November 8–9 Openings Preview
By GINNY VAN ALYEA
Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9 both feature a number of openings taking place in galleries around the city, from West Town to Ravenswood, as many spaces open major shows that will be their final exhibitions of the 2019.
Our overview of highlights from this coming weekend is below, and our full calendar may be viewed here.
See you in the galleries!
Opening Friday, November 8
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
Using sculpture, painting, and installation, SAIC grad Jacob Hashimoto creates complex worlds from a range of modular components: bamboo-and-paper kites, model boats, even astroturf-covered blocks. His accretive, layered compositions reference video games, virtual environments, and cosmology, while also remaining deeply rooted in art-historical traditions notably, landscape-based abstraction, modernism, and handcraft.
Deb Sokolow Profiles in Leadership, Drawings without words
Opening Friday, November 8
Western Exhibitions
For her 4th solo show at Western Exhibitions, Deb Sokolow will present two bodies of work: “Profiles in Leadership” — new narrative drawings that blend fact with fiction and speculate both comically and critically on the foibles of famous men in leadership roles in Gallery 1 and “Drawings without words” — Sokolow’s first ever foray into abstraction in Gallery 2.
Sokolow’s drawings incorporate the voice of an unnamed narrator of questionable authority who recounts seemingly humorous, harmless anecdotes on a number of famous men, while also suggesting a more sinister mix of machismo, narcissism and insecurity at play. Lines between fact and fiction blur, and the tone shifts from objectivity to admiration and sarcasm. The viewer is left to decipher how much is true and to determine when, if ever, a narrator can be trusted.
Bureau Spectacular: Shadows of Things We Wish We Had
Opening Friday, November 8
Volume Gallery
In their first solo exhibition at Volume Gallery, Shadows of Things We Wished We Had presents a selection of designed objects that frames the living room as a still life painting.
Within the tradition of painting, the still life is a typology that carries a history where, a curated representation of one’s identity is made public through objects. In still life paintings, collections of inanimate objects are arranged in three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. And through this process, the identity of the individual is symbolically communicated through the staging of said objects.
Opening Saturday, November 9
Carrie Secrist Gallery
EPISODES is the gallery's second solo exhibition by New York City-based gallery artist Dannielle Tegeder. Featuring new paintings, drawings and video, this exhibition continues Tegeder's investigation into the concept of systems and what the medium of painting means in the expanded field.
EPISODES presents seven large-format, vertically oriented paintings propped up on artist-designed sculptural pedestals and leaning on a gallery wall painted with triangular swaths of pinks, blues, oranges and greens. Creating a metaphorical series of stations, or episodes, this installation reveals a series of juxtapositions, contradictions and crosscurrents contextualized within the formal atmosphere of a gallery. Through this non-traditional presentation, the resulting immersive environment suggests architecture's ability to both confront and disappear from expectations and experience.
Julia Bland and Robert Burnier
Opening Friday, November 8
Andrew Rafacz Gallery
Andrew Rafacz is opening in a new space in West Town on Friday night, at 1749 West Chicago Avenue. Two shows will be on view: The Half That Ties, The Half That Breaks, a solo exhibition of new works by Julia Bland in Gallery One, and Temple, a solo exhibition of new works by Robert Burnier in Gallery Two. The gallery was formerly in the West Loop for many years.
Kerry Hirth: All I Wish to Own
Opening Saturday, November 9
Bert Green Fine Art
Kerry Hirth uses her synesthetic experience of musical harmony as color to create visual music in vibrant linear patterns. Her recent work goes beyond representing the complexities of musical patterns to explore the ways they point to the source of music in life experiences. By engaging the colors of real and enchanted landscapes, her drawings of music gain a unique sense of time, place, and the profound relationship between music and the natural world.
The pastel drawings in All I Wish to Own represent the progression of harmonies in a late piano Intermezzo by Johannes Brahms. Essentially, they are visual music, conveying the continuous motion and contours of the music in a linear pattern with consistent correlations between harmony and color.
A history, a fragment, a territory
Opening Friday, November 8
EXTRA Projects
EXTRA showcases the work of Rebecca Tanda, featuring mixed media and sculptural work paired with a site specific installation in manufactured materials such as glass and plastics. Topics such as development, neighborhood change and technology are investigated by referencing the history of the exhibition space. Through layers of opacity and transparency rendered physical, Tanda invites us to consider how these concerns might influence our lives now.
Opening Friday, November 8
Hofheimer Gallery
This show features works under 15" tall by artists Tim Anderson, Betty Cleeland, Colleen Cox, Frances Cox, William Conger, Susan Frankel, Judith Roston Freilich, Chuck Gniech, Lisa Goesling, Susan Hall, Michiko Itatani, Teresa James, Mary Jones, George Klauba, Louise LeBourgeois, Tim Lowly, Catherine Maize, Mike Noland, Karen Perl, Jeanine Coupe Ryding, Nick Sistler, Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, Doug Stapleton, Fred Stonehouse, Bruce Thorn, Chuck Walker.