rivabro's Site

If you walked into the Kunsthalle New gallery in Pilsen at around 8pm last Saturday, the first thing you would have noticed was a group of people standing and staring at the ceiling. Above them, what looked like a pile of rags jumped and rustled, like a cat wandering under a pile of clothes. It was artist Chris Collins? contribution to the thirty-some projections at Chicago?s BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), a one-night exhibition by Chicago-based internet artists.

BYOB is the brainchild of Rafaël Rozendaal, a Berlin artist who started the event as a way to bring net artists together in a seamlessly adaptable exhibition. Because the only stipulations are that artists must attend and they must bring their own projectors (they?re known as beamers in Europe), BYOBs were meant to be exported far and wide. Since its first incarnation in Berlin in July 2010, there have been more than ten BYOBs in cities across the globe. Nicholas O?Brien and Brian Khek, both SAIC-affiliated artists who do internet and computer-based art, organized the Chicago version. ?It?s really about coming together and saying, yes, this is kind of one community, even if it?s not in one geographical location,? O?Brien says. ?Also, being able to share with others in the physical space and not having to be limited by the typical channels of communication on the internet. Like, you don?t have to have a certain number of ?likes? to engage with the space, which can really dictate the online traffic of certain projects.?

For a while on Saturday, it looked like BYOB was in jeopardy. Its original space, Bridgeport?s Archer Ballroom, bailed at the last minute. Luckily, Bea Fremderman, who participated in the show and runs Kunsthalle, stepped in. Still, once everyone showed up and the projectors were humming, power was a constant struggle. Every fifteen minutes or so, the small space would go dark. Circuits were overloaded by all the projectors. That was something O?Brien and Khek had worried about, and O?Brien spent a good half hour dashing from one computer to another, plugging and unplugging, unrolling extension cords. Finally, he decided that the artists had to show their work in twenty-minute shifts. That did the trick.

Daniel Baird, a sculptor at UIC, seemed lost in thought, standing to one side as others mingled and drank beer in the shifting light of the projectors. His piece was projected on the ceiling above the gallery door, a green square with what looked like a transparent box in the center. ?I used modeling software to create a glass model of NASA?s Vehicle Assembly Building in Cape Canaveral,? he explains. But why is it surrounded by a green, uninhabited landscape? ?It?s like a future ruin. It?s like what would happen if people discovered it in a thousand years. I?m interested in space travel, and also the idea of a future ruin?I mean, a cassette player, for example, isn?t a ruin like the Parthenon, but it sort of is, because we?re so far ahead of it.?

Collins was at his laptop, demonstrating how to toss the bundle of rags on the ceiling by running his cursor over the image on his screen. He had created this piece by stitching together images from all the other projections using a game engine and giving them the physical properties of cloth?a sort of cheeky nod to communal quilt. ?It?s kind of a way to physically embody the event,? he says, adding, ?Most of these people here I only know on Facebook, so it?s weird to finally meet them.? (Benjamin Rossi)

Joe Grimm, "Blink"

RECOMMENDED

Community is often formed out of a sense of loss, and this is often the loss of a community. In a piece on artist Bruce Nauman, acclaimed Chicago critic Kathryn Hixson wrote, ?If the social contract that staves off mutual murder is our most controllable defense against death, and if death is the most feared fact of our lives, then Bruce Nauman?s work is about the fear of death.? We can see one facet of this social anxiety in the twinkling lights of Jan Tichy?s creepy ?Project Cabrini Green,? on display at the MCA. ?Public space? nostalgia may focus on an era, like that of the functional social safety net, but the show ?No Joke? at LVL3 Gallery focuses on a person: Kathryn Hixson herself, who passed away in November.

The LVL3 exhibition features students who worked with Hixson at SAIC, but the overall feeling is exuberant rather than elegiac, if in a deadpan tone reminiscent of Nauman. Twin brothers Alan Fleming and Michael Fleming are seen bouncing on a mini-trampoline, Michael in Chicago and Alan in Brooklyn, with one monitor turned upside down. A mini-trampoline is placed on the ground to assist visitors in getting a better look at the monitors, which sit on a high shelf. Joe Grimm?s piece consists of three synchronized film projectors pointed into a corner and shining a flickering Albers-esque composition of overlapping blank white rectangles, which, while I was there, occasioned some pretty trippy shadow puppetry. Grimm talked to me about Hixson?s enthusiasm to engage with her students, expressed in the book club Hixson had formed with her graduate advisees. He said they intend to keep the book club going; a sense of Hixson?s scholarly and literary interests will be on display this coming Sunday as the gallery hosts a reading event in Hixson?s honor. (Bert Stabler)

Through April 30 at LVL3, 1542 North Milwaukee, third floor.

When I first joined Facebook (all the way back in 2008? Really?) I didn?t exactly have a plan, other than to steer clear of Bejeweled, Farmville, and all the other productivity snares. Also, being on Facebook was a good way to avoid committing to Twitter. However, we couldn?t resist joining the conversation any longer because we?ve finally figured out how that channel fits in with the blog, feed, FB page, etc. etc.

I?ll be announcing in a day or two how 10,000 Birds will be taking advantage of Twitter?s unparalleled immediacy as early as next week. For now, if you?re interested in following us, find us at where else but 10000birds. And if you?ve got any advice, we?re all ears!

