synagogues, and cathedral-like auto factories scattered throughout the mid-west and rust belt, all captured in late moments of decrepitude. Holubow’s images are strikingly beautiful; full of luminous colors, dynamic compositions, and extraordinary details that highlight the breadth and magnificence of these ambitiously crafted spaces as well as the monumentality of their decline. Wide-angle shots and large-scale prints encapsulate the magnitude of his subjects; structures that once served the cultural and spiritual wishes or economic needs of the communities for which they were built. Ultimately, these buildings are corpses and the photographer’s work is a record of their deaths.

St. Stephen’s Great Hall (2008) shows a hollowed shell of a cathedral. The stone grey interior is gutted of its pews, leaving behind an empty portico. The expansive drum, dome, and oculus over the nave harken back to the Pantheon, though the century old Chicago church looks far more decrepit than the Roman temple built two thousand year ago. Modeled after the idealized architecture of an ancient empire, St. Stephen’s represents the defunct historical aspirations of American society at the turn of the 20th Century.

"Hollowed Ark" 2011; Agudas Achim Synagogue; Chicago, IL; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Wall texts displayed beside each picture relay the histories of the structures depicted, from glorious, innovative, or utopic origins to disrepair and abandonment, revealing the migration of communities and economies that happened along the way. Chicago’s Agudas Achim Synagogue, photographed in Hallowed Arc (2011), for instance, was once a lavish place of worship for the Jewish residents of Uptown, a neighborhood in the northern part of the city. As those families moved to suburban villages like Skokie and Rogers Park, the synagogue’s rainbow colored Byzantine arc, stained glass windows, and gold mosaics fell into decay. The image itself is of a lofty vertical interior that was clearly gorgeous in its heyday, though now the space is a ruinous mess littered with debris.

With an emphasis on crumbling buildings that were designed in the styles of various imperial aesthetics like the Byzantine and the Roman, the exhibition reflects the hubristic self-image of the “American Century.” Clearly these buildings were created to reflect principles of prosperity and stability by mimicking the grand styles of past empires. This impulse becomes uniquely American when high concept design trickled down to Roaring 20’s movie theaters, such as the palatial Uptown Theater shown in Downstaging Uptown (2009). Like a Parisian opera house from the days of Marie Antoinette, the Baroque-inspired theater is dripping with lavish ornamentation. Shot from the vantage point of the stage, the slight lens distortion depicts a panorama of vacant seats bulging at the center.

"Room with a View" 2008; Packard Auto Plant; Detroit, MI; 16 in. x 24 in. Courtesy of Chicago Cultural Center.

Images such as Room with a View (2008) and Engine Room of Bethlehem Steel (2009) – respectively showing the decomposing, overgrown, and exposed factory floor of a Detroit Packard Auto Plant, and the silent rusted engine room of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation – are reminders of the now defunct industrial giants that powered the post-WWII and Gilded Age boom eras. Hartsville Nuclear Power Plant (2010), a picture of a half-finished cylinder made of concrete and rebar sitting in a pool of filmy water, is like an oversize postcard from an industrial future that was gone before it happened. Holubow’s photographs are documents of these places and serve as reminders that powerful institutions rise and fall, even when they are housed in buildings designed to stand the test of time.

“In Decay – Stitching America’s Ruins” will be on view at Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, IL through July 8, 2012.

Zachary Buchner, Untitled (JYS 08), 2012. Plaster, acrylic, and tempera on canvas. Courtesy of Andrew Rafacz

Looking at Zachary Buchner’s one-man show of mixed media plaster paintings at Andrew Rafacz Gallery entitled, Just Say Yes, I couldn’t help but think of Julian Schnabel’s sculptural plate paintings from the 80’s. In both cases, the dense treatment of the surface straddles the line between sculpture and image while exploring painting as an idiomatic language. Unlike Schnabel, Buchner doesn’t go in for representation or introduce any narrative or iconographic elements that would distract from the purity of this investigation. He’s not building a surface over which to paint a picture. The way Buchner layers paint and plaster creates an integrated whole that preserves the basic characteristics of each. The materials are always distinguishable from one another. They exist in the same plane – over lapping, covering – though there is never a breach of material autonomy.

Buchner’s work is very much in the tradition of painting about painting. That’s not meant to be a de facto criticism, but it does suggest a strategy for approaching the work that requires a certain openness on the part of the audience.

