September shows in Chicago: To sum it up. . . photo and video have a firm grip on the Chicago art scene right now, and rightfully so, I saw several shows of paintings and works on paper and while they were aesthetically pleasing the work did not have much to say. One exception was the exhibition, "as we live and breathe" at Carrie Secrist Gallery with paintings by Megan Greene and David Lefkowitz; yet, the most intriguing works in this show were Kim Keever's large scale photographs of wilderness dioramas made from plastic models and painted backdrops inside of a giant fishtank filled with water to give the images this strange light.

Melanie Schiff's photographs at Kavi Gupta, are all images of tunnels--some organic and overgrown others the smooth and industrial. The title of the show is "The Mirror" one wonders how these holes act as a mirror for Schiff. The heavy duty metal frames on these works make the photographs look almost like light boxes and don't allow the viewer to fall into these tunnel spaces because the images are thrust so far out from the wall. Totally alluring nonetheless.

Selina Trepp's exhibition at Andrew Rafacz Gallery explores what happens after the mirror (of identity, of subjectivity?) is fragmented. Of all the work that I saw this weekend, the one work that I keep coming back to is Selina Trepp's "Appear to Disappear" (2009). At first this work seems altogether too blunt--a character in the video tosses broken shards of glass into a bucket while the actual bucket and broken glass dangle in the gallery space opposite the video. What is compelling about this piece is the gap that we experience as viewers between seeing a material and at the same time seeing it being used in the video. The display of the video piece was also very different from anything that I have seen before using mirrors and tape Trepp allows the figures to kind of float on the wall and they seem to become part of the same space of the viewer because they are unbound by a frame. It is more like a memory or a hallucination of a gesture, rather than a picture or a film of an action.

Michael Ruglio-Misurell's show "Project #12" at Gallery 400 is totally exuberant with colors, textures spiraling almost out of control--I love the ecstasy (jouissance?) of this in the work, but the more time I spent in the space there was this sadness that lingered in the work as well. One of the things I must enjoyed about this exhibition was the way that it dealt with issues of sexuality in a robust material form, such as the two urinals joined together. What troubles me about the discourse around this show is that it does not include this aspect of the work which is a missed opportunity to add another layer of meaning to a show that could easily be categorized as simply art about the spectacle of destruction. For a very complete review of entire show go to Bad at Sports.

Jason Lazarus' small installation Recordings ("Big Storm" January 30, 1967, Mom) at the Art Institute displays the backs of found photographs with lovely hand written phrases like "while we were visiting. . ." or blunt notations like "1959". The installation offers viewers the experience of imagining the image on the opposite side, but frustrates the viewer with the inability to turn the image around. This piece also nicely contrasts the experiences of reading and looking and how they are similar or different. I also thought the variation in the color of the photographs from dingy browns to creamy whites, they stood in stack contrast to the white of the gallery.

Two works I was so blown out by that I can't yet formulate a comment: Cy Twombly's painting "The Roses" (2007) lush sparkling blacks against the a lime green backdrop, dripping with magenta--sometimes a painting can be so right. Finally, Zarina Bhimji's "Out of Blue" made in 16mm film and transferred to digital the images are so beautiful and terrifying that I could barely watch and I could barely leave the gallery. Still from the video below: