Diane Arbus

FRAENKEL GALLERY
49 Geary Street
January 7–March 6

Diane Arbus, Girl Emerging from the Ocean in Curlers, Coney Island, N.Y., 1963, black-and-white photograph, 14 x 11".

Robert Gober’s engrossing selection of Diane Arbus’s photographs may bear his imprint, but besides two contextualizing admissions of influence—his 1976 drawing of her 1972 monograph and a wall text––in this exhibition he uses pictures culled from uncommon access to the Arbus archives to honor the artist and reroute the mythology of troubled psyches and exploitation into something that courses with humanistic subtext. The forty-five works, oddly enough, celebrate life—there’s a notable number of baby photographs; one uncharacteristically bright image from 1968 depicts an ebullient infant—as much as soberly acknowledge mortality: Arbus’s father, David Nemerov, on his 1963 deathbed; a dead dog; a murder scene constructed in a wax museum.

In between, Gober finds photographs of lively wonder and melancholy, including two stunning, nearly abstract images of blurry windblown newspapers on expanses of black asphalt, or the descriptively titled Girl Watching a Soap Bubble, Central Park, N.Y.C., 1960, and Boy Beneath a Falling Leaf, 1956. Gober brings a queer eye to images of musclemen, butch lesbians, and a heavily tattooed man that from a current perspective seem full of comfort, rather than of the freakishness so often attributed to Arbus’s work. Even the morbidly obese woman in Circus Fat Lady with Her Dog Troubles, MD, 1964, has an unfettered grin that’s the antithesis of sideshow tragedy.

Like “Heat Waves in a Swamp,” the survey of paintings by Charles Burchfield that Gober curated for the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles last fall, his Arbus show points to ambivalent undercurrents of twentieth-century American art and life, its political and social inequities, real lives and fever dreams—the same mixture that makes Gober’s own work so memorable.

— Glen Helfand

Ewan Gibbs

SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
151 Third Street
January 16–June 27

Ewan Gibbs, San Francisco (detail), 2009, graphite on paper, 11 11/16 x 8 1/4".

The not-unfounded stereotype of northern-California fog is well suited to Ewan Gibbs’s modestly scaled, labor-intensive graphite drawings, which previously depicted famous buildings and anonymous hotel rooms. This exhibition comprises eighteen works, commissioned for SF MoMA on the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, and are titled as a group San Francisco, 2009. They show tourist views—think snapshots from Flickr instead of postcard-perfect shots of Coit Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge—that subvert image conventions through their conceptual strategies. Gibbs constructs his works through the repeated inscription of a single mark. This method translates into thousands of tiny slashes or circles, notations borrowed from knitting patterns, which in turn form pale, monochromatic views of the streets of San Francisco. The British artist’s visual tropes echo Photorealist strategies; the results look something like pint-size versions of early Chuck Close works crossed with Robert Bechtle’s paintings of impassive Bay Area abodes.

Gibbs’s quietly demanding output reveals itself slowly—most emphatically in his wan rendering of the Transamerica Pyramid, which is made nearly invisible by a blanket of fog. With a deft hand, the artist manages an impressive amount of tonal variation within his tight framework, yet more compelling is how he encapsulates issues of temporality in his compositions. While the photographic sources were culled from brief visits to San Francisco, Gibbs manages to transform travelogue into an extended poetic meditation.

— Glen Helfand

Jiha Moon

SALTWORKS
664 11TH ST NW, ATLANTA GA 30318
January 23–March 6

Jiha Moon, Painter’s Argument, 2009, ink and acrylic on hanji paper, 33 1/2 x 32".

Jiha Moon’s increased confidence is evident in this new series of paintings. The tension between figuration and abstraction still pervades her repeated layering of traditional Asian landscapes and gestural expressionism. But this new work seems to revel in the joy of painting, alternating thin washes of ink with delicately rendered objects and thick impasto brushstrokes, all on Moon’s favored handmade hanji paper. Collage also figures in some of the works, as when she adds paper to extend her painted surface from the rectangular picture plane or incorporates fabric appliqués, possibly an influence from her ongoing residency at the Fabric Workshop.

