Beatriz E. Ledesma: Not Quite There Yet
Elephant Room Gallery
Chicago
June 13 – July 22, 2010

There is a richness and sense of place to the exhibition of Beatrice E. Ledesma “Not Quite There Yet”, currently at the Elephant Room Gallery. There’s a theme the artist establishes and celebrates which reaches for explanation while connecting the traffic of conception to development to completion. In this show, she has found ways to do such things in a fashion is both pleasing and, upon exploration, tenacious to the unexpected. There is range in her works.

“I decided to show Beatriz Ledesma’s work because she is an artist that is incredibly passionate about her beliefs and concerns with current society specifically in the U.S., but also around the world,” shared Kimberly Atwood, curator and gallery owner. “Her work is directly influenced by these beliefs and reflects quite obviously in all of her vibrant pieces.” She concludes, “I am also intrigued by her background in psychoanalysis and how she interweaves that into her art, resulting in a marriage of the two that makes sense to both viewers coming from either background.”

A sophisticated use of browns and yellow ochre presents an emphatic sense to, “Surrounded by Warmth”, oil on canvas. There is a depth in this use of color, as well as a subtlety. In one bottom corner Ledesma surrounds a small brown bird on a swath of red and green patch. There are touches of the primitive along side resolute strokes and pale wide-openness accomplished with brushwork. “I tend to cover the canvas with a yellow ocher or raw umber to strip it away with a cloth and then apply it again- as many times as the energy indicates,” says Ledema. “This process allows me to determine if there will be a source of light and where it will come from. There are times when there is no image but only the treatment process of the canvas. I trust that the image will come when it is time.”

There is poetry in the work, some of which smiles of a different time, and with the artist’s application, and her tints and tones of. The shapes and angles of her shades and figures supply a shyness, or strength of. A lipse of sort. It is as though a pre-verbal society has come alive. The artists shares, “Oils and watercolors were the media I worked with when at the Institute de Bellas Artes de Buenos Aires, so I trained on them. But as time has passed I have chosen to continue working with oils as they have a personality of its own- if I dip the brush into a tinny amount of pigment, it will colored more than I want to.” She continued, “There is warmth, they take time to dry, and I can go back many times as I want to work and rework an area; besides the layering process brings a depth to the image that I find highly attractive and visually pleasing to the eye.”

In her willowy,”2010″, oil on canvas, as in her, “From the Earth, to the Earth, Breathing”, the viewer is called to look and move deeper into the canvas. These pieces push and pull with their evolutions of shades of reds and yellow ocher. There is polish to this performance, with the artist’s layered, scratched canvas groans from the scraping and brush work.

The works of Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi, Kathy Kollwitz, and the prints of William Blake in particular, have been very appealing and moving for the artist. They contribute to the dramatic expressiveness of as her figures, and appear distilled into her color. Ledesma notes, “When at the art institute of Buenos Aires, we were trained to look at the European masters; I felt particularly drawn to Flemish art for the use of oil in details and the light it seems to emanate from its paintings. The use of light & darkness, emotion and drama energy in these works also reflects this.”

This exhibition confirms the artist’s now confident engagement with color. Yet she does on occasion wrestle with her art. “I may ‘sacrifice it’, she jokes. “I actually fight with it- scream and insult at it or it may call for a complete slash of gesso upon the image worked The piece has to talk to me and if it does it after ‘our’ fight”.

In the narrative of her work, the artist makes a leap toward turning her philosophy into art. Absent are the abstract themes some strive to peddle as representative, or to separate the figure from the painting in its imagery. What one finds ultimately is graceful and pleasing in its rhythms, imperfections and all, hardly not quite there yet.

www.elephantroomgallery.com

Zg Gallery: Spring Group Show
Zg Gallery
Chicago
April 23 – May 22, 2010

The Zg Gallery opened its powerful Spring Group Show with the works of thirteen artists, each laying out their individual imagery along side stylistic differences in a generalized dissociation. There is a delicate balance in such a vivid experience, with many of the works holding connections to the “natural”, the exhibitions curator, Meg Sheehy points out, “The show is seasonal, and serves as a boost and equal exposure. It’s a profile of the Gallery and demonstrates the kind of work we’ll be showing.” These are pieces to see, not just to look at.

Queried on her pieces, Anna Joelsdottir shared early on, “I understand that they have one wall and good breathing space which is tricky in a group show of many”. Joelsdottir’s work, “no one knew or will ever know”, mixed media on Mylar, reflects a softening adjective, ethereal which lingers on from her most recent exhibition at the gallery. “The transparency creates an added depth/space effect that is hard to do on canvas or paper”, she shares. “I started to use mylar for installation purposes, folded in 3d you wrote about my installation at Zg last summer”, reminding me of a previous review. The artist remains eager to explore how this would work, flat, as individual paintings. This is one such piece which has made her métier. “I also wanted to see if I could do small paintings that look like they are large or could be large.”

Ben Butler cast an enigmatic captivating slice of the show with an, ‘untitled’, ink with earl grey tea, presenting an organic feel. With his system the viewer comes upon small boxes with tiny X’s through them, establishing an overall unique design while producing somewhat of a meditative state with relaxed grace.

