2.27.10 TypeForce

NOW AT CO-PROSPERITY SPHERE:

Typeforce

February 26, 2010 - March 14, 2010

Since this show did not have a formal press release available on the website, we'll just have to do this old school. As an attender of the Typeforce opening, I can honestly say it is worth your while. Not too far from school, free, and impressive... what's not to love?

This show consists of a multitude of artists exploring the limits of what type can offer. Still not interested? (We can't believe you could be saying that) Handmade, constructed pieces combine with computer generated. Sculptural, drawing, graphic design, video. collage. they all meet.It's not just for designers and type nerds. Although sometimes we are them.

Allstars Include:

Jeremiah Chiu, Renata Graw, David Weik, Billy Baumann, Matthew Hoffman, Chris Eichenseer, Chad Kouri, Ryan Thurwell, Luke Williams, Tnop, Andy Luce, John Pobojewski, Darren McPherson, Lora Fosberg, Margo Harrington, Greg Calvert, Aaron Pedersen, Christian Kuras and Duncan Mackenzie , Will Miller, Nick Adam

Many fantastic reviews, as well as a typographers dream,

all yours for FREE!

- 3219 South Morgan St., Chicago, IL 60608 -

Hours: Call for Appointment

2.20.10 On PTG

NOW AT ROWLEY KENNERK:

On PTG

February 13, 2010 - March 27, 2010

In conjunction with the College Art Association’s annual conference—convening in Chicago, February 11-13, 2010 — four Chicago galleries are hosting exhibitions that feature the work of the 13 painters who comprised CAA’s Studio Art Session: Painting Panel. “What’s to be done about painting?” is a perennial yet ungraspable question that continues to spur contemplation and examination within the contemporary art apparatus. The first sentence to the catalogue essay accompanying the 1999 exhibition “Examining Pictures,” it is the rhetorical response to the statement “painting is dead.” This show investigates the position of painting and painting practices. It will not only ask: “what’s to be done about painting” but “how is painting valued?” How does painting assert its authority? What is painting’s speed? Can painting enact radical social and cultural critique? What is painting’s place within the mainstream? How does painting implicate itself in capital? As a means of examining these questions the artists Carrie Moyer, Ann Craven, Susanna Coffey, Anoka Faruqee, Peter Halley, Thomas Lawson, Judy Ledgerwood, Rebecca Morris, Sabina Ott, Jon Pestoni, Scott Reeder, Molly Zuckerman Hartung and Michelle Grabner presented a 10 minute position on painting at the panel. Each of these artists are exhibiting their work at four Chicago galleries.

The galleries ON PTG are at:

JULIUS CÆSAR
3311 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60624
312-725-6084 (gallery voicemail) / email: julius@juliuscaesarchicago.com
exhibition: February 13 – 28, 2010
Artists: Thomas Lawson, Scott Reeder, Carrie Moyer and Michelle Grabner

Shane Campbell Gallery
1431 W. Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622
312-226-2223 / email: info@shanecampbellgallery.com
exhibition: February 13 – March 13, 2010
Artists: Ann Craven, Peter Halley and Jon Pestoni

Western Exhibitions
119 N Peoria St, 2A, Chicago IL 60607
312.480.8390 / scott@westernexhibitions.com
exhibition: February 13 – March 20, 2010
Artists: Anoka Faruqee, Judy Ledgerwood, Sabina Ott, Susanna Coffey and Richard Hull

Rowley Kennerk Gallery
119 N. Peoria St., #3C Chicago, IL 60607
773-983-0077 / 
email: info@rowleykennerk.com
exhibition: February 13 – March 27, 2010
Artists: Rebecca Morris, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Mary Heilmann and Varda Caivano

Many fantastic reviews, and a chance to see your art history profs space,

all yours for FREE!

- 119 North Peoria St. #3C, Chicago, IL 60607 -

Hours: Friday and Saturday, 12-6PM or Call for Appointment

2.17.10 Production Site

NOW AT THE MCA:

PRODUCTION SITE

February 6, 2010 - May 30, 2010

Throughout art history, artists have reflexively looked at the very site where art work is produced -- the studio -- as a source of inspiration for their work. Production Sitereexamines 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 an unprecedented and illuminating 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.

Many fantastic reviews, all yours for only $7 or FREE on Tuesdays!

- 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 -

Museum Hours: Closed Monday, Tuesday 10am-8pm, Wednesday-Sunday 10am-5pm

2.11.10 Greg Stimac & Scott Wolniak

NOW AT ANDREW RAFACZ:

GREG STIMAC & SCOTT WOLNIAK

February 3, 2010 - March 13, 2010

In the summer of 2009, while driving around the country, Greg Stimac attached a sheet of Plexiglas to the front of his car every time he set out for a new city. At the end of the road, whether in Baltimore, Cheyenne, or Reno, he would stop along the highway and use a flatbed scanner powered by the cigarette lighter to create a photograph of the insects and grit that built up on the surface. These images, set against total blackness, are tangible records of the artist's journeys— each one registers time and distance through an endless stream of minute collisions and the traces they left behind.