The South Korean–born, Atlanta-based artist still wrestles with the notion of shifting identities, particularly in our image-laden society. Pac-Man-like figures with razor-sharp teeth, butterflies, and even Wonderland’s Alice find their way into her peaceful landscapes with floating clouds and trees, which are interrupted by bursts of energetic color. The work speaks of a society that not only straddles two cultures but also occupies a third—in cyberspace. Moon’s professed hero Philip Guston stated in 1960, “[P]ainting is impure. It is the adjustment of impurities which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.” Moon seems to have taken this to heart in her current exhibition (titled “Blue Peony and Impure Thoughts,” in Guston’s honor), providing thought-provoking interpretations of the multilayered and image-rich world she inhabits.

— Rebecca Dimling Cochran

Mette Tronvoll

GALLERY BENOIT
450 Harrison Avenue, #63
, 8232;,
February 5–February 28

Mette Tronvoll, Isortoq Unartoq 1, 1999, color photograph, 29 x 35".

Mette Tronvoll’s spare Boston debut, comprising a total of six photographs from two different series, perhaps fits her restrained aesthetic approach. The Norwegian artist has spent two decades honing a documentary language that tries to mesh objective distancing and typological categorization with the construction and communication of intimacy.

For the “Isortoq Unartoq” series, 1998–99, Tronvoll visited Greenland during two consecutive summers, camping on the sparsely populated southeastern island of Isortoq and the hot-spring-rich southern island of Uunartoq. In the midst of this harsh, glacial landscape, children and adults immerse themselves in thermal waters, warming their bodies and relaxing their reticence. A recently published catalogue explains that Tronvoll won the residents’ emotional confidence by visiting the islands without her camera before starting the project. While shunning sentimentalism, the juxtaposition of these analog images monumentalizes (and mythifies) Greenland’s topographic austerity while revealing (and romanticizing) the reserved warmth of its inhabitants.

The other two photographs on view, Peder, 2000, and Anastasia and Nina, 2001, illustrate Tronvoll’s documentation of people in her immediate circle (her grandfather and two friends from Berlin, respectively). Here, too, she eschews exaggerated theatrical gestures of affinity (there are no bright smiles or jocular swaggering) for a quiet and composed closeness. Yet there is something equally dramatic about this (enforced) stillness, suggesting that Tronvoll’s subjects have internalized and now cannily perform a particular form of portraiture for the camera.

Given Tronvoll’s current midcareer retrospective in Norway, it is unclear why the artist’s Boston entrée has been so diluted. This limited representation of her oeuvre historicizes Tronvoll with the same partial lens through which she frames her subjects.

— Nuit Banai

M. Pravat and Heeseop Yoon

BOSE PACIA
163 Plymouth Street,
February 4–March 26

View of “M. Pravat and Heeseop Yoon,” 2010.

In “Linear Obscurity,” M. Pravat and Heeseop Yoon create elegant clutter. Both artists use a flurry of lines to suggest layered architectural spaces: The New Delhi–based Pravat fashions neat ground plans that are obscured by overlaid abstractions, and Yoon, who lives in New York, manipulates Mylar, tape, and ink drawings into dense surfaces evoking her perception of crowded places. The total effect is visually harmonious, if conceptually diverse.

While the lines and shapes in Pravat’s “Still Underconstruction” series (all works cited, 2009) appear as formal structures, Yoon’s built-up surfaces hint at real things underneath and unearthed. Indeed, titles like Storages and Dad’s Basement remind viewers of the often packed places hidden within our lives, and the freehand, cumulative-construction feel of these works––iterating the memory of abandoned objects in such spaces––attests to their potential for chaos and ambiguity.

Most dramatically, Yoon’s Junkshop, a large-scale masking-tape-on-Mylar piece, highlights the organic and individualized qualities of her layered lines, having been adapted specifically to the architecture of Bose Pacia’s fresh Dumbo space. The work frames the gallery and the exhibition, while––with a touch of irony––asking viewers to redraw their lines of perception about what we see and how we remember.

— Beth Citron

Lauren E. Simonutti

CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY
300 W. Superior St.,
January 8–March 6

Lauren E. Simonutti, She Left a Light on but They Were Never Coming Back, 2007, toned gelatin-silver contact print, 5 x 4".

