Tiffany Holmes: Everything that happens in “darkSky,” the Chicago media artist’s installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is a direct result of viewer participation. Ideas are not grafted on, attributed or hidden. What the piece has to say is achieved through visual means alone. Anybody seeking a work that communicates should see it.
The piece presents 27 recycled lamps, painted white, without shades, in three rows on a long, low rectangular table. To the left and right are flat-screen video monitors that seem to swarm with a greater or lesser number of fireflies. Viewers control the number intensity and speed of the flies by turning on or off the lamps. The more lamps on, the fewer, fainter and slower the flies.
“darkSky” is a poetic visualization of consequences of electric consumption. There is no lesson or finger-wagging in it. There does not have to be. Each viewer is shown aesthetically the impact of his or her environmental behavior. An action taken with one kind of light is measured for us through another.
Part of the reason it’s so effective is it’s so clear. Another part is because it steers clear of anything apocalyptic. It does not warn. It shows. And it shows us how we’re a part of it.
***1/2 At 220 E. Chicago Ave., through April 26. 312-280-2660.
Jasmine Justice: The first solo exhibition in Chicago — at 65GRAND — for this New York painter has nine abstract canvases that toy with the language of early modern abstraction as a way of (in the artist’s words) “playing dress-up in Grandfather’s clothing.”
As is often the case with young painters, Justice is suspicious of a signature style and tries to avoid one by embracing (among other things) hard-edge geometry; mottled, thinly brushed passages and metallic paint. Nevertheless, there are the constants of brilliant color and an often febrile line that jolts her compositions, giving some a dynamism beyond mischievousness.
The best of this animates “Blue Screen,” a square with a centrifugal all-over pattern that is at the same time seriously explosive and frisky as a Tex Avery cartoon. Elsewhere, Justice is unafraid to be “decorative,” in passages evoking the dense patternmaking of late 19th Century French painters or the landscapes-in-transformation of an abstract pioneer such as Frantisek Kupka. How much is by intent doesn’t matter. By whatever means she is clearly plugged into the history of the last century of painting, making it work to fresh, impish advantage.
*** At 1378 W. Grand Ave., through April 25. 312-719-4325.
Jack Tworkov: In 1949, a year before Willem de Kooning embarked on his famous series of “Woman” paintings, Tworkov had a show of very different works on the same subject. Not long after, the figure dropped out of Tworkov’s paintings, and works from the show went undercover. Now, a number of the pictures make up another exhibition devoted to Tworkov’s “Women,” at the Valerie Carberry Gallery.
The works are, by and large, portraits. Sometimes the subjects are known. At other times, the sitters are models. Tworkov confronts most of them directly, without props, in his cluttered studio.
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Carberry has several preliminary drawings alongside the paintings. In both, transcription is important, though Tworkov has worked the sheets with an eraser, giving graphite some of the thrust of the oils. And, conversely, drawing proves as central to the finished pieces as the slashing strokes of pigment. The women never become archetypes, though their frontal, open-legged pose is bold and the way the artist occasionally renders their pelvic area bolder.
*** At 875 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 2510, through May 23. 312-397-9990.
Marc Swanson: Two strains animate the first Chicago exhibition of discrete works — at the Richard Gray Gallery — for the Brooklyn-based artist who made a reputation with installations. One involves an engagement with the Constructivist tradition in abstract art, the other, issues of identity put forth through kitsch.
The Constructivist impulse is strongest in the artist’s wood pieces, boxes as well as crisscrossing bars with lights. But the purity of the tradition also is challenged by a multipart wall piece of enamel and glitter as well as lots of free-hanging or stretched-taut chains. Thus does Swanson make even the most non-referential of modern traditions autobiographical.
The assumed hunter of elk and ram comes together with rhinestones and glitter, which presumably are meant to signal the artist’s homosexuality. One of his T-shirts turned into a virtual animal hide and faintly inscribed with a target yields a poignant effect, not just a formal arrangement. Antlers covered with glimmering crystals and stood on end give a weak effect, barely a formal arrangement.
The most successful pieces tend to showboat the least: a white wasp’s nest of glass, a box with antlers suspended like the spiky forms in a Surrealist construction.
**1/2 At 875 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 2503, through May 23. 312-642-8877.
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