ARTS & CULTURE

REVIEWS R Temporary in nature

“For Iris and Other Flowers” tends to the memory of Leslie Baum’s first art teacher: her mother.

Is the temporary worthwhile? Gardeners come face to face with this dilemma every day, caring for their plants with exceptional diligence. But the seasons change, and they must confront an inevitable winter. Despite this grief, they return to their plots, routinely tending to the temporary. This is the dilemma that Chicago artist Leslie Baum contemplates in her exhibition “For Iris and Other Flowers,” a meditation on memory and her mother, Iris.

“For Iris and Other Flowers” features several watercolor paintings of garden flowers, a collection of delicately arranged ceramics, and a massive painting installation, conceived in three parts, that ornaments the far wall of Compound Yellow’s gallery space. Baum’s showcase feels temporary, unfixed to the room. Her smaller paintings that decorate the outdoor walls of the gallery will wash away, and eventually, the gallery will invite new art to replace hers. But that is not a detriment to her exhibition. Baum effectively captures the value in transient art, and instead of lamenting futility, she celebrates it.

To frame her exhibition, Baum references author Jordan Kisner’s musings on the ephemeral nature of flowers—an anticipated yet poignant loss. Her artmaking practice is deliberately untethered, embodying Kisner’s meditations. Baum’s art is inspired by a persisting memory of her mother’s artmaking. For instance, her ceramics are imprinted with Iris’s signature using a clay stamp made in the 1970s. Working in her mother’s two primary mediums, clay and watercolor, Baum reflects on loss and attempts to cherish the ephemeral. —MAXWELL RABB

“FOR IRIS AND OTHER FLOWERS” Through 4/29: Sat 2-6 PM, Compound Yellow, 244 Lake, Oak Park, compoundyellow.com/exhibitions

R Tongue tied

Iceberg Project’s group exhibition, “Tongue & Nail,” balances the line between flesh and material.

The best way to approach “Tongue & Nail” is by starting with the artworks that inspired the ensemble. And you won’t miss them. Kat Bawden’s visceral microfilm, Tongue Tie, is playing on loop on Iceberg’s gallery wall. The black-and-white video displays a tongue, close-up and painfully bound by thin twine. Beneath the video is Tarik Kentouche’s replica of Carlo Mollino’s “Gaudi” chair, one of four featured at the gallery. For those unfamiliar with Mollino’s original design, it is undeniably “tongue-ish,” reminiscent of an open jaw with an extruding tongue. A er they encountered these two pieces, John Neff and Dan Berger were inspired to find other “tongue-ish” art to curate a full exhibition.

“Tongue & Nail” is a modest show, featuring only one or two contributions each from Doron Langberg, Le Hien Minh, Jeff Prokash, David Sprecher, Tom of Finland, and Maggie Wong to accompany Kentouche and Bawden. But what stands out is the variety of mediums that together conflate the body and severity. The result is tender, emerging in Langberg’s erotic and warm oil paintings or Wong’s To Iceberg a naturally dyed linen cloth with a watercolor gradient that is draped (or possibly disposed of) in the gallery’s corner. The eye is drawn immediately to Minh’s Ornamentalism and its delicate follicles that protrude from the wall, made from wood and traditional Vietnamese handmade Dó paper. Her sculpture blends together the fragility of Kentouche’s sculptures and the discomfort of Bawden’s video. The entire ensemble of “Tongue & Nail” confronts this contradiction, balancing the line between flesh and material. —MAXWELL RABB “TONGUE AND NAIL” Through 4/30: Sat 11 AM-4 PM, Iceberg Projects, 7714 N. Sheridan, icebergchicago.com

RSearching for enlightenment

Artist Theodora Allen merges the physical world with the metaphysical one.

Artist Theodora Allen’s work has long reminded me of the Major Arcana tarot or a deck of playing cards; her paintings, both intimate and grand, are worlds ripe with hidden meanings. This merge of the physical with the metaphysical produces an uncanny sensation in the viewer. One might reasonably expect The Lovers, The Queen of Hearts, or Fortune itself to emerge from Allen’s picture planes. Her exhibition “Solitaire,” up at Soccer Club Club, continues the exploration of the frictions between the known and unknown, the esoteric and the everyday, that she began in “Saturnine,” her first museum exhibition in Chicago, which occurred last year at the Driehaus Museum.

“Solitaire” traces the idea of “solitaire” through social history, linguistics, and popular culture. Using the word’s Latin origins (“solitarius”) as a springboard, the show’s written materials consider how the word has transformed throughout history; it once named a military tactical maneuver, a jewelry setting for a single stone, and the well-known card game. The exhibition’s epigraph is from Chrétien de Troyes’s tales of King Arthur’s court and describes the solitude of a knight’s quest for honor, enlightenment, and redemption.

