I first dropped by Roots and Culture’s latest show on opening night, squeezed past the crowd outside and poked my head over shoulders of an unusually tall crowd to see the art, decided the tide had turned to afterparty early, and ran out. While too much crowd to see art with both eyes, not bad for a space looking to engage the community.

Luckily what I did manage to see convinced me to make a return stop.

Clay Schiff, Nine and a Half Objects

NAH POP NO STYLE features art – mostly paintings – from Providence and Baltimore. Despite the geographic differences, the work here tends to homogenize; there isn’t enough dramaticly different between the art out of Providence/RISD vs. Baltimore/MICA to see the work separate into camps. That doesn’t really matter, except to say that the show doesn’t have as much internal contrast as a two-city show might suggest.

Geography aside, the work in the gallery was some interesting stuff.

Annabeth Marks, Rumspringa

I’ll run through what I liked quickly: Annabeth Marks‘ paintings were grungy, clever abstractions that made pukey pallete-goo oil paint look less gross than, say, Kent Dorn‘s Figutives,  but more fuck-around-ish too. Clay Schiff’s work was more reserved, but made up for straightforward material use with excellent composition and color choices. Blade Wynne not only has one of the most bad assed names in the world, but his gouache paintings were very skilled, advanced pieces too. Wynne was definitely a standout in this show and someone I’d keep an eye on in the future.

Blade Wynne, Garden

Lucy Campana’s work ended up using paint in a beautiful way, but for mediocre ends. I enjoyed her After Laughter Comes Tears up to the point where I recognized the profiles traced into the paint, at which time I tried hard to un-see them. The way she uses paint, I can imagine her work losing the pictorial or figurative elements and being better for it. Unfortunatey I have neither a photo or a link for Ms. Campana, so you’ll have to take my word on this.

(Update: You can see her work here.)

Quinn Taylor, (Untitled)

I liked Quinn Taylor’s two pieces both as works themselves and as foils to the work around them. The curatorial team (Michael Thibault and Hugh Zeigler) made good use of Taylor, and in turn Taylor’s pieces looked great in the show.

Chloe Wessner, The Last Walk

However much talent was on display at NAH POP NO STYLE, there was a new artist smell to some of the pieces, with work that seemed to spring from the art school structure rather than from a developed body of work. Chloe Wessner’s The Last Walk and Kandis Williams’ I Saw What You Did, Bitch (Cunty Whisper) both felt like one-off, pointed constructions. These may be other cases of wait and see.

Thomas Harrington, Untitled

While there were few pieces I swallow whole, and despite minor problems with some pieces, NAH POP NO STYLE is still one of the most interesting shows up in Chicago right now. Thibault and Zeigler have put together a very balanced show, rich in content and interplay, honestly beautiful in the space, and with pieces that generated more opinions and discussion than most shows I’ve attended and/or discussed. I may go a third time.

I give it a:

7.6

NAH POP NO STYLE runs July 11th through August 8th @ Roots and Culture, 1034 N. Milkwaukee.

P.S. This was one of the more difficult articles to write, only because of the very sparse online content. I nearly wore out my googler trying to track down information for some of the artists involved in this show. While I can (only reluctantly) handle the gallery not putting up a piece list/images for the show, the artists themselves should really have some online presence for interested parties. If you’re an artist without a website, please, for my sake as well as your own, go set up a blog and put your name and work on it. Put a tiny bio. Include the word artist. For me. Please.

Last Saturday saw the final show at Mini Dutch, Lucia Fabio‘s seasoned apartment gallery in Logan Square. Having ran the gallery for more than two years (a truly respectable amount of time for any alternative space), Lucia and her fiance Robert Mueller chose to close it out by exhibiting the art they’d personally collected along the way.

As sorry as it is to see a space like Mini Dutch go, all apartment gallery owners take note: if you’ve got to go out, this is the way to do it.

Lucia Fabio and Robert Mueller

By some luck I arrived at the gallery early and despite my tics and ticks was graciously invited in to snap some pictures and chat and distract while the titular duo finished up the final points of the show. Though I missed the meat of the event – the memories and good-byes and champagne toasts – I was allowed a sunny private view of the work, which was a great thing indeed considering the art in the space.

