Opal Pools of Milk and the Luzhin Defence: Review of This Too Shall Pass
In This Too Shall Pass at Ralph Arnold Gallery, the artists’ works speak to the knotty impossibilities of living and dying in a world marked by capital and consumption.
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How to View a Solar Eclipse: Both And at Tiger Strikes Asteroid
Both And at Tiger Strikes Asteroid traces and cultivates a dialogue between five contemporary artists and Chicago-based artist Miyoko Ito through their use of color, time, form, and space.
“We were not invented yesterday”, in c/o: practice at The Luminary
in ℅: practice at The Luminary presents modes of community engagement, institutional commitment, and artist making that are informed and invigorated by Black Feminist thought and histories.
Saint Vitus Dance: Holy Things Dripping Sweat in Lauren Wy’s AUTODESIRE VOL. 1
Featured Image: Installation shot of AUTODESIRE in Gallery Two of Western Exhibitions. Center image sits a square wooden table and two chairs where visitors can request specific volumes of AUTODESIRE. To the right of the table, volumes of AUTODESIRE are closed and mounted on the gallery wall. Each piece’s wooden spine lists the artist’s last name, volume number, and title where appropriate. To the left of the table, two pieces are exhibited on the gallery wall. A final piece is displayed on the wall directly behind the central viewing table. Photo by James Prinz, courtesy of Western Exhibitions. Alice through the looking glass, St. Teresa’s translucent veined ecstasy, Sylvia’s rhinestone tears trickling to wet the country ground. Fantasy is hard work; tell that to the Sadeian Woman or Louise and her spiders. Our scene opens at the end of the world, it’s a blazing stage. Take the man at his word when he says, “I am become death.” Lights, camera, ACTION! Beneath the desert’s floodlight suns and Planet Hollywood’s unearthly glow, a champagne orgy twitches …
Lion Cages and Lilac Fields: From Chicago Stages to Basements, Art, Work, and Other Pandemic Songs
Featured Image: Jyreika Guest (left) performing in a music video for the livestreamed theater production grelley. Guest stands on a crate and gestures toward the video camera, surrounded by lighting equipment and a basic set design. At right are crew members (L-R) Eon Mora, Kevin Veselka, and Glamhag. In the background another actor checks their outfit in a mirror. Filmed in Chicago, May 2021. Photo by Sarah Elizabeth Larson. This is the first in a series of articles made in collaboration with the Chicago Arts Census to explore the living, labor, and material realities of art workers in the city of Chicago. To learn more about the Census, how to get involved, or how to take the survey, please visit: https://chicagoartscensus.com/. Click here to read the second article of this series. To get to the Internal Call Center you have to enter the museum’s loading dock, head down endless hallways of windowed offices—the home of Curatorial, Education, the Director, the President (a.k.a. the people who neither know nor want to know you exist)—hop down two …
The House You Built: Memory, Touch, and Performance in Repository and Repertoire
The body is an archive: a hard drive, memorial, escape pod, Netflix queue, a bound of Gordian knots surrounding soft rooms.
Loving the Cannibal: Lia Kohl and Nick Meryhew’s Measures of Distance
The show does not propose a way forward, rather it asks you to stop and look, to see, truly see what you have now. Measures proposes the possibility of home in the aching places, because maybe pleasure lives there too.
