Raquel Landensack, Iceland II

Ladensack’s photographs have a lot to do with using distance in composition and emotional impression. Her work is split between pictures that are shot so close up that the subject blooms into abstraction, and photos zoomed and cropped at such a distance and in such a way that her landscapes flatten and collapse. The formal techniques link well with Ladensack’s eye for atmosphere, and some of the best images convey an observational hum between present stillness and distant action.

Raquel Ladensack, Iceland IV

Raquel Ladensack, Michigan IV

This difference is best shown in Ladensack’s Shifting Ground I and II, an excellent diptych showing Atlantic waves crushing against a distant Icelandic seawall. At the bottom of each frame is the top of a sill or balcony which serves to both separate the viewer from the scene, and to creating a double awareness of the natural violence over there and constructed safety over here. This separation turns the landscape into something to like a caged animal, to be viewed but not experienced.

Raquel Ladensack, Shifting Ground I

Raquel Ladensack, Shifting Ground II

Being from a place in the world so clipped to a grid that even the biggest views are highway etched with one-point perspective, this distant flattening effect makes such works as Shifting Ground or Iceland II lose some of their landscapiness and turn into something else. Likewise, near works like Liminal Space, Untitled, and Egress flit between still life and abstraction, playing off of the representational trust inherent in photography (i.e. I am aware these objects would be recognizable if only I could recognize them). There is some of James Turrell here, most directly in Iceland III, but generally too in many others where the natural world is used as a route into abstraction.

Raquel Ladensack, Iceland III, 2010

Raquel Ladensack @ Alderman Exhibitions

Approaching abstraction through representation seems to be a popular topic of conversation in the art I’ve been seeing in Chicago. It would be easy to place Ladensack alongside Heidi Norton, another photographer whose works collapse space and distort distance; or even with painter Andrew Falkowski, particularly in his Crowns series. It is a good conversation to see, and Ladensack brings to it an appreciated and functional atmospheric angle.

I give it a:

7.9

Raquel Ladensack‘s show runs between January 15th and March 28th @ Alderman Exhibitions, 350 N Ogden, 450E.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 3. The Plan. Footnote 2

While Sokolow’s latest at Western Exhibitions is a departure from earlier forms, all of that above-mentioned content is preserved. There is still the regular cast – a meta-narrative, a paranoid narrator, and plenty of capital letters. The humor is there (ie, always be eating a hot dog) but the themes are sometimes darker, such as the chapter on the Illinois State University Watterson Towers suicide rumor. Our narrator is much more confident, however, traveling out of the apartment and crossing state lines in search of answers. There are no passive revelations.

Deb Sokolow @ Western Exhibitions

But the biggest changes are formal, with the iconic, spiraling installation form traded in for discrete objects, mostly paper on panel rectangles like blown up pages the artist’s books. This move split the story into chapters and footnotes, along with mixed-media graph-sheets and accordion side-narratives in paper. This fragmentation went both ways for me. I can appreciate how the disjointed feeling produced by separating the narrative into panels responds to the narrative itself, but the viewing experience was less engaging than the guided continuity of the wall-wrapping installations of Sokolow. I normally exclude Deb Sokolow when complaining about the pacing of text-heavy art, but without the confusion of connected works, this was the first time that the artist’s work felt slowed down.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 4. The Examination

Deb Sokolow, Managerial Hierarchies (excerpt)

Of course, the formal changes make sense in the context of the show. Sokolow based the exhibition on her new project of building a split-up and more or less infinite artist’s book, with chapters out of order and lacking direct connection. There is a fuzzy theme mixing the Denver Airport Conspiracy with some art-world Illuminati, but there isn’t a traditional story in three acts – no twist, no resolution, no Richard Serra reveal. It isn’t clear whether these fragmentary decisions reference narrative theory or conspiracy theory, but the jumbling gives character and adds an weird, “and then” conversational complexity familiar to the way these stories are told.