The viewer is casually launched in a different direction and toward a different style with Martina Nehrling’s bold, bright colors and their own language. “Often I begin a painting with an agenda of content and formal strategies in mind,” Nehrling says. “But sometimes I just start, acting on a whim. I was turned on by the vibrancy of acrylic colors and when I discovered an acrylic medium that created a texture and shine similar to the stand oil I most often combined with oil paint I was pretty much committed to continuing with acrylics, at least for a while,” she adds.

Her, “Keeping Faith”, acrylic on canvas, is a departure from her normal, typical brush strokes. There is controlled chaos in this work. That ‘language of color’ steps up, speaking loud and clear. The work is illuminating. The freshness of the brush stroke and sense of spontaneity on the surface is essential to the directness of this language. “I love the immediacy of painting”, Nehrling shares. “Probably most painters would admit to this on some. I use acrylic paint to be specific. I love the buttery texture and elemental odors of painting with oils but I switched from oils to acrylic paint to more expediently pour and combine different consistencies of paint.”

The art of Molly Briggs, Ben Butler, Amy Casey, Bill Frederick, Dan Gamble, Gregory Jacobsen, Mark Murphy, Regin Igloria, and Jackie Tileston also hold even keel in the exhibition. As does the calming, “Still”, auto paint on Plexiglas, of Steve Hough.

Justin Henry Miller emerges more curio vs. ornament. These pieces develop, “out of conglomerating the leftovers or detritus”, Miller holds of his contributions to the show. “Like these byproducts, the vintage photos I collect have been forgotten or discarded. I seek to resurrect these commemorations and give them new life.” Miller also appears intrigued in changing the narratives in these photos with his addition of paint elements. Figures in these images have the potential to operate as armatures for stories that extend beyond their original context.

“My paintings on vintage photographs begin with a search for images that interest me in some way. I am drawn to personalities with intriguing poses, facial expressions, and attire”, he says. In his, “War Changes a Man”, oil on photograph, the artist plays off the central figure’s uniform and his relationship to his proud parents. “In my mind he could be a soldier who has returned from a war, now altered by the effects of that endeavor, but still loved by his family”, Miller adds. There are traces of Man Ray beneath the fold(s).

The show is more than an accumulation of the art of painters having visited upon the ZG in the past. There appears an innate desire in these works, a common effort and intelligent attitude to touch upon the now, the day-to-day. Group shows of this size hold the risk of being unforgiving. This exhibition sidesteps all of that.

Top image: Amy Casey

www.zggallery.com

Noelle Mason: Bad Boys
Thomas Robertello Gallery
Chicago
April 9 – June 5, 2010

In, “Bad Boys,” a solo exhibition of her work, Noelle Mason provides a close up, a look at notions of “hysterical masculinity”. “Bad Boys”, she writes, “is about the representation of masculinity, or the ‘drag’ of masculinity, and how this ‘drag’ is crafted through clothes, accessories, or in the aesthetic of the cinematic ‘gaze.’” But the show, currently at the Thomas Robertello Gallery, is about, and does, way more than that. Here the artist, in lieu of providing artistic clean table linens, re-sets the entire dining area with a critical complexity and, takes the viewer on a wild ride into a world of ultra-violence and horrific images often anesthetized on the evening news. It rattles the often vague, shopworn themes of an art world grown accustomed to just muddling through, and rolls, in synchronized fashion, through events and communities where you don’t want to debark or casually fuck around. One can hear the gunfire, just about smell the cordite. Ain’t no abstraction. Rather it trumpets a payment of artistic dues and dives deep into the pores of post-modernity and the enveloping flow of an increasingly rough and dangerous world accompanying the period.

“I am interested in the idea of ‘hysterical masculinity’ in reference to this show,” Mason shares. “The word hysterical being derived from the female anatomy but is turned on its head as the distinctly irrational behavior of men and boys who in fear of acknowledging their own frailties seek to expunge ‘weakness’ through violence and accessorizing.” In, ‘Nothing Much Happened Today (for Eric and Dylan)”,12pt. cotton counted X-stitch 32 x 40, the artist combines a cross-stitched work, a pixelated image from Columbine High School’s cafeteria surveillance camera taken during the April 20, 1999 massacre. Her five-year endeavor captures the iconic image representing 1/30 of a second of the event. It is prepared as a “mourning cloth or evidence”, and serves as a gadfly to reopening old wounds. There is a soft, shadowiness to the piece. “I started with the medium of cross-stitch, and was drawn to cross-stitch for its tactility, familiarity and relationship to the pixel,” says the artist. “The distortion of the image when made into a stitchery seemed to relate nicely to the low-resolution quality of surveillance footage.” Continuing, “As for the subject, Columbine just felt right. It felt undone, as if it needed more attention than it was afforded, I needed to process it in some way.”

“There is an exploration of time in the work. The iconic image represents 1/30 of a second of the event at Columbine”, she continues. “This 1/30 of a second became something much larger kind of evidence. Each color of embroidery floss corresponds to one pixel on my computer screen. This piece is intended to reopen wounds. Last time we closed them up we didn’t get all the poison out. I am trying to uncover something. The Columbine murders irritated the public conscience to ask why. I don’t think it was enough. Most people found an answer to that question that fit nicely into their worldview and then stopped asking. “Nothing Much Happened Today” is intended to make it irritating again.” A horrible dilemma, clearly.

