I know for a fact that there are brilliant studios with white walls and painted ceilings, glowing with LED panels and humming with tastefully sourceless, low-volume public radio; but for young artists plodding through unfunded gap between undergrad and graduate school, sometimes the studio is wherever you can find it. This week Chicago painter and photographer Jacob Goudreault (acceptably mis-pronounced good-row) invited me to his studio in the western suburb of Winfield, tucked in a tiny and mostly unfinished corner in the basement of his parent’s nice big house. As we went downstairs he gestured to the rest of the basement, sparse and freshly occupied by a pool table and a few boxes. “I used to have this whole space before we put the carpet in.”

Jacob Goudreault

As the most hyper-provisional of the city’s sculptural painters fascinated with shitty materials and gross surfaces, Goudreault’s dim studio makes sense. He points out some of the paints he’s been using, Craftsmart acrylics in aisle ten pinks and greens. A few of his small paintings show the neon paint almost shattered on the surface, a result of the temperature shift between his car and his studio. Bottle caps serve as hanging devices, staple gunned to the back of the scrap-wood blocks he stretches paper and fabric and second hand cashmere over. The work was clever and reveled in its rough edges, a play off of materials and grunge that make me wonder whether the lights were low on purpose.

Jacob Goudreault

Jacob Goudreault

While Goudreault keeps another studio in the West Loop and works on occasion up at the Poor Farm estate, much of his smaller and recent paintings he’s known for are made here in the Winfield space. If you’re looking to see that new work, you’re in luck: most of the paintings are downtown or close to it, currently installed in the Fever Dream group show at Roots and Culture or getting ready for the upcoming Vibrator at Knock Knock Gallery.

Check out these picks for my picks or more listings for more listings.

Fever Dream @ Roots & Culture

Expect a lot of physical, almost sculptural use of paint at Fever Dream at Roots & Culture, and some of the weird and shitty materials painters love so much these days. Paintings and the rest from Jacob Goudreault, Angel Otero, Max Reinhardt, Simon Slater, with special guest Easton Miller. The show opens this Friday, January 26th from 6-9 PM @Roots & Culture, 1034 N Milwaukee Ave.

Simon Slater, Hey Lew! I Can Never Be You.

TYPEFORCE @ Co-Prosperity Sphere

This weekend Bridgeport’s Co-Prosperity Sphere opens TYPEFORCE, a pretty broad-reaching survey of Chicago typography artists and designers, with work from (deep breath, since designers actually have websites): Jeremiah Chiu, Renata Graw, David Weik, Billy Baumann, Matthew Hoffman, Chris Eichenseer, Chad Kouri, Ryan Thurwell, Luke Williams, Tnop, Andy Luce, John Pobojewski, Darren McPherson, Lora Fosberg, Margo Harrington, Greg Calvert, Aaron Pedersen, Duncan MacKenzie, Will Miller and Nick Adam. Show opens Friday, February 27th from 6-9 PM @ Co-Prosperity Sphere, 3219 S Morgan St, Chicago.

Darren McPherson

Ken Fandell @ Donald Young

Mysterious new work from Ken Fandell at Donald Young this month, some kind of off-site exhibition while Tony Wight puts the finishing touches on the new Washington Blvd space. Opens this Friday, February 26th from 5-7 PM @ Donald Young Gallery, 224 S Michigan Ave.

Ken Fandell

Isabella Ng and Millie Kapp @ Monument 2

Isabella Ng and Millie Kapp

Matt Saunders @ The Renaissance Society

Matt Saunders, Hertha Thiele (Frau Lehmann's Töchter) #3

I went to high-school with two of the artists mentioned in this preview!

This week’s picks from Ryan:

Raphael Garnier, Thickbox

Baptiste de Bombourg, Turbo 0

Merijn Hos, Implosions

Stephanie Pryor, Jag

Nicole Cherubini, Black Flower

Pedro Bell

Joanne Greenbaum, Prom King

suffocation, no reading

I slipped into Kavi Gupta last week to check out Susan Giles‘ new show, Buildings and Gestures. I’d seen some of the promotional shots and remembered her sculptures from last year’s NEXT fair and had been expecting some average sized memory based sculptures, the kind of architectural combinations that show off the novelty of form removed from practicality that I’d heard about.

Susan Giles, Memory Palace III

And had the side room been the only space, I would have been pretty much right – Giles’ works there were well crafted paper sculptures were awesome in form and detail. They looked to have been as much fun to design and build as they were to look at (maybe more-so) and were plenty smart, but as demonstrations of the artist’s ideas about the power of architecture on the mind, they would have gotten stuck in form.

They would have needed something else to really activate Giles’ structural/deep structural content, like maybe a giant shapeless cardboard and wood spacial installation with a completely appropriate and engaging video piece projected inside of it.

Susan Giles, Buildings and Gestures

Standing inside of the sculpture and watching the video, where figures gestured and swept while describing monuments they’d seen, I felt part of the feedback loop I think Giles was aiming for. How would I describe this weird moment, or this weird thing I was standing in? By shape or by function, by its representation or meaning, or by my experience of it? Would an architect describe it differently? If Frank Gehry’s big sweeping forms on the Jay Pritzker Pavilion really do help with the acoustics, can they still be called post-structuralist?

Susan Giles, Buildings and Gestures

Call it a narrow field of attention, but sometimes I have a hard time thinking about concepts like memory and the psychic impact of monumental architecture while looking at things that are really cool to look at. Pulling off that kind of simultaneity isn’t an easy thing to do, but Buildings and Gestures managed it; I thought Giles brought out her ideas very well and smoothly despite a potentially distracting high craft coolness factor in all of her works.

I give the show an:

8.2

Susan Giles‘ Buildings and Gestures opened February 6th and runs through March 13, 2010 @ Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 W. Washington Blvd.