Deb Sokolow @ Western Exhibitions

Deb Sokolow, Exhibit 13. A Man-made Pyramid Structure

Its true that I was a little disappointed by the pagination of Sokolow’s story, but it’s also true that I’ve been a fan of Sokolow’s for a few years and was expecting – and maybe looking forward to – more of the same. That’s on me, though; when The Strokes released First Impressions of Earth, I realized all I’d been wanting was Is This It – Volume 3, and when Kanye West dropped 808s + Heartbreak, I wished it was something like Nontraditional / Returning College Student. I might be a bad fan in that way, but Deb Sokolow is a better artist for ignoring me. She is like Kanye, yes.

This solo Western exhibition was a necessary, assertive shift that produced solidly enjoyable artwork. It retained all the best elements of analytical drawing, engaged the artist’s book form in a cool and more direct way, and taught me a little about the correlation between revolution and fresh meats. It will be interesting to see where she goes next.

I give it a:

8.4

Deb Sokolow‘s exhibition ran from November 19th to December 31st @ Western Exhibitions, 119 N. Peoria St, Suite 2A.

1) New Icon @ LUMA

It’s hard not to fill this list with sum-up shows, where mostly familiar work is presented in a way that lends easily to declarative statements. In a way, New Icon at Loyola University’s Museum of Art is the perfect show to point at and say there, that was 2010 in Chicago. It had many of the city’s best artists and new work from each; but curator Britton Bertran went a step further and made it the first Contemporary Art Council annual show composed entirely of Chicago artists. I was encouraging to see a local show that could stay local without sacrificing quality or content at all, so it felt declarative in that sense too. Also, Dan Gunn. Review here.

Dan Gunn in New Icon @ LUMA

2) Andy Moore @ Gallery 400

Andy Moore could easily take best art object of the year with his mega artist’s book John’s Luv, first exhibited in May at Gallery 400 and currently living at Western Exhibitions. Moore’s book is an achievement of prolonged focus and conceptual dedication, combining a marathon construction with engrossing, well-written, and seemingly endlessly edited written narrative. Review here.

Andy Moore @ Gallery 400

3) Kim Piotrowski @ 65GRAND

Its rare that I see a straight-on painting exhibitions that makes me want to run home and paint, but that was exactly how I felt after seeing Kim Piotrowski‘s exhibition at 65GRAND. Whatever edge painting had gained on me from an exposure to too much MFA pressure-painting was instantly relieved by Piotrowski’s confident, casual, and excellent paintings. Review here.

Kim Piotrowski, Vintage Me

4) Sarah Pickering @ Museum of Contemporary Photography

This might be a case of value added by over-reading, but I thought Pickering‘s documentation of domestic fires – constructed and purposely set for fire companies and forensic team practice – were a beautiful looking way of talking about curatorial transience. The settings were entirely fabricated, but done so with an insanely fine and ostensibly pointless eye for detail, with thousands of found objects brought together for thematic, doomed installations. Review @ Newcity here.

Sarah Pickering, Cigarette

5) Production Site @ Museum of Contemporary Art

The MCA did a great job with their side of 2010′s studio obsession. Some of the room transformations that artists and the Museum’s curatorial staff made during Production Site made even later exhibitions as packed as the Calder & Friends show look under-stimulating by comparison. The work was almost universally excellent, included plenty of Chicago’s finest, and I genuinely learned a lot about the working practices of the artists featured. Good job! Info here.

Production Site, The Artist’s Studio Inside-Out @ Museum of Contemporary Art

And here are five more shows I really enjoyed:

Joe Hardesty @ Western Exhibitions (info) (link)

B.C MacEachran @ Ebersmoore Gallery (info) (link)

Justin B. Williams @ Monument2 (info) (link) (review)

Timothy Bergstrom @ Hungry Man Gallery (info)

ANGELS @ Kunz,Vis,Gonzalez. (info) (link)

Karl Haendel, Tom & Jerry #5

Haendel’s installation of his work is curiously extensive. The white cube of Tony Wight Gallery is now a middle-dark grey, but why a grey cube is more appropriate isn’t clear. Short museum walls are built in, blocking sight lines and forcing proximity to the work, but these gestures of audience manipulation seem arbitrary. Coca-cola cans, tools, paint cans, and extra bits of installation junk are arranged in neat false refuse piles which declare the show’s man-made construction but degrade the works on the walls, which are hung awkwardly in dim clusters and corners. As audacious as it is, it isn’t unusual for the artist, who has hung plenty of shows that make My Invisible Friend look conservative.

