This is gonna take one more night, an exhibition of photographs by Chicago-based artist Jason Lazarus has opened at Bucket Rider Gallery. Lazarus’s work has always re-defined notions of self-portraiture and self-representation using the photographic image. This exhibition is exemplary in that it allows photographs from several disparate series (NIRVANA, Self Portrait as an Artist, Living with a Portrait series) to exist in one gallery space as cohesive, succinct unit. Yet each photograph remains an individual depiction of a particular wonderland or an odd and even sometimes dark personal moment which Lazarus masterfully captures without using his physical presence. The last rose of summer on my nightstand, a collection of found photographs and text collected and curated by the artist, and a catalogue of recent work is available through Bucket Rider gallery.
Down the street at Rowley Kennerk Gallery are a group of intense yet quirky canvases thick with acrylic paint in mystifying color combinations by School of the Art Institute of Chicago MFA graduate Molly Zuckerman-Hartung in her first solo exhibition at the gallery entitled She-male Guitar Solo. You can read an interview with the artist by the gallery owner here.
In the same building at Tony Wight Gallery (formerly Body Builder and Sportsman) is an exhibition of new paintings by John Phillips and, in the project room, a video animation by Ken Fandell.
John Phillips makes an appearance in Caleb Lyons’s (artist and co-owner of an apartment gallery in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood- Old Gold) show Slow Dance backinblackisblackisblackisblacisback as a grave digger who makes little progress in a mesmerizing and eerie video work shot in the backyard of the artist’s childhood home in Michigan. Here, the strobe effect and warped soundtrack of folk music disorient the viewer into thinking the digging man is making headway through the dirt the more one watches. Slow Dance backinblackisblackisblackisblacisback is on view at Three Wall’s Gallery 2A space until March 29 and Lyons will be speaking this Friday, March 20th at 7pm.