By Jason Foumberg

When we?re tourists we often find ourselves standing on graves or admiring tombs of the illustrious dead. Several years ago, after a traipse through some European cemeteries and catacombs, I became (morbidly) obsessed with the Capuchin ossuary in Rome, a series of underground chapels decorated with the bones of monks in the seventeenth century. Where a tomb designed by Bernini or Michelangelo hides the deceased behind decadently carved marble, the Capuchin monks used actual bones for their headstones, creating decorative patterns in the style of Baroque stucco bas-relief or fresco?swirling aureoles and floral motifs?while other skeletons are collaged into tableaux, such as a clock made from phalanges and flying cherubim composed of skulls and winged shoulder blades.

I wanted to learn why the Capuchins built their shrine to death but, oddly, I could not find any full historical accounts about this strange place. I realized that the thousands of tourists who visit the chapels each year are not informed about why this place exists or how it came to be; we are simply left to ogle the lugubrious sculptures and ponder our own mortality. Tourists to the bone chapel can purchase postcards of the crypts so that the visceral images of bodily decomposition may be contemplated in private or distributed around the world like a decree: death trumps art.

Today, bone sculptures on a grand scale might inflame the pious rather than exalt them, and our contemporary monuments to tragedy tend toward the minimal and metaphoric: Peter Eisenman?s Memorial to the Murdered Jew of Europe is a field of unadorned blocks, and Maya Lin?s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a gash of monochrome marble.

Balint Zsako, ?Monument?

Two currently exhibited sculptures in Chicago invoke the pleasurable old-timey macabre of the Capuchin bone chapel. Balint Zsako?s ?Monument? is an approximately nine-foot tall collage of skeletons in his exhibition at the Loyola University Museum of Art, and Annie Heckman?s ?You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time,? a room-sized installation of stacked drawings of skeletons, is currently configured in the ?Physio|tasma|gorical? group exhibition at the Evanston Art Center. Although both sculptures are composed solely of paper, they seek to draw from the power of the original Capuchin bone memorial?a little bit absurd, a lot scary. Heckman?s sculpture is coated with glow-in-the-dark paint, which elicits more of an aura of fun than terror. Zsako?s collage has a wonderfully realistic quality, as the bones are sourced from an early nineteenth-century anatomy book. The monument is flanked by cutouts of a man and woman, and because they are tiny in comparison to the bone fragments, they unwittingly make the pile of bones unrelatable to viewers. Will tiny folk tend our bones in the afterlife?

Annie Heckman, "You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time"

Of course, being composed of paper and not bone, Heckman and Zsako?s sculptures do not inspire the horror and revulsion of a real skull removed from its happy home (atop our shoulders, covered in lively flesh), of the Burr Oak/Gacy/Hitler/Capuchin variety. I think the artists are aware of their material limitations, and instead of shock they smartly approach allegory. Heckman?s sculpture is titled ?You thought that you were alone but I caught your bullet just in time,? which, although it seems to specify a narrative, alludes to salvation. Someone is saved from a bullet. The religious layer is not explicit, but a larger-than-life saving grace lurks just beneath the surface. Still, the whole sculpture is a house-of-cards made of ?bones,? a diversion from the macabre that, like the Capuchin bone chapel, circles art with death, and ultimately sits you back down with death. The moral layer of Zsako?s bone tower is also similar to the Capuchins? bone art allegory: the body may find its way out of the dirt but it will stay on the earth.

Tony Tasset, "Capuchine Chandelier"

Heckman?s glow-in-the-dark bones remind me of Tony Tasset?s ?Capuchine [sic] Chandelier? from 2006, a simulacrum of a chandelier that might appear in the Capuchin crypt, although Tasset?s plastic lamp is fitted with faux-flame electric bulbs for the modern home. In 1773 the Marquis de Sade visited the Capuchin bone chapel and advised in his travelogue that visitors should not visit during the day, for the daylight diminishes the horror; one should visit at night and use candlelight. Even back then the gothic was a horribly campy pleasure.

Balint Zsako shows at the Loyola University Museum of Art, 820 North Michigan, through May 1. Annie Heckman shows at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, through April 17.

RECOMMENDED

Claire Sherman?s decorative landscapes offer the explosive joy of youth, which is probably why, five years into her career, she has had solo shows in New York, London and Amsterdam, as well as this, her second show at Kavi Gupta in Chicago. The gallery sales pitch suggests that she is questioning the ?historical distinction between abstraction and representation,? as it can be questioned with paintings going back to the Lascaux caves. Other critics have connected her work to the Romantic era and Kant?s notion of the sublime, while it might also be noted that her kind of brush-driven landscape was first developed in Han Dynasty China.

Antiquated as it may be, her work feels as fresh as tomorrow because she?s not looking back. Like Faulkner?s characters in ?Wild Palms,? the title she has borrowed for this exhibition, Sherman is exploring her own destiny which, this time around, includes some chthonic visits into enormous caves and a few almost figurative monumental still-lifes.

Though traditional in many ways, the one tradition that?s been avoided is European landscape. There are few shadows, and no clouds or natural light. Her paintings are not windows looking out at the natural world. They are the natural world crashing in and dominating a wall. Rather than following the Impressionist way of breaking down the components of light, Sherman breaks down areas of color into jagged, rectangular patches, the way that computer graphics do. Rather than presenting a specific view, each image feels more like an ideogram.

With its architectural scale, use of brushwork and close-up focus on nature, her work resembles those historic Japanese screens that were shown at the Art Institute two years ago, except that the broken angularity creates an effect that is triumphantly rambunctious rather than contemplatively peaceful. Claire Sherman?s natural world is bustling with the unpredictable energy of scruffy trees that grow through the pavement of abandoned parking lots, making a room full of her work as overwhelming as a landslide. If art galleries were sports arenas, we?d all have to stand up and cheer. (Chris Miller)

Through April 19 at Kavi Gupta Gallery, 835 West Washington