Karl Haendel @ Tony Wight Gallery

Karl Haendel, Abstract Chicago #2

But why do it this way? The gestures Haendel has made with his installation push the show in two opposite directions. In one direction, the artist is bringing down the artwork and up the space to some middle-ground where they can be considered equally, subverting the usual hierarchy of the gallery. In another, the over-production of the installation references and mirrors the intense over-production of the work itself, making the gallery space a kind of over-miked back-up band for the artworks. Caught between these two forces, it isn’t clear whether Haendel wants viewers to see or care about his drawings.

Karl Haendel @ Tony Wight Gallery

There is a problematic collision between an over-produced install which minimizes the importance of art objects and an exhibition which is actually and mostly about showing art objects. If these works are meant to be looked at, cared about, and purchased, then the installation comes off as a matter of making up for something lacking in the work. None of the artwork in My Invisible Friend is too far out, and such a far out install suggests Haendel’s opinion is that given a straight-on hanging, the work wouldn’t be as interesting as he wants it to be.

Karl Haendel @ Tony Wight Gallery

Karl Haendel, Break-up #11

As for the work itself, while I wouldn’t call any of it audacious, Haendel has made some good stuff. The show is made up of graphite on paper reproductions of Tom & Jerry comic strip panels, video and drawings of a partial suit of armor from various angles, enamel paintings of broken glass, a number of (great looking) graphite, enamel, and charcoal folded abstractions also resembling broken glass, and a text-piece sampling Hans Abbling‘s power-point slide titled Are low incomes problematic? from his lecture, Why are artists poor?. In a regular setting, My Invisible Friend would read as a not-too-thrilling look at labor-intensive artistic production as a response to various other forms of productive activity. Here, however, that content is complemented to obscurity by the over-production of the exhibition’s installation.

I give it a:

7.0

Karl Haendel‘s My Invisible Friend runs October 15th through November 13th, 2010 at Tony Wight Gallery, 845 W Washington Blvd.

The results are below –  as comprehensive as we could get and honest too. Enjoy the lots of words.

Note: images link to show information pages where available.

Chris Johanson @ Kavi Gupta

Chris Johanson, Installation View of Backwards Toward Forwards

Steve: I’ll admit that this is the first time I’ve seen Chris Johanson’s work in person, so the angle of departure or continuity with past work wasn’t part of my response. I thought the installation as a whole clicked, with the surprising and refreshingly simple subject of the day/night cycle tackled in a smart, successful way. However, it was definitely one of those shows where the individual elements are less interesting than the work as the whole, so hopefully the crowds didn’t break the piece up too much for viewers to appreciate how it was all working together.

Erik: I wasn’t terribly into this show. I did like the network/maze of cobbled together chunks of plywood caked with thick paint. Some of the abstraction moments looked like early American modernism, such as Stuart Davis. One in particular looked a lot like an early Ad Reinhardt. But I wonder what this does? Haphazardly built geometric assemblages that morphologically resemble art history. Where does it go? And  then nestling that stuff in crude seascapes, suburban scenes and little walking figures… Is this some  statement on the domestication of abstraction? It just looks like some stuff that can sort of be placed somewhere within certain historic contexts.

Pedro: What we have here is a strange brew: Cordy Ryman (who also shows with Kavi) meets Louise Nevelson and a Christian pamphlet in the Osterizer. Nothing to philosophize about because Johanson is a brand. He makes skater art that’s really cute, sappy and inoffensive. This installation in particular looks like a life -size diorama modeled after those tacky decoupages one finds behind the reception desk of a beachfront motel. If that is the intention, then Johanson is my hero. Though, it seems unlikely. The colors are muddy, boring, flat and generic, and the constructions/accumulations are too simplistic. One thing I do admire is that at least he tried to make something new out of stick figures walking over a picture plane.

