Daniel Baird’s video piece, “And Ever,” images a crowd of people looking up at the sky in awe. The tape is clearly found footage, as the characters’ fashions are obviously dated, 1980’s. We observe the group, standing on risers, watching a spectacle up above them. Their expressions are of reverence and giddy excitement as the camera pans through the masses, from one face to another in groups of 5-6 people at a time, a boyscout troop, an older couple. Something big and amazing is happening.

Daniel Baird, still from "And Ever", video, 2011, courtesy of the artist.

And then as they wait, eyes to the sky in anticipation, the emotions on their faces transform gradually into concern and confusion. Yes, something big is happening here, but it isn’t what we expected to occur. People cry and cover their mouths, or they look away, some collapse in despair. Something big happened indeed. And finally the crowd begins to disperse, some in bewilderment, some in tears, some evidently just speechless.

We never catch a glimpse of the disaster itself, only the players’ reactions to it. Though this viewer certainly has a hunch about the nature of the tragedy (the Challenger explosion, maybe?), it remains a subtlety. The real action is the human drama. The spectacle of the unknown catastrophe becomes the spectacle of the varied human responses to it. We empathize with these affectations, even to the point of wondering how we might perform in such a situation. What’s a normal human reaction to tragedy?

Daniel Baird, still from "And Ever", video, 2011, courtesy of the artist.

Baird really nailed it with this piece, showing at Hungryman Gallery in Chicago among the delights of the exhibition, “Ruins,” on view through October 23. Check out some of Baird’s other video works, including the Endymion pieces, as well as his installation work. They are accompanied in the show by the paintings of Russell Leng.

Additionally, Baird is featured in upcoming exhibitions in Maastricht, Netherlands; Missoula, Montana; and Chicago. I’ll be keeping an eye out for more work from this up-and-comer.

Alison Ruttan, Mullet, ballpoint pen on inkjet print, 2006, courtesy of the artis

In the increasingly rigorous quest for knowledge acquisition and verification, photography and science are uneasy bedfellows. Allison Grant‘s curatorial statement for Our Origins, showing at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, puts it so: “Like science, photography offers arrangements of information, pulled out of the complexity of the world as a whole, presented with seemingly impartial clarity.” Sure, data in visual form can aid us in more fully analyzing and authenticating abstract concepts; it can contribute to a collectively shared, reproducible, foundational knowledge base.

But, after years of convenient digital manipulation built upon decades more of tediously produced and often lo-fi, though no less convincing, visual fictions–from spirit photography to Stalin’s ‘retouched’ propaganda–if there’s one thing we’ve learned about photography, if not yet science, it’s that seeming ‘evidence’ can be deceiving. That’s not even to mention the now relatively widespread practice of illustrating, and claiming new if sometimes unfounded comprehensibility in, sophisticated hypotheses by way of compelling pieces of information design. (GOOD Magazine, I’m talking to you.) In this, it’s clear that images, not only in their contents, but in their arrangements and relationships to one another, can tell a misleading story.

In its approach, Eric William Carroll’s G.U.T. Feeling series featured in the show, is reminiscent of Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel’s Evidence, one of the original masters of the beguilingly incomplete visual account. Carroll gathers found scientific documents and his original drawings and photos in a classification that seeks a coherent grand narrative, while also taking humorous comfort in its impossibility.

Penelope Umbrico, Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, inkjet prints, 2006-ongoing, courtesy of the artist

More often than deliberate misdirection, though, both science and photography engage in presenting a purportedly complete picture as a culturally or biologically shared phenomenon while removing it from its context. Though I haven’t seen Penelope Umbrico‘s 7,626,056 Suns From Flickr in it’s entirety—like most installations of the work, the partial in this show only exhibits a grid of a couple hundred of them—I already feel like it’s everywhere. Haven’t seen the suns yet? Sure you have. Each of these few million snapshots pulled from the popular photo-sharing website, feature our nearest star as the main character. You’ve already experienced multitudes of these sun shining/setting images, just like in Umbrico’s collection. What you haven’t experienced, and the absence of which her obsessive compilation emphasizes for us, is each of the unique circumstances in which those photos were captured.