I don’t think it would be entirely appropriate to critique a personal collection, so I’ll limit myself to congradulating Lucia on bringing the work out for us to see in a way that could have easily passed for a dream-team group show of Chicago artists. Many small and medium-sized works were presented here from artists like Chris Millar (who I’d call one of the the best artists living in the city at the moment), the soon-to-be-in-New-York Stacie Johnson (her new project named Wandering Caterpillar is well worth a look), E. C. Brown, Mark Porter, and many, many more.

Here are some pictures!

Chris Millar, Life Inside a Very Small Painting

Andrew Holmquest, New Heart (The Bob Newhart Show)

Blazo Calovic, Untitled

Stacie Johnson, Frontside: Starburst with Mirrors

 

Carol Jackson, I burst from my confinement then hid unseen amid the rocks until the flies gave way to gnats.

I wish Lucia the best in her new place on the left coast and hope that if or when she ends up starting a new alternative (or more standard) space, she would choose to open it with this exact same show. It would be as perfect a Hello show in California as it was a Good-Bye show in Chicago. Good luck!

I give it a:

Selections from the Fabio-Mueller Collection was held Saturday, July 11th at Mini Dutch, 3111 W. Diversy (1st floor apartment).

While many are busy bemoaning the stable review shows that are up for this summer, one shouldn’t get the impression that interesting art in Chicago takes the same vacation as the universities do. This weekend, crush in the heart of the West Loop’s 119 N. Peoria building (home to many local faves), the Spoke gallery hosted an epic performance by Karolina Gnatowski entitled In Memory Of…A Love Story.

Karolina Gnatowski, In Memory Of... A Love Story

A crowd of over thirty were packed into the front of the Spoke space, and when the lights went down Gnatowski’s show began. While best described as a puppet show, In Memory of… brought together all elements of a good show:  music (including a full play-through of Stairway to Heaven and a full-piped rendition of Harry Nilson’s Without You), high-proof whiskey (passed around the audience in the real and shot on stage in the fake), and weed (a legit spliff shared with a puppet), all laid over the most personality-driven artistic struts imaginable. The show was at parts endearing, painfully geeky, and erotically bizzare as anything Dutes could dream up a floor below.

If you’re waiting for me to get to what the performance was about, don’t hold your breath. The narrative itself, while perfectly appropriate as a vehicle for the performance, never really moved beyond that. It wasn’t a bad story, its just that the quality and content of the show was far more present in Gnatowski’s telling of the story than in the story she was telling. The craft and trick and gimmick and humor were the point.

But if you must know: it began with a horizontal gill flex, went to sea, fucked in hell, ended in heaven, and taught the moral that there is no loss so great that it can’t be danced off.

One side to this performance I appreciated, especially in light of those aformentioned summer stable shows that are dominating the west loop this summer, was the complete one-offness of the show. Her backdrops, which were very cool watercolor on paper paintings, were torn, folded, and pitched out the roof of her puppet-house for each scene change. Her puppets were declothed in an apparently irreversible way. It was advertised as a one-time performance, it really was, and in the dark with thirty other people and a bottle of whiskey I couldn’t stop thinking of how lucky I was to be there for it.

I give it a:

8.5

Karolina Gnatowski‘s In Memory Of… A Love Affair was performed July 10th, 2009 and (apparently, somehow) runs through July 31st, 2009 at Spoke, 119 N. Peoria.

Tucked into a pretty front in the West Loop is E|C Gallery, a relatively new space ran by Polish-born and Chicago-based artist Ewa Czeremuszkin (note the titular initials) which, with its floor to ceiling windows full of western sun, functions perfectly as an import venue for Czeremuszkin’s bad-ass artist friends from Polandland. E|C’s current show Crazy Julka is a perfect continuation fitting with that theme, with Jola Jastrzab‘s drawings and paintings here enjoying their first American exposure.

Jola Jastrzab, Crazy Julka

Jastrzab’s work exists between two states – material abstraction and figure drawing. Its evident that the work begins at the former with loose  line renditions of (and I’m guessing here from the title) her female friend Julka, who is crazy, and then moves through very rough application of dry and wet media into material fistfights.

As fun as it is, the physicality of the work is a little odd – the paper is beat to shit in some places, with an inexplicable hole chewed through one page, tears on many, and dirty, abused edges on pretty much all of them. Its not that I’d need these pieces to be very clean, its just that I can’t tell why the damage exists in places. The application of materials, while rough in places, doesn’t explain the edges or the tears or holes, so they come off as quicky made and poorly cared for more than aggressively handled.

Jola Jastrzab

There’s a woman sitting in the image above, legs bent under her and one hand resting on her ankle. Can you see it? Can you try without feeling guilty? One of the first common rules in appreciating abstract or highly formal artwork is to suppress the mind’s natural desire to turn everything you see into people. Enjoying the random beauty in a mass of paint is made much harder if all you can see are faces and arms and legs. See stoner art for examples.

In the case of Crazy Julka, this rule is to some degree turned on its head. These are figure drawings, and though the figurative structure is masked and hung with far more interesting marks, seeing the work without seeing the figure isn’t really seeing the work. It was a little uncomfortable having to step back and find the root, to squint until I saw the legs in Legs or the sitting woman in the image above.

While its moderate breadth and egregious paper damages preventing it from being a “wow” show for me, Jastrzab’s paintings and drawings were overall very enjoyable, the space was pretty, and its always good to see Polish work in Chicago. If you’re looking to see some aggressive figure work, Crazy Julka should satisfy.

I give it a:

7.0

Jola Jastrzab‘s Crazy Julka runs June 26th to August 15th, 2009 at E|C Gallery, 215 N. Aberdeen.

I spent Saturday afternoon back at the Hyde Park Art Center for their Fryvalry event, hosted by third annual fry daddies Philip von Zweck (local mover and shaker whose curated show at Western Exhibitions runs through to August 1st, 2009) and Kevin Jennings (local white, working class, straight male without a website). I came there late with bananas to fry, which was a lot like being the last person on a karaoke list wanting to sing Thriller. While I missed out on most dishes fried, highlights on the vegetarian side were fried green beans and okra, and on the meatatarian side the fried catfish was a clear standout. Also, someone double fried a quarter-pounder.

Philip Von Zweck at last year's Fryvalry

Leaving Hyde Park, the next stop on the art tour was all the way up in Bucktown where H. Mathis‘ goddamned beautiful Believe Inn space was hosting David Horviz‘s Impossible to See The Whole Thing at The Same Time. As the space is the front third of Sighn‘ studio (the middle third being a social space with curios packed with art and Golden Age literature for sale) there wasn’t a great deal of room to work with, but the perfectly clever stark painted-floor white-cube effect marked each zone for what it was and allowed the gallery space to function as more than spillover.

Worlds Collide: Marco from Golden Age at David Horvitz at Believe Inn

The show consisted of photo projects by Horvitz, many of which were distributed digitally along with instructions for recreation, which is itself an interesting reboot of an old conceptual hit and caused me to google Yoko Ono for the first time in years. The photographs themselves were deceptively clever, coming off at first as quick conceptual jokes but resonating like haiku. In How To Exit a Photograph, we see three images: the first shows Horvitz setting up a ladder in a field, the second shows him climbing the ladder, and the third shows the latter alone – with Horvitz assumed to have climbed out of the frame.

David Horvitz, How to Exit a Photograph (image c)

It reads like a three panel conceptual art cartoon, packed with questions and challenges about photography and photographer that could easily be air dropped as leaflets over countries without 20th century art history professors. As a bonus, the piece in its full resolution entirety is available for free download along with instructions to reproduce the piece.

The interaction between artist and viewer through some digital/tangible crossover medium is a hallmark of Horvitz’ wok. Other works in this instructional series include Walk in Sun (download it here) and an instance of his disposible camera project, which should send you to the nearest Walgreens immediately:

David Horvitz, Disposible Camera Photos

The impressive use of interactive media should by no means suggest that this spider work stands on those legs alone; David Horvitz is a real photographer who makes real photographs complete with eyes and heart and guts. In one corner, a slightly broken black view-master is installed with a image of Horvitz mother at a beach kinked between the stereo lenses. Beside it is a description of the event, telling in plain language how he and his mother stood at the beach for more than an hour in silence, him snapping photos and her staring at the ocean with her back to the camera. Its a quiet, emotional, intimate and excellent piece of art which doesn’t fuck around.

David Horvitz

Skating so close to punch lines, Its Impossible to See The Whole Thing at The Same Time shows a deftness of concept that should make any artist jealous. Horvitz brings the poetry of conceptual photography into 2009 in a way that is both delicate and confident, dependant and inviting, and which can even make snapshot narratives worth paying attention to.

I give the show an:

8.8

David Horvitz’ Its Impossible to See The Whole Thing at The Same Time will run through to July 26th at Believe Inn, 2043 N Winchester.