Ben Stone @ Western Exhibitions

Ben Stone

Steve: Hours later at the bar I would make the assertion that the basic culture of Chicago consists of sports and politics, and that too many artists ignore this local culture in a way that artists in other cities don’t ignore their own. Ben Stone’s work, while definitely goofy and connected to a history of goof, capitalized on those familiar themes for smart sculpture. Its a point for Stone (rather than a point against the night’s other art) that his little totem bust of Abraham Lincoln in a Bear’s hat was one of the weekend’s best.

Erik: I don’t think the 3-D reliefs of 2-D images like the ubiquitous nail salon graphic by Nagel or the Anime characters are carefully crafted enough. But compared with the factory finish of Takashi Murakami, maybe there is something in what is lacking. What interested me most in the centerpiece, the baseball Laocoon, was the treatment of the surface on the figures. They were all whitish grey, as though they were sculpted but unpainted, unfinished. But then the details–their clothes, socks and belts–were drawn in with ballpoint pen. For me this referenced carefully drawn, but largely imperfect nonetheless, pictures made by young boys in their notebooks. I am also really intrigued by the practice of drawing, particularly with implements like pens & pencils, on sculpture. The piece I think the most about, though, is that weird spy character in a trench coat. It displays how cartoon/comic character design flirts with, and utilizes, modernist tenants of abstraction and composition.

Joey Fauerso @ Western Exhibitions

Joey Fauerso

Steve: Everyone I spoke to brought up Fauerso’s room as completely unexpected and hilarious. I agree, but I also remembered really enjoying the nicely done figure painting. I wasn’t in long enough to tie together the elements, so have no idea what this work was about, but I’d like to get back to find out.

Erik: There was a video of some chick making out with various puppets. It was a little extra disturbing for me because she looked like someone I know, but I couldn’t decide if it was her or not. I don’t think it is. It talks  about educational shows for children, sexuality and uh, cheating. Or maybe the woman having multiple partners for a change. Since she was the puppeteer too, then maybe it is also supposed to make you think a little about masturbation or fantasizing. It mainly made me think of how this would be a hit at a graduate  student art show. The difference between “grad school art” and “undergrad art” is that the technique and realization is sophisticated (if it’s sloppy we trust you meant it that way) and the concepts are a little more advanced. But they are still pretty simple. There were some works on paper of naked men with some smears of color over their top halves. Oh and a high production value animation mixed with live action. I’d like to come back and watch that one. But the rest was just a bother.

Wendy White @ Andrew Rafacz Gallery

Wendy White, Le Grau '96

Steve: One of the best of the night, and another surprise given the elements involved: day-glo sprays, airbrush marks, a titular piece, and taped-off text. White’s work seemed familiar, as if a few of the artists who’d shown last spring at Rafacz had been blended together, but hell, I thought they were good paintings. The smaller work could have been left out, but those did at least serve to point out how the larger paintings benefited from their size and jigged out text. Big cool looking formalist stuff goes over well in crowded rooms.

Erik: These looked like good paintings with force and presence. But I was not really that into them. They were the kind of paintings that just a few years ago would have seemed very… What’s the word for “where it’s at”? The neon, the looseness, the raw canvas all that combined with text, that would have been the center of what made painting contemporary and new. Now it seems just a little off, a little pale. The intricacy of the stretched canvas on the lettering still impresses me, though. This incorporation of letters into the painting structure, not just two-dimensional composition, is an interesting move worth further investigation, but that neon shit has to go. Those colors and black & white make the whole group read not just as a group, but as many iterations of one thought. This regularization is good, but I am arguing those 1990 neons are a misstep. Or they are doing what they are meant to and I am just morally opposed: Maybe those colors are here to stay, but whenever I see them in art, I almost always feel they are meant to be read as taking a piss at “serious” art or “grown up” art. In general use of that kind of color, it seems like a little bit too much fun and not nearly enough considered, at worst it seems childish and ignorant.