With, “Love Letters”, 39 white embroidered handkerchiefs, Mason revisits Columbine’s ‘trench coat mafia’ via member Eric Harris’ writings. The artist carefully stitches the words and anger with black thread, capturing rage and fear in terms like, “no I am not crazy. crazy is just a word. to me it has no meaning. everyone is different. but most of you fuckheads out there in society, going to your everyday fucking jobs and doing your everyday routine shitty things, i say fuck you and die. If you got a problem with my thoughts, come tell me and ill kill you, because………goddammit, dead people don’t argue!!

For the artist, surveillance implied in the work, “Nothing Much Happened Today” is confronted again in, “LAN Party”, an instillation. These pieces, the artist reflects, “critique the “fetishization” of the surveillance aesthetic in popular culture.” “LAN Party”, presents video footage of U.S. Army forces aboard an Apache Helicopter killing Iraqis through via the scope of a model of a menacing, black Remington M-700 sniper rifle. Headphones provide sound for the episode, and through this, the viewer becomes participant.

Combined, these pieces, Mason holds, “expose the desire for public approval through the hyper-masculine ‘drag’”. “I come to my work from a place of fear and frustration. The sensation is close to sexual frustration or of not being able to find the right word, the inability to stop time or comprehend death ”the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon,” says Mason. “More specifically I am interested in how we project our fears and desires into cultural objects and in turn how these technologies shape the construction of identity.”

“Sonata”, laser cut on vellum, stems from a video of an Al-Qaeda beheading. Here the artist removes the visual content and instead reinterprets the horror as sheet music, and ultimately sound. “In Sonata I have remediated video footage of beheadings performed by Al-Qaeda over the last decade. The beheading videos which are intended to terrorize through the power of video have been stripped of their visual content,” she says. “The word sonata literally means ‘sounded’ and is the opposite of cantata or ‘sung.’ This transposition is akin to the translation of video image or written language into craft object. And thematically references the fantasy of masculine performance of power in the attempt to dominate through explicit exhibition of brutal violence.”

Thomas Robertello, curator of the exhibition, and an accomplished flautist in his own right, finds the pitches and rhythms of the work similar to a North Indian raga, with ‘evil energy’ at the end…in it’s rest.

The exhibition has chilling aspects, while consistently contributing to an aesthetic which pits aggressive acts often associated with masculine power against the soft, the handmade, the beautiful, the domestic. It soothes, cusses, points out and preaches.

“I am primarily interested in how we are manipulated by not only the content of the media spectacle but also the medium of computer/television screens. By changing the form of content and the spectator’s spatial relationship to content”, says Mason. “I de-editorialize the images that I use. This un-packaging provides an alternative space for contemplation of specific events and destabilized the media spin.”

What’s next? “I have currently begun a new body of work that looks at formalism as a means to understand the representational aesthetics of power. I have had a nomadic practice for approximately 5 years now and having recently acquired a studio I am looking forward to a period of experimentation with form and medium.”

Good luck with that. Surely, if we continue to look at things as this artist presents it, we are almost sure to adjust ourselves in some way or another.

www.thomasrobertello.com

Bill Frederick: Something About You
January 16 – March 21, 2010
Elmhurst Art Museum
Elmhurst, IL

A dumpster and an abandoned gas station. A nuclear cooling tower next to a junkyard. Craning electric street lights on an empty highway. These are the places which the expert draughtsman Bill Frederick has always chosen as subjects. His scrupulous ink renderings from photographs strain to record abandoned and banal modern structures, often giving them a quaking and ominous quality. His distinct palette of black and white gives his subjects a dramatic sense of being ghostly. Mundane structures of everyday life are imbedded with an intense focus and belie a strange subjective hum below the surface of ordinary “empirical” existence. In one drawing a boy stands on a beach with the slash of an airplane vapor trail above his head. There is a distinct tension in the scene: a contradiction between man and machine. The line in the sky seems to be a harbinger of the figure’s isolation and loneliness; a distant sign that speaks of the alienation that exists behind everyday appearances. The mundane becomes disproportionate and strange. People in several of his pictures seem trapped in a desert of everyday reality, trying to make sense of their existence, and co-existence, within it. They are strangely objectified, as though puzzled to find themselves where they are. In several drawings a woman sits in her car where deep shadows cast a gloomy and imprisoning mood. Nature itself is made unnatural, even in the middle of the woods where man made elements such as a picnic table or canoe assert themselves with an oblique strangeness to the surrounding nature, making nature itself strange.

The artist also concentrates on the painstaking rendering of the traces of phenomena from photographs that are out of focus or jittered. Some works reproduce the chemical tones of color photography or show unfocus elements to create visual depth. This has the effect of making the concretely real strangely unreal and hyper-real at the same time. These photographic phenomena sometimes gives a distancing quality to his subjects and imbue them with an existential silence that is tinged with melancholy that longs for connection and transcendence. The mundane has become otherworldly.

Some pieces in the show have a distinctly Hopperesque quality to them. They demonstrate a theme that both Frederick and the American realist painter Edward Hopper are drawn to: the incommensurateness of our modern environment to human existence. Structures and machines signal a profound break with human proportion and meaning. There is no mistaking Frederick’s pictures for images that are aimed at “tricking the eye” or are obsessed with the exact rendering of surfaces for their own sake. His pictures create an existential tension between the objectively, even incomprehensively, real and suppressed emotions vibrating below the surface. This subterfuge of feeling in his strangely barren subjects marks the everyday appearance of things with ominous significance. His people are real in their feelings, if somehow lost and bewildered (like Hopper’s people are) by their existence in the modern world. The deadening effects of modernity are both a mystery and a dark dream, where emotional substance still attempts to break through an alienating contemporary landscape.

Frederick’s works should not be mistaken for simplistic photorealistic transcription: they do not seek to celebrate popular culture and city life as the kind of superficial subjects which many Photorealist artists have depicted in the past. Nor do they sentimentalize abandoned structures and landscapes. There is a searching eye and mindfulness behind the meticulous surfaces: technical virtuosity is at the service of a subjective task that his mind seeks. There is a strange wildness in the world he glimpses behind modern banality; not sterility but the emotional struggle with the sterility of modern, abandoned environments. Bill Frederick remains a contemporary emotional witness in his art, and a keeper of internal human experiences in a true Chicago art vein.

Diane Thodos is an artist and art critic who lives in Evanston, IL. She will be exhibiting at the Kouros Gallery in New York City in 2010 and is represented by the Paule Friedman & Alex Rivault Gallery in Paris, the Traeger/Pinto Gallery in Mexico City, and the Thomas Masters Gallery in Chicago.

www.elmhurstartmuseum.org

Justyna Adamczyk: New Paintings
EC Gallery
Chicago
January 15 – February 13, 2010

“I don’t want to communicate directly with the thoughts of people seeing my art. I’d like to provide a road show which allows for personal reflection”, notes Justyna Adamczyk. Her current exhibition, New Paintings at the EC Gallery is a challenging row toward that ambition.

“In my work, for many years, I have tried many media, but over time I realized that I speak sincerely in the media which is painting. Painting gives me the opportunity to comment on my subjective reality. The work connected with the fatigue of everyday life, trivial but inevitable problems.” Theoretically, at least, she holds that in a highly structured world, there is need to experience spiritual growth. “Painting is my valve, which allows escape and turns them into tame pictures.”

“Cannibal”, acrylic on linen, as in her other pieces, appears spontaneous, with the artist being there, not just copying it. Here her pinks and orange are staggering, as if a silhouette’s hair has been set ablaze. The untreated, grayish brown linen hands the paint over to the viewer. It’s a new romanticism.

Determinately, her shades and stain on the fabric, the pastel rose, browns, yellows of varying tones, read aloud from the cloth, as if having been about for ages. It could be dry blood. It could be cancerous blobs. “I have always been attracted to the works of artists who pass themselves and their subjective view of punk”, she says.

One questions, has the artist returned to adolescence in, “ Range of Flavors ”, acrylic on linen. Not stating its inspiration directly, rather it plays with color, with shapes, and sometimes brushes about aesthetic presence with thorny figures, rained upon by Jungian dreams and complexes in the form of a lab experiment run wild upon the work. There is a special, different kind of authenticity in this experience.

In these images the viewer finds autonomy and color associations, visions and insinuations. Some appear soiled, and wander off, but hardly into the mundane. There cycles are short, but in there shortness form narratives.

Adamczyk touts Frida, Mark Ryden, Matthew Barney, and Kim Sooja as influences on her work. “These are characters from whom I have learned a lot. They are completely different, in views of reality”, she says. “In addition to this they differ personally and intimately. An important issue for me is the impact on the viewer. I’m looking for language that allows the viewer to feel my idea. ”

It is difficult to find excess in the paintings. They’re almost involuntary. Adamczyk’s provocation is at the heart of artistic exhibitionism. “Any idea seems to be perfect when I got it in my or on a sketch”, she says, “but the battle begins at the time of transfer…the move to the real picture. I try to be as close as possible to what arises from the first thought or impression.” That, she maintains, is the impulse to the creation of the image.

With her, works are created and driven by a very personal inspiration. They are offerings…to us…and to what remains in each of us individually. This should be appreciated.

The artist’s works has been exhibited in a host of venues including Biennale of Painting “Bielska Jesien 2009, Poland; 9 Contest Gepperta, BWA Awangarda Wroc?aw, Poland; Joung polisch Painters I-XII, Bestregarts Gallery – Frankfurt am Main, Germany; 30 Premio Internacional de Pintura de Caja de Extremadura; More or Less, Musemu da Ciencia e da Industria – Porto, Portugal and Aula de Cultura de Plasencia. She received her MFA from the The Academy of Fine Arts in Poland , Wroclaw in 2007. This is her first U.S. exhibition.

www.ec-gallery.com

Judith Mullen: Aerie
Linda Warren Gallery (Main Space)
January 22 – February 27, 2010
Chicago

Upon entering the Linda Warren Gallery for Judith Mullen’s current exhibition, “Aerie”, the viewer immediately realizes something exciting is gonna happen. It’s a wonderland, one of thrilling, beautiful art. It’s a cotillion of color, of sculpture, of painting of instillation. Here the artist has become dramatist, captivating, with an abundance of works in varying media, and with incredible generosity.