Aspen Mays, Punched Out Stars 2, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Golden Gallery

While Aspen Mays’s Punched Out Stars highlight their vacancies much more aggressively. Rather than depicting the suns of other galaxies in her images of night skies, Mays chooses to redact them, literally removing them with a hole punch, precisely asserting the lack of information present. And here the show highlights the use of photography in pursuits of scientific endeavor as both powerfully illuminating and uneasily incomplete, while also articulating the insufficiency of the scientific effort itself. There are just so many gaps in our knowledge and thus gaps in our ability to accurately represent that knowledge.

Our Origins is on view at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Photography through October 15.

Theaster Gates, Love Seat, cement, wood, fabric and glass, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

Outmoded by street festivals, public music events, movies in the parks, and trips to the beach, Chicago’s summertime visual art scene is a desert of options. Dominated by loosely-themed group shows and limited gallery hours, art spaces choose to focus on scheduling studio visits and re-strategizing programming, all but closing their doors to the public.

Kavi Gupta is arguably no exception, but the lure of the gallery artists in their simply and straightforwardly-titled group show, Summer, up through September 3, was enough to draw my interest. Stepping out of the 104 degree, 100% humid exuberance of a Chicago August, into the stark, air-conditioned quiet of the gallery space, the works in this show reflect a shared, and for me mutual, sense of wildness contained.

Theaster Gates‘s sculptural pieces, uniform stacks of plates entombed in box-shaped cement, yearn to be unpacked, freed from their confinement. While Loveseat, the tattered, decripit, side-view of a sofa also encased in cement speaks more to times past, loss, decay, and eventual interment, but with a nod toward the savage process of decomposition controlled.

Antonia Gurkovska Untitled (AG12) oil, acrylic, enamel paint, staples on canvas, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

A large painting, Untitled, by Antonia Gurkovska unexpectedly reveals itself. Upon approach, pastel pours give way to vague art historically familiar figures undulating on a background of meticulous rows of staples. Something about it is both primitive and prim in a juxtaposition that evokes a feeling of being let in on a secret–whispers devious yet restrained.

Curtis Mann, Night Sky, chemically altered chromogenic development print, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

Curtis Mann reliably delivers with his Night Sky, a mural grid of chemically treated photos, as, moving up off the horizon line, stars become tiny explosions, become splatters of light. It is spectacular and disturbing in its dazzling and subsequent collapsing of the image.

Nathaniel Donnett, Treason in the Land of Melanosites, mixed media, 2011, courtesy of Kavi Gupta Chicago | Berlin

And finally, Nathaniel Donnett‘s collage-drawing, a boy, his head enigmatically composed of a black trash bag, carrying a giant, obviously burdensome chess piece. I don’t quite have it all figured out, but the title, Treason in the Land of Melanosites, makes a nod to skin pigmentation somehow gone awry, the child’s t-shirt references Tutenkhamen and (Michael?) Jackson, among others, with a prominent gold necklace stating “King” hanging around the chess piece’s de-facto neck. I struggle to put together pieces of a puzzle that isn’t yet complete, but one thing’s sure: wherever this kid is going with the strain of his gamepiece, it feels strangely hopeful. Donnett’s work will be featured in a solo show at Kavi Gupta in September, an opportunity to pick up more clues from this sphinx.

And with that, I head back out into the heat.

Deb Sokolow, Chapter 5. They meant for it to fail., 2011, graphite and acrylic on paper mounted to panel, 30x22", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

“People don’t like to read art.” It’s the sort of self-deprecating, tongue in cheek, slightly hipster-ish title you’d expect from a show featuring just such a group of young artists. “We acknowledge not everyone will enjoy this text+art stuff. And we don’t care, because we say it’s important.” But taken a bit less literally, as I had initially interpreted the title, it gets at the idea that people don’t like to derive meaning, to decipher, art. So in this way, perhaps the language in these text-based pieces helps us derive meaning more concretely; the verbage helps us “read” the works more deeply.

Kirsten Stoltmann, You Will Never Be Punk, 2011, oil paint Sharpie on magazine pages, 10x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

The offering in Western Exhibition’s group show sweeps the spectrum in terms of media—collage, drawing, sculpture, video, artist books. And in terms of voice as well. The labored, meditative collages of Meg Hitchcock, each one fashioned from thousands of tiny cut-out squares of individual type are juxtaposed against Kirsten Stoltmann’s loud, sharply funny, colorful sharpie drawings on pages from fashion magazines. One of her models declares, “To fart or not to fart.,” as she looks oh so forlorn with her hand to her cheek. Cat Glennon’s “Fuck This” spelled out with cigarette butts and her “You Don’t Need to Read It” in which the words “you don’t need to read into it, you just need to read it” overlaid with a check from a greasy spoon, dead matches, and playing cards, speak of grungy coffee shop angst.