Pedro: Ms. White is a domesticated graffiti artist who knows how to control space, surface and spray paint. Her application of it (spray paint) is so squeaky-clean, it brings back memories of Airbrush compressors and such nerdy techniques. She also has a keen sense of rhythm when alternating ground versus foreground, interspersed with shaped lettering. A natural fluidity we can also find in the text-based work of Tao Rey, Lily van der Stokker and Michal Majerus. The difference is that her “text” is contained and truncated right at the edges of the painting-as if it were to spill over. One thing I love most is how close to the floor these paintings are and how much canvas goes wasted.  Somehow, I feel this series have not reach their full potential yet; it has to go further. Who knows? Maybe all those empty white spaces I love so much on the canvas show insecurity on the part of the artist.

Kelly Kaczynski @ threewalls

Kelly Kaczynski, The Stagehand's Unseen

Steve: This is going to be a show I’ll have to come back to, as I think it required a level of thought and attention just beyond the (admittedly low) threshold I was operating under Friday night. The stages were a great install, and for one brilliant moment I thought they’d cut out the floor and connected two spaces by a single sculpture. I almost asked someone whether the shoveling photos were a riff on Tony Tasset, but as he was standing next to me I decided to leave it a mystery.

Erik: I, I, I. All my sentences and entries start with “I.” What the fuck is my problem? I am not sure what the digging was all about or the museum of natural history type of installation of vitrines containing dioramas as you entered the space. But the massive platform was not only impressive, it was a solid aesthetic experience. The structure sits skewed on a bed of mirrors and wood appearing to hover over a massive cut in the floor. The material of unstained wood works well with the space, which is composed mainly of wood  planks. Additionally, the age-old juxtaposition between the organic and the geometric is always welcome when done well. This is also touched on in the way two rigid, geometric and forms refuse to line up.

Kirsten Leenaars @ threewalls

Kirsten Leenaar, The Impossible Voyage

Steve: I missed this, but so must the current of people I was caught in. Sorry! I hope this information is useful.

Erik: I totally missed this. I thought it was just the threewalls apartment and offices back there. I didn’t even notice the entrance. Oops.

Lauren Anderson @ goldenage

Lauren Anderson, Untitled Smoke Bomb Drawing

Steve: Its entirely possible that colored smoke bombs introduced me to the chance-based mark – I used to use them to paint my driveway every summer. Lauren Anderson showed that they can work just as well on paper and as framed art, and even if the paintings were among the lightest fare of the night, the results weren’t bad. If the chance gesture has gotten old and lost its teeth, maybe kind of play is a good place to retire it.

Erik: I found the entrance to this one though. Right though threewalls. I think it was great that you could move in and out of the space either via threewalls or its entrance from the hall. Going from the large space to the small was also a palpable shift I enjoyed. I liked the work, but as I mentioned above, the color choices flirted with the young hip default setting. In this case these were made with smoke bombs, so the resulting pigmentation was directly tied to the method of production. And the colors weren’t really neon anyway. Maybe nestled alongside books the context was less focused on a singular state of reverence that an otherwise empty gallery demands. The imposing blob sculpture it in the already tight space was also an interesting presence to navigate. And maybe I just like Anderson’s use of color a lot better. And sense of humor, I thought the poster was great: “Lauren Andersonnnnnn” in “Chicago, IL UUSSAA” I guess a mark of good art is when it can coax you into being hypocritical about your own beliefs.

Arturo Herrera and David Schutter @ Tony Wight

David Schutter, after AIC W, YCBA C, GSMB R

Steve: I thought this would be a strange pairing, but it turned out to be one of those no-trust-me successes that make me admire Wight. Schutter’s elemental approach to painting went well with Herrera’s elemental approach to imagery, and while I don’t think anyone had their faces melted by the subtle works, it was one  of the deepest of the weekend and is still on my mind.