“All of the paintings are done in the fresco technique and I’ve chosen this method for a variety of reasons”, Mullen shares. “Initially I was very drawn to the organic “whiteness” of the plaster, and as I worked over time I began to fully appreciate the materials used to create a fresco panel.” The major influences of Lee Bontecous and Kandinsky are found in these works.

“Homage to Bonteque III”, mixed media, is a “pebbly” painting upon a surface mixed of sand and limestone putty. Its rich earth shades hold the aura of the cave drawings of the prehistorics. The artist imported limestone putty and found river sand, mixing a formula used to create a foundation. She then worked the wet plaster with pigment and charcoal. “In this manner I am very much connected to the history of painting to include the cave painters of 30,000 years ago”, she adds. “I had an opportunity to visit these remarkable works in France (Grotte deNaiux) and they are truly inspirational.”

“In Site IV”, mixed media of pigment, charcoal, wax, ink, tea, as are other pieces in that series, inspired by the presences of birds, as can be seen in the yellow ochre pigment of the work. “The image of the bird has always appeared in my work, however in this series,” says the artist, “I wanted to make it front and center, the focal point rather than the side kick. The bird appears in this piece to be successfully negotiating its way around a complicated environment using it’s own momentum to accomplish this goal.” She continues, “The ideas of courage and fortitude along with adaptability, acceptance and action hopefully are brought forth through this image. Maybe it was the new construction site found across the street from my studio in the city or the telephone/electrical poles that dot the prarie path outside my home in the suburb that displaced the bird and its nest… in either case, the task of rebuilding and adapting was played out. On some level I think we can all identify with the bird in this scenario.” Her vision, the connections, that application and detail traffic between the conceptual, process and endgame is executed perfectly in this work.

Comes now, “In Site XIII” mixed media installation, that daring epic in scale work upon which the show pivots and to which the viewer is drawn as to a bonfire on a distant hill. Centered in the middle of the wall is a huge piece of very worked paper with slashes in it. This piece of tracing paper, Mullen used to embed charcoal into a new fresco piece. “I have been saving these left over tracing paper pieces for years, playing with them on the wall, trying to make some sort of 3-D sculptural piece,” she says. “I tried adding wax, have used all sorts of stiffeners, you name it to make the paper firm. Finally, I decided to use wire under the piece and ta-da…I was off and running.” There are blue rocks, “an idea I had swimming around in my head from a book I read on Thomas Merton and his ideas on spirituality and rocks.” These are at the foot of the installation, carved and shaped from Styrofoam. “I found myself using all the materials I use in the tree sculptures but in a different way…on the wall. My interpretation of the piece is that it’s somewhat of a fight between nature and the man made world, the ying and yang of life, something along those lines.”

The work is startling. It is art having shed its skin, dancing and delighting as if leading the viewer about by lantern. There’s the street…the wrecking-ball…street cones…fallen branches…things, caught in chaos. Mullen’s tree sculptures are new additions to her package. She continues the use of things natural and un-natural…broken branches, rice paper, wire, plaster, paint, Styrofoam, studio rags, etc., etc. and of course, birds. Here are more of her inner-thoughts, her firefly hunting. “The sculptures evolved out of the painting process, about 2 years ago. I’ve always been drawn to the poetry of the ‘naked winter’” she says, “tree branches and began collecting broken ones found as I walk. So, each piece begins with a branch which is then sometimes attached to a base or is hung from above.”

Judith Mullen received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited throughout the Midwest, including shows at the Chicago Cultural Center, Evanston Art Center, a recent solo exhibition at The Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago and is currently having a concurrent solo exhibition in Los Angeles at JK Gallery. She also will be having a solo show this year at The Krasl Art Center in Michigan. She was the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Her work is also on display in the Drawing Center of New York’s artist’s registry.

“Along with my stated inspirations, I find all of my inspiration from routines, rhythms and travels of my own life as it intersects with those around me. I live in a suburb surrounded by forest preserve and travel to the city each day where my studio is located”, she notes. “It works for me. It is where nature and the man made world intersect and the various ways this plays out that I find myself drawn in to wander around.”

There’s no dominant color in the show. It all works together, yet it’s almost out of control, like a spectacular, contemporary fireworks display, soon to be fabled. It wrings out every sense of the imagination. “Where do I see myself headed from hear? For me, it’s always been about the process so hopefully that will continue to be the case. I’m open to wherever that will lead me.”

www.lindawarrengallery.com

Art Shay’s True Colors
Thomas Masters Gallery
Chicago
January 15 – February 15, 2010

Art Shay’s photography is brilliant. And should one be in search of art as solely objects of, and for, aesthetic enjoyment, the exhibition, “Art Shay’s True Colors”, opening Friday, January 15 at the Thomas Masters Gallery, is not that experience. It is not an imagined dream life. It is a collection, an exhibition of the works of a photographer who has managed to crystallize defining moments in the American experience in bright colors, without a bypass, on archive rag paper with digital print.

For the artist, simply telling a story is too easy. Shay’s photos appear to tell a story behind a story. There is a pattern of capturing his subject sans posing. There are athletes, and movie stars. There is Khrushchev in Iowa, and Johnny Cash, Daleys and Jordan. There is Warhol and Jack Nicholas, Vince Lombardi and Bart Star and other luminaries out of their usual. There are protestors and police faced-off tango style in Grant Park in ‘68…the viewer can practically whiff the tear gas and refer and hear the chants. There’s the Nixon, amped up with arms in that ‘v’ before the looming, “Goddess of Grain” in the background.

