Despite what you may have read, Justin B. Williams is not dead.

The lengthy and entertaining accompanying text for his latest exhibition Justin B. Williams: The last paintings (1985-2010) at Monument 2 describes the art-heroic discovery by Nevin Thomlison of the last paintings Justin executed before his equally heroic death saving a child from an out of control vehicle. Whether this was a little prank or sketchy, stretchy reference to a deceased doppelgänger, I don’t know – in any case, it probably scared some old friends and framed the work nicely in romance, innocence, and adolescence.

The show hangs like a collection of smaller projects, with framed clippings and sketches (adorned with increasingly ubiquitous clear polymer mystery goop), floor-displayed gridded micro-paintings, surface experiments and big, mostly straight-material oil paintings. The works are brought together by the artist’s unmistakable composition, his low saturation palette and impulsive, cartoony warble lines. When put all together in the big paintings, the results are intense overgrown gardens of activity. The variety of approaches is a good thing, implying progress and ambition, so I have a feeling these paintings won’t be Williams last.

Justin B. Williams

Justin B. Williams

Justin B. Williams

Justin B. Williams

Justin B. Williams

Its rough that these works were only up for a night, as a few are complex enough to want to get back and chew through their layers and relationships. The central, thematic content Williams is using is exciting to see, both in the dense paintings and the sparse surfacey sandboxes, where it drives the material experiments in a way that shows purpose slightly more than play.

I give it a:

7.8

Justin B. Williams: The last paintings (1985-2010) was a one night exhibition on Saturday, June 12th @ Monument 2, 2007 N Point St.

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.

Peregrine Program is a small, brand new gallery in the Riverfront Work Lofts building in Pilsen, ran by SAIC’s Edmund Chia. After spending a few minutes trying to find out how to get into the place (turns out it was the red door), then a few more finding the elevator, I arrived at the smallish one-room loft that contained Chicagoland the mostly self-lit show of miniatures by Daniel Lavitt.

Daniel Lavitt, Untitled

In Chicagoland, Lavitt tells his story of living in Chicago through miniatures. Having grown up with the Thorne Miniature Rooms collection, I’m immediately happy to see anything crafted at a small scale; and while there wasn’t a hobbyist’s exactness and minute quality in Lavitt’s work, ideas of relative scale and privacy were acknowledged and played with really well. In The Mozart Street House, the gallery wall intersects the face of a house at an off angle, and in the upstairs window, a lamp light lights a room or a studio with a painting on the wall. In a clever turn on the King Kong voyeurism of miniature rooms, a motion sensor tucked under the eve of the roof controls this light, darkening the room whenever a viewer passes in front of it as if clicked off as if by a paranoid and drapeless artist worried about early exposure.

Daniel Lavitt, Project #33250

Many of the pieces are pretty straightforward, cool little combinations of light fixtures or miniature lights, content to stick to the novelty of scale and causal relationships within a work. A few go for something more descriptive, like Lavitt’s, Project #33250, which injects human individuality into the modular domesticity of urban housing projects, and plays out that story in colored lights and tiny paintings in standard issue cardboard boxes.

Daniel Lavitt, Project #33250 (detail)

Chicagoland has the kind of intimate, fun atmosphere that this kind of sculptural work is great at, and there were some notable moments of concept and craft connection. It’s pretty light fare for a show about urban living, but personality and play was the point and it has plenty of both.

I give it a:

8.1

Daniel Lavitt‘s Chicagoland opened January 22nd and runs through February 26th, 2010 @ PEREGRINEPROGRAM, 500 W. Cermak Rd, 727.

There have been a lot of shows lately with occult, mysterious, or power image content, but Elijah Burgher does more with the material than most. In his work on display at Shane Campbell‘s Oak Park space, Burgher knits together queer culture and witchcraft/sorcery/the occult with soft, muted drawings of nude men preparing spaces for and performing intimate (though not overly sexual) rituals.

Elijah Burgher, Preparing a Ritual Space 2

There are many of points of connection in the queer/occult relationship, from the in the social deviant role given to both by mainstream culture, to insider signs and signals, to the fearful potentials of private physical rituals in the minds of the uninitiated or ignorant. While that alone would be enough to carry the work, Burgher’s goes farther and escapes the limits of this pure analogy through a somewhat fantastic discussion of intimacy as functional ritual, designed both to mark and bond participants while honoring an idea or changing reality into a more desirable form.

Elijah Burgher, Promise Delivery

Elijah Burgher, JCDC

For all their modest size and materials, Burgher’s small drawings on spiral bound paper are able to mark out a wide space for discussion, even beyond the almost certainly terminal topic of gay sorcerers.

I give it a:

7.8

Elijah Burgher exhibition opened January 24th and runs through April 18th, 2010 @ Shane Campbell Gallery, 125 N. Harvey Ave. Many more images can be found at Elijah Burgher’s blog.