Buchner’s investigation is distilled to a few key concepts; specifically, the boundaries of integration through material engagement, surface density, the interplay between “neutral” material colors like the white of the plaster or beige of raw canvas with the vivacity of saturated hues – all within the confines of a specific rectangular format. The mark making is generally restrained and absent of much expressiveness or lyricism, and shapes curb toward organic round-ish blobs. Color becomes a real source of energy within the work. In Untitled (JYS 08) (all works are from 2012) a splotchy layer of white plaster rests over tones of warm green, bright yellow, and silver. Shards of blue painted plaster imbedded in and framed by the white pops out in front of the acidic background like icy ruptures.

Who’s Bad?, 2012, single-channel video, 10:44 (looped).

Alan and Michael Fleming come to play in their show GAME ON at Chicago’s threewalls gallery. Working as a collaborative team, the identical twin brothers frame their practice within their genetic and fraternal relationship in order to create a variety of thought provoking gestures about similarity and difference, friendship, and the creative potential of games.

Many of the pieces in the show were created during a yearlong separation in which the brothers, while spending 2011 living in different cities – Alan in Brooklyn and Michael in Chicago – used their time apart as a springboard for a series of conceptual projects. Psychic Color Calendars (2011), for example, tests the twins’ long-range telepathic abilities. For each day in January, the Flemings would try to think of the same color, red, blue, yellow, black, or white, and record the results on their respective calendars. Out of thirty-one days, they were successful only three times. The results were predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless in that they reveal the creative options available when success is an impossibility.

Throughout the show, simple instructions, like the rules to a game, create spaces for variation and play. In a series titled Correspondence (2011), the artists mailed each other absurd instructions written on tourist postcards featuring their respective cities. One postcard reads, “Move an object that is bigger than your body.” The object chosen was a dumpster, documented slightly askew in a Polaroid snapshot accompanying the postcard. The instructions are all fairly simple and silly, like the challenges children might pose to one another, testing the bravery and creativity of a surrogate body.

Rock Paper Scissors, 2011, hydrocal, 3" x 36" x 20".

The mail also factors into a piece titled A Sea Shanty (2011), which consists of a six inch cubed cardboard box that the brothers mailed back and forth to each other throughout the year they were apart. Like a long range game of catch, the act of sending and resending the package provided the artists with a simple ritual capable of fortifying their relationship. Fittingly, the box was empty; a true gift in the sense that it was the gesture of sending something and the consideration for one another that was the purpose behind the package. The object itself could act as a substitute visitor when Alan and Michael were unable to make the journey to meet one another, the meaning of the box developing out of a shared sense of longing.

The poignancy of the brothers’ connection is further illustrated in Conjoined Chairs (2011). Here, each artist set out on the same day to purchase a chair at a thrift store in his respective neighborhood. The chairs were then cut in half down the middle and reassembled to create two new chairs that mirror one another. There is something tender about the way the chairs suggest comity within the nature of the brothers’ identities; that half of one is contained within the structure of the other and vice versa. The chairs also serve as an allegory of artistic partnership as the suturing together of ideas.

United again in Brooklyn, where the artists now live, the Flemings created a second body of work for the show utilizing strategies from the 2011 projects. Like Psychic Color Calendars, the video Psychic Color Pour (2012) employs chance and a limited color scheme in a new game of telepathy. In the piece, each brother takes a turn sitting in a chair trying to guess the color of six buckets of paint held above him one at a time by the other brother. Answer correctly and the paint is set aside. Answer incorrectly and the paint comes showering down. Consequence and reward, trust, and just a hint of malice are inserted into the Flemings’ themes of play, collaboration, and impossible expectations.

Installation View.

Physical abilities are also tested and measured. A video piece titled Who’s Bad? (2012) features the artists attempting to perform a dance sequence from Michael Jackson’s music video “Bad” on the same Brooklyn subway platform where Martin Scorsese directed the original. Mimicking the internal process of becoming a trained dancer, Alan, who has studied hip-hop and break dancing for several years, coaches his untrained brother Michael through the series of movements. While Alan moves through the choreography with confidence and obvious skill, Michael appears hesitant and is always just a step behind, revealing the distance between the twins’ physical abilities.

The dance steps in Who’s Bad, like the simple instructions and systems used in projects throughout the show, are similar to the ways in which children’s games rely on rules to create spaces of imagination and play. In the spirit of cooperation, the artists rarely push these spaces to dangerous, destructive, or malicious places. Instead, a sense of camaraderie and friendship pervades the show, offering a catalogue of what is possible between two artists generously open to pursuing each other’s creative impulses.