Erik: This is the show I most liked and most want to return to. I liked the pairing. It seems a little odd at first. Schutter with his drawings and paintings of fugitive attempts to capture lines or passages in the drawings and paintings of others he studies some how works well with Herrera’s collaging of very similar instances in cartoons, printed material and photographs. I thought the cool austerity of the works was inviting, enticing even. Every move in both artists’ work was tight and precise; I think you could spend ages looking at these little visual instances and I intend to.

Pedro: For a brief period in ‘98, Arturo Herrera was my advisor in graduate school. Back then he was a god in Chicago. Let me put it in context: Once you have a show at the Renaissance Society and Hamza Walker gives you his blessing, the skies open and angels sing. I was young, unaware of Chicago art world politics. All I knew was that he made those sick, sexual cut–felt works based on White Snow and The Seven Dwarfs, and that he was born either in Venezuela or in Argentina. The first time we met I talked to him in English, he responded in the same language. In hindsight a terrible mistake on my part. You see, assimilated Latinos and Puerto Ricans do not feel comfortable trying to guess publicly other people’s nationalities. You never know, after all Latinos have similar features to Greeks, Arabs and so on. Ever since that first meeting we never communicated in Spanish and that, obviously, produced a cultural riff. Later in the semester, he started implying I was lazy– which is highly debatable. Probably he did it to encourage me to have more passion; maybe I was not showing off enough Latiness in my work. And he might have had a point there because I am not a Latino artist. Anyway, to make a long story short, we ended up having fallout, screamed at each other, it was quite a scene. At least we made progress: the discussion was in Spanglish. Harsh things were said about identity, respect, and all those Latino things that also apply to assimilated Puerto Ricans like me. About the show, there is not much I can say about small sellable trinkets. He should had given us more, he is great artist and we deserve better than pre -packaged lazy shows that fit in a suitcase. Now that I think about it. When was the last time Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle had a big solo show in a commercial gallery in Chicago?

Kehinde Wiley @ Rhona Hoffman

Kehinde Wiley

Steve: I liked Kehinde Wiley’s earlier paintings because it reinforced the idea that the right content can still make big slick oil portraits interesting. Whereas his previous work (depicting black men in poses pulled from classic western imagery) engaged the unique problem of black youth being caught between internalized western and non-western histories, power in representation, and even the flimsier juxtaposing of urban culture with high European art history, there’s unfortunately none of that here. Here we have young Indian and Sri-Lankan men in poses which I assume are pulled from local art history, but painted in the style of and set against backdrops pulled from 19th century European orientalist painting. But what’s the point? Almost none of Wiley’s content fits here; even the urban/Western influence content seems like a long stretch or an aesthetic afterthought. What it really looks like is contemporary orientalist portraiture – which it is, operating within the exact same mode of the 19th century orientalist portraiture it aesthetically references. Gérôme would shrug and ask about the inconsistent lighting, which is really all I could do too.

Erik: It was a packed madhouse and someone said he looked great in his red and black paisley suit with his entourage and flashing cameras. Kanye West was rumored to be there, but that was apparently disproved via his twitter feed. But I ask you, what bar are you closing down in New York City at 6:30pm? At any rate his work is totally boring and he is one of those painters that perpetuates the myth that having technical skill means you are a good artist. He has assistants that do all the painting. Everyone always says, “Well, at least he’s getting better at painting.” No, he is able to hire better painters. I have no problem with painters utilizing means such as this to create their work. I have a problem with them not being forthcoming about it. Are you ashamed? You buy into an antiquated belief system centered around craftsmanship, but you can’t even live up to it. This is one thing that is admirable about Koons, Murakami and Hirst–they have never denied using teams of people to make their work. “Sure, come on over. Bring a camera crew!” they even say.

John Henley and Carol Jackson @ Roots & Culture

Carol Jackson, Strata

Steve: Carol Jackson’s pit or quarry or hole piece had a nice reveal. I like when pattern recognition clicks in suddenly, especially when accompanied by vertigo. Beyond that, I didn’t get the connections between most of the work, or between the two artists, and most of the show blurred out for me. This was the last gallery I visited on Friday and that may have something to do with it, I’m not sure.

