In BUZZ SPECTOR’s latest show, the artist returns to his process of incorporating torn paper. But instead of finding existing documents to alter and transform, the artworks Spector changes he now creates himself. “I can better control the scale this way, and philosophically I own the material rather than damage other people’s existing works,” Spector explains. His current method involves selecting an image, photographing it with a large-format camera, making four-color separations, binding them in a large press run of between 200 and 500 sheets and tearing them so that the edges have a feathered rough look. The artworks displayed range from recognizable black-and-white images of people to mutely colored abstract designs that resemble lyrical prints or paintings. At the Zolla/Leiberman Gallery, 230 W. Huron St., through April 19.
A show titled “Pink,” curated by Lisa Wainwright, Associate Professor of Art History at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, pokes fun at the once common practice of identifying newborn baby girls with pink tags around their wrists, in contrast to tagging boys with blue. Out of the hospital, baby girls often were dressed in pink and resided in pink rooms. Once older, they used pink makeup. Wainwright shows through the 15 artists’ pink-infused works that this sweet color can also be provocative, glamorous, sexy, sophisticated and even angry. Wainwright selected some female artists whom she knew used pink and others whose work interested her. She asked the second group to work with pink as a color or concept.
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The media they selected — paint, fur, feathers, wood, ceramics — are as varied and seductive as the connotations and surfaces they produce. Lorraine Peltz’s painted cherries are juicy and domestic; Heather Simmons’ pink-feathered bird in a cage is as trapped as Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” though others may simply read into it a woman’s yearning for a fur coat; and Barbara DeGenevieve’s audiovisual piece has a pair of red lips surrounded by fake fur, offering a sexually explicit message that makes the woman speaking not seem “feminine” or classy at all. At the Jean Albano Gallery, 215 W. Superior St., through April 26.
Though Martin Mull may be best known as a comedian and as the actor who plays Leon Carp on “Roseanne,” he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the Rhode Island School of Design and has exhibited widely. Mull’s oil paintings, watercolors, pencil, chalk and collages are meant to be good compositions, with their soft lyrical colors and some recognizable forms, rather than convey a deep message, the artist explained by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “Hopefully, my art has depth,” he says, “but I don’t want to impose my transitory feelings on others.” His small delicate watercolors, some with a charming unfinished quality, succeed better than his large paintings, with their isolated fragments of figures and shapes. At the Carl Hammer Gallery 200 W. Superior St., through April 19.