Lauren E. Simonutti’s black-and-white images depict meticulously staged representations of life as she experiences it, starring herself as the main character. In 2006, the Baltimore-based artist was diagnosed with rapid-cycling bipolar and schizoaffective disorder and since then she has lived alone, in “self-imposed isolation,” taking photographs in a house where none of the clocks tell time correctly––a house that is, for Simonutti, a haven, a stage set, a performer, and a collaborator.

Using sheets to create drapes, walls, and screens, she turns a single small corner of her home into theatrical sets and Surrealist tableaux. Peculiar arrangements of found objects—doll heads, mirrors, wooden horses, and candlesticks, for example—are transformed into charged and sometimes inscrutable personal lexica. Simonutti’s images have the vaporous appearance of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes. Her face, arms, hands, and legs are often disembodied, while doubled visages and apparitional forms make it clear that her photographs are, in some sense, playing tricks on viewers in the manner of Victorian-era spirit photography. She bleaches and tones each print in the darkroom, exaggerating shadows and eliminating contours while exacerbating an already palpable sense of dread.

The artist does not always succeed in avoiding redundancy and cliché, as an image of her bound in chains before an array of prescription medication unfortunately attests. At her best, however, Simonutti marshals familiar tropes judiciously in her portrayal of experiences that are deeply personal and profoundly misunderstood.

— Claudine Ise

Laura Letinsky

MONIQUE MELOCHE GALLERY
2154 W. Division
January 16–March 13

Laura Letinsky, Untitled #2, 2008, color photograph, 32 x 40". From the series “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009.

In her first series of domestic still-life photographs (“Morning, and Melancholia,” 2002–), Laura Letinsky put the contemporary kitchen countertop and the traditions of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings under analysis, as it were, revealing them both to be purveyors of deep-seated cultural meanings. In Letinsky’s subsequent bodies of work, the white tablecloth—traditionally a sign of cleanliness and elegance—figures as a screen on which a culture’s ideas surrounding food, desire, and sustenance are projected and consumed.

Succulence and decay, desire and the sense of repulsion that often follows satiety, are competing forces in the artist’s latest exhibition, a magnificently concise selection of five large-format color photographs culled from a new series titled “The Dog and the Wolf,” 2008–2009. These grimly elegiac images, all shot in the artist’s studio during the velvety gray hours of twilight, foreground to a greater extent than before the serene abjection at the heart of Letinsky’s project without sacrificing any of the exquisitely controlled formalism for which she is known.

The artfully strewn cellophane wrappers and fast-food packaging of her 2006 series “To Say It Isn’t So” have been replaced by a dead rabbit and pigeon, a pile of scooped-out oyster shells, and various minute scraps of organic detritus placed so precisely on the table’s surface as to suggest an excavation site rather than an abandoned meal. Shot from a range of perspectives, all of them somewhat disorienting, Letinsky’s dining table no longer appears as a deserted gathering spot. Now it seems more like a precipice, its contents pushed precariously close to the edge with nowhere left to go.

— Claudine Ise

“Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out”

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO
220 East Chicago Avenue
February 6–May 30

View of “Production Site: The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out,” 2010. From left: William Kentridge, Tabula Rasa I, 2003; Balancing Act, 2003; Moveable Assets, 2003; Feats of Prestidigitation, 2003.

“Production Site” highlights the studio as a place of work, as well as a compelling aesthetic subject in itself. The “selected visual history of the artist’s studio”—installed on a wall directly outside the exhibition galleries, as an initial point of reference—includes a variety of iconic images: Jackson Pollock throwing his body into an “action” painting; Lee Bontecou in her New York studio, blowtorch in hand; Andy Warhol seated alone in his cavernous Factory. There’s even a film still of Julianne Moore as an “avant-garde feminist artist” from The Big Lebowski (1998).