Dan Gunn @ Lloyd Dobler

Dan Gunn, Multistable Picture Fable

Steve: Even with only three pieces in the gallery, Dan Gunn made a ridiculous lot to look at. The spiraling wall that occupied the main space was made up of over twenty smaller panels, each hinged together, working as part of the whole and as pieces on their own, with front and back sides addressed. As expected, there were moments of real beauty throughout, especially the cross wove lycra gradients and red acrylic, but I really enjoyed Gunn’s sculptural re-consideration of the familiar 2-4” deep rectangle.

Erik: Gunn hass a background in stage construction. So therefore we can read his ever more elaborate sculptural tableau through that lens. No, not really. But knowing that makes it hard to ignore. And I certainly believe it has had a bearing on his method. This installation is a marked departure from the altar like works in New Icon seen earlier this year at LUMA. For Dobbler, Gunn presents two of his now trademark “paintings”–painting like frames made up of undulating lattices– and a single work that occupies the main gallery space. The snaking construction unfolds like a dressing blind and has little vignettes, such as tiny paintings attached by hinges or little windows. It was a little more raw and incongruent than the unified works in New Icon. This is not to say one is good or bad. The moment that encapsulates the whole spirit of  the show comes in a series of little white slats carefully nailed to the sill of a window cut in the large architectural construction.

George Gittings @ Monument2

Steve: A few formal elements here stood out; for instance, the artist made good on the unique surface of his stretched paper on canvas, with washy paint catching in the not-quite-canvas, not-quite-panel texture. There were some paintings that I thought looked great, but the work’s small scale and overall modesty of mark and color kept me from getting too excited. They all felt pretty familiar.

Montgomery Perry Smith @ Johalla Projects

Montgommery Perry Smith

Steve: It could just be a way to square an interest in good-looking stuff with a need for challenging art, but I like creepy art. Aggressive art. Art that appears to threaten, confront, or impose – and that looks good while doing it – is my kind of thing, which is also a kind of thing Montgomery Perry Smith sort of makes. Its what drew me to his work originally, where the loom and doom contrasted with the delicate and sexual, but those key (to me) darker elements seemed absent from this show at Johalla Projects. I think it all would have read better with half the work and half the lighting. Or maybe I was looking for more edge than Smith intended?

Timothy Bergstrom @ Hungry Man

Timothy Bergstrom, Believe Me

Steve: I thought Bergstrom’s paintings were the standouts of the evening, great to look at and rich to think on. The text elements I’d dismissed when looking at photos of the work turned out to be a real and critical part of the work’s surface content and process. You should see this work in person.

Erik: The image for the show sent in the press release is a black muddy mass with a purple metallic oval in the center. Surrounding it are ice cream cones. It’s a mess. In person, it’s still a mess, but a mess with presence. The cones are actually fully cast sculptures and the black is a whole bog. The oval is a mirror and it reflects onto the floor of the gallery a ovoid beam of violet light. This oval is repeated in another work, the one with the most stuff collaged into it. In a yellow field are gunky balls, which surround the mirror that’s embedded into the paint. Partially obscuring the mirror are a couple wigs that have also been affixed to the canvas. You can start to think about someone backstage sitting at their vanity, the balls of paint like light bulbs. But there is this motif of the mirrors to contend with. Right next to this yellow one is a sparse little orange painting. It is the relationships between all the works in the show that really make the whole thing function.

Pedro: At HungryMan Bergrstrom takes it up a notch with huge framed objects, wall reliefs and mirrors, even a yellow wig. One painting you can only read form afar says,  “so what about vision”. We are on Fabian Marcaccio territory here– fossilized art. In another work, multi colored and fluffy three-dimensional snow cones protrude from a black blanket of melted skulls. In the center of it all is a purple mirror that reflects the gallery space and people drinking Old Style. This one takes a while to digest and I am still not sure whether it is good or terrible, and that is a good thing. These are not easy works, they are right on the edge, but their intricacy, resolution and ambition make it all worthwhile. It must mean Bergstrom is triumphant.