These are some of the gallery shows that I plan on seeing while I’m in Chicago (all have openings this Friday from 6-9pm)…

Don Doe (main space) and D’nell Larson (project space) @ Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery. Don Doe makes pirate girl paintings so, really, you can’t go wrong with that. They’re sexy, curvy, without the skurvy. D’nell Larson who lives in Los Angeles and, oddly enough, I think we’re on the same flight back to LA, is breaking beyond her usual sculpture and installation to present a video piece. Cannot wait!

In her new video Close Your Eyes and Think of Me, Larson continues to explore the themes of love, longing and the possibility of emotional exchange. For the piece, Larson selected a series of songs with great personal significance and asked her parents to perform them. Larson then recorded the
performances in her family’s basement, where she had grown up hearing her parents rehearse love songs for their regular wedding gigs. The unembellished presentation – a single-camera shot, looping without titles or credits, and featuring the musicians dressed in everyday clothing – heightens our focus on the emotional content of the songs and their unique adaptation by the artist’s parents. These songs, each about love, longing and loss, in many ways counter the traditional upbeat soundtrack of wedding entertainment, but ultimately speak to the real experience of emotional entanglement.

Click continue reading for the others…

Gabert Farrar – half colors of quarter-things @ monique meloche gallery. I love Monique and this will be the first time I’ve been to one of her openings in a long time:

half colors of quarter-things is a line from the Wallace Stevens poem “The Motive for Metaphor” – a poem about how language can never adequately describe experiences and how in order to describe events we must make metaphors, saying this experience was like something else…. and how the act of making metaphors, though creative, is a weakening, a step removed from the actual indescribable experience. …This failure to communicate is brought to the forefront in Farrar’s new series of large-scale, abstract paintings. Using text as a point of departure – quotes from poetry and theoretical texts scattered about the artist’s studio – Farrar works in a process-oriented manner, with each subsequent step in the painting used to negate the previous one. With the ultimate destruction of the text through abstraction, the paintings are unburdened by any attempt to “address” anything and exist on their own terms. The physical nature of this work directly references his past work abstracting the desolate urban landscape.

Sabrina Raaf – rift -> ad-rift @ Wendy Cooper Gallery

Chicago-based Raaf will exhibit recent photographs, as well as mechanical and robotic installations. These works evoke a powerful sense of displacement derived from Raaf’s interest in anti-gravitational motion and experimentation with audience perception of real time and space/not real time and space.