Some entrances and exits flow in this exhibition. In 1964, two years prior to returning to participate in an open housing campaign, Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Chicago and spoke at a rally for racial justice at Soldier Field. Shay was there, and captured a youthful civil rights leader being greeted by both police and the assembled masses, “King at Soldier Field”. Moving deeper into the exhibition there are more King photographs, King smiling, King speaking, King dead…in an open casket with his followers appearing stunned and in tears. Shay captured the riots following the assassination and the drama of the police search for the killer in Memphis with a dramatic and searing intensity.

“Photography has been my love since I was 12 and my Dad lent me his folding Kodak. I immediately began to shoot but also develop other peoples’ rolls of Verichrome in the coal bin that made up part of the modest Bronx four family home we lived in,” says Shay. “I built my first enlarger out of a Maxwell House coffee can that slid up and down on the sandwiched 2 x4’s I found in a junk heap. The sliding wood pieces came from the bottom of a long abandoned dining room table.”

The exhibition brings the viewer shots of Nelson Algren, (a friend of Shay and god father to one of his children) on the gritty side streets and back alleys of Chicago. Shay had followed Algren with a camera, shooting photos for a piece he was pitching to Life. It’s been written that they were, “masters chronicling the same patch of ground with different tools.”

Back to his early days, Shay continued in his ribald fashion, “When I was 16 an ancient divorcee of 35, professing interest in my work, professed wanting to learn enlarging, and in the process enlarged me sufficiently in 5 seconds to capture my virginity. This influenced me greatly as to the value of photography.”

Sharing more of his history, “I took a Leica into WWII and used it during combat flying of 52 missions. Just after the war, when I was thinking of becoming a professional writer… I was an English major in my only nine months of college before enlisting at age 20 in 1942…and the Washington Post took to printing Sunday features I wrote.”

Shay was soon hired as a staff reporter for Life Magazine. “It was my job at one time or another to schlep camera equipment around for perhaps 20 of Life’s fotogs. Life reporters were verboten from using a camera under pain of firing, but in my three years as a staffer I must have had 20 pages in print under other (real) photographers’ bylines- while carrying their spare cameras” It was at this point Shay opted to leave Life, going freelance, shooting mostly his own ideas and crafting his own stories, as well as shooting them in Chicago for Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and other outlets.

The photographer holds the camera is an extension of the eye, but also the humor and world experience behind that eye as well.

There is an emotional heart to the exhibition. The iconic photos of JFK and Nixon prior to there now famous televised debate. King’s casket being unloaded from a plane from Memphis . Inner-city Chicago children playing in run-down playgrounds. There’s Jack Kennedy appearing in conference with a Native American chief, “Two Chiefs”. And there’s Jimmy Hoffa, in a suit, behind bars. “It’s called, ‘Hoffa in Jail’. I knew Hoffa,” Shay says, “We used to play handball in Detroit . Hell of a handball player. It’s in Lewisberg Prison, and he’s holding the coat to hide the handcuffs.”

The talent and skill of the artist appears through the passion, humor, and history of the show. In, “Masai Spear Thrower”, the photographer catches the hunter’s spear in flight, on it’s arc, the second it leaves his hand in Nairobi. All of the work at the exhibition is done ‘in-camera’.

“I am not an agonizer. I work in the equivalent of bolts of controlled lighting, getting ideas and varying the themes that make them publishable.” Shay explains. “In covering JFK addressing 100,000 farmers live in North Dakota, I didn’t like the composition of Kennedy at one side—so I had the sponsors move a flagpole with flying pennants of different colors on it so it composed well across from Kennedy. I had just purchased the then new Widelux camera—140 degrees—and my first picture of JFK with it ran in Time across two pages.”

For Art Shay, a chance to show “Art Shay’s True Colors”, “is an important segment of my life’s work—at last.” And for others, this show provides lessons, and yet for others still, remembrance.

www.thomasmastersgallery.com

Daniel Kim and Michael Parker: Structure and Space
David Weinberg Gallery
Chicago
January 8th – February 20th, 2010

Poise appears conscientiously injected into the current exhibition at the David Weinberg Gallery. The abstract paintings of Daniel Kim, combined with the photography of Michael Parker make for a very impressive introduction to the new year, stepping from the holiday vestibule into a pantheon of sometimes sharp-edge, yet eloquent art. It’s a fine gathering of work.

“In my work, monochrome paintings deal with very important aspect of painting”, says Kim. “In order for a painting to be successful I believe 3 things have to work together, and that’s color, image and the paint application. If the 3 work, it’s like flicking a switch and activating a painting to make it come alive. I do this to speculate what beauty might look like.” His work is not shy. Early on in the show the viewer catches his erudite use of basic grays, of fundamentals, of shadow and of space.

In speaking to his own work, Parker holds, “Architecture begins on paper. Photography is the method by which it returns”… my official slogan. I honestly believe the relationship between photography and architecture is a unique one. Architecture, being such a detailed medium is best recorded with photography for most purposes. Be it for commercial use, fine art, or historical record, photography is really the only way to put an immense physical structure into your briefcase or on the wall.”

