It’s rare that an economic downturn has an 'upside' but without the downturn Jan Tichy’s show “Installations” for Richard Gray Gallery would not have been possible. Mr. Tichy’s video installations are literally embedded in the vacant offices and abandoned conference rooms of an entire floor in the Hancock Building.

Stepping off of an elevator into an empty and dimly lit level of corporate offices is already an evocative enough experience on its own and is heightened by what Mr. Tichy’s videos do with the dark.  Frequently the only light source available, Mr. Tichy’s projected works are predominantly black and white videos that illuminate accompanying topographical paper forms on the walls or the floors. The sculpted paper and the videos interact: casting shadows, spotlighting, filling up or revealing separate parts.

Jan Tichy. Installation No. 4 (Towers). Image courtesy of the artist and Richard Gray Gallery.

Installation No. 8 (Hancock) washes light onto and off of a crooked architectural nook created by the building itself. Shown above, the most evocative piece, Installation No. 4 (Towers) sits alone in a large room. Two paper radar towers were lit from above by a projection that slowly ebbed and flowed between a cold crisp brightness and a deep, twilight darkness. The brightness cast stark shadows from the towers and the curvature of the radar dome splits the projected pixels apart. The transition between the two states begins as a sliver of light  grows progressively longer and wider to bathe the floor in a bright white rectangle.

Some other works sit awkwardly in the mix, like Recess, a long shot of a park playground during the day, seemingly unrelated to the light referenced in the rest of the work. Even Bats, a dueling pair of slide projectors that show photos of urban bats in mid-flight, relate back to Mr. Tichy’s more formal installations.  Their eyes glow in the night sky and the camera’s flash shows their bone structure through their translucent wings. Caught like naked specters of the night mistakenly revealed, the bats symbolize the “otherness” of the dark that Mr. Tichy plays with elsewhere.

The natural impetus driving his work with light is clearly seen in a series called Pictures. Displayed on tiny LCD screens about the size of a family photo the vignettes feature banal nighttime arrangements of light. A streetlamp reflecting in a puddle of water, lit windows in a building across the street or a searchlight roaming the sky are like observational drawings done in video. Despite being more like studies for larger works they still they hold a quiet understated beauty in themselves.

Mr. Tichy has found in the play of material and light, representation and digital information, the intoxicating charm of a darkened cinema and the epiphany-like glow of the projector-- a remarkable feat for a medium that is as technological as video.

--Dan Gunn

In Alex Olson’s and Lisa Williamson’s first show at Shane Campbell Gallery they find in each other an interesting analog. Alex Olson’s paintings reference different forms of written text like announcements, editorials, or shorthand writing. Their pictorial flatness emphasizes their texture over an optic space and nods to the paintings’ source material. However, these references appear to be really just a way to organize shapes on a two-dimensional surface, to give it a reason to be one way and not another.

Ms. Olson’s works register two maybe three layers of paint at most. A majority of the paintings are built upon a textured patchwork of opposing white brush marks. By dragging a matte black paint atop the glossy white in strokes crossing the surface Ms. Olson further emphasizes a texture not unlike making a rubbing with charcoal.

This is seen in the painting Articulation where the dark matte black seems to fall from v-shaped marks, as if it were charcoal dust accumulating on the raised brushstrokes below. Ms. Olson also uses this matte black stroke to ring several of his canvases in a thin dark strip. The effect of this faux-shadow is to further flatten his canvases making them appear to be wafer thin and almost floating off of the wall.

Installation view of Alex Olson and Lisa Williamson at Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago.  Image courtesy the gallery.

Similarly Lisa Williamson’s framed paper pieces also name recognizable sources, like her paper relief The Unswept Floor is Here Shown at an Angle or Faulty Window with an Awkward Shade. In Faulty Window, a broken rectangular white shape floats in a black surround above accordion folds in the paper. Another paper work like This Mouth is simply a painted maroon sheet of paper lightly folded at the bottom. Beneath the fold a brilliant red color peeks out. With the title in mind the work does resemble a wide-open mouth. With Ms. Williamson’s references it’s hard to tell which comes first. Either the work proceeds from an extended formal investigation of a source or the title represents an attribution of a recognizable form onto an otherwise abstract work.

Ms. Williamson’s series Low and Horizontal pushes this tension into a comment on design. In three separate floor pieces cut canvas lays atop on large veneered panels of wood. The polished but slightly cheap looking walnut stained panels are each ringed by fashionably tinted versions of the primary colors in what must be a superficial Bauhaus reference. Together, the elements of the work form references given via titles: Low and Horizontal, Floor Plan, Low and Horizontal, Roll and Low and Horizontal, Bed.

Ms. Olson’s and Ms. Williamson’s practices land in a familiar territory between “abstraction” and “representation”, but this designation fails to be descriptive or useful. Instead the work begins to talk about a priori vs. tacit knowledge.  This is the difference between planning something out or making it up as you go along and responding to what you learn. These two modes of thought and action cannot be neatly separated and it is the balance between the designed and “found out” in these works that makes them difficult to quantify and thus inviting to look at.

--Dan Gunn

This coming Sunday, November 22nd from 5 to 7 pm, InCUBATE will hold their final Sunday Soup at their space around the corner from the Congress Theatre at 2129 Rockwell.  For a modest donation of $10, participants get a home-cooked meal and the collected funds are granted to an artist voted on by those in attendance. The members of InCUBATE are collectively pursuing their careers and educations, many of them in other cities and countries and the space has been rendered somewhat unnecessary.

For this last Sunday Soup, the member’s of InCUBATE and their Sunday Soup Coordinator will take over the soup creation from the guest artists who usually prepare the soup and cook themselves. It promises to be a nostalgic affair with accounts of past soups, and info on other soups happening around the country and abroad. As InCUBATE’s ideas have spread, other groups have also adopted the “food-based micro-granting” model in locations as diverse as New York City, Portland, Newcastle and Mexico City. The importance of this ground-up, so simple it’s almost stupid, re-thinking of art’s funding models and administrative priorities is a reflection of how deeply and systemically the model is and has been flawed.

Funding for non-profit art is still mostly publicly provided, though at anemic levels, and corporate and foundation funding have adopted investment models that stress strict guidelines, targets, demographic studies and identifiable goals. This corporate structure drowns smaller ventures in increased layers of bureaucracy and stifles funding.  The Sunday Soup’s brilliance is not only it’s good cuisine, or it’s actual monetary collections (usually between 200–500 dollars a meal) though these are certainly intrinsic parts. Rather it is the re-centering of the ideological locus of arts funding away from contentious public funding or capitalist models toward a direct re-involvement in a real community.

This is not the “community,” as it is sometimes used as an empty bureaucratic buzzword signaling some non-specific benefit to an imagined public. No, this community is made up of the real individuals who attend the soup function, give their money of their own accord, and vote on the grant proposals. The structure of the Sunday Soup ensures that its participants cannot be lumped into a generic mass, but instead maintains their agency and at the same time promotes conversation and the free exchange of ideas.

--Dan Gunn