Uh-Oh It’s Magic: The Terrors and Pleasures of Ben Russell at threewalls

The green-screen toned gallery that made everyone do a double take upon entering was the perfect touch to Ben Russell’s otherworldly opening of Uh-Oh It’s Magic at threewalls. Even the floor was painted green and as each visitor arrived, there was a sudden pause followed by mild but palpable awe. A few people even craned their heads back into the hallway to make sure they were in the right place. They were.

On each green wall hangs a blue frame with a small black and white photograph swallowed by enormous white matting. In the center of the room sits a record player garbling rhythmic noise from a custom-made 45” in which Russell looped a sample of the first ten seconds of The Cars’ song Magic, the show’s namesake. Russell also has a history with the Providence, RI noise music scene where he collaborated with the band Lightning Bolt for his video, Black and White Trypps Number Three. The photos are mid-air shots of wuxia wire-fu aerialists. Russell uses photography, film, and sound to adjust our reality. The way in which cinema is able to utilize green screens to simulate the impossible or to transport people to other surroundings, these tiny photographs take a take a page from that book. They seem unreal yet documentary at the same time. Instead of experiencing the dread of capturing the moment before the subject dives head first into the floorboards, the photos instead secure the subject’s everlasting and absurd ability to dangle or even levitate.

Levitation is a frequent theme in Russell’s self-described “psychedelic ethnography.” Behind a curtain, in the second room, is Incantation for Eternity (After Abbie Hoffman). Abbie Hoffman was a famous political activist who attempted to levitate the Pentagon in 1967 in order to end the Vietnam War. In the dark room, four projectors whir on the ground, pointed outward in 4 directions. They each hold spools of black film with a single white frame. In the high corners of the room are small prisms that sparkle each time the white frame passes over the lens. The anticipation of that enchanting moment leaves one standing, waiting for a long time, listening to the hum of the projectors and watching the prisms. Wait long enough and all 4 projectors will flash their white frames in sync, releasing a split-second rainbow from the prisms.

Having thoroughly covered the “magic” portion, the “uh-oh” from the show’s title also plays a significant role. Coupled with the mystical dazzling is a funny feeling of trepidation in Russell’s work. Like the LSD trip documented in Russell’s film Trypps #7 (Badlands), shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s UBS 12×12 space last September, exploring mystical universes is tinged with a sense of fear. There is an element of supernatural danger to traveling too far from reality. Magic can be fantasy but it can also be casting spells, voodoo, séances, or a bad trip.

This uneasiness creeps in when entering the third and final room. Each room has taken the viewer another level deeper, farther from their reality. The third room is dark and projects a 16mm loop titled Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation: Knossos/Drekkingarhylur depicting a figure walking on a wall, arms outstretched, sun glinting over the lens. The two-sided title is both exciting and foreboding and refers to two separate locations in which traveling too far from reality resulted in death. In Drekkingarhylur, women that were accused of witchcraft were murdered in this “drowning pool” and Knossos was the earthly site of Icarus’ crash from the heavens. The third room is a balance between the excitement of making it to the end and the fear we won’t find our way back.

Referring almost always to his artistic ventures as “psychedelic ethnography,” the global investigations are noticeable. Location is imperative to the experience of Russell’s mythologies. This is why the multiple rooms work so well. The viewer isn’t allowed to deviate from the plan, the rooms are only entered in one order and each doorway is another risk we are willing to take in order to experience what we hope will be magic.

-Whitney Stoepel, appeared in F Newsmagazine, April 2011

Doubleness at Tony Wight

Image Courtesy of Tony Wight Gallery

We have always been fascinated by the conundrum of duplicity. There are countless representations–from Bizarro Superman to Evil Homer Simpson–of the “evil twin.” And the image of the little girls from The Shining or Diane Arbus’ uncomfortable photograph, Identical Twins exhibit our discomfort with duplication. Is it because we feel like one is a counterfeit? A copycat? Does is challenge our notions of originality? These are questions to be pondered while viewing Arturo Herrera and David Schutter at Tony Wight Gallery.

Public Notice 3 at The Art Institute

“We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu monk and early champion of inter-faith dialogue, spoke those words in a speech given in Chicago at the Parliament of the World’s Religions on September 11, 1893 — a little over a century before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. That date may be coincidental, but it serves as a poignant reminder of the continued need for that tolerance today, nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center; and it’s certainly not a coincidence that Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat chose to unveil his site-specific installation, “Public Notice 3,” at The Art Institute on September 11, 2010.

Peter Schjeldahl at GSU

On Friday, when more than 2 million Chicagoans flocked in exodus to the Loop for the Blackhawks celebratory parade, a few made like salmon and fought their way upstream to University Park. An hour outside the city, University Park is home to Governor’s State University (GSU) where The New Yorker’s chief art critic Peter Schjeldahl was accepting an honorary degree and presenting a guest lecture. Schjeldahl is the kind of writer every aspiring (and perhaps accomplished) art critic wants to be. His writing is elegant, his tongue is sharp, and he’s never afraid to use polarizing declarations like “bad” and “world’s greatest” even when commenting on GSU’s cherished Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park.

Fashion Chicago Shows Off Hometown Talents

StyleChicago.com hosted Fashion Chicago: Exclusive Shopping Event yesterday afternoon in the trendy River North neighborhood. Women in their 20s and 30s, dressed in their warm weather best, formed a long line to get into the makeshift boutique on Huron St. Within the small, not to mention sweltering, space were tables and racks that displayed jewelry and clothing by Chicago designers. Smart Water, Fuze, wine and cocktails were handy for cooling down and caterers wove in and out with appetizers from Nacional 27 and Ra Sushi.

Return of the Real

This spring, shows at Chicago galleries have been like cries for help, echoing an anxiety that is endemic to this contemporary world of recessions, wars, and catastrophic natural disasters. While shows like “I’m OK You’re OK” at Concertina, “Notes to Nonself” at the Hyde Park Art Center and “The Gesture Guild” at threewalls proposed, played with and critiqued “therapeutic” ways of handling that anxiety, two new exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Photography explore its root causes.

the real estate

When artists Beate Geissler and Oliver Sann moved from Germany to Chicago in 2008, their search for a place to live took them on a desolate tour through Chicago’s neglected living spaces. “the real estate,” up now at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, reveals 60 color photographs that document the interior spaces of foreclosed homes visited by the artists in early 2008 and 2009.

Constructive Criticism

“One Very Big Thumbs Down: Balcony closed, idiot floodgates open,” declared Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune on April 15. “Good critics are an endangered species … Blame the usual suspect, the Internet. Just as it has put book, record, and video stores out of business, the Web also is grinding away at the very notion that critics should be respected for credentials and experience that show they actually know what they’re talking about.”

This proclamation comes close to the one-year anniversary of the Tribune firing Alan Artner, the paper’s only staff art critic, who was let go in April of 2008.

This example alone sums up the ire, resentment and self-righteousness that has colored heated debates around the state of art criticism over the past several months. It’s a debate that has been particularly virulent here in Chicago; local writers are fired up over the increasing shift to web-based art writing.

So does this shift in media spell out doom for the industry, as Page would have it?