Mitzi Pederson

RATIO 3
1447 Stevenson Street
September 11–October 24

Mitzi Pederson, Untitled, 2009, wood, paint, string, 87 x 39 1/2".

By titling her exhibition “I’ll Start Again,” Mitzi Pederson hints at reinvention. But though the show finds the artist maintaining an economy of modest gestures and low-grade materials that seem diverted from landfill, her new sculptures exude the integrity of starting from scratch. Where Pederson’s previous bodies of work have evoked Richard Tuttle, here the spirit of Fred Sandback appears in a series of string-based works that respond directly to the gallery space. Several balance thin thread and pieces of wood and at times articulate geometric volume. All are far more commanding of space than their humble ingredients would ever suggest.

Pederson responds with grace to the gallery’s floor, an irregular patchwork of wooden planks, some splattered and stained by former tenants, others more recently placed. She tackles this visually dominant feature head-on with a group of eight small sculptures made from irregular, scraplike pieces of wood placed directly on the floor. As if spawned from the worn planks underfoot, the artworks are made of fresher wood and function primarily as platforms for smaller papier-mâché forms that are visually droopy but materially firm, defiant in their pint-size ungainliness. A back room features an assortment of works less dependent on the gallery architecture. Letter-size sheets of vellum are the ground for rough washes of paint that seem almost to be as weighty as the tattered and curling paper, revealing that Pederson confidently takes her foundations where she finds them.

— Glen Helfand

Bessma Khalaf

STEVEN WOLF FINE ARTS
49 Geary Street, Suite 411
October 9–November 14

Bessma Khalaf, Monument, 2009, still from a color video, 3 hours 56 minutes.

In two of the three videos that compose “You’re Not There,” Bessma Khalaf’s first solo exhibition at this gallery, the artist shares—through precise actions—an extremely ambivalent relationship with the American landscape and much of what it signifies. In Projection (all works 2009), a sequence of Sierra Club–style photographs of golden plains, majestic mountains, and rolling rivers is revealed as fictional when a fist punches through the sheets of paper the images are screened on one by one. These efficient blows to the land form a rhythmic slide show of constant insertion and, perhaps, rejection. On the opposite wall, in Landscape, the paper itself forms a relief that seems just as volcanically violent.

An abrupt moment is temporally distorted in the show’s epic centerpiece, Monument, a video documenting the Iraqi-American artist straddling a life-size ice sculpture of a horse for the nearly four hours it takes to melt in the hot California sun. Her pratfall is defused by the viewer’s prolonged anticipation and becomes a memorial to inevitable defeat––not to mention frozen inner thighs. The artist’s body is also something of a conduit in Ectoplasm, a creepy Victorian-inspired work that involves Khalaf knitting a scarf with nubby white yarn pulled from her mouth. The dark mirror used in the video is mounted nearby, and though Khalaf’s sculptural gesture is not quite there, her videos make the discomfiture of the show vividly present.

— Glen Helfand

“Toward Abstraction: Photographs and Photograms”

DE YOUNG MUSEUM
50 Hagiwara Tea Garden Drive
June 20–November 15

Arthur Siegel, RCA Building, ca. 1940–49, gelatin silver print, 13 1/4 x 10 3/8".

If the quiddity of photography is the realism it affords, then what is the medium’s relationship to abstraction? Most of the works in this tight, striking exhibition take up well after an answer was provided by modernist photography’s conquest of a nonmimetic domain, driven by the likes of Edward Steichen and Alfred Steiglitz.

The work of Arthur Siegel—who studied with László Moholy-Nagy, one of the masters of early-twentieth-century photographic abstraction—forms the exhibition’s touchstone, weighted as it is toward midcentury. In Siegel’s RCA Building, ca. 1940–49, the company’s acronym forms a lone referential anchor in a blurred field of light-smeared architectonics. Siegel’s extended exposure charges an otherwise straightforward cityscape with an air of brooding, miragelike menace. Photogram, 1946, and Right of Assembly, 1939, sit across the gallery, offering further examples of his range of experimentation. Both fill the frame with innumerable objects, but the patterns of the former are purely formal, while the latter’s quasi-abstraction stirs up wider metaphors of anonymity and collectivity, modernity and ideology. Here, as in many of the works on display, the voluntarily embraced limitations of photographic representation—croppings, occlusions—invest the image with a wider range of nonrepresentational meanings.

Jack Welpott’s shots of the sides of a house with exposed clapboard produces, by virtue of his framing, flattened planes of geometric near abstraction. More painterly effects emerge in William Garnett’s Untitled (Aerial Landscape), ca. 1976, which was shot from the seat of his own plane and which seems to register the distortions of speed and distance as part of the image’s smeared, buckled landscape. The human body, too, is the object of many artists’ abstractions—all the more uncanny for their focus on this most familiar form made strange and foreign. Lee Friedlander’s Wilmington, Delaware, 1965, figures a lanky human shadow distended and distorted over a solitary chair in the foreground. The body’s transformation into alien shapes is inverted in pictures such as Anton Bruehl’s close-up of machinery, in which the objects of modernity come to take on a nearly corporeal presence.

— Ara H. Merjian

“Undercover: Performing and Transforming Black Female Identities”

SPELMAN COLLEGE MUSEUM OF FINE ART
350 Spelman Lane SW,
September 10–December 5

Nandipha Mntambo, Europa, 2009, archival ink on cotton rag paper, 39 1/2 x 39 1/2".

Physical representation of the black female is explored in this thoughtful and thematically rich exhibition. Curators Andrea Barnwell Brownlee and Karen Comer Lowe have brought together more than seventy-five often-challenging examples of video, painting, sculpture, drawing, and photography that explore how black women sometimes disguise, adorn, and otherwise manipulate their appearances in an effort to conceal or reveal their identities.

