CHICAGO HAS LOADS of galleries, and museums (see listings in Section 2), and fall is a great time to explore them because of all the openings.
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Other places on the second floor include Bodybuilder & Sportsman (312-492-7261), Chicago’s blue-chip independent space. Started by Tony Wight nearly a decade ago, Bodybuilder showcases what I call Chicago’s “carny” style—art that’s often scuffed, gloopy, and crowded with detail. It may evoke old-timey design, commercial illustration, outsider art, puppets, or circuses. It’s big on figure and landscape painting and on obsessive wood or cardboard models, and the work often combines painstaking technique with slapdash bravura. If it’s truly Chicago, it includes Old Style cans. Bodybuilder is showing Scott Fife’s carefully crafted cardboard celebrity busts. Also on this floor, Wendy Cooper (312-455-1195) has a great paganoid show in the rainbow vein: gothic modernist wall art and videos by Belgian artists Aline Bouvy and John Gillis. On the third floor Bucket Rider (312-421-6993) shows bright, snazzy stuff in the flat, flashy west-coast “lowrider” style. This art might be drawings or paintings accompanied by texts on plywood or found objects, or it might be inflated Day-Glo sculptures inspired by cartoons, graffiti, or skater graphics. (Entrepreneurial lowrider artists create customized consumer items: T-shirts, skateboards, sneakers, etc.) The current exhibits are more rainbow, however, featuring primitivist fauve-ish paintings by Andrew Guenther and a group show that includes work by Plastic Crimewave, who heads local noise act Plastic Crimewave Sound, and a collaboration between Matteah Baim and flamboyant freak-folk icon Devendra Banhart.
Moving west you’ll find the independent spaces that make up the West Town Gallery Network. It holds a gallery hop Saturday, September 23, from noon to 6 PM featuring a couple of outdoor performances: Jeanne Dunning’s “tomato fight” at 2 PM at Gallery 400 (400 S. Peoria) and Stan Shellabarger’s autumn equinox walking exercise in the northwest corner of Humboldt Park. At Duchess, 1043 W. Grand (312-933-5317), technology/fashion artist Huong Ngo is showing interactive costumes, backdrops, and props. Lisa Boyle (now at 1821 W. Hubbard, 773-655-5457) had a great carny exhibit this summer of hard-edged paintings and virtuoso constructions, best of which was Brian Getnick’s ingenious electrified cardboard- and-wood Hog Head Theater. The current exhibit features Andrea Myers and Jeffrey Beebe. Conceptualist powerhouse John Neff is at Western Exhibitions (also 1821 W. Hubbard, 312-307-4685), showing his plans for an invention “that enables users to replicate and rephotograph poses observed in gay male pornographic digital images using live models.” Corbett vs. Dempsey (1120 N. Ashland, 773-278-1664) has an intriguing selection of midcentury Chicago art.