Meg Hitchcock, detail of In the Day of My Trouble (Psalm 86), 2009, letters cut from the Chandogya Upanishad, 12x8", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Simon Evans’s pyramid-shaped sculpture, “Monument for Sun Related Events,” is one of the most startlingly intimate pieces in the exhibit. Lined, yellow legal paper covers the pyramid, affixed to which are snippets of hand-written text. An inner world emerges in sentence fragments. Somehow these thoughts, memories really, are a stream-of-consciousness confessional, and at the same time, they’re so familiar you can almost recall, from your own past, the moments he spins forth. It was such a guilty pleasure to read, as if peeking into someone’s diary.

Simon Evans, Monument for Sun Related Events, 2008, pyramidal sculpture covered in lined yellow legal paper with blue and red ball point pen, 28x20x20", courtesy of Western Exhibitions

Whatever an art lover’s appetite for “reading,” whether compelled by a quick glance that packs a punch aesthetically or by more of an in-depth verbal communion with the pieces, from bubble gum beach fiction to heavy tomes of autobiography, the work in this show provides for all preferences, except of course for those people who really don’t like to read art.

“People don’t like to read art” is on view at Western Exhibitions in Chicago through August 13.

Leonie Hampton, In the Shadow of Things, photograph, 2011, courtesy of the artist

Vernacular photography tells us our story. It shows us who we are and who we want to be. Open any photo album, and you’re confronted with cultural clichés played out to illustrate an ideal of family, success, happiness. No surprise these are the moments we choose to memorialize. These amateur-ish snapshots create an archive of moments of imagined joy; they stop time at the instances when we are happiest (or at least when we are aping happiness) and then catalog those pictured felicities as memories.

Leonie Hampton’s autobiographical photography, In the Shadow of Things, on view at Forma in Milan, draws deeply from this vernacular aesthetic. Her work reveals both the intense emotions interweaving a familial unit and the mundane context from which they arise. At times poignant, funny, or simply peculiar, Hampton presents a narrative tour of her cultural environment. According to the texts accompanying the show, that narrative revolves around her mother’s obsessive-compulsive, hoarding tendencies. But, more importantly, these photos describe a young photographer coming to terms with her own identity within this unit, struggling to understand her nature, her decisions and impulses against the cultural backdrop of home.

Leonie Hampton, In the Shadow of Things, photograph, 2011, courtesy of the artist

Most suggestive of this inquiry is the inclusion of a collection of family snapshots, chronologically ordered, The Christmas Tree Series. The artist captions these images in pencil, directly on the wall, giving a brief description of the theme—amateur group portrait in front of the Christmas tree—leaving blank spaces where the years’ photos have gone missing. In one, the caption states the Christmas tree was salvaged from the trash heap, and indeed the ‘tree’ in the picture is now only a naked branch, having lost its needles. The subjects, Leonie and her siblings, are similarly threadbare, wearing shorts and t-shirts, asserting that this year the photograph was snapped sometime, perhaps a lengthy period, after the winter holiday. This is a tribe clinging to a tradition that it has outgrown, a group bound by duty if not hope, re-enacting the story of a happy family at Christmastime, preserved once again for its ongoing archive.

Leonie Hampton, In the Shadow of Things, photograph, 2011, courtesy of the artist

In the images shot by Hampton herself, the impulse to preserve an ideal of the family is clear as well, but in a way, less choreographed, less rigid. These candid photos reveal the concerns, sensibilities, and banalities of these people’s lives, pictures of a changing home, a changing dynamic. They present the evidence of a bent toward preserving and archiving the household, presumably the symptoms of Hampton’s mother. At each turn, they manifest the vision of the artist, also documenting, accumulating, cataloging, as she understands her relationships with these characters and as she settles her own identity as one of the story’s collecting protagonists herself.

Pipilotti Rist , Aujourdíhui (I Couldnít Agree With You More, version chaise longue), 1999, courtesy of La Triennale di Milano

As I encounter the Happy Tech exhibition on view at Triennale Bovisa from the position of someone primarily in the artist camp, I certainly have my biases. I am less interested in the technology vs. art debate, as it seems a bit reductive, and much more interested in the featured works of A-listers like Pipilotti Rist, Alfredo Jaar, Thomas Ruff, and Bill Viola, among others. The exhibition is ambitious, and approaches the issue with a utopian vision of the creative potential that technology supplies art. Though many of the pieces use new media, they at the same time manifest a cynical or conflicted attitude to aspects of technology and progress. This is counterbalanced by the relative optimism of the corresponding tech displays. But for me, the strength of the show lies in the interactions between the artworks themselves, rather than their reciprocal relationships with the complementing science exhibits.