The cross-referencing of voices throughout the show—which, crucially, are neither just black nor just female—is fascinating. The legacy of blackface performance runs through the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, Ellen Gallagher, and Cindy Sherman. Yet Harris’s cross-dressing as female also speaks to Emma Amos’s poignant self-portrait as an artist wearing a jumpsuit painted with a nude male body. Gallagher’s work simultaneously explores the identity issues behind black hair, a concern evident in both Lorna Simpson’s multipaneled study of wigs and Mequitta Ahuja’s exquisite wall-size drawings of black tresses. Sherman’s black-and-white self-portraits initiate an interesting conversation with James Van Der Zee’s and Doris Ulmann’s early black-and-white photographs of African Americans. And Ulmann’s portrait of a young black nun in her habit connects to the costuming of Renee Cox in upper-class trappings, Nandipha Mntambo in home-cured animal skins, Sheila Pree Bright’s portrait of herself morphed into a black Barbie, and Nick Cave’s richly decorated full-body sound suit. These overlapping themes occur across genres and generations, bringing together old favorites and new voices in what is clearly a continuing conversation.

— Rebecca Cochran

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat

DOMY BOOKS
913 E Cesar Chavez
September 12–October 22

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat, The Exhibit of the Past Is the Certainty of the Future
Year, 2009, graphite and acrylic on wood, 49 x 48 1/2".

Leah DeVun and Levi Dugat’s works love the eye, using alternating stretches of seamless, misty penciled passages and scribbled fill-ins to enmesh reverie with alienation. “Your Heart Is Not a Museum,” an exhibition of drawings, is the artists’ second collaboration; most of the works on view were authored together via conversation rather than by hand. Viewers can imagine each artist visiting the other’s studio and leaving ideas like so many Victorian calling cards, generating the vulnerability, intimacy, and occasional identity dysphoria that bind the resulting works together.

Their styles are disparate: DeVun’s renderings of diamonds and soap-opera characters speak to intimacy’s promise, but her works’ obsessive, almost cold technical proficiency precludes any closeness that her subjects might otherwise exude. Dugat is a sweet crafter of cursive titles and embroidery-sampler-esque ovoid compositions. He shades his works with repetitive marks, which gives his compositions a sense of pixelation, as though to highlight the excessive daydreaming that was poured into the image.

A collaborative graphite-on-wood portrait of the two seated on a colored quilt offers a depiction of Dugat gazing just above the viewer’s eyes, while DeVun assumes the ramrod-straight spine of an uncomfortable teenage girl, each representing a dimension of identity that bears out equal risks when made either public or private. Here, aspiration and comfort are well married, proving that the currencies of one’s inner and outer life can sometimes collide beautifully.

— Katie Anania

Hank Willis Thomas

BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART
10 Art Museum Drive
July 29–November 29

Hank Willis Thomas, “I AM A MAN,” 2009, Liquitex on twenty framed canvases, 25 1/4 x 19 1/4".

Moving seamlessly across media, Hank Willis Thomas’s meticulously crafted works employ the formal language of late Minimalism to produce graphic, historically steeped meditations on imaging blackness in America today. The exhibition’s strongest moment, a series of twenty canvases titled “I AM A MAN,” 2009, typifies Thomas’s modus operandi of trawling through the archives of American literature, visual culture, and advertising for source material: in this case, Ernest Wither’s famous 1968 photograph of striking sanitation workers all bearing signs with their iconic, eponymous message. Forming a dynamic working improvisation on Wither’s work, Thomas’s painted texts—I AM HUMAN, I AM THE MAN, and YOU THE MAN—roll around the quiet gallery like a piece of jazz.

The Day I Discovered I Was Colored, 2009, also speaks to us from the under the dust of the historical archive. A printed cartoon of three children talking beneath the fiery orange canopy of a tree, it is the only work to feature vivid color. And it does so precisely to illuminate the distance between the formal and political valences of the word colored, between the hidebound categories of race and the broad range of human diversity. That every other work in the small exhibition is visually structured by the stark play of black pigment against white ground, or vice versa, highlights the politics of color that is Thomas’s subject here, while functioning, too, as a metaphor for the codependence of racial categories: the idea that blackness is culturally readable only against a conceptual ground of whiteness. Thomas’s lenticular, with its two declamatory phrases—BLACK IMITATES BLACK and WHITE IMITATES WHITE, wherein one statement shifts to the other with the movement of the viewer—further emphasizes this point by refusing to resolve these two extreme readings. As the sclerotic logic of the binary prevails, the work becomes literal “writing on the wall,” asserting the intractability of the issue of race in America today.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Omer Fast

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY ART MUSEUM AND PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
2626 Bancroft Way
October 25–December 17

Omer Fast, Nostalgia, 2009, four-channel color video. Production still.

Omer Fast’s Nostalgia, 2009, produced by the South London Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Nationalgalerie at the Hamburger Bahnhof, is a video installation in three parts. The first depicts a man building a trap in the woods while in voice-over another man speaks to his life as a former child soldier, segueing into an incidental description of the trap’s construction. In the next video, two actors take up the story in the form of an interview that loops through conversations about the trap, the man’s quest for asylum, and fractured memory of his childhood, as well as the fact that the film itself will be based on the interview. The third video, transferred from 16-mm film, is a series of vignettes, set in a future seemingly projected from the past, in which interconnected characters—a refugee, his caseworker, her lover, his child—alternate between recipient and informant of how to engineer the trap. As the cycle progresses and the story repeats, authorship, and subsequently authority, become more elusive.

Fast not only disconnects the story of the trap––which never quite coheres into a clear image––from its original narrator, he strategically creates a distance between each segment of the installation and fractures the continuity between image and cinematic construction. The trap is both a metaphor and a framework for experiencing the piece. It is almost immediately evident that we will not arrive at conclusive positions around the larger political issues of race, nationality, or asylum unfolding in the work. Instead, the artist lures the viewer further and further into personal narratives, each time creating a more familiar but less certain understanding of the individual authors. Similarly, Nostalgia leads one away from authoritative knowledge toward individual testimony and unloosens these stories from documentary’s voyeuristic demand to locate larger truths in personal reality.

