The folks at the Western Corridor shared live/work studio/venue/loft known asThe Hills Esthetic Center have recently added a fresh white cube and brick gallery to their space, and this last Friday kicked off their exhibition foray with a show of work from Mike Kloss called The Hills Have Thighs.

Mike Kloss, The Hills Have Thighs

While Kloss’ work spans plenty of media, its collages and sculptures and drawings and photographs mostly filter found object modification through a aesthetic both psychedelic and fragile, like a good trip a heartbeat away from sorrow. The work plays with themes of danger and death in a mostly superficial way, exploiting the colors of and textures of man’s destructive relationship to nature, and so we see a work like Neglectful Plant Designer (described on the walking list as a “murdered and decapitated palm,” dimensions variable) next to gstad, a joyful pop-consumer “collage on floaty ocean,” both pieces halting a few steps shy of any possible message to enjoy the imagery and language of the meaning-making.

Mike Kloss, gstad

While these sculptures and collages were fun, I thought the stronger work was in Kloss’ drawings, dark and inky and spookier, with narratives and potential narratives still flighty with titles like “Zombie Volcano” but slowed and grounded by their straightforward construction.

Mike Kloss, Drawings

For a first show at a group space curated by close personal friends of the artist, The Hills Have Thighs could have been much less cohesive and, especially with an artist like Kloss who employs humor in his work, easily filled with with just the funny shit. Luckily, or maybe as a credit to those close friends’ good tastes, the show comes off pretty well balanced and smart, with your trippy shark vagina work to enjoy over there and fifteen really good drawings to get dark on over here. I liked it.

I give it a:

7.3

Mike Kloss’ The Hills have Thighs opened January 22nd @ The Hills Esthetic Center, 128 N. Campbell Ave. More images can be found at Kloss’ flickr page.

While a bubbling zeitgeist, published theory, secret CIA promotion, institutional propping, market hype and bar booth collectives may be the most commonly understood forces by which art trends and made and made to move, one of my favorite and too often overlooked components of progress is the availability of new materials, and of how their introduction leads to new angles on of art-making. Whenever artists get their hands on something new, there are inevitably those who are able to take advantage of its particulars and create something really excellent, be it tubed oil paint enabling plein air impressionism or the Portapak putting video art in gear. In our own last few years, synthetic papers like Yupo have gradually move into use as a material in fine art, and its been interesting to watch the paper’s beautiful and unique way of supporting paint experimented and capitalized on. If you haven’t played with synthetic paper yet, give it a try and see what it can do. Chicago’s own Kim Piotrowski certainly did, and in the latest show Crowns at 65GRAND, her wildly dynamic work proves it beyond craft novelty as a medium perfect for a renewed formal celebration of paint.

Kim Piotrowski, Ages Spent

Like any good artwork based on randomly discovered jpegs, the work isn’t so much representation as liberal dramatization; based on a true story, but barely. While each here painting centers on an image of a crown, pulled of course from the great digital image void, Piotrowski appears to use the crown less as its sign than as a formal skeleton for fleshing out in paint. Attachments of power and opulence are put to work as rich color pools and gold leaf applications, turrets and plumes opportunities for gesture and splash.

Kim Piotrowski, She King

With so many materials at play, viewing the work is an experience wrapped in trying to pick out the individual media and techniques in each painting. To its credit, the ability of Piotrowski’s synthetic paper to grip liquid materials without absorbing them made this all the more interesting, with wet pools of acrylic ink laid down without a weave to work into drying to look like something entirely different, more similar to the drawn media around it. Even with a materials list on hand, picking the enamel from the flashe from the gouache from the collage is a fun optical challenge.

Kim Piotrowski, Twirl Fool

If you’d like to try to pick them out yourself, the above image is composed of:  acrylic ink, flashe, gouache, permanent marker and gold leaf.

I really enjoyed Crowns. The last few good painting shows I’ve seen in Chicago have shown various way of dealing with the problem of imagery in painting while being uncomfortable without giving it up, eventually arriving at a kind of formal content by way of representation. While the subject matter relationship between the image and the painting has been far more stretched and abraded by other painters, Piotrowski’s Crowns could be looked at as a part of this conversation too, translating the elegance and power from the sign source of its images into painted materiality.

I give it an:

8.6

Kim Piotrowski‘s Crowns opened Friday, January 8th and runs through February 13th @ 65GRAND, 1378 W. Grand Ave (entrance on Noble St).