Curator Aaron Ott has consciously ‘zig-zagged’ the works early on in the exhibition. Ott appreciates mixing mediums in joint shows, and in this instance pieces settle, more than dominate in such fashion.

In many of Kim’s paintings the viewer is introduced to cloud shapes, to explosions of chaos and areas of the larger works appearing to be paintings on their own. “Oil paint for me has enough range that I almost feel its part of who I am, and the paint becomes a tool to complete my other half,” he says. “The decision I make with the paint is personal and very much reflects who I am as person.”

Moving deeper into the exhibition, one comes upon large color works of Kim’s. Here the dialogue continues with traces of pastel whispering on the canvases of brilliant color. “Color paintings which are bit more challenging to make is also driven by my speculation of beauty, using the formal elements I know and composing them to become a interesting visual stimulation. In a simple term I try to make interesting paintings, because that is what visual artist do.”

Many of Parker’s works approach the mystical. The stark, geometrical designs freeze in camera. His, ‘Disney Concert Hall, LA, CA’, Pigment print, sweeps and slashes and swoons with the titanium of the structure itself. “When I step back from my work,” he says, “I realize that I am working with three elements that everybody loves…photography, architecture, and travel. The questions of “where? how? and what?” are easily answered… so the work is very user friendly. I purposely shoot with traditional B&W film in order to commit the images to a life of fine art. I considered shooting digital photos in order to maximize the value for various stock photo purposes but abandon the idea in order to preserve the integrity of the black and white.

Both artists share the trials of their work. “I wrestle with my work there are times in my studio where I spend more time starring and thinking about the paintings then executing” says Kim. “I actually enjoy the times when I am wrestling with my work, I feel that’s when I use my brain the most and try to squeeze out all the knowledge I have about painting and apply it on to my paintings.”

Parker adds, “Life is a constant struggle. Photography is no different. There are photos I love and there are photos that sell. Its pretty obvious, when you see the show you’ll see a few images of trees that are stretching the theme of the show, we sell so much of this work for its aesthetic appeal. The only problem I have with these images are that they overlap a bit with other photographer’s work, as an artist I really want to create something new and distinct.” He concludes, “The good news is that my abstract architectural work does well. I really believe that I’m on to something new.”

What now? Parker says, “I’m sticking with the plan. I’ve have standardized sizes, frames standardized sizes, frames, and printing methods, which has helped to make a recognizable a piece in such a crowded genre.” Sharing, “I simply intend to continually travel and expand my archive. I had a wonderful installation in Atlanta composed of fifteen wall size murals, all in black and white. Since I shot everything on medium and large format film the images were very sharp in the grand scale.”

“I use to be very inpatient after graduating from school, thinking I have to show in New York or LA”, says Kim, “but now I realize patience isn’t such a bad thing. All I can do is try to make good art and hope people will notice, so my answer is I am not really sure where my art is headed in the future, but I am very ambitious.” With many of his works, ‘untitled’, the show calls for revisits and imagination to roam and name them.

www.davidweinberggallery.com

West Loop Trilogy – Part 3
Entare l ‘Inverno
Black Walnut Gallery
Chicago
December 1- 31, 2009

The tone of the current exhibition at the Black Walnut Gallery is in tune with the themes curator, gallery owner Robert Waynor, generally purports. Aesthetically there is a measured distance between the various works. They do not leave possessions in seats beside them, and each artist succeeds in rolling out a clear coda of their own style and approach.

The show, “Entare l ‘Inverno”, brings together a group of Midwestern artists, including Michael Coakes and Janet Krehbiel Pieracci, emerging with dramatic stories.

The themes in Krehbiel Pieracci’s works reflect her interests in layers of paint, of transparency and opacity. These layers, she holds, “Sometimes hold layers of meanings, change in scale. I am always looking to recognize the serendipitous accident and leave it, present.”

The sensation of her sometimes thick application of oil offers a tingling mixture of texture and form. “Pietra VI”, oil on canvas, is part of a series of paintings titled “Carrara White”, a title pulled from architectural nomenclature used to specify the white marble of Carrara for an architectural project (as opposed to Calacatta Grey or Crema Valencia). The first source of the painting is the marble quarries themselves, the quarries from which much of Michelangelo’s stone was obtained.

“I have spent considerable time there, and “Pietra VI”, particularly, draws from the appearance of the marble at day’s end, when the huge white cuts can take on the pinks and oranges of sunset”, she shares. “I’m drawn both by the appearance of the stone and the long connection to art and architectural history. I identify with Michelangelo’s love of marble and can easily imagine his supposed torn feelings between wanting to order his piece and take it home to sculpture and just wanting to stay and work the quarry.”

The works of Michael Coakes take on a sensation with a somewhat hallucinatory intensity. “In general, the theme that seems to be the common thread in my art is beauty. Most often it’s specifically female beauty,” the artist comments. “I’ve been accused often of worshipping women in my work by taking an angle of view looking up toward the subjects in my work. That angle of view, when it is apparent in the work, has never been a conscious decision and whether or not it represents my attitude toward women, I can’t say.”

His series, “The Illusion of Psyche”, proves a well developed conceptual idea. It’s classical Greek, nuanced but not overly sensual. Coakes develops the works thematically, then develops them into beautiful pieces of art.