This ancillary display reminds viewers that long-standing misperceptions about the nature of artists’ studios are inevitably linked to the clichés surrounding artists themselves. Perplexingly, however, it is also one of the few points in the exhibition where practitioners actually manifest an embodied presence. Mostly, they appear as trace elements: the whirling dervish of anxiety in Justin Cooper’s video Studio Visit, 2007; the hot white blob of infrared light shutting the studio door at night (Bruce Nauman, Mapping the Studio II, 2002); the covert operative who comes in to expand and edit her painting’s sprawling narrative only on Mondays, when the museum is closed (Deb Sokolow, You Tell People You’re Working Really Hard on Things These Days, 2010).

There are several memorable exceptions. Nikhil Chopra’s two-day gallery performance offered a brief but potent instance of an artist responding directly, if theatrically, to his immediate environment, while William Kentridge’s magnificent multichannel animation—a meditation on the medium’s place in the history of cinematic trickery—draws viewers into a space that feels authentically “magic,” despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s like walking into a waking dream.

— Claudine Ise

“Starburst: Color Photography in America: 1970–1980”

CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM
953 Eden Park Drive
February 13–May 9

Stephen Shore, West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974, color photograph, 8 x 10".

“I photograph in color because the world is in color,” Eve Sonneman declared in 1976. Such a statement presented color photography as a near tautology––as exquisitely self-evident. But it also addressed an art world where the medium was understood as black-and-white. So argues this exhibition, which charts the fraught and uneven emergence of chromatic photography in the 1970s. While black-and-white images were seen as artful translations of the world––and hence cerebral abstractions of it––Sonneman’s comment captured a desire for an artless empiricism that several early color photographers toyed with as they married the camera’s capacity for dumb transcription with the radical de-skilling enabled by new technologies like the Polaroid.

Stephen Shore’s 1971 postcards of Amarillo, Texas, clearly indebted to Ed Ruscha’s serial cartographies, are situated as one point of origin of the emergent tradition. Yet these deadpan Conceptual beginnings seem to quickly slip into more traditional documentary modes. In the many images of vernacular landscapes, clapboard houses, billboards and signage, the legacy of Walker Evans looms large, even if his focused vision is now splayed out into a spectrum of possibilities. By contrast, Jan Groover and Barbara Kasten turned their backs on the dialogue with documentary, using color instead to articulate a range of formal, painterly concerns. This chromatic intensity reaches a saturated frenzy in John Divola’s Zuma #29, 1978, Richard Misrach’s 1978 “Hawaii” series, and, most famously, in the milky-veined, crimson ceiling of William Eggleston’s Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973.

Unhitching pigment and dye from the seemingly natural relationship they currently enjoy with photography, the show adeptly denaturalizes color. In prodding the general amnesia on this point, “Starburst” also accounts for the monumental Gurskys and Struths of the 1990s, worlds away from Shore’s drugstore prints, yet arguably the apotheoses of color photography’s chameleonic history.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Dana Frankfort

INMAN GALLERY
3901 Main Street
January 15–March 6

Dana Frankfort, COMING, 2009, oil on panel, 36 x 48".

With their bright palettes and rough rectangular forms, Dana Frankfort’s latest canvases recall early Rothko. Hovering bodies of vivid colors, applied in jagged brushstrokes, pleasurably shock the system on a gray winter day. As in her previous works, Frankfort seeks to go beyond a formal interpretation of color and form through her incorporation of various words rendered in capital letters. Ubiquitous in her work for more than a decade, they are never straightforward. Filling up the canvas from top to bottom, her words seem the equivalent of screaming at the heavens in our digital age.

The artist singles out the elastic potential of her letterforms and teases subtlety out of surprising places. Titled “PICTURES,” this exhibition explores subjective readings of words without specificity. Like Day-Glo interpretations of Color Field painting, a hazy world of emotion is all one has to contextualize HEALTH and FITNESS (all works 2009). COMING is a nearly blank white canvas, its titular word obscured to a faded hint of translucent yellow on a ground of neon orange. Many layers of color are painted beneath the surface; purples and yellows leak out at the edges of a panel mounted to a wooden frame. Frankfort shines a light on communication’s foibles here, which seem obscure even in plain sight.

— Sean Carroll

Jonathan Marshall

ART PALACE
3913 Main Street
January 15–March 6

Jonathan Marshall, Quest of Sight, 2009, still from a color video, 29 minutes.

