Alicia Eler is a Chicago-based writer & curator. Her arts criticism appears in Artforum.com, Art Papers magazine, Time Out Chicago, and Newcity Newspaper, among others. She is currently a curator with ACRE Chicago, an exhibition space and summer residency program. Visit her website for more info: www.aliciaeler.com.
CHICAGO — What does it mean, bodily, physically, emotionally, mentally, and perhaps spiritually, to be what Simone de Beauvoir deemed “the second sex,” to be a woman and, moreover, to be a mother? These are questions that Chelsea Knight explores in her latest video work “The Breath We Took” (2013), now on view at Aspect Ratio.
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For more than 20 years, John O’Brien’s Dolphin Gallery has been a cultural and community epicenter for Kansas City artists. Located in a huge white wall space in the West Bottoms, a historical area in downtown Kansas City, the Dolphin is the size of a barn, and embodies the charisma of an established Chelsea or Chicago River North gallery.
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CHICAGO — The latest internet fodder for comment threads and message boards is Charles Ramsey, a man who helped rescue three Cleveland women who were thought dead more than a decade ago. Providing quotes to the pageview-hungry internet media (“I was eatin’ my McDonald’s.”) and others like that have helped to mark Ramsey as a total hero. As of less than 24 hours ago, Ramsey was trending #6 on whatthetrend.com. Yet watching this video calls to mind the problematic stereotype of the “hilarious black neighbor,” as noted by Slate …
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CHICAGO — Move over, John Currin. Your paintings of disproportionate, not symmetrical picture-perfect bodies pale in comparison to the photographs of Philip Toledano, whose images portray women and men with extreme cosmetic surgery. As a matter of focus, I’ll only look at images of women in this post.
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CHICAGO — What happens when blogs GURLDONTBEDUMB and WEIRD DUDE ENERGY face off in the reblogosphere, dueling it out in a viral battle-of-the-sexes? This post compares these two Tumblrs, both of which index hyper-gendered pop culture tropes, readily spinning off memes for the easy consumption of an A.D.D.-addled web audience.
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MILWAUKEE — When a story, an image of a work of art, or an essay goes viral, it has struck a cultural nerve, somewhere, and people can’t stop passing it on. The work itself becomes freed of the space where it was first realized; it is taken over by global internet culture and social networks, co-opted by BuzzFeed, threaded on reddit, and then picked up by mainstream media outlets.
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OAK PARK, Illinois — You’re driving to a suburb that you don’t know well, and you whip out your iPhone to quickly punch an address into Google Maps. In this case, that address is 704 Highland Avenue, home of Sabina Ott and John Paulett, who run Terrain Exhibitions, a once-a-month-ish, home-turned-cozy gallery experience. Every artist who shows work here must wrap it around the concept of the artist-writer couple’s home.
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CHICAGO — Tavi Gevinson took the ACT exam the same day she took the stage at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Edlis Neeson Theater, joining old family friend and LA-based filmmaker Jonah Ansell to discuss their latest collaboration, “Cadaver.” In this animated short film, Ansell and Gevinson marry a playful macabre — think Edward Gorey, Tim Burton — with the voice of Tavi, a mature, old-souled 17-year-old girl. The event felt more like a family affair than anything, with Ansell and Gevinson often bringing up subject matter linked to Oak Park, where they both grew up.
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CHICAGO — Michelangelo’s Renaissance masterpiece “David” presents the idealized masculine body. Chiseled and exacted over a period of three years, this perfect man stands on his pedestal, head cocked to one side, proportionate and gorgeous in his porcelain pose. Centuries after its Renaissance birth, The David stands in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, on view for visitors. David is available on the Internet, where a digital landscape emerges from the thoughts, images, random text, and links that users generate and dump as they so desire.
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CHICAGO — In the GIF world of twohundredfiftysixcolors, there is no time to process visual imagery; viewers are left with reaction options to each short GIF much like those found on a Buzzfeed post. It’s all <3, LOL, WIN, OMG, CUTE, WTF, UNBELIEVABLE, SCARY, FAIL TRASHY, OLD, EW, <heart break! or whatever and then it’s over. Even for a person who spends many hours a day at a computer, this film is torturous, and a painfully accurate experience of today’s over-saturated internet media environment. Certain gifs will keep playing over and over in your mind long after the credits role. It is a perfect portrait of the Internet world we live in.
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