These 2021 Exhibitions are Closing Soon
By CGN Staff
There are just a few days left in 2021, and if you're in town for the holidays, consider stopping by area galleries to catch these notable exhibitions before they close soon.
Of course please call before you visit to make an appointment or check for holiday hours. And bring your mask!
Goodbye 2021!
Par Excellence Redux. The Back 9
In a unique collision of recreation and art, the Elmhurst Art Museum joins forces with Colossal founder Christopher Jobson to curate two 9-hole golf courses made by artists.
The Back 9 closes January 2, 2022.
The fully playable course, designed by artists and architects from the Midwest and beyond, pays homage to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s wildly popular 1988 exhibition, Par Excellence. Tee time reservations are made online and available at elmhurstartmuseum.org/golf.
At the Chicago Cultural Center thru January 2, 2022
This one-person exhibition by highly respected Chicago photographer Jin Lee features a series of photographs that closely examine landscapes and built environments around Chicago. The exhibition brings together four bodies of work: Train Views – images made during the artist’s weekly 2-hour Amtrak commute between Chicago and Bloomington/Normal; Great Water – views of Lake Michigan taken from a single location on the South Side of Chicago; Salt Mountains – images of piles and mounds of salt and dirt found on storage sites around the city; and Weeds – a collection of portraits of wild plants that grow in alleys and empty lots in a neighborhood.
Atrium Project: Orkideh Torabi
At the MCA thru January 2, 2022
Orkideh Torabi rendered a vividly detailed bathhouse filled with characters based on men she encountered during her upbringing and visits to Iran. Inspired by traditional Persian miniature paintings, Torabi depicts the rooms of the bathhouse in a split-scene style. After transferring paint dye onto cotton fabric, Torabi dries it with an everyday hairdryer, resulting in the saturated colors in her artworks. For this exhibition, in which her work is presented at a larger scale than it has been before, Torabi’s work on cotton fabric has been transferred to vinyl.
Jeffrey Gibson: Beyond the Horizon
Thru January 8, 2022 at Kavi Gupta. Also viewable online.
Gibson’s aesthetic position is rooted in the spaces where narratives collide. The work recontextualizes relationships between popular culture, identity politics, personal experience, memory, and canonized versions of history, inviting viewers to question the myths and assumptions that empower contemporary social structures.
For Beyond the Horizon, Gibson brings together four bodies of work, integrating a broad mix of source content, including a dazzling new series of Quilt Block Paintings.
Rachel Harrison: Assorted Varieties
Thru January 8 at Corbett vs Dempsey
In Assorted Varieties, Rachel Harrison unveils four major sculptures and three wall works. Of these large-scale pieces, three are in theory monochromatic – red, blue, and yellow – however their variegated hues almost chide the idea of the monochrome, revealing a subtle pandemonium of hues and temperatures residing in craggy surfaces, torqued volumes, and inset objects. The wall works roughly map onto the color scheme of the sculptures, recast in three different media – a set of post-it notes, an enigmatic abstract photograph (titled "Photograph"), and a blown-up screen grab of a frozen cherry pie with associated Tweet. Everything in Harrison's artistic ecosystem is buzzing with latent meaning – nothing is arbitrary, but nothing is obvious.