Inaugurating Art Palace’s new Houston home, Jonathan Marshall’s “Doubled Vision”––his second solo exhibition at the gallery––offers a new chapter in his homespun folk mythology. Quest of Sight, 2009, an almost thirty-minute-long video that is part western, part sci-fi epic, combines segments from the artist’s older videos with new footage shot in remote Texas locations. Nearly devoid of dialogue, the work introduces three self-styled adventurers fated to meet one another: Lenny, a mop-bearded nomad, played by Marshall; Johan Pilgrim, a ruggedly sexy cowboy; and Skelebones, a beach-dwelling witch doctor. Its quirky humor, DIY aesthetic, and digital interludes bring to mind a host of emerging video artists, such as Brian Bress, Matthew Morgan, and Shana Moulton.

Like that of the best of his contemporaries, Marshall’s vision coheres through a preoccupation with obsolete forms that extends to his drawings, prints, and sculptures. Dazzle camouflage, a bright geometric pattern used on World War I–era battleships to confuse enemy squadrons, is deployed throughout the show. It’s especially seductive in the tondo painting Nike, Adidas, Reebok, or Little Bangs in a Big Bang, 2009, which incorporates the pattern within the companies’ color palettes.

Failed modern technology, such as the Lunar Surface Gravimeter (a device used in the 1972 Apollo 17 space mission and intended to measure gravitational pull on the moon), is reconsidered as an untitled sculpture in the diptych Ambiguous Landscape Land Art Proposal Drawing, 2009. Discarded by astronauts on the moon’s surface, the gravimeter’s location is indicated by a blank rectangle in both a realistic rendering of the lunar landscape (left) and among a black-on-black razzle-dazzle pattern (right). Given Marshall’s richness of allusion and his whimsical spirit, one should be sure to catch the subsequent adventures of Lenny and Johan’s Quest.

— Wendy Vogel

Francesca Fuchs

TEXAS GALLERY
2012 Peden Street
February 18–March 27

Francesca Fuchs, Abstract Print and Bed,
 2009, 
acrylic on canvas, 
59 3/4 x 80".

This deceptively enigmatic exhibition by Francesca Fuchs, simply titled “Paintings,” will not appease those looking for a quick read. While the ten canvases might initially come off as staid, their metaphoric import is tantalizingly tautological—a self-reflective statement on value. The questions raised by the works are both simple and stubborn and thus recall the novels of Magnus Mills. The protagonists in Mills’s stories are typically part of a maddening, self-sustaining, yet purposeless system. Similarly, Fuchs creates an existential conundrum in her show, one that implores the viewer to question profound issues via a simple apparatus.

All the works here depict paintings of paintings, and the artist’s signature washed-out pastel palette is dominant, if somewhat more painterly than in earlier works. Fuchs’s source material is culled from a mix of junk-shop kitsch paintings, which are sometimes positioned next to pictures by renowned artists. By rendering both genres in one work, she not just draws the mercurial nature of aesthetic value into focus but also, more poignantly, pulls herself into the mix. While so much contemporary art distances the maker from the viewer, these paintings expose the artist’s deep-seated questioning of worth and value within the very context of the system that is celebrating her. The fact that the exhibition is in one of Houston’s top venues only enriches the dialogue.

— Garland Fielder

“The Graphic Unconscious”

THE PENNSYLVANIA ACADEMY OF THE FINE ARTS
118-128 North Broad Street
January 29–April 11

Tromarama, Serigala Militia (detail), 2005, 402 woodcuts, video projection, woodcuts 10 x 8" each.

This ambitious five-venue exhibition brings together thirty-five artists who incorporate prints or printmaking into a wide array of styles and practices. The highlight of the exhibition (itself part of Philadelphia’s citywide festival “Philagrafika 2010”) is at Morris and Fisher Brooks Galleries at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and features Christiane Baumgartner, Mark Bradford, Orit Hofshi, Pepón Osorio, Kiki Smith, Qiu Zhijie, and the artist collective Tromarama. The show encourages a broadened definition of printmaking, one that takes into account digital reproduction technology and encompasses the use of printed matter in combined-media works.

Several of the pieces challenge the traditional notion of prints as multiples. Hofshi, for example, incorporates hand-carved pine panels along with the prints pulled from them into a large-scale sculptural installation. By including the blocks in If the Tread Is an Echo, 2009, the artist blurs the line between process and final artwork. She also precludes the possibility of an edition. Another print that would be challenging to reproduce is Osorio’s You’re Never Ready, 2009. For this piece, he used a laser printer to superimpose an X-ray of his mother’s skull onto a flattened, compressed pile of confetti. The single continuous image––printed across thousands of individual paper bits like a giant jigsaw puzzle––is a technological feat that subverts printmaking’s tradition of multiple reproductions of a single image by instead printing one image on numerous surfaces.

Also worth pointing out as an effective fusion of new media and traditional printmaking technique is Tromarama’s Serigala Militia, 2005. This stop-motion animation, projected in a small chamber, was made by filming a sequence of wooden panels that also line the exterior walls of the room. The blocks’ handmade materiality and implicit labor-intensive production enrich the slick, fast-paced video. Overall, the assimilation of prints and printmaking into a wide variety of contemporary art practices confirms the sustained relevance and versatility of this ancient medium.

— Mara Hoberman

Carey Young

MUSEUM OF ART, RISD
Rhode Island School of Design, 224 Benefit Street
October 9–April 18

Carey Young, Declared Void, 2005, vinyl drawing and text on wall, dimensions variable.

As this small show demonstrates, Carey Young has considered deeply the realm of corporate-structured business and the legalization of Western culture. In the nearly fifteen-minute video Uncertain Contract, 2008, an actor in business attire roams an empty white set while dramatizing legalese such as parties, tender, and notice—at one point furiously punching an imagined victim while repeating the word “damages.” Body Techniques (after Parallel Stress, Dennis Oppenheim, 1970), 2007, is a photograph of Young, in a business suit, resting facedown in a hollow of sand on the outskirts of an anonymous Arab boomtown. The work comments ruefully on the fate of the individual in transnational capitalist enterprises while evoking still other artistic precedents, including performance documentation of Valie Export’s 1972–76 series “Body Configurations.”

The exhibition hinges on Declared Void, 2005, a cubic space delineated by a thick black vinyl line applied to the walls and floor. Alongside it, a text declares: BY ENTERING THE ZONE CREATED BY THIS DRAWING, AND FOR THE PERIOD YOU REMAIN THERE, YOU DECLARE AND AGREE THAT THE US CONSTITUTION WILL NOT APPLY TO YOU. The contractual language imbues the emptiness with a charge that simultaneously repulses and seduces. During my visit, two men discussed the work’s implications (“Someone could come in there and strip my clothes off and beat me to a bloody pulp, I guess”) and a woman gingerly stretched her foot across the line. She withdrew it quickly and then, for the rest of her time in the gallery, skirted this seeming black hole of rights. In fact, while crafting the piece Young sought legal advice on how best to re-create the “gray area” of the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay. An irony, no doubt intended by this consistently observant artist, is the presence just above Declared Void of one of the museum’s surveillance cameras, watching over the scene below impassively.

— Brian Sholis

“Wild Is the Wind”

SAVANNAH COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN
Gutstein Gallery, 201 E. Broughton St., Pei Ling Chan Gallery, 322 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
January 11–February 28

Zineb Sedira, MiddleSea, 2008, still from a color video, 16 minutes.

“Wild Is the Wind” brings together seven artists whose work shares a sensibility that the curator, Laurie Ann Farrell, connects to the mood and lyrics of the 1957 American song of the same title, a slow, melancholic ballad of longing, discovery, and love. To translate these emotions into a coherent visual exhibition, Farrell casts her net wide. MiddleSea, 2008, a hauntingly beautiful video by Zineb Sedira, follows a middle-aged man who is alternately lost in contemplation and pacing the deck as he travels as the lone passenger on a ferry. Ghada Amer’s equally compelling installation, Le Salon Courbé, 2007, explores the space between cultures and examines the definition of terrorism in English and Arabic. Kiluanji Kia Henda’s large-scale color prints reveal the beauty and dignity the Angolan photographer has found among Luanda’s poverty-struck inhabitants. His pictures provide an interesting contrast to Shish Kebab, 2004, Lara Baladi’s critical look at the culturally loaded media images that flood society.