(special thanks to the artist and Anni Holm for photos)

With a new address, coat racks, a paneled ceiling and a floor covered in tiny stones, Old Gold has opened again with a one night show featuring the work of Aline Cautis, Josh Mannis and Andy Roche. There was the prevailing social element to the event of the kind expected at one night events, with the work itself giving a nice backdrop and throbbing beat to conversation. Check out the great video documentation below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwFnVEf3Tf8]

Mannis’s looping video collage, Variations (the source of that throb) saw the artist, dressed like a subdivision neighbor and wearing a grossly disfiguring mask, winding into digitally synchronized, then syncopated dance steps. This collaging extended to Does This System Work? #1, an infinite crowd created by edge-tracing and repeating a milling marathon. The static loop, printed on fabric (#2 was on a hat), came out more as an okay wallpaper than much else, containing all of the elements of Mannis’s video work except the best ones. The extended scope and patterning of crowd might have suggest flocking or fascist troop parades, but lacking the transformative, anxious pace of his videos, the imagery looked regular and harmless.

Old Gold

Roche presented two polyester hair pieces and a video titled Glass Flag. The larger and pretty awesome hair piece, Wall Do, hung like a desert island decoration, strung between edges of burlap and wood in wide synthetic grins.  The other, Red Talk, saw the hair draped over the sides of a pink, blown out drawing room photo like creepy drapery, framing the image. The result was an oddly feminized image of a very male sort of event, with the middle tone false hair adding an extra touch of unpleasant gaudiness. Glass Flag showed various views, including much of the installation space itself, while a transparent plastic sheet was danced before the camera. It was interesting to watch a video of the space I was currently occupying but which that didn’t include me, but I wasn’t sure how to connect this to the idea of a transparent flag, which served more as a disruption of the scenes than the anti-political content the clear flag could also suggest.

Josh Mannis, Does this System Work? #1 and Andrew Roche, Glass Flag

While Aline Cautis’s paintings didn’t thrill me beyond the scratched and marked surfaces on a couple, the highlight of the show was Aline Cautis’s, 1, 2, 3, 4, which managed to bridge both video, sculpture, and drawing. The work projected 16 millimeter film, strung over a spool on the ceiling, which had been marked with thousands of small parallel lines by Cautis. These handmade lines, moving along the film loop in colored chunks, skittered on the wall when projected. It was interesting to see the same marks in motion, existing at once in two different ways on two surfaces.

Old Gold

One night shows are great, but I saw this one more as a welcome-back party than a full on, acutely curated exhibition. Still, the work included was solid and the pieces fit well together, even with some leaning against walls or placed on mirror ledges. I look forward to seeing something done with the fireplace.

I give it a:

SEVEN AND A THIRD

Future Facing was a one night event, held on November 13th, 2009 @ Old Gold, 2102 West Palmer.

(Note: I’m catching up on my backlog of shows I attended, photographed, and never wrote about. Enjoy the pictures and the brief summary.)

At the end of September, Dominican University’s O’Connor Gallery opened Site Unspecific, a group show which included work by Heather Mekkelson, Mara Baker, Adam Farcus, Rafael E. Vera, Brian Yates and Heidi Norton. The pieces were linked by the thread of site specificity, though each referenced a specific site outside of the gallery. Not all of the artwork here sustained the interest and had the conceptual skin to carry the theme, and some merely suggested an unknown place without going any further, but there were notable works. Adam Farcus’s sculpture, a paper chain draped over the track lights and doing much for the exhibition’s overall framing, was constructed from photocopied maps of the stars that would have been visible above at the time and place of his birth. Heather Mekkelson’s Debris Field was a reconstructed disaster, with artifacts of tragedy such as melted aluminum and burnt file cabinets meticulously reconstructed by Mekkelson from photographs of real remains. The show ended up relying on and challenging my trust in the artists’ claims, an interaction highlighted best by Heidi Nortons photographs which may or may not be accurate to their titles, and I spent the drive home wondering about that intersection of representation and belief. Without any way to validate the fact, would it matter if Farcus’s stars were from yesterday?

Site Unspecific @ O'Connor Gallery

Brian Yates, Untitled

Heidi Norton, Hariett Tubman's Birthplace

Mara Baker, deterioration of: (boardwalk)

Brian Yates

Rafael E. Vera, Two Stairs

Brian Yates, untitled (for HM Tomlinson)

Heather Mekkelson, Debris Field

Site Unspecific opened on September 29th, 2009 and runs until December 13th, 2009 @ Dominican University’s O’Connor Art Gallery, 7900 W Division St. in River Forest.