— Patricia Maloney

David X. Levine

STEVEN ZEVITAS GALLERY
450 Harrison Avenue, #47
October 22–December 5

David X. Levine, James Brown, 2008, colored pencil and collage on paper, 23 x 20".

Despite the fact that both his relationship to his idols and their rapport with him is completely projected, David X. Levine’s exhibition of drawings, “Brian Wilson Loves You,” is a confession of the musical devotee’s intense closeness to his subjects. In fact, while the viewer of Levine’s homage to musicians like Chuck Berry, Janis Joplin, and Amy Winehouse may imagine that the “You” in the title is directed at them, it seems more likely that it is the artist’s wishful desire for a reciprocal affinity with the performers.

Yet much like that of Andy Warhol, the ultimate fan, Levine’s work communicates more broadly because of the artist’s ability to transform his emotive effusion into an aesthetic labor of love. Though most of the works contain collage elements, they are grafted onto variously sized sheets of paper colored entirely with pencil. The extreme manual labor and repetitive gestures necessary to achieve each expanse’s uniform and almost waxy sheen are temporal testaments to Levine’s devotion.

However, Levine is interested not just in exploring the visual fabrication of intimacy with a gamut of public figures, some lesser known than others (Beach Boy sensation Brian Wilson and Carol Mountain––an old classmate and love interest of Wilson’s––receive equal treatment), but also in the possibility of turning abstraction into a similarly cherished object of desire. In some of the best works, such as James Brown, 2008, and Super Black . . ., 2009, Levine presents an overlay of recurring patterns (reminiscent of Russian Constructivist textiles), zones of pure color, and collages framed within monochromatic planes. In these, the artist lavishes the same attention on the language of abstraction as he does on his heroes, suggesting that they are sites for both the creation of desire and the constitution of the self.

— Nuit Banai

Damián Ortega

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, BOSTON
100 Northern Avenue
September 18–January 18

Damián Ortega, Resting Matter (Brazil), 2004, set of twenty digital prints, 11 x 14" each.

Damián Ortega practices a sculpture of ingenious dis-engineering and gentle explosions. In it, the laws of physics––motion and rest, gravity and centrifugal forces––function as compositional devices, tentatively cohering objects into an aesthetics of suspense. Energy coils out of these works: Witness the drunken spinning of Union-Separation, 2000; the tumbling, clattering release of falling bricks in Nine Types of Terrain, 2007; and the painfully slow unfurling of a golf ball’s insides in Liquid Center, 1997. Sometimes dynamism remains incipient, sucking in its breath and holding gravity at bay in piles of virtuosically balanced furniture, rotating oil barrels, or—most spectacularly, in 2002’s Cosmic Thing—a dissected classic VW Beetle whose insides are strewn through space. Even static materials, like inert heaps of bricks, are titled “Resting Matter,” as if to emphasize how the jumpy flux of constructive––and destructive––energy underpins all matter. In the gleefully twisted and tweaked forms of Ortega’s vitreous meditations on a Coke bottle in 120 Days, 2002, such dynamic processes of deformation are paraded before us.

Ortega’s interest in systems and in the dynamic energy of process art explains his affinity for the work of Robert Morris and Carl Andre. The former’s felt sculptures are recast as droopy saddles tattooed with the plans of utopian buildings. Sagging down from the ceiling, Skin, 2006–2007, playfully threads global strains of modernist architecture through the leathery filter of local economies of labor. In “Resting Matter,” a series of photographs from 2004, it is Andre’s trademark bricks that Ortega transforms from generic building blocks into culturally specific products of Mexico and Brazil, just as he unravels Andre’s orderly, generic grid with the idiosyncratic slump of individuals’ brick heaps. Both works tie labor, materials, and process to the specificities of place, leaving as universal only the cosmic state of deferral that seems to accompany the prospect of home renovations––the ostensible reason for massing these bricks outside people’s homes.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Melanie Schiff

KAVI GUPTA GALLERY
835 West Washington
September 11–October 24

Melanie Schiff, Hellroom, color photograph, 2009, 31 1/2 x 35".

Melanie Schiff’s new series of photographs are called “narratives” in the gallery’s press materials, yet her pictures lack figures or anthropomorphized objects that might function as characters, much less any obvious sense of duration. The concrete viaducts and forlorn landscapes that Schiff captures are the functioning detritus of a normally invisible infrastructure that supports vast conurbations. (Perhaps these are part of the web of waterworks that service the parched Los Angeles area, where Schiff lives.)

Unit after unit, mile after mile, the viaducts are gigantic, yet in Schiff’s photographs these bland and imposing structures dematerialize. Take Hellroom, 2009, where the walls and floor of a huge drainage culvert are covered with mostly red graffiti so densely layered that the concrete surface transforms into something akin to intricately tattooed human skin. Further, the square shape of the culvert self-consciously mirrors the square format of the photograph, and the white-and-orange spots in each lower corner of the structure resemble overexposed patches on a negative. The photograph pulls in two directions: to the print’s surface and to the shimmering spray-painted cement. The man-made canyon nearly disappears between these competing poles. It is a ruin of sorts, not from long ago, but instead the recent past or even the present. Ruins manifest narrative in their decrepitude: how much their present form differs from what had once been pristine and new. Perhaps the narrative then resides in that gap and in the taut pull between surface and skin.

— James Glisson

Doug Ischar

GOLDEN
816 W Newport
September 12–October 25

Doug Ischar, MW 1, 1985, color photograph, 26 x 40".

The languorous tangles of seminude men in Doug Ischar’s photographs resurrect lost moments in queer urban history. Heads resting against thighs, hands reaching across bare torsos to stroke damp hair; the glazed eyes and drowsy expressions of these men result not from sex or drugs but from the pleasures of sun and heat. Taken in the summer of 1985 at a gay lakeside hangout in Chicago known as the Belmont Rocks (removed in 2003 as part of a revetment project), Ischar’s images capture an era through its cultural effects: gold chains and zebra-striped bikinis, an outdated issue of Vanity Fair under a book about Diane Arbus, a pink plastic flamingo perched jauntily next to a dozing sunbather.

For the most part, the photographs function as mementos. AIDS was ravaging flesh and community at that time and formed the invisible backdrop against which these strewn bodies must inevitably be viewed. Yet Ischar’s inclusion of a new single-channel projection that depicts two 1960s-era men engaged in furtive versions of the activities shown in the photographs helps direct the exhibition away from purely sociological readings. Ischar has slightly altered this found piece of Super 8 footage by adjusting its playback speed and adding a translated portion of Walter Benjamin’s 1928 book One-Way Street and a sound track of Heinrich Schütz’s 1629 composition Symphoniae sacrae (Book 1). This 2009 piece, titled Forget Him, reminds us of the fleeting nature of bodies and the social landscapes that shape them.

— Claudine Ise

Allan Sekula

THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY
The University of Chicago, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, Cobb Hall #418
September 20–December 13

Allan Sekula, My Father with His List. Sacramento, December 1979, black-and-white photograph, 24 x 36".

In “Polonia and Other Fables,” photographer Allan Sekula documents Polonia, the diasporic zone of expatriated Poles—an “imagined community,” in Sekula’s words—in which he immersed himself during the past three years. The forty pictures in the exhibition, a joint commission of Chicago’s Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, plumb the links between the two cities—migration, hibernal light, hardscrabble working-class conditions—through a mosaic of fragments.

“Polonia” finds Sekula modulating fluidly between street photography, aerial surveillance, and hagiographic portraiture, his subjects linked by his ethnographic sensibility and a centrifugally propelled cloud of association. Although its style is ostensibly documentary, the exhibition has the feel of an imperfect archive, the pictures that of extant evidence of a rapidly shifting place. Diaspora is territory that has been aggressively intellectualized in the past decade, but it is presented here as memories at once lucid and surreal.

Hence instances of Sekula’s now-familiar concerns: post-Soviet landscapes updated in flimsy Western dress, pig farmers displaced by industrial agriculture, and ominous military installations cropping up throughout New Europe. These more global issues are tempered, however, with hints of the autobiographical—Sekula’s father holding a list of names alluding to the family’s contested Catholic and Jewish heritage—and the local, in pictures of Latino workers in Chicago marching on May Day or a middle-aged black woman warily smoking. These sorts of pictures push Sekula’s cartography to its extremes but also render his ideologically rich survey both poetic and grounded.

— Ian Bourland

“Heartland”

SMART MUSEUM OF ART, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
5550 South Greenwood Avenue
October 1–January 17

View of “Heartland,” 2009. Left: Cody Critcheloe, Boy, 2009. Right: Carnal Topor, Purifications of the CalmDome, 2009.

This eye-opening group exhibition highlights the work of visual artists and other cultural producers who take tactical advantage of their peripheral geographic relationship to major urban cultural centers. From its title onward, “Heartland”—a collaboration between the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands—simultaneously embraces and debunks regional clichés. The independent spirit, bootstrapping gumption, and friendliness often attributed to midwesterners, for example, here takes the form of a determined DIY mind-set, a willingness to collaborate, and a savvy ability to get the job done by “making do.”

Such methods are certainly not exclusive to this region, but they are arguably most prevalent (and essential) in cities like Detroit, Kansas City, Chicago, and Memphis. Falling real estate prices have enabled the Detroit-based, community-minded collective Design 99 to purchase studio and storefront space, while Lowndes County, Alabama—the birthplace of the first independent African-American political party—provides a rich vein of unwritten sociopolitical history for artist Jeremiah Day to tap. Oral histories and other forms of storytelling enable artists to situate a dislocated present in terms of a shared past or an imagined future, although sometimes, as in the comics-style drawings of Chicagoans Kerry James Marshall and Deb Sokolow, such place-based narratives can take surreal, truth-twisting turns.

The Chicago iteration of “Heartland” wisely includes smaller ancillary exhibitions of paintings by self-taught artist Joseph Yoakum and the Chicago Imagists, ensuring that the unique contributions of the city to the region’s art are not overlooked. Overall, however, the focus is on shared practices rather than common stylistic attributes.

— Claudine Ise

Thomas Baldischwyler

GALERIE CONRADI
Schopenstehl 20,
November 6–December 19

Thomas Baldischwyler, Die Spiegel (Physik), 2009, collage, glass, paint, 22 x 16".  

Visions of social upheaval and cultural touchstones are painted with a rosy, muted palette in Thomas Baldischwyler’s solo exhibition. Over a series of collaged images culled mainly from vintage mass-market news publications, Baldischwyler elegantly paints Rorschach-blot-like abstractions with thick acrylic, resin, and glitter glazes and employs silk-screen patterns against heavy, occasionally blistered glass panels. The few instances of strong color in the compositions are softened by the thick glass, and the dominant colors on view include sweet, minty green, light yellow, lavender, and rose. The images themselves range from a photograph of a German tank in Kosovo (ironically or unself-consciously named Sancho by the soldiers inside) to a dreamy publicity snap of Olivia Newton-John perched in a tree, next to a small, rarely seen portrait of Joseph Beuys intently staring out a window, and a black-and-white concert shot of Mudhoney performing.

