Tidy, picturesquely gritty Bridgeport resembles the Wicker Park of 20 years ago: rich in architectural history, it has a large, stable working-class population and good access to public transit. Home to the White Sox, the Chicago Police Department, and the Daley regime, it’s also become the latest destination of local “independent” culture with the advent of Select Media Festival 4, a jam-packed month of exhibits and events spearheaded by Wicker Park interventionist/impresario Ed Marszewski, the man behind Buddy, Lumpen, and the Version media festival. In true Buddy fashion, a key component is a busy schedule of one-time-only experimental/activist party-performances. But there’s also a large, flashy flagship exhibition of 34 artists, “The New Chicagoans,” at Iron Studios. As claimed, the show provides an overview of many local “emerging and established practitioners,” if not a terribly “wide range of approaches to contemporary art making”–from a conceptual standpoint at least.
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One of the strongest areas is the sculpture. Christine Tarkowski’s beautiful untitled mound of litter is immersed in murky layers of fiberglass, cropped to look like it’s oozing from the wall. Engulfing this effluvia blurs it and gives it a dreamy quality. Nick Black’s motorized contraption, which inflates and deflates a mouth-shaped balloon, is modest but engaging. Most amusing is Dolan Geiman’s Art-o-Matic, a towering painted-wood monument to the all-too-predictable tropes of outsider art: hand-lettered Bible verses, anthropomorphic found objects, strange hybrid animals. The photography in “The New Chicagoans” is also good, sometimes used in distinctive ways. Greg Stimac’s Recoil is a thought-provoking quartet of framed photos of gun enthusiasts in outdoor settings training their weapons on the viewer. 3X, by Melinda Fries and Andrew Wilson, is a low-key but lyrical installation of small photos of romantically bleak Chicago vistas (many involving angry dogs) as well as video segments and ambient sounds collected on their melancholy, overcast treks.
Though not officially part of the festival, there’s also a show at the Bridgeport Museum of Modern Art–aka artist Chris Uphues’s apartment–called “BMOMA #3.” The sculpture here is memorable too. Hanging over Uphues’s electric organ is Juan Angel Chavez’s lyrical wall “lamp,” a subtly glowing yellow traffic light surrounded by a sunburst and clouds on sticks. Cat Chow’s abstraction sits on the coffee table like an uncanny sea creature, while the refrigerator is home to Erik Wenzel’s plasticine doggy. There’s also photography, painting, video, and drawing, including a wide selection of Nudd’s charming icky visions.
Where: Iron Studios, 3636 S. Iron
Where: 3213 S. Lituanica