One of the most arresting pieces here is a 16-minute video loop by Rainer Ganahl, Dal Vaticano a Piazza della Republicca Bicycling Roma, in which he rides a bicycle against traffic through Rome. The camera is situated from the viewpoint of the rider, so we see only the handlebars of the bike, often free of hands, and the bicycle’s forward moving trajectory through the city. Cars and trucks advance toward us, neglecting to swerve their paths, and we feel acutely impelled to go on watching. The artist-cum-cyclist continues, through intersections in which traffic is moving parallel, through oncoming truckage, through gridlock, squeezing his bicycle through the spaces between stopped cars and motorbikes facing him at stalled intersections. It’s an impending disaster, and deeply wrought with intensity, as we feel both the utter recklessness of this journey and the inability to stop as we experience the adrenalin of the moment coursing through our bodies.

Rainer Ganahl, Dal Vaticano a Piazza della Repubblica senza ritorno, Bicycling Roma, 2006, courtesy of La Triennale di Milano

Tearing myself away from Ganahl, I move on to the Tony Oursler piece adjacent. Blue Classic is two large, vaguely head-shaped, bulbous blobs on which are projected blue faces, disturbingly distorted by the shapes of the ‘screens.’ They move their lips, speaking a meditation nearly inaudible over the cacophonous street noises of the Ganahl piece nearby. It’s repulsive and at the same time deeply compelling. But I am momentarily distracted by the sound of the Bicycling Roma video, the artist is speaking to someone. I move back to watch. And again I’m drawn in. Once more I feel the intense anticipation of a calamity. I can’t stop. And then, I reluctantly pull myself away. Back to Oursler. I lean in to hear the blue creature’s utterances: “Don’t stop. I’ll die…Keep me alive with your eyes…Don’t look away…I’ll die…Don’t stop. Don’t stop…I’ll die. Keep me alive…” And it’s true.

Tony Oursler, Blue Classic, 2009, courtesy of Triennale di Milano

Both pieces need me. Both need my empathy as a viewer. Both will die without me. In the Bicycling Roma piece, the imagined catastrophe occurs if I’m not watching. I’m powerless to prevent it, but as I continue to ride along with the protagonist, it feels as though, by my presence, he is protected from harm. And the pathetic little alien character of Blue Classic is sustained by me as well. He is okay, so long as I’m there with him to share in his loneliness, his need for attention, to provide that necessary attention. Together, these artworks evoke both the estrangement and the seduction we experience through media technology. The intimate exchange of viewing these pieces is somewhat akin to how we consume news media or reality television. They present us with both the wreckage of life and the potential redemption inherent within it, through a heightened visceral experience. Though we are horrified, we can’t stop looking, because it’s us on that screen. Through this media we experience humanity, and by inclusion, some portion of ourselves. So we’re compelled to watch, to in some ways view ourselves through the projected lens of the media.

Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, Marilisa Reflected, 2005. Photo by Ricoh Gerbl. Courtesy Impronte contemporary art.

The abridged version of the story goes something like this: Shortly after the founding of Rome, the local men noticed a decided lack of ladies with which to start families. They attempted to negotiate a deal for some of the women of neighboring tribes, known as Sabine; however, the patriarchs of those tribes refused. Plan B was to arrange a great feast, invite all the neighbors, and then kidnap the females, which is exactly what happened. Some histories are adamant here that no sexual assault actually took place, that the ‘rape’ was in fact an abduction. The Sabine women were then offered marriage with Romans, along with civic and property rights and the privilege of mothering free men. Later, as the Sabine tribes confronted Rome in an attempt to reclaim their daughters, the Sabine-Roman wives intervened, begging their fathers and husbands to cease combat, in fear of being orphaned or widowed. And the war was ended, thus sealing the destiny of Western civilization.

Eve Sussman, in collaboration with the improvisational players known as the Rufus Corporation, stages her revision of The Rape of the Sabine Women in an idyllic 1960’s setting, filmed on location in Greece and Germany. Having been shown, since its release in 2007, at major international exhibitions in New York, London, San Francisco, and Berlin, among other venues, The Rape… is now premiering in Italy, screening at Impronte Contemporary Art in Milan through March 19. This 80-minute ensemble-musical without dialogue, in 5 acts, is filled to overflowing, cinematically. Its slow, sumptuous shots, voluminous and heavily pitched sound, dramatic staging, and densely packed art-historical references lend themselves to a deeply self-conscious and masterful, if overwrought, work of filmmaking. This piece never loses sight of itself.

Eve Sussman | Rufus Corporation, Annette with Rabbits, 2005. Photo by Benedikt Partenheimer. Courtesy of Impronte contemporary art.

The Romans here are costumed in dark business suits and ties, hovering somewhere between the glamour of double-oh-seven spy-culture and the comforting anonymity of the everyday corporate employee. The Sabine women recall Holly Golightly in mod shift dresses and big dark sunglasses, all against an opulent backdrop of sleek mid-century (and at times, ancient) architecture and design. The characteristic representation of Roman-Sabine married life is a drawn-out summer party scene at a lavish mid-century vacation home, in which affections are openly shared, alcohol flows freely, and cigarette smoke obscures our vision. Sussman provides viewers with a re-imagined fantasy of indulgence, affluence, and Roman excess.

But (spoiler alert!) the modern paradise collapses in on itself at the culmination of the film, as a slow, fraught battle ensues between the men and, though the women attempt to intercede, the struggle continues to utter destruction. And in the end, I’m compelled to consider the value of the feminine role in this version. Whereas, in the original legend, the Sabine women were venerated for their heroic halt of the conflict, here they are unwary co-conspirators in bringing forth the decline of a deceptively prosperous dreamworld. This myth of love in the face of adversity, buoying the frenetic rise of a civilization, is recast instead as the final fall, no thanks to the ladies, of an overly idealized utopia.

Jason Kalogiros. Double Sunset no. 3, 2007; analog c-print; 16 x 20 in. Courtesy of the UnoSolo.

Testimony of Simplicity, on view at Unosolo Project Room in Milan chronicles Kalogiros’s use of his twin pinhole camera to reconsider iconic pictorial subjects. On exhibit are a suite of photographs of sunsets shot with the device, as well as a number of images of figures in landscapes, and something of a self-portrait, a photo of the Quaker Oats camera most likely captured as a reflection in the mirror.

Jason Kalogiros. Installation shot of all 12 double sunsets. Courtesy of UnoSolo.

Confronted with Kalogiros’s Double Sunset series, arguably the most prominent pieces in the show, I am struck by a pair of glowing eyes piercing through the serene canvas of a darkened sky as two suns descend over a horizon. The sunset, honored subject of many a snapshot elicits a contemplation of the photographic process itself, as we imagine these orbs of light seeping in through the exterior of the Quaker Oats apparatus, via its “eyeballs,” into a darkened interior to create their lucid impression.

Reciprocally, the resonance between the photographic process and human vision is disrupted by the doubling of the picture. The image contains its own copy. It is so obviously recognizable as a sunset and not a sunset in the same moment. Here, seeing isn’t believing. Accuracy of representation has been an issue at stake in photography since its inception. By cloning the image upon itself, Kalogiros reveals an ambivalence toward the medium’s evidentiary claim. Replication becomes a tool for both affirming and denying the veracity of the photographic subject.

Jason Kalogiros. In the Same Place no.7 (Bernal Hill), 2010; analog c-print., 4 x 5 in. Courtesy of UnoSolo.

These contentions of representation and repetition, this vacillation between authenticity and imitation embodied in much of contemporary photography, reaches its crescendo with another piece featured in the show. This photograph, which at 4 x 5 inches is much smaller than the sunsets and characteristically blurry, appears to describe two people, one on either side of a divided frame, each holding a poster-size likeness of his/her counterpart. A copy of a copy. An inverted double. Presumably, the process for making this particular photo, as well as the other portrait pieces in the show, was a bit different from that for the sunsets, as it is impossible for the two halves of this image to have been exposed simultaneously. Questions of timing arise. Which model was exposed first? Which is the underived representation and which its simulacrum? The two converge at once. Here, Kalogiros has created a unique moment of trickery in which the original document is bound up with its facsimile in its own tiny hall of mirrors.

Testimony of Simplicity is on view at Unosolo Project Room in Milan, