ARTS & CULTURE

Reviews

RFinding meaning in abstraction

Carmen Neely dares viewers to feel comfortable with silence.

Carmen Neely’s large-scale abstract paintings fill Mariane Ibrahim gallery with energy—feminine, intimate, and sensual but also strong and purposeful. “Sometimes a painting is a prayer” is a very personal exhibition; it’s almost esoteric. Soothing hues—creamy beige, earthy maroon, and so pink—blend with wine burgundy, dark plum, and intense black. Lines, scribbles, and symbols take on a life of their own in a visual language that the artist describes as “narrative abstraction.”

Through personal archives including journal pages (in the form of lithographic replicas) that unveil the deepest layers of Neely’s private life, paintings, and works on paper, the artist takes the viewer on a journey through time and emotion. O en, mundane objects of sentimental value are literally affixed to her canvas. Memories, experiences, and reflections on relationships past are brought together as one. The lines between the personal and the collective blur.

“Every painting cannot say everything. One painting cannot contain everything,” reads one print dating back to March 2021 (3.29.21. Remember, 2023.) “And you will survive this. Without forcing your work into a cramped space. Your work will survive this,” she continues poetically—almost foreshadowing her future. To her, the backstory is absolutely necessary. To look forward, it is imperative to look back.

Through an unexpected form of storytelling, she becomes self-aware but at the same time vulnerable. She takes risks, feels hopeful, lets go—and invites the viewer to do the same. Carried away by scale and composition, one needs a closer look to appreciate the intricate details of Neely’s works—to connect the dots. Her paintings are nothing short of riveting.

As you stand in front of the monumental Caught a Glimpse, you find yourself amid a wave of overwhelming emotions. In the backdrop of acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen, Neely’s words find a way in: “How o en do we feel an uncomfortable urge to fill up the silence in our lives with anything in reach?” she asks. “All space is not a void. There is so much necessary life and emotion that resides in the open air of all things quiet.” You know she’s right. But still you cannot help but wonder: am I really present?—VASIA RIGOU “SOMETIMES A PAINTING IS A PRAYER” Through 7/8: Tue-Sat 11 AM-6 PM, Mariane Ibrahim, 437 N. Paulina, marianeibrahim.com

RContrasts and connections

“Friendship’s Death” is alive with sensuous form and pleasurable color.

A er the velvet curtains close on glistening spring art fairs and innumerable MFA shows, summer’s strange pitch descends. The next two months can be slow. Drowsy weekend tranquility punctuated, maybe, by a big name (Van Gogh at the Art Institute!), provocative content (Gary Simmons at the MCA!), or a modest but somehow more satisfying group show featuring five artists whose works, visions, and voices are uniquely abstract. See “Friendship’s Death” at Andrew Rafacz. The show’s title, a reference to the eponymous 1987 experimental sci-fi film, is a curious lodestone for an exhibition alive with sensuous form and pleasurable color. The movie’s idiosyncratic ending (a series of abstract visuals juxtaposed against clips of an injured soccer player and a developing fetus, among others) is mentioned in the press release but sheds limited, if any, light on paintings by Melanie Authier, Leslie Baum, Judy Dolnick, Magalie Guérin, and Melissa Leandro.

Setting aside that Leandro’s richly woven pieces are maybe more tapestry than painting per se, all the pictures on view say more about each other than the show’s title ever could. Take Authier’s tumescent fields of rippling painterly form, silvery and seemingly nonobjective. Paired with Baum’s aqueous, floral-figured close-ups, the Canadian artist’s paintings are suddenly verdant landscapes, rolling in midday breeze. Guérin’s work, whose thick surfaces o en feel so leaden and object-like, similarly opens up in the presence of Dolnick’s airy canvases. Thoughtfully curated and replete with animating contrasts and connections, there’s nothing dead in this show. —ALAN POCARO “FRIENDSHIP’S

DEATH” Through 7/15: Tue-Fri 10 AM-5 PM, Sat 11 AM-5 PM, Andrew Rafacz, 1749 W. Chicago, andrewrafacz.com

RMusic’s multitudes

This cross-disciplinary exhibition shows music’s ability to both torture and heal.

Can music be propaganda? Torture? How about a tool of manipulation, disorientation, and oppression? “Shi : Music, Meaning, Context” contemplates how music changes in form and interpretation as it moves across time, body, and place. Reflecting history and culture unlike any other medium, music has shaped the world at a micro, meso, and macro level. This cross-disciplinary exhibition, a curatorial collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Goethe-Institut Chicago, which features work from artists across the world—Germany, Morocco, England, Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria, and the U.S.—reveals just that.