Less obvious but no less powerful are paintings by Odili Donald Odita, whose hard-edge abstractions speak of a desire to create harmony among elements that may be at odds with one another. Similarly, Nicholas Hlobo’s elegant sewn “drawings” made from leather, tire rubber, and ribbon offer personal meditations regarding his search for acceptance as a gay black man in post-apartheid South Africa. Combined with Penny Siopis’s figurative paintings, which teeter between romanticism and fantasy, the exhibition becomes a thought-provoking meditation on the very basic human quest for understanding and acceptance.

— Rebecca Dimling Cochran

Wafaa Bilal

HELEN DAY ART CENTER
5 School Street
January 21–April 4

Wafaa Bilal, Chair, 2009, color photograph, 40 x 50".

Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal’s recent work turns the topicality of its subject matter––the horrors of war in the artist’s native Iraq, which he fled as a dissident in the run-up to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait––into a set of chilling meditations on photography and representation, outrage and loss, and the long-distance violence of technologically mediated warfare in the digital age. The ambiguous evidentiary character of the war-zone photograph––and of the stories it tells––plays an organizing role in this overtly political body of work. Chair, 2009, is a large-format image of an elaborate dollhouse reconstruction based on a scene captured in 2003 by photojournalist Robert Nickelsberg in one of Saddam Hussein’s war-ravaged palaces. The installation Samarra, 2009, allows visitors to perform the same trick for themselves: The viewfinder of a battered Pentax embedded in the gallery’s wall opens onto a dioramic re-creation of a ruined mosque interior in Fallujah, destroyed by American bombs in 2004.

Bilal is perhaps best known for his 2007 performance piece Domestic Tension, which took shape in response to the 2005 death of his brother, killed by an unmanned American Predator drone in Iraq. It is represented here by a life-size reconstruction of the ersatz bedroom the artist inhabited for thirty days at the now-closed Flatfile Galleries in Chicago. Watched round-the-clock via webcam, Bilal invited online visitors to “shoot an Iraqi” with a remote-controlled paintball gun. Some forty thousand paintballs later, the room’s paint-spattered walls and furniture bear mute witness to the sharp aim of Bilal’s provocation and the remarkable lengths he was willing to go to turn what he calls his “comfort zone” into a “conflict zone.” Silenced and stilled here, the scene takes on the hushed atmosphere of a battlefield memorial hastily erected before the end of a war.

— Alexander Keefe

Jeremy Kost

CONNER CONTEMPORARY ART
1358-60 Florida Avenue, NE
January 16–March 6

Jeremy Kost, Life Ball 2009 (the Party Don't Stop) May 18, 2009: 9:30pm to 4am (Vienna, Austria), 2009, 130 Polaroids, 47 x 61".

The JPEG has largely supplanted the analog photograph as the preferred medium for party documentation, conveyed through endless image streams dedicated to the fleeting and residual impressions of last night’s party. In his exhibition “Anyone Other than Me,” Jeremy Kost strives to reclaim lost ground for the photograph, capturing one thousand (and then some) celebrity and nightlife portraits using Polaroid instant film. In this effort, he is partly successful. The Polaroid deliberately signals to the viewer an effort at displacement: The vernacular, democratic camera stands at odds with the access that gives him truck with the elites of New York’s glam subculture. This contrast is most successful when presented in large grids comprising snapshots taken in unedited sequences over the course of a single evening. These document an array of individual genderfuck performances: A photo shoot of the animated twenty-two-year-old drag star Rainblo underscores the celebrity of both subject and photographer. But with his collages—in which parts of performers are overlaid messily to map out the whole—Kost’s Warholesque point grows redundant. His subjects want to be plastic, their identities constructed not just for the camera but by the camera.

