picks February 04, 2021

Bob Hooper

Throughout Bob Hooper’s exhibition of abstract paintings at Regards is a recurring motif: a “circle-square,” to borrow the artist’s term for it. It feels oddly familiar, calling to mind a teardrop, a punctuation mark, a speech bubble, an element of a floor plan, or perhaps even some type of wayfinding marker. And yet, subjected to Hooper’s inversions and manipulations, the circle-square elides any sort of referential comprehension, taking on a life of its own and infusing the show with an unstable, electric energy.

A trio of pared-down and identically sized paintings—quiddity, figment, and opaque

picks November 13, 2020

ektor garcia

ektor garcia’s site-responsive exhibition is a humble, poetic offering for Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, the heart of the city’s Mexican community. His installation features handmade ceramics that cluster on the floor and wedge their way into the corners, ledges, and windowsills of this artist-run storefront space, conjuring the intertwined histories of Mesoamerican lore and craft through his earnest, restless experimentation.

Dozens of the sculptures, shaped like teardrops, line the main gallery, imbuing it with a rhythmic, ritualistic aura. They vary in color, texture, and size—from tiny red

picks September 26, 2018

Steffani Jemison

In this exhibition, Steffani Jemison presents a new iteration of her ongoing research into the alternative literacies of Black Americans from slavery to the present—a legacy wherein individual actors have invented mechanisms to construct, communicate, and preserve knowledge outside white-supremacist power structures. Jemison, in fixing on moments where language has opened tiny cracks in prevailing narratives, stakes out a space of quiet possibility in which to consider the imaginative and resistant potential of words, notations, and their corresponding sounds.

Though willfully spare in their

picks April 26, 2018

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

Paul Mpagi Sepuya figures a beguiling intimacy among the technologies that produce photographic meaning. Meticulously shot in mirror reflections, Sepuya’s images manifest a gravid tension between the artist himself and his nude male subjects, the trappings of his studio, and the material stuff of photography itself. Works on view from four ongoing series—“Mirror Studies,” “Darkroom” (both 2016–), “Figures,” and “Exposures” (both 2017–)—attest to the structured and collaborative studio experimentation that characterizes his practice. The great pleasure and challenge of this work is in trying to

picks February 12, 2018

Jennie C. Jones

Equal parts spare and sumptuous, Jennie C. Jones’s exhibition is a celebration of return, in more ways than one. It’s the artist’s first solo exhibition in this city, where she lived while attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1990s. Moreover, the works on view show Jones returning to earlier experiments with the materiality of sound, embracing modes that predate the more formally resolved works, commonly called her “acoustic paintings,” for which she is best known.

Referencing the practice of takes—the studio recordings occasionally released as alternate tracks—the

picks September 24, 2017

“Let Me Be an Object That Screams”

As powerful men set the world around us on fire, philosophical challenges to anthropocentrism can seem futile. From object-oriented ontology to theories of the posthuman, however, much recent effort has been spent complicating the Enlightenment ideal of man as distinct from nature and thus able to master it through knowledge or industry. In this group show, organized by Matt Morris, artistic practice and exhibition-making prove fertile grounds to explore de-hierarchized ways of negotiating the material world.

Taking its title from Clarice Lispector, the show offers sculptures and images (moving

Jared Quinton