“I thought of people’s attraction to the symmetrically shaped ink blots we commonly attribute to Dr. Rorschach and the almost reflex-like interest in finding what we “see” in their shapes,” he says. “I was imagining how I might light a model photographically to make the images of blot and woman fuse together fluidly. I tested my idea with a friend during a shoot and got the look I was after. From that point on the female form in the work was Psyche and the series, “The Illusions of Psyche”.

In, “Pietra VII”, oil on canvas, Krehbielp Pieracci shares, “I think the Courbet side is winning but perhaps not. That’s really not for me to say and although I think it is important for me to know what my sources are, ultimately the paintings need to stand.”

Both artist, as do many, tussle with these works. “There have been times when I thought the flow from the ink forms to the figure would be more fluid and satisfying only to find that another figurative pose will better complete the piece” says Coakes, adding “I’m careful to maintain the sinuosity of the form without crossing or even nearing the line of sexual explicitly. Beauty needs to be preserved.”

“I wrestle with stretching and preparing large canvas, and I like that battle. Pietra VI is one of those. I finished it before completing Pietra III. ”, comments Krehbielp Pieracci. “The Carrara series has developed over 10 years, I started with a lot of work on paper and it took about 3 years before I began to paint on canvas. When I get stuck in the middle of a piece I go back to my sources and my sketchbooks and sometimes I stop and do smaller studies in oil. Sometimes that leads to an entirely new painting before the stuck one gets finished.”

The exhibition begs the right to roam, then returns with nourishing images and stories.

www.blackwalnutgallery.com

West Loop Trilogy – Part 2
Juan Angel Chavez: Dragging the Leash
Linda Warren Gallery
Chicago
December 11 – January 16, 2010

Juan Angel Chavez’s solo exhibition, “Dragging the Leash”, now at the Linda Warren Gallery, lays out a sermon. It presents an emblematic voyagers tale told in pressed wood and street found jagged things tidied up and made to rejoice. It leads the viewer off the curb like an intruder, into circles of the semi-starved and discarded and the opera which runs aside such cultures. It bites, while not drawing blood. It’s way past that. “My work has always had a consistent theme that relates to the notion of being free while being tied to the responsibilities of civilization”, he says. “This is what I call feral work. Thematically speaking, it’s about the ingenuity of survival.” It’s the central activity of this show.

Upon entering the exhibition, “Otherside”, a 3-D collage, beckons the viewer to bend or squat, to take a look inside of the orange, battered construction barrel on its side, back lit, encouraging a peep. “On this particular body of work I’m focusing on the idea of being homeless, the consumption of decay and transient ways of life”, Chavez says. This piece, more or less, kicks off his tour, saddled upon cut waves of wood. Social demanding art has fascinated Shakespeare and many the philosopher – Aristotle, Plato, mac-man Machiavelli to name a few, and a posse or two of rappers. There’s rough shit in that landscape. Mouths move and words don’t come out.

But then…comes now, “Last Breath”, mixed media, with its near overwhelming narrative quality. “Last Breath” is about watching someone die in front of my eyes”, the artist rises. “It’s the contradiction…of life and death and the tranquility in the eyes as he went. I began working on layers until I achieved the feeling of that moment. That is my ultimate goal in the work. I want them to be felt while they are looked at.” Antlers reach from the work, along with tufts of fur, burned wood and a melted plastic letter. And it dictates sadly and clearly, in long hand, the story of another pilgrim’s engagement with concrete and cold.

The circular emerges in many of the artist’s works. Segments of “Deep Scars”, produce a star filled sky effect. Another side of the same work carries a wooden log, back-lit to portray a fire, camp or barrel, providing sympathy and warmth for the resident. The homeless often decorate their spaces and Chavez captures that with a small banner of a male and female figure hanging from the work. Each piece holds its own history. “Shine”, sneers out the memory of a deer, or man, or woman frozen in the headlights of a vehicle where they’d best not be.

Mr. Chavez’s career making art rolled out with his murals around Chicago’s neighborhoods. He has been a prolific figure on that scene with a major work, a mural on the city’s major transit line. “My grand mother drew me to art and the influences have been vast”, the artist shares, continuing, “My influence draws from Rushenberg, Chuck Close, Gordon Matta Clark and others. But, I’m also inspired by outsider art. I’m inspired by what I consider the battle against permanence, which includes daily displays of overcoming what we build and what we forget.” There are other works here one just must spend time with.

The step into the Linda Warren Gallery is a bold, and can be seen as a ‘breakout’ move for the artist. It’s charming. Such ether is a gear shift from the non-for-profit board driven options having housed much of his works and messages in the past and have provided limited choices, and visibility. Will such a move call for a new direction for the artist? Will the pieces fight back as they sometime do? “I wrestle with all of them but they all have a different fight”, he shares. “Some start out huge and end up small. Others are simple and complicated at the same time. When they get overwhelming I usually go for a walk until clarity appears.”

No one can predict the fate of Chavez’s subjects, or the terms and direction of his brilliant, conscious art. “I’m wanting to continue this same path. I have several projects I want to develop regarding this direction. So, it’s hard for me to say what’s the direction. I’m going with this work. I guess you are going to have to wait and see.” And that we will, sir, eager and anxious.

www.lindawarrengallery.com