Carl Heldmann talks with Lou Manfredini

Here’s the follow-up to my photo post about going with my dad to do a taping of HouseSmarts TV to talk about his book Be Your Own House Contractor. House Smarts has updated their website with the segment from my dad’s interview and it’s totally neat!

If you’re in the Chicago area this Sunday, please stop by 3039 West Carroll between 4 and 7 for the opening reception of Christopher Michlig’s  solo exhibition at Devening Projects + Editions.

Chris is my brother-in-law and has gotten really great press over the last year, including a review in Artforum. He will be at the reception, and he’s super nice and articulate about his work. So, go!

Here’s the gallery write-up:

devening projects + editions is pleased to present Christopher Michlig: MAN MAN MAN in his first solo exhibition in Chicago featuring new collages and a sculpture installation. Made from reconstituted fluorescent street posters whose advertised events have passed, the collages in MAN MAN MAN cut away all but one detail of the publicized occasion. The collages produce a constellation of fragmented information that oscillates between direct communication and abstraction. Whereas each individual poster previously conveyed concrete information relevant to a particular event, the new collages collectively insinuate a woolly, indefinite event.

Accompanying the collages is a group of sculptures that dissemble and reform the structures of public communication: kiosks, street signs, etc. Redacted panels atop active supports, toppled signposts, jumbled letterforms, and crumpled paper bases lay bare the potential of these forms to shift the function of language from the communicative to the poetic.

Christopher Michlig is based in Los Angeles and works in a variety media including video. Michlig was featured in the exhibition Half-Life, curated by Thomas Solomon at LACE and Yellow, curated by Lia Trinka-Browner at the Fellows of Contemporary Art in 2008. Michlig was recently part of group exhibitions at devening projects + editions, CSLA Luckman Gallery, Los Angeles and 1000 Eventi Gallery, Milan. Michlig’s solo debut at Jail Gallery, Los Angeles, was reviewed by Jan Tumlir in the May 2008 issue of ARTFORUM.

Yesterday, walking out the door to the library of all places, the mail carrier handed me a priority pack from my sister containing the book she recently published in conjunction with her Jail gallery show called Of Course and Never. Happy to have something new and anticipated to look at while on the 15 minute train ride to the Harold Washington Library, I was also amused by the coincidence. I had been meaning to go to the library all week and had only just found the time; here was an entire book provided to me that was acting as a primer for my library experience, introducing aesthetic and philosophical ideas to the outing. As you can see from these images, or in larger form on her website, this series of paintings by Wendy consists entirely of images of library book stacks in various states of disarray. “Tomes slump in their shelves, books lie in unintelligible piles on the floor, and periodicals are strewn across aisles, defying the organizing principles that make their contents accessible.”

Of Course and Never is a beautifully-made book and the accompanying text by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is superb, with thoughtful passages on the nature of books and libraries and a lovely introduction to Wendy’s paintings that gives the reader both a physical sensation of the work outside of reproduction and a literary starting point from which to view the images that follow.

One might think that a book accompanying a gallery show might only be a preview of the show, a kind of souvenir, but the number of paintings in the book is only one less than the show itself; it generously provides 17 handsome color plates. The overall effect of the paintings and the text make it a book worth revisiting often, I can already tell, and while I would be happy to add any volume of my sister’s work to my library (as she is both my sister and an artist whom I admire), I am doubly happy to have this book on my shelf.

More information on the book can be found here. Wendy’s solo exhibition at Jail Gallery will be up until March 14th. Read more about it on her website.

I’m really looking forward to visiting this exhibition next week at the Smart Museum:

Aaron Siskind, Chicago, 1949, Gelatin silver print, mounted. Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Gift of the Illinois Arts Council, 1976.140.

“Aaron Siskind (1903–1991) is best known for his abstract photographs, often of natural forms or architectural features that were manipulated in order to produce unfamiliar images. Siskind minimized the importance of literal representation by carefully distinguishing between a photograph of something—which is a distinct, flat object shaped by the photographer’s perception—and his fully three-dimensional subject or “the thing itself.” This intimate exhibition combines key images from Siskind’s first forays into abstraction with the artist’s own eloquent writings in order to examine the tension inherent in his work: between the artist’s perception and the literal representation of an object.”