Similar colors flash in the front room of the gallery, where a program of random light patterns plays underneath glass floorboards that the gallery staff discovered after removing the former tenants’ carpet. The lights weakly replicate a disco floor, which Baldischwyler offers as a symbol of the first freedoms enjoyed by East Germans after the fall of the wall. In contrast to the potent, energetic primary colors usually used in disco floors, the shades that flash from Baldischwyler’s work are pale, and their melancholy glow is only faintly comforting, rather than electrifying and erotic, as their pretty patterns summon up feelings of nostalgia for bygone days that were defined by an intense hope for the future.

— Ana Finel Honigman

“Reduced Visibility”

THE GLASSELL SCHOOL OF ART AT THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
5101 Montrose Blvd.
September 4–November 15

Mark Lombardi, Frank Sharp and Sharpstown State Bank, c. 1968–72, 1994, graphite on paper, 11 x 13 1/2".

If abstraction can distill the essence of an otherwise quotidian occurrence, it can also achieve a seemingly contradictory end—simply obfuscating the obvious, rendering any meaning arbitrary. “Reduced Visibility,” curated by Kurt Mueller, carries on this tradition of duplicity. The exhibition comprises five artists working in the more politically entrenched region of abstraction. Its success depends on the viewer’s interest in and, at times, tolerance for didacticism.

Mueller does well in choosing artists who gravitate toward the sublime. Trevor Paglen’s blurred vistas, which capture a purported secret military testing site off the coast of southern California, formally reference Rothko’s color fields. The sci-fi-seeming content of the large-scale photographs enriches the ambient mood created by the works’ atmospheric soft focus. Lisa Oppenheim’s “Multicultural Crayon Displacements” series, 2008, similarly embraces a modernist aesthetic: Drawing from Crayola’s recently launched color palette—expanded to include non-Eurocentric skin tones—Oppenheim creates photograms of rectilinear compositions. The results are as sumptuous as her concept is hackneyed. Rico Gatson also deals with racial overtones in his video installation, History Lessons, 2004. This frantic montage of culturally loaded source material, like scenes from The Birth of a Nation and imagery of the 1965 Watts riots, pulsates to a syncopated beat on two screens separated by a black divider. The result is engaging, but at times it is unclear how the commentary extends past a trendy music-video montage. The quietest voice in the show packs the most punch. Mark Lombardi’s drawings of corporate malfeasance are direct and elegant, composed of simple arching lines and circles that trace various money trails. They are disturbing without relying on irrelevant aesthetic decisions to enhance dialogue. The works are abstractions, to be sure, but illustrative enough of the myriad scandalous financial ways of our times to insinuate a cabal of paranoia without coming off as heavy-handed.

— Garland Fielder

Dieter Balzer

GALLERY SONJA ROESCH
2309 Caroline Street
November 7–January 2

Dieter Balzer, Skoop, 2007, MDF foil, 37 x 37 x 3.5".

Precision in reductive-themed art is not merely essential but also the means and the end of such work. Dieter Balzer’s recent exhibition on view at Gallery Sonja Roesch exemplifies the genre’s correlation between presentation and execution. His elegantly constructed, wall-mounted linear sculptures are a delight. Brightly colored monochromatic bars overlap, intertwine, and obfuscate in prescribed rhythms that uniquely balance each piece. The artist displays an understanding of the logic of randomness, as it were, in that his creations hold steady to a purpose that is self-contained—playfully executing their own systemic patterning with grace and authority. Balzer exemplifies a mature understanding of spatial depth, both illusory and real, that makes the complicated works appear at once effortless and fully realized. References from Sol LeWitt to Jo Baer come to mind but fail to fully capture Balzer’s unique configurations, which have freshness apart from historical precedent. The wise decision to include relatively few forms in the show strengthens the presence of the artworks—each of which displays its own syncopated trajectory.

— Garland Fielder

Greely Myatt

MEMPHIS BROOKS MUSEUM OF ART
1934 Poplar Avenue
August 15–January 3

Greely Myatt, I gotta learn to talk (detail), 2006, steel, acrylic on paper on canvas, 106 x 65 x 7".

To mark Greely Myatt’s twentieth year working and teaching in Memphis, his work is featured in nine venues around the city for nearly four months. This proliferation of exhibitions offers a vast retrospective view of his output, much of which suggests or actively engages in dialogues––between the artist and art history, the art and its imagined audience, or notions of fine art and the craft tradition.

One motif that appears repeatedly in Myatt’s work is the cartoon speech bubble. He fashions these from found pieces of wood, scraps of metal from discarded signage, old cookie and baking tins, and even false eyelashes. In Talking, 2006–2009, an installation that was on view at Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, eleven speech bubbles hung on a single wall, containing fragments of brand names, embossed architectural decorations, or a zipper or ruler embedded in their surfaces. The speech bubble appears again at the Memphis Brooks Museum in I gotta learn to talk, 2006. Here, instead of recouped materials mounted on wood, Myatt has meticulously assembled 156 paper rectangles, each containing a comic strip, their surfaces whitewashed save for a single statement in a bubble. Each seems to represent dramatic introspection by the artist––NOBODY APPRECIATES THE WORK I DO or MY NAME WILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY––if not gentle mockery of art criticism or a reaction from a blasé audience––DO YOU HAVE ANY OTHER IDEAS? or WE DON’T GET IT EITHER.

Myatt’s role as a southern artist facing the canonical works of art history is never far from his mind, as works including Roomrug, 1999, demonstrate. The combination of multicolored broomsticks fashioned into a fragment of a rug and reflected into a right-angled mirror re-creates a Smithsonesque non-site, though the site represented is that of the domestic sphere. The playful attitude and meticulous rigor with which Myatt handles his materials might be considered a mask that hides a deeper understanding of the roles and restrictions of regional artists in a universal context.