To create the works in this ongoing series, Stimac sets up basic parameters and then gives in to the process: he drives for hours while the road itself shapes the composition, one dust cloud or dead bug at a time. The final images reveal nothing of the scenery; if you want to know anything about the places he's been you'll have to search for meaning in the patterns on the glass. All the same, in making this body of work Stimac continues a long tradition of American road-trip photography; this history, you might say, just happens to be packed away in the trunk rather than sitting in the passenger's seat holding the map. In the end, one might keep in mind the two famous photographs by Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank in which an empty highway extends off to a distant horizon. In an inventive and more visceral way, perhaps suited to a now-photo-saturated culture, Stimac is expressing what it means to travel that road as well.

Throughout his career, Scott Wolniak has used drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and installation to experiment with form and content and their inherent relationships. He utilizes a multidisciplinary practice to undo any formal notions of one medium’s priority over another and the results are an investigation into how art-making can be a template for examining everyday occurrences and experiences. Far from an insular project of the artist in his studio, Wolniak’s constructions remain poetic and vital through an openness and humor. His work often reveals the process with which it was made, simultaneously offering a visceral experience and a conceptual resonance.

At the beginning of 2009, Wolniak presented a series of bleached and folded works on a paper. Titled “Simulated Sunprints,” they simulated natural effects with artificial means. With Afterimage, the artist has pushed his process to its limits, ‘abusing’ the medium to elicit new possibilities both in materiality and image. Individual pieces of colored paper are folded in different patterns and sprayed with bursts of bleach and ink and repeated. Spray paint, acrylic paint and collage are occasionally added afterwards. Folding enhances the fading, staining and final color effect, establishing the distinct structure of each drawing. These pieces are suggestive of natural forms but never depart from abstraction. There are connotations of weather and time, as well as pollution and geography. The bleach brutalizes the paper, damaging it to its core, while producing gorgeous visual transformations. The ink battles the bleach, positive versus negative. Like the sunset that is prettier because of smog, these works are formally intricate meditations on dualism. The artist has further defined this relationship between figuration and abstraction by suggesting, through their parenthetical titles, humorously contrived scenic projections to describe these Rorschach-like compositions.

Many fantastic reviews, all yours for FREE!

- Andrew Rafacz Gallery

835 W. Washington Blvd. Chicago, IL 60607 -

Hours: Closed Monday, Tuesday-Friday 11am-6pm, Saturday 11am-5pm

2.1.10 Anna Shteynshleyger

NOW AT THE REN:

ANNA SHTEYNSHLEYGER

January 3, 2010 - February 14, 2010

The Renaissance Society has a solo exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Anna Shteynshleyger (b. 1977). Trained at Yale, Shteynshleyger belongs to a generation of photographers whose work is notable for its formal beauty and technical execution. The exhibition features approximately 20 works that poignantly document Shteynshleyger's life over the past several years. During that period, Shteynshleyger has had to renegotiate her relationship to Orthodox Judaism, which she had practiced since the age of 16, after moving to the United States from Moscow where she was born. Too personal to qualify as documentary of the Orthodox Jewish community, Shteynshleyger's work spans a variety of genres—portraits, still-life, landscape, and interiors—all of which will be included in the exhibition. The portraits and interiors display a sensitivity that is as questioning as it is knowing of its subjects.

Many fantastic reviews, all yours for FREE!

- Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418

5811 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637 -

Museum Hours: Closed Monday, Tuesday-Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday-Sunday 12pm-5pm

1.17.10 Italics

NOW AT THE MCA:

Italics: Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution 1968–2008

November 14, 2009 - February 14, 2010

This exhibition, co-presented by the MCA and the Palazzo Grassi, Venice, explores Italian art and creativity from the late 1960s to the present. It offers an unprecedented look at the artistic production of a country where cultural change has often been defined by the persistence of the past, revealing a deep sense of originality and vitality on the part of numerous artists whose work spans all media.

Whether embracing classical roots or breaking away from traditions, Italian artists active during the past forty years are at ease with the realities of social transformation. Reflecting the idiosyncratic paths carved by Italian artists and resisting the artificiality of groupings and movements such as arte povera, the project attempts to counter a tendency within Italian culture to curb individuality and experimentation.

Including work by more than 75 Italian artists, Italics is not just an exhibition about art made in Italy but, more importantly, demonstrates how these artists have forged new identities from deep roots blossoming in many different directions. This exhibition is guest curated by Francesco Bonami.

Cause of major controversies and many fantastic reviews, all yours for only $7 or FREE on Tuesdays!

- 220 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611 -

Museum Hours: Closed Monday, Tuesday 10am-8pm, Wednesday-Sunday 10am-5pm