print September 2010

Ewan Gibbs

The tautly focused pursuit of infinitesimal difference within the incredibly tiny is an intriguing pictorial obsession, and Ewan Gibbs has a kind of atom vision. His standard procedure is to take blackand-white photographs and translate them onto paper into a grid of multiple thousands of meticulously drawn cells, each precisely the same minute size, many hatched with a small mark, parallel row after parallel row, to create a teeming, handmade benday dot matrix. From cell to cell, the minuscule differences in the pressure of his pencil give each dot its near-microscopic uniqueness, and through

print April 2010

Angel Otero

With the ebullience of youth—he’s not yet thirty—Puerto Rican–born, Brooklyn-based Angel Otero fills old bottles with new wine, bringing innovative and dramatic formal strategies to bear on conventional formats and subjects. Although his compositions often resemble traditional oil paintings, Otero rarely touches the surface of a canvas with a brush carrying paint. Instead, he crafts many of his works from “oil skins”—paint that has been poured on glass or Plexiglas, left to dry, and then peeled off in sheets. Sometimes Otero crumples the skins and uses them as building blocks in representational

print February 2010

John Delk

Like a sly human computer, Brooklyn-based artist John Delk amasses vast quantities of data, which he processes and shuffles, changing up the platform to reconsider the content. A typical project is Pressed (all works cited, 2009), in which he took issues of the Wall Street Journal published during the spring of 2008, extracted the 1,358 hedcuts that appeared during that period (the paper’s iconic small-scale portraits), and printed them on an extremely long scroll, in chronological order and to scale. Universally recognized faces often make multiple appearances and share this stage with ephemeral

print November 2009

Aspen Mays

Escape, the sheer exhilaration of chucking it all and getting far, far away, seems much on the mind of Aspen Mays. While this Chicago-based artist never indicates just what she might so assiduously be fleeing, the urge to relocate, physically or psychologically, is suggested in her recent work, and this show offered a witty repertoire of options for getting the hell out of Dodge.

An allusion to space travel surfaces in The Future of the Future (Spaceman), 2009, a photograph of a fictive astronaut made of aluminum foil standing in an aluminum foil–gilded room. Fusing high fantasy and low

print October 2009

Dennis Balk

That the title of this exhibition, “Dennis Balk: Early Work 1890–2090,” turned out to seem plausible was only the first of its many twists. Sixty photographs, sculptures, drawings on tablecloths and napkins, videos, silk screens, found objects, installations, collages, and pieces of mail art surveyed an artist so omnivorous, so much a living kunstkammer, that anything felt possible.

The credo uniting Balk’s disparate output appeared on a piece of laminated paper embedded within Photo Magnetic Receiver, installation component, 2009, a rambling, collagelike installation made from found and fabricated

print Summer 2009

Matthew Rich

Matthew Rich makes art in patchwork fashion. A pictorial quilter, he stitches—tapes, actually—imprecise geometric forms together, creating compositions that never hide the means of their production. He begins by painting individual sheets of paper with shades of latex paint, leaving behind visible brushwork and just barely perceptible shifts in hue. These colorful sheets are then cut into shapes, which he subsequently tapes together to form irregularly shaped abstractions. While referring at once to Color Field and pattern painting, the works never strike an equipoise between part and whole:

print May 2009

Rachel Mason

In 2004, Rachel Mason began to make groupings of small porcelain ﬁgures for every year of her life. Each set includes, in addition to a self-portrait, busts portraying global political and military leaders who were chief actors in some notable geopolitical aggression or armed conﬂict during that grouping’s respective year. Titled The Ambassadors, the work is currently complete through 2008 (the artist’s thirtieth year), and includes 117 ﬁgures ranging from two and a half to four inches in height. At Andrew Rafacz the ﬁgures appeared on a long shelf that snaked around the gallery, and ran in

print March 2009

Jim Lutes

Conversations about Jim Lutes regularly devolve into assessments of his “Chicago-ness,” or the degree to which the artist from Washington State who relocated to Chicago for his MFA and remained here has absorbed deep-seated local traditions into his art. Is Lutes heir to the roughneck figural surrealism dating back to Chicago artists such as Ivan Albright, Seymour Rosofsky, and Ed Paschke? Is his predilection for exploring blue-collar themes with an assertive “up yours” cynicism and dark humor an act of seamless continuity, the artist a working-class Chicago craftsman with a paintbrush? This

print February 2009

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle has probably passed enough professional milestones—participation in Documenta (in 2007), the Whitney Biennial (in 2000), and various other exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world; receipt of a MacArthur “genius” grant—to indulge himself in a one-liner. Dirty Bomb, 2008, is a full-scale replica of Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945, immaculately translated by the artist into white fiberglass and aluminum. Suspended from the ceiling, the bulbous, dirigible-shaped colossus has mud slathering its otherwise pristine snout, much of it dripping

print January 2009

Ian Pedigo

The old dictum that certain sculptors prefer to work with, rather than on, materials rings true in the case of Ian Pedigo. His efforts fall somewhere between found-object assemblage and three-dimensional collage; he takes the more or less utilitarian stuff of the world—the works in this exhibition, for example, incorporate lampshades, denim, foam insulation board, carpeting, plastic sheets, Homasote, magazine clippings, concrete, fabric, and plastic cups—and combines it so as to coax out poetic visual subtleties. Showing a predilection for planar arrangement, Pedigo builds what look like drawings

print December 2008

Jason Meadows

Jason Meadows now lives in Los Angeles, but he’s originally from Indianapolis and attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As this exhibition everywhere suggests, at some point he got inculcated with the core traditions of Chicago art, particularly its obsessive blue-collar insouciance—its affection for scrupulous but low-tech craftsmanship and its earnest and unapologetic sympathy with proletarian and vernacular culture. Take, for example, Hamburger Tower (all works 2008). It’s a pretty straightforward painting of a hamburger—if hamburgers were six feet tall and had about forty

print November 2008

Wallace Whitney

Wallace Whitney is alive to the curious allure of gestural abstraction, to the drama and theatricality made possible by painting with a wide and overloaded brush in thick three- or four-foot strokes that can seem impetuous, risky, sudden, bold, unconsciously derived, and—when they work—pictorially inevitable. That model has persisted for some sixty years, the sense of a painting as an intense sequence of real-time decisions—the ultimate fate of the canvas always in doubt, the painter someone functioning under great tension, who, like a jazz musician, must trust that his familiarity with his

James Yood