Questions in Time: Looking Back and Ahead, Together
In our current moment, Chicago’s artists and creators find themselves exhaustingly entrenched within the gig economy, where artist-run spaces and projects commonly exist in liminal zones of financial and programmatic instability. Neoliberalism’s acceleration has only illuminated how the endeavor to make and create within the art economy is demarcated by racism, classism, and technological isolation, i.e. the art world’s role in gentrification, the exclusionary cost of many MFA programs, the growing scarcity of funding, and the fleetingness of social capital within the attention economy. Uncertainty and anxiety permeate our current moment; we live in a constant state of reckoning. How can one meaningfully create and work while maintaining a constructive and reparative critique of one’s own complicity within systems of oppression? In a maze of disenfranchisement, how can the art world be a roadmap for advocacy? Is such a change even possible? I do not know the answers to these questions. However, I do believe that there is something––a hint, a clue, a discovery––to be uncovered within an examination of time and how it has …
The Last Cruze: LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Renaissance Society
Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors, stated at the October 2018 CityLab Detroit Leaders Conference that she hoped to shift public perception of GM from that of an automobile manufacturer to a technology company before her retirement. Barra’s comment hinted at a desire to not only change the driving ethos of GM production but to also transform the configuration of GM’s workforce: imagine a future akin to Tesla’s automated assembly line, their factories quiet save for the AI programmed to build their “tech.” The wish to associate GM with an encroaching technocratic future reflects how labor, capital, and the management of these two components of late capitalism have shifted within the neoliberal paradigm. The dialogue of labor is rapidly changing. Rather than centering the conversation on workers, the question is now how production is managed, diffused and parceled out: human lives become human capital. This message casts a long shadow over the recent United Autoworkers Union deal with GM, ratified on Nov 4th, 2019. UAW members were on strike for six weeks, the longest …
The Tokyo Show: Black & Brown Are Beautiful – A Conversation with Curator Asha Iman Veal
Chicago has taught me that there is still so much in this country that sees only black and white. That it is a political action every step of every day to be Black.
Nation Time: An Interview with Jeffreen Hayes
Activism means thinking about who are the artists getting exhibitions and making sure exhibition practices are equitable; making sure that all are empowered to have their voices heard.
Jose Santiago Perez: The Sites and Sounds of Memory and Belonging
In Anne Carson’s essay “The Gender of Sound” she writes “every sound we make is a bit of autobiography. It has a totally private interior yet its trajectory is public. A piece of inside projected to the outside.” Carson builds upon these thoughts to create a framework that examines the cultural considerations and consequences of our sounds: what do we listen to, what do we censor? In a sense, Carson’s schema develops an account of value–what sounds do we listen to, what sounds do we remember, what sounds form a life? Viewing artist Jose Santiago Perez’s show PASSIVITIES, currently up at the Humboldt Park based Ignition Project Space, brought Carson’s ideas of aural intimacy to mind by virtue of the work’s inextricable entanglement with memory and the performance of memory. Though Carson is not explicitly engaged with in the exhibition, Santiago Perez’s use of craft and repetition render each piece a memory palace; every work endowed with the ghostly remnants of what was said and never said. Santiago Perez is an artist invested in understanding …
El Sol Sale Para Todxs: A Conversation with Galia Basail
Video and installation artist Galia Basail speaks about her pop-up exhibition and her wider curatorial practice, inclusivity, and communities in Chicago and Mexico.
Communal Space and Place: An Interview with Hume Founder Fontaine Capel
Talking about operating a space that runs solely on community support and how to be a good neighbor.
Welcome to the End
A review of the most recent show at The Franklin in Garfield Park.
Softness as Subversion
The Franklin’s My Feet Have Lost Memory of Softness utilizes space and place to explore the concept of softness, questioning and expanding the audience’s pre-existing relationships with change, time, and the hierarchies of an art gallery. Curated by Ionit Behar, the crux of the installation is the representation of softness as a characteristic of mutability and change. Within the realm of an art installation, change can be indicative of transition and fluctuation in a viewer’s experience and subsequent understanding of a work. This conception of softness is compounded by the nature of the Franklin as a site, a quality described by the show’s written materials as an “unconventional and unofficial presence.” Such presence is derived from the fact that the Franklin is an artist-run site within Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan’s East Garfield Park home and yard. These blurred boundaries between the communal and the domestic are in and of themselves a softness, one that speaks towards an artist community formed from transition. When entering the Franklin’s outdoor space one is immediately confronted by Jean …