GAME ON is on view at threewalls in Chicago through April 21, 2012.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #14 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2010-2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

Laura Letinsky is a master at having it both ways. She photographs messes that are exquisitely tidy. She uses white like a color. She presents endings in a moment when they are still new, still vibrating with just spent energy. She captures objects as images and images as objects. She makes decay look gorgeous.

Letinsky is known for her artfully arranged still life photographs of empty ice cream bowls, half-eaten and over-ripened cantaloupes, and slumping party balloons. Over the last decade, she has chronicled the moments after the party, after the sumptuous meal, after all the ice has melted and all the guests have gone home. With the eye of a commercial art director, her photographs are as fastidiously orchestrated as those you might find in a Martha Stewart catalogue. Similar, that is, if the Grande Dame of country house finery employed petit bourgeois entertaining as a metaphor for loss, mortality, and the tragic promise of unattainable perfection, as Letinsky does.

At Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Laura Letinsky’s self-titled exhibition “Laura Letinsky” consists of large-scale still life photographs from her series Ill Form and Void Full and expands upon her exploration of earlier themes by incorporating collage elements into her tableaus. Decaying food items, wilting flowers, and dirty silverware are arranged next to magazine images of fresh fruit and sparkling serving dishes in order to create a poetic effect that complicates viewers’ perception of what is on display.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #3 (from the series Ill Form and Void Full), 2010. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Within the reality of these photographs there is the constant question of which elements are authentic and which elements are mediated; what is an actual object and what is actually an image of an object? A lime rind twisting through Untitled #3 (2010) appears to be a paper cut out. But it also casts a shadow. The paper is an object in space with an image printed on it. The lime rind – as well as the ripe cantaloupe and candy dish also featured in the piece – is an idealized depiction of an every day object. It’s also an idea pertaining to decoration, one that casts a shadow on our desires as consumers and on our notions of what to strive for as members of an image conscious society, but only exists in print.

These collage elements cover just a fraction of Letinksy’s pictures. Layers of white surfaces take up most of the space within the photographs. Untitled #14 (2010-2011) uses a white platform on a white floor next to a white wall partially covered by a white piece of paper that serves more as a collage element than a backdrop. Letinsky pushes this study of white to almost dizzying effect in Untitled #34 (2011) by including a clear plastic bag, flower pedals, an over grown white onion, and a white piece of paper featuring a roughly cut silhouette of a flower and vase. The subtle interplay between these surfaces, images, and objects creates a delicate range of white, off-white, and gray gradations that reminds us that in life there is no pure value of white. It’s another unobtainable ideal.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #34 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

The nuance within the white echoes the constructed quality of the collages and also adds to the overall sense of delicacy to the compositions, which is emphasized in myriad different ways throughout the show. The paper elements have a tangible quality of thinness to them. Food items often look precariously near or beyond their shelf lives as the shriveling grapes do in Untitled #14 (2010-2011). Collage items in Untitled #19 (2011) teeter dangerously near the edge of a sloped platform. Even the natural light quality used throughout the photographs seems to suggest that, were the picture taken a moment later, the fineness of the end result may have been lost.

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #19 (from the Ill Form and Void Full series), 2011. Courtesy of the artist; Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago; and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

This sense of fragility is nothing new to Letinsky’s work. The artist’s still life photos made prior to the inclusion of the collage elements contained this characteristic, but because she was photographing objects and not other images, there was a greater sense of urgency to the pictures. In her series Hardly More Than Ever, for example, Letinsky presented the after products – wilted flowers, segmented fruit, and dirty bowls – only moments after they had out lived their usefulness. The objects in these images were tenuously situated in a transitional process, carrying with them the remnants of their beginnings and forecasting their completed decay while encapsulating a total event or a full lifecycle in a single photographic instant. This work spoke to the rich temporal possibilities of photography.

In the new series, she is still playing with this notion of temporality by carefully selecting images and objects that convey a sense of potential and decay. But in photographing images – moments already frozen in time – the urgent materiality of the subject matter is replaced by conceptual distance. Loss, mortality, flux, unreachable ideals; these themes are still present, but at a slight remove that lends an academic quality to the show.

Letinsky is clearly pushing the boundaries of still life, as well as her own process of art making. And while I appreciate the materiality and dynamism of the artist’s earlier work more than the conceptual gamesmanship of what is on display at the M.C.A., the show is incredibly rich. It’s always exciting to see a gifted artist work through new questions, and arriving at such pleasing results.

Laura Letinsky will be on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago through April 17, 2012.

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.