This exhibition is also on view at the Art Museum at the University of Memphis until November 7 and the Dixon Gallery and Gardens through November 14. It was recently at the Clough-Hansen Gallery at Rhodes College, the Metal Museum, Power House Memphis, David Lusk Gallery, P & H Center for the Arts, and the On the Street Gallery at the Memphis College of Art.

— Chelsea Weathers

“The Austerity Cookbook”

THE SOAP FACTORY
518 2nd St. SE,
September 5–October 25

Adam Parker-Smith, Umbrellas, 2009, umbrellas, wood, dimensions variable. Installation view.

Given recent emphasis on immersive and site-specific installation, it is easy to write off many new works as gimmicky. Nonetheless, “The Austerity Cookbook,” at Minneapolis’s Soap Factory, uses these conceits to stirring effect. The space, a sort of steampunk fun house, is in many ways the star of the show.

The Soap Factory’s massive volumes retain the patina of age and provide airy tableaux for incipient practices. The exhibition began with an invitation to emerging artists to arrive with a receptiveness to the raw and unheated environment. As a result, the finished pieces do not feel grafted onto the galleries but instead balance in organic unity with the building.

The show is at its weakest, then, when it recedes into mere display, which includes projections of Eileen Maxson’s Cinderella +++, 2002, and Wendy DesChene’s self-referential distortion paintings. Hidden behind a curtain, however, is Scott Rogers’s Wireframe Beta, 2009, an array of light boxes that click off when the viewer enters the room. In the dark, the armature of the building appears delimited in photoluminescent tape that traces the cattywompus arc of the ceiling and a meandering crack on the back wall of the cavernous room.

This fusion of ragged imperfection and aesthetic precision appears again in the main gallery, where dust from the space has been affixed to adhesive plastic by Alison Owen to depict lush ornaments, arabesques, and trapdoors. Additionally, the New York–based artist Adam Parker Smith has positioned cloudlike plumes of umbrellas throughout the building. Yet the impact of the space is most pronounced in Lauren Herzak-Bauman’s Memory Eternal, 2009, four circles of shattered porcelain lit with weathered industrial lamps. On a smaller scale, the project lacks conceptual interest, but writ large, the debris assumes an elegiac beauty.

— Ian Bourland

Rob Fischer

FRANKLIN ART WORKS
1021 East Franklin Avenue,
September 18–October 30

View of “Rob Fischer,” 2009.

For years, Rob Fischer has been building strange hybrid vehicles: a glass-roofed rowboat with a matching greenhouse trailer, a single-engine plane with an ice-fishing shack for a cockpit. This exhibition continues the theme, although transport is more implied than depicted, and it’s unclear whether movement represents escape from rural America or, for a Minnesota native like Fischer transplanted to New York, a yearning for home.

Fischer captures the desolate winter landscape of northern Minnesota in four videos; liquid propane-tank sales lots, shuttered tourist shops, and fleet-supply stores are seen through the windows of a borrowed Buick. Handpainted signs propped against a wall suggest discarded wayfinders, while a two-dimensional wall sculpture, accented by colors seen in the videos, arranges slats of gymnasium flooring in a geometric maze reminiscent of country roadways.

Another personal habitat for Fischer is here, too: that of the art world. Submerged in a pond constructed in the gallery is the twisted hull of a boat, painted up in Mondrian red, yellow, and blue. A series of suspended clear plastic cubes reference a Jasper Johns set piece for Merce Cunningham’s Walkaround Time (1968), although Fischer’s version has a quirky, regionally appropriate tweak: Screenprinted on one are Hubbard County Sheriff’s notices, copied from a small-town paper, that highlight snowmobiling infractions, DWIs, and one count of failure to wear BLAZE ORANGE IN FIREARM DEER SEASON. Likewise, a deconstructed billboard of the kind towering over area roads might offer another art-historical reference––fluorescent tubes à la Dan Flavin. But the exposed wiring and rough construction, not to mention the lonely stretch of highway (complete with a Cindy Q gas-station sign), suggest that it’s midwestern pragmatism, not intended allusion, that dictated his choices.

— Paul Schmelzer

Nan Curtis and Nicolaii Dornstauder

FOURTEEN30 CONTEMPORARY
1430 SE 3rd Avenue
October 1–October 31

View of “Nan Curtis and Nicolaii Dornstauder,” 2009. From left: Nicolaii Dornstauder, Brush Lean-to, 2009; Nicolaii Dornstauder, Storage, 2009; Nicolaii Dornstauder, Bindle Stick, 2009.

A new Northwest imaginary is taking shape in the studios and backyards of Portland—rough-hewn, historical, and voraciously sullen. Nan Curtis and Nicolaii Dornstauder’s two-person show exemplifies the organic pungency, polymorphic perversity, and pensive reverie that characterize some of the best art and literature emerging from the region.

Curtis’s sculptures explore the remains and secrets of familial ties, motherhood, and feminist art history. In Soiled/Spoiled (all works 2009), a low plinth covered in white matelassé supports a cotton crib mattress. The bed’s otherwise clean minimalism is marked by wavy blotches of dried urine. These traces of liquid excretion and spillage reference feminist artistic methodologies and, just as important, the Northwest’s natural torpidity. On a nearby shelf sit the companion works Performative Portrait: Bound Yearbooks and Performative Portrait: Sealed Diaries—books and diaries tightly bound, respectively, by white rope and a welded vice grip. These pieces are not-for-sale stand-ins for a purchasable act of social engagement; collectors bring their own possessions to Curtis for binding.

In Brush Lean-to, Dornstauer creates a large backwoods dwelling that offers the viewer a wool-blanketed bed from which to inspect the interior’s nooks and crannies, occupied by a home-surgery kit, food, a reading lamp, firewood, and a found elk antler fitted with a leather shoulder strap. Dornstauder describes the antler as a natural fetish object “replacing a hunter’s gun.” The utility of his construction is subservient to its rich status as a space in harmony with the natural and the fantastic. Nearby, two smaller sculptures comprise found cardboard boxes (replete with shipping labels), a disconcerting collection of survival gear, and freshly harvested maple saplings. One of these pieces, Storage, is Dornstauder’s most disturbing work: a box held shut by a stack of used two-by-fours. From a rupture in the container's side, an animal pelt swells and recoils to the vibrating, stinging hum of an old motor.

— Stephanie Snyder

Arnold J. Kemp

PDX CONTEMPORARY ART
925 NW Flanders Street
November 2–November 28

Arnold J. Kemp, Recant, 2009, watercolor, acrylic paint, Flashe, mixed media on linen, 14 x 18".

It is tempting to view Arnold J. Kemp’s new work strictly in formal terms: modest collages with black paint, glitter, and googly doll eyes that form abstract patterns and pleasant landscape arrangements. Yet the paint used in each piece seems not simply an aesthetic choice and suggests further musings on the elasticity of Black representation, as well as the personal biography of Kemp, an African-American artist. In several small monochromes, such as Vampire (Titled), 2009, one can see evidence of bright primary colors that were applied prior to the surface coat, a black “skin” of paint. In other works, Kemp affixes groups of googly eyes together, which rummage through the picture and impede on dense patches of black glitter, the mixture both kitschy and mildly foreboding.

The title of the exhibition, “This Quiet Dust, Ladies and Gentlemen,” is an adaptation of an Emily Dickinson poem. Dickinson’s original line reads, “This Quiet Dust was Gentleman and Ladies,” implying quiet dust is the resting ground where men and women now lie. The slight alteration in the text wryly casts Kemp as a host, announcing the entrance of the dust to the audience.

In another series, “(Them) Changes and (Them) Trees,” 2009, photographs extend for the length of a wall. All the images depict a dense crowd of tangled, leafless tree branches at the top of the sheet and reaching beyond the pictures’ frames, as well as a muted sky in the backdrop. Each offers a different composition of the same branches, implying a shift in perspective as one strolls along. The subject might also be someone lying on the ground, gazing at the varied configurations on an overcast day. Or perhaps Kemp is trying to mimic the perspective of the actual ground, the quiet dust exerting its own point of view, after its proper introduction.

— Micah Malone

“Broadcast”

RONNA AND ERIC HOFFMAN GALLERY OF CONTEMPORARY ART
Lewis and Clark College, 0615 SW Palatine Hill Road,
September 8–December 13

Chris Burden, TV Hijack (detail), 1972, panel 1: three gelatin silver prints and one photocopy on mat board, 20 1/4 x 38"; panel 2: three gelatin silver prints and one chromogenic print on mat board, 24 1/4 x 45 5/8".

“Broadcast” brings together artists who have, according to the exhibition’s press release, “engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio.” Whether attempts to engage with mainstream media are hostile, indifferent, judgmental, passive, or proactive (all of which attitudes are documented in the exhibition), the strategies employed say much about the political potential of art but also about each artist's proclivity for confrontation.

For The Amarillo News Tapes, 1980, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter became “artists-in-residence” at station KVII-TV Channel 7. The Tapes show the anchors at Pro News, along with the artists, reading bizarre copy and inconceivable weather reports (all written by the artists), in the manner of charming small-town anchors. Most important, though, the artists' relationship with Channel 7 was jovial and respectful, yet they still managed to disrupt the presumed authority of the newscasters.

Chris Burden’s TV Hijack, 1972—documented here with video stills—occupies the opposite side of the spectrum. On February 9, 1972, Burden held TV interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans hostage with a knife to her throat during their interview. It remains a bit troubling to learn that Burden’s act—confrontational in form—was a response to his TV programming proposals having been repeatedly turned down. Was Burden simply acting out, behaving like a petty artist who had his suggestions rejected? Whether vengeful or critical, Burden’s strategies hardly seem viable for challenging mass media.

A different strategy, one that circumvents any obvious critique of power structures, opts for a live relationship with broadcast media. For Telemistica, 1999, Christian Jankowski repeatedly called phone-in psychic shows in Venice, asking “Will I be successful?” and “What will the public think about my work?” Perhaps Jankowski was sincere when he went looking for answers by way of kitsch broadcast. Rather than employing deconstructive strategies, Jankowski suggests that an artist’s role in mass media is best defined by performing within the parameters put forth by the broadcasters.

— Micah Malone

Io Palmer and Modou Dieng

THE ART GYM AT MARYLHURST UNIVERSITY
BP John Administration Building, 17600 Pacific Highway (Hwy 43),
November 8–December 13

View of “Io Palmer and Modou Dieng,” 2009. From left: Io Palmer, Artstar #4, 2009; Io Palmer, Artstar #3, 2009; Io Palmer, Janitorial Supplies #7, 2009; Io Palmer, Janitorial Supplies #4, 2009.

Io Palmer’s ongoing work Artstars, 2007–, comprises a team of players represented, in absentia, by a collection of white “uniforms” paired with common cleaning tools (mops, brushes, and brooms) that have been radically accessorized with artificial hair, bobby pins, and barrettes, transforming them into radically hirsute tools. The Artstars are Palmer’s Dream Team—heroic amalgamations of the artist’s friends, family members, and sports heroes––and brilliantly synthesize haute couture, feminist art history, professional sports, and domestic servitude.

In the artists’ hands, a plain maid’s smock is sexed up into a flowing linen gown that opens across the gallery floor in a corona of petal-like teardrops. Palmer references labor and women’s work while raising African-American identity politics to glamorous new heights of Jugendstil panache. In one instance, Palmer exhibits a cape made of leather that is covered in bobby pins and patterned after former Detroit Piston Allen Iverson’s cornrows. The piece reads like a chain-mail cuirass lying in wait for its commander.