In four of the six pieces that compose the show, Allen’s highly mannered compositions detail the heart, the club, the spade, and the diamond of playing card suits in a heraldic crest. The two remaining works are framed scenes of an arctic landscape; one bears a hand holding an orb, the other a drill bit bearing down on a lone heart. There’s a searching quality inherent to each work; through Allen’s exercises with light and tone, her luminescent white against shaded blue, viewers are given cause to wander and search themselves. Heed

Allen’s call: See “Solitaire”—seek, quest, and find yourself. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE ”SOLITAIRE” Through 5/12: Mon-Fri 10 AM-6 PM, and by appointment, Soccer Club Club, 2923 N. Cicero, soccerclub.club

R Double negative

Katherine Simóne Reynolds considers trauma through the Rust Belt landscape.

Unlike a regular scar, a keloid grows far beyond the original wound. Through the buildup of collagen, the body slips under its own cover and piles up, over, and around a loss—a powerful metaphor for Katherine Simóne Reynolds, whose solo exhibition at the Graham Foundation, “A different kind of tender and the practice of overhealing,” explores racial trauma and the attempt to exit the pain of white supremacy. Photographing the “keloidal” Rust Belt landscape, including Brooklyn, Illinois, the oldest incorporated African American town in the United States, Reynolds circles the event horizon of a heavy double negative: “How do you disappear from a world . . . that wants to see your non-existence at all costs?” she asks in her accompanying essay.

In photographs of prickly flatland, brush muddles horizon lines and engulfs road signs. Parking lots and gentlemen’s clubs are abandoned, except for Queen, a recurring character played by the artist dressed in a puffy-sleeved gown. “A different kind of tender,” a two-channel video, follows Queen as she crosses open fields, watches a boat depart from shore, and climbs a sky-blue staircase leading nowhere. Queen is stuck in place, an avatar for an inflamed and restless sore. She walks on a flat treadmill in an empty event hall and sits alone in a blue and purple nightclub to echoes of “Deep Shadows,” Detroit singer Little Ann’s long-unreleased single. Haunting is another healing overgrown.

Reynolds writes about Black womanhood, the puzzling fear of extinguishment and the desire for it. Traps are everywhere. The exhibition is dotted with physical keloids, gummy glycerin lumps that freeze costume jewelry in blackstrap molasses, one pole of the “triangular trade,” sugar for rum, rum for slaves, slaves for sugar. Reynolds rejects the remedy that erases the harm, looking to methods of overhealing to insist that disappearance does not require invisibility. —EMELINE BOEHRINGER “A DIFFERENT KIND OF TENDER AND THE PRACTICE OF OVERHEALING” Through 6/10:

Wed-Sat noon-5 PM, Graham Foundation, 4 W. Burton, grahamfoundation.org

RHands-on reading

The Newberry Library highlights the evolution of pop-up books.

The act of reading is rarely just a simple matter of decoding text, but as this diverting exhibition demonstrates, book designers have been augmenting blocks of words with fold-out extensions, rotating dials, opening doorways, and 3D elements for almost as long as there’s been a printing press. Composed of objects from the Newberry Library’s own collection, the show charts the many creative ways artists have contributed to books on art, cartography, fairy tales, life sciences, and more. The great pleasure for a viewer in 2023 is to notice how tangible and imperfect so many of these books are. We’re at a moment when bots are edging us out of authorship of any kind, but in these galleries the evidence of the human hand is everywhere.

Highlights include a colorful 1932 pop-up version of Pinocchio, a bookmark from the Middle Ages comprised of string and a paper dial that allows a reader to note how far down the page they last le off, and a variety of mix-and-match illustrations that allow heads, torsos, and extremities to swap out like a very early version of FaceApp.

It may be quaint to admire outmoded technology that can only summon a globe via a lithograph-printed color disc grommeted awkwardly into the pages of an ancient tome, when putting on a VR helmet will simulate flight around the very same sphere. But what these humble illustrated papers allow is engagement of imagination and a chance at physical interactivity rather than the passive submission that is the only reaction to much of today’s multimedia technology.

The show has many facsimiles that allow visitors to flip, pull, and spin elements from these inventive old media. It’s definitely a nostalgia trip but one which causes us to reconsider our relationship with technology and imagine a future in which we might even have some agency in relation to it.

—DMITRY SAMAROV “POP-UP BOOKS THROUGH THE AGES” Through 7/15: Tue-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton, newberry.org, free v