Redundancy is a risk in this show. A cautious video featuring a drag queen in full dress promenading in New York reiterates the theatricality of performative identity. But video of drag stateliness is too deliberate to convey the urgency depicted in Kost’s Polaroid grids—the inexhaustible social striving that is ultimately his subject and process. Though rare, there are some candid slips—an exhausted grimace or sheen of sweat. These glimpses through the facade tempt the viewer to focus on the familiar among the exotic. Rather, Kost’s Polaroid matrices—mapping so many repetitive permutations of access, location, and artifice—make the meticulous mundane, emphasizing the notion that any gender identification is ineluctably performance.

— Kriston Capps

Oliver Husain

ART GALLERY OF YORK UNIVERSITY (AGYU)
Accolade East Building, 4700 Keele Street
January 21–March 14

View of “Oliver Husain,” 2010.

Occupying two adjacent galleries separated by a transparent vinyl curtain, Oliver Husain’s multivalent exhibition “Hovering Proxies” mischievously refigures the boundary between subject and object. Surrounded by a tropical suburban panorama depicted in fourteen framed photographs, The Dupe’s Garden, 2010, dominates the first room. It is an open architecture delineated by sheer fabric panels, handpainted silk scarves, and a beaded curtain suspended from commercial light stands. Materially, Husain’s sensitive yet lush approach echoes the porousness of this liminal space. At the structure’s center, a pile of linked block letters cut from newspapers points to additional encrypted texts—a tangible “garden of forking paths” in the Borgesian sense—that when fully unraveled reads as a lyric poem set in an exotic locale.

Beyond the curtain, in the nearly empty second gallery, a three-and-a-half-minute silent film is projected on the narrow band of wall space above this permeable membrane. In it, the camera voyeuristically follows a number of helium balloons as they bump, meander, and hobnob around the diaphanous planes of the Garden.

Husain’s double framing of the first gallery viewed through the curtain, and the same space depicted on film but populated with his latex “proxies,” delivers a clever disjuncture. By separating the two spaces with this proverbial “fourth wall,” he stages a theatrical setup that on one level brings to mind Dan Graham’s two-way-mirror or time-delay installations, except replete with delightful indulgences, like ostrich-feather finials and the proxies’ gossipy banter recorded in snappy, interjecting subtitles. This playfulness extends to the film’s end, when Husain engages a simple parlor trick to disrupt a static portrait of the proxies huddled in the gallery. A sudden swift breeze that whips the balloons into a frenzy on-screen is simultaneously felt as two electric fans in the room are triggered on cue, thus returning us to the present but vividly inserting us in the garden, too.

— Jen Hutton

Pedro Reyes

LABOR
Colima 55
February 25–April 18

Pedro Reyes, Babymarx, 2009, still from a color video, 23 minutes.

Pedro Reyes first conceived of a television series that would feature puppets of Karl Marx and philosopher Adam Smith in 2007. It was not until the next year, however, when Akiko Miyake, the cocurator of the third Yokohama Triennale, put him in touch with Japanese master puppet maker Takumi Ota, that Reyes was able to move forward with the project. Through elaborate drawings, Reyes designed twelve puppets for Ota to create, after which he began to work on a trailer and the pilot episode of Babymarx, 2009. This exhibition presents many of the objects, props, and sets that resulted from the filming of both the pilot and the trailer. It includes puppets of Marx, Smith, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Guevara, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman—all of whom take part in the ideological debate central to Reyes’s film. Also on view are Reyes’s puppets of fictional characters, including the librarian Miss Lena, which create the engine and support for the debate between capitalism and socialism in “Crisis City.”

Monitors on top of two tables here portray scenes of the making of the first episode of Babymarx. Members of the Japanese puppet theater company Hitomiza manipulate the characters in a two-story library building designed by Reyes, which references modern architects and designers including Le Corbusier, Jean Prouvé, Richard Neutra, and Jørn Utzon, as well as Mexican modern masters such as Mario Pani and Reynaldo Pérez Rayón. Nearby, the actual model of the library takes up the rest of the exhibition space. While it may seem strange that Reyes’s characters inhabit the library, Babymarx suggests that the premise of that sacred space as a container of knowledge is now subject to revision. Eschewing cynicism, the artist imagines it as space from which it is possible to conceive of new economic systems and perhaps even question the premise of capitalism.

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.

— Montserrat Albores