In the Art Gym’s second gallery, Senegalese artist Modou Dieng exhibits a series of new mixed-media wall works inspired by African cloth, African-American musical history, and sexy Blaxploitation graphics. Dieng works the canvas with a rigorous ease, incorporating vinyl LPs into the work and slathering them with iridescent paint and collage elements. In hello mom, hello dad, 2009, Dieng overlays silk-screened images of Malcolm X with actual albums (and their covers) by Louis Armstrong, Aretha Franklin, and Isaac Hayes. The albums transmit a vibrant, kinetic energy and hark back to Marcel Duchamp’s Rotorelief devices. Yet Dieng takes on the history of the readymade and Pop art with a fresh attitude and finesse.

— Stephanie Snyder

Kirsten Hassenfeld

CADE TOMPKINS EDITIONS AND PROJECTS
198 Hope Street,
September 25–November 14

View of “Kirsten Hassenfeld,” 2009. From left: Blueware (Cloud), 2009; Blueware (Garden), 2009; Blueware (Bouquet), 2009.

Paper gains mass and volume in Kirsten Hassenfeld’s exhibition of recent sculpture: It shimmers and swirls in the low-lit gallery at David Winton Bell, drawing the viewer into a luminescent world of alabaster baubles and dangling airy chains. Part Aladdin’s cave and part dollhouse, Hassenfeld’s sumptuous installation Dans la Lune (In the Moon), 2007, is constructed entirely of paper that has been cut, folded, rolled, and glued to form suspended sculptures that call to mind enormous snowflakes magnified to reveal their crystalline structure or massive lanterns strung with rivers of pearls. Hassenfeld toys with scale in this elaborate installation—lunar not only in its weightlessness and its spectral glow but also in its call to Dionysus and the gods of all paper party favors—inflating gems to the size of boulders and making cameos for a giant.

Yet despite the nimbuslike aura summoned by both the work and its title (meaning, idiomatically, “to have one’s head in the clouds”), both beauty and lust circulate freely through this fantasy space of platinum light and paper diamonds. Hassenfeld’s enlarged bibelots speak to a grotesque desire for objects: as if a penumbra of insatiability––the dark side of the moon––lies just beyond the visible in these delicate, ethereal forms, whose ghostly silhouettes gesture to the elusiveness of possession.

Hassenfeld’s penchant for consummate craft similarly marks her recent freestanding sculptures in which paper beads, now painted in washy cobalt and aquamarine inks and petrified by acrylic, masquerade as glossy ceramics. Confounding our sense of materiality, these works evoke a craft as historically gendered as the embroidery and wedding-cake decorations of her lunar phase. Hassenfeld’s “blueware” continues in delicate ink-on-vellum drawings on view at Cade Tompkins Editions, which return this protean artist to her papery origins in drawing and printmaking.

This exhibition is also on view at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University until November 1.

— Leora Maltz-Leca

Ian Wallace

CATRIONA JEFFRIES
274 East 1st Avenue
September 18–October 24

Ian Wallace, L’Apres Midi I, II, III, 1977–79, nine hand-colored black-and-white photographs, 3 x 28'.

This selection of early work by Ian Wallace converges on the 1970s and serves as a primer on the artist’s forty-plus-year career. Comprising drawings, photographs, videos, and assorted printed matter, it offers evidence of Wallace’s contribution to the durational and narrative turns of Photoconceptualism through his considerable expansion and blending of Minimalist and Conceptual approaches. Several hand-colored black-and-white photographs foreshadow the artist’s later signature method of freely exchanging painting and photography. In particular, the large-scale L’ Après-Midi I, II, III, 1977–79, is a multipanel work with backgrounds painted in three monochromatic hues. The photographs (from left to right) depict standard film sequences of a landscape, a midground framing of a figure lying on the grass, and, finally, a close-up. The sense of narration in the work is captivating because it appears that the monochromatic paintings are using the photographs, rather than canvas, as support. Thus, the experience that Wallace creates is rooted in the blurring of distinct fields of research, including film history, photography, and modernist painting, within the broader emblem of the artist as a cultural producer at large. Indeed, Wallace has deepened his practice by forging an estimable career as a writer, historian, and teacher. However, what gives him such a considerable influence today is this particular ordering of a conceptual framework for another generation of artists.

— Jerry Allen

“Presuntos Culpables”

MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO MEXICO
Paseo de la Reforma y Gandhi, Bosque de Chapultepec
April 3–November 15

Antonio Vega Macotela, Exchange 63: shake hands with all the neighbors of “De La Mora,” and in exchange the inmate narrates to the artist a basketball match as concrete poetry, 2007, ink on paper, 17 x 11".

“Presuntos Culpables” (Alleged Culprits) is a group exhibition of artworks—photographs, installations, videos, objects, and drawings—that explore confinement in prison. Pericles Lavat’s series, titled “Aquí Estuvo Su Padre Putos” (Your Father Waz Here Motha’fuckers), 2002, consists of interior shots of an abandoned prison. By depicting remains of objects and decorations that were left inside cells, the pictures evince the identity and language codes of the spaces’ inhabitants. In Time Divisa, 2006–2009, Antonio Vega Macotela explores time as a container of actions through 365 exchanges with prisoners of Santa Marta Acatitla—one of the largest and most overpopulated jails in Mexico City. On a specific date and time in the outside world, the artist performed tasks for the inmates, whether by visiting their kids or friends or simply by traveling to specific places. In exchange, the prisoners were asked to document actions requested by the artist. Santiago Sierra’s installation, titled Room of 9 Square Meters, 2004, invites visitors to experience the feeling of confinement in a small space where they can remain from half an hour to four hours, depending on dice rolled by a guard. Overall, the pieces in this exhibition attempt to make visible the invisibility of reclusion, through gestures that interweave social and intimate aspects. Here, art works as a testimony to a territory too often hidden from public view.

— Claudia Arozqueta