Two uber-colorful works from Hassan Hajjaj’s My Rockstars series nod to hip-hop culture and identity. The mixed media works Acrobat, a metallic C-print in a wood frame with chili powder tins, and Master Cobra Mansa, featuring pimento tins, draw the eye due to their exuberant nature. Across the gallery, Cecil McDonald, Jr. captures unfiltered family life in 1200 Meditation Things My Mother Gave Me, part of the series In the Company of Black, which centers the space between Black misery and Black exceptionalism, both not o en portrayed in the media; he chooses humanity instead. Elsewhere, André Lützen’s black-and-white photographs from his Generation Boul Fale series give an inside look into the rap universe in France and Senegal, where the influence of American rap is very much alive. In Conflicted Phonemes Lawrence Abu Hamdan illustrates language as a determining factor of asylum migration.

But Tony Cokes’s Evil.16 (Torture.Musik) is literally haunting. The video is based on a disturbing, real-life “advanced” interrogation technique deployed by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, and elsewhere that utilized popular music blasted at defeaning volume as a weapon of psychological torture: AC/DC, Britney Spears, Guns N’ Roses. Blue and red backgrounds, the iconic colors of the American flag, flash for 16 minutes and 27 seconds. The text on the screen is adapted from journalist Moustafa Bayoumi’s article “Disco Inferno.”

“Disco isn’t dead. It has gone to war.” “Torture music has a history.”

MEANING, CONTEXT” Through 8/6: Mon-Wed and Fri-Sat 10 AM-5 PM, Thu 10 AM-8 PM, Sun noon-5 PM, Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 S. Michigan, mocp.org/exhibition/shift, free

R The alchemy of everyday happiness

At Hyde Park Art Center, artists share the objects that give them strength.

Do you possess a talisman, a lucky charm? Like the amulets of history and myth, these objects can be the beads you wore, the fragrance you sprayed, the ceramic shard you grasped during moments of triumph and survival: the alchemy of everyday happiness. It’s this shared history that imbues these items with their energy, their vitality.

The exhibition “Amuleto,” up at the Hyde Park Art Center, invited over 40 artists to think through what objects serve a similar purpose in their own lives and practices. The show was borne of a collaboration between the independent art spaces The Franklin, The Mayfield, and HPAC. Artists Edra Soto, Madeleine Aguilar, and Alberto Aguilar, founders of the first two aforementioned spaces, all hold a passion for the material of the ordinary. This joy in turn catalyzed the scent, sound, and images of strength that adorn HPAC’s walls.

R Space race

Artist Joel Kuennen asks if life on earth really matters.

The Kepler Mission was NASA’s first attempt at finding planets with the potential to support life in our galaxy. Scientific maps, governmental documents, and business (yes, business) contracts commonly present data from the mission in the form of a cross; this cross is the space we know the best within the Milky Way. Such knowledge has led to a race to extract resources, a space race borne of colonial and imperial intent.

It’s this cross that splays across the floor of artist, writer, and curator Joel Kuennen’s “Planets Are Slow Animals” at Chicago Manual Style. Curated by Stephanie Cristello, the show is a continuation of Kuennen’s interdisciplinary work on abiogenesis and exoplanets, through experiments with the element of olivine. Exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, exist outside our solar system and some may support abiogenesis, which is the process by which life forms from inanimate matter. Olivine is a mineral whose presence marks environments as hospitable to life, as it is the primary mineral within the Earth’s upper mantle.

”Shi : Music, Meaning, Context” reveals music’s multitudes. It can change shape and form—from torture to healing and back again—it can connect, empower, and inspire. In its vastness, it can be influenced by personal feelings, tastes, opinions, and experiences. It ultimately is what you make it.

An image of artist Krista Franklin’s Library of Love installation sits near work by Diana Gabriel and Bun Stout. Franklin’s work is itself an archive of objects; the shelves in the print brim with crystals, cassette tapes, cherished photos, and fat flowers with butter yellow petals. Franklin’s work functions as a ballast of sorts, as each of the show’s amulets is also an archive—the interior chambers, the hearts of each loved object bursting with butter yellow blooms. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE “AMULETO”

—VASIA RIGOU “SHIFT: MUSIC,

Through 8/13: Mon-Thu 10 AM-7 PM, Fri 10 AM-4:30 PM, Sat 10 AM-4 PM, Sun 11 AM-4 PM, Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell, hydeparkart.org, free

Positioned above the dark panels of the cross is the Messianic Frame (2023) series: five basalt slabs of synthetic olivine Kuennen grew in a lab in Switzerland. Like the Roman or Arabic numerals of a clock, these slabs are markers of a messianic timetable. Nodding to Walter Benjamin’s notion of messianic time, Kuennen asks: if the world, if history, if time is meant to end, by fire, by storm, by messiah, does life here really matter? The answers to this question are beautifully chilling as we float above the slabs of Kuennen’s Kepler Field, where we’re forced to confront both our solitude and what we owe one another. —ANNETTE LEPIQUE “PLANETS ARE SLOW ANIMALS” Through 9/1: hours by appointment, contact info@chicagomanual.style to visit, Chicago Manual Style, 1927 W. Superior, www.chicagomanual.style