Selected articles, essays, interviews and reviews. For additional essays on art, architecture and urbanism, please see my blog In/Site.
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San Diego filmmaker Cauleen Smith began her artistic journey into the life and legacy of experimental jazz musician Sun Ra during a 2010 residency at Threewalls, and the odyssey recently culminated in two powerful exhibitions (all work 2012) that pay homage to both her subject and Chicago, where Sun Ra lived from 1945 to 1961.
As suggested by the exhibition’s title, Antonia Gurkovska (b. 1984, Bulgaria) presented a lexicon of painting in her first solo show, “Index.”
Dianna Frid constructs sculptures, artist’s books and wall-based assemblages that attempt to give new form to natural phenomena, whether earthly or celestial, concrete or ethereal, as suggested by the title of her recent solo exhibition “Evidence of the Material World.”
Soaring Echoes, a new sonic sculpture created by Bill Fontana for the Pritzker Pavilion at Chicago’s Millennium Park, dislocates then relocates the viewer within its host environment, transforming perceptions of time and space.
Shunning distinct geographical, temporal, even thematic delineations, Ostalgia presents viewers with an idiosyncratic and intentionally fragmentary portrait, or rather series of portraits, of life under socialist domination. At its heart is the role of the artist – and art –within and in response to this political condition, a position of both resistance and preservation.
Dan Gunn’s hybrid constructions, whether freestanding or wall-mounted, retain their indebtedness to the history of abstract painting at the same time that they embrace other mediums and disciplines, including sculpture and design.
In her new series, “ . . . and to draw a bright white line with light” (2011), created specifically for her show at the Art Institute of Chicago, Uta Barth continues her exploration of the nature of seeing, offering atmospheric tableaux that challenge our perceptions of the physical world.
The following podcast took place on October 30, 2011, on the occasion of the exhibition Voices from the Center at threewalls gallery in Chicago, October 28 – December 10, 2011. The exhibition is an extension of a series of interviews with those living in Eastern Europe about life during and after communism by artist and curator Janeil Engelstad, beginning in 2006.
Pioneering public artist Mary Miss unveiled FLOW: Can You See the River? in Indianapolis, the first in the artist’s City as Living Laboratory (CaLL) series of projects that combine art and environmentalism to raise public awareness about issues of sustainability
Yael Bartana infuses all her works with tensions and contradictions, blending fact and fiction, past and present to question cultural definitions of nationhood and identity. These issues play out in an epic style that draws from traditional documentary, socialist-realist propaganda and the artist’s self-scripted narratives.
Claes Oldenburg’s statement “I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic . . . or violent, or whatever is necessary” can readily be applied to the art of Ben Stone, whose six recent works explore pathos in contemporary American life, particularly as manifested by tragi-comic characters in his native Chicago.
Public Notice 3, a text-based installation conceived for the Grand Staircase of the Art Institute of Chicago by Jitish Kallat, is truly monumental in aim. The site-specific work engages the historical and cultural conditions of its locale, connecting past and present in a powerful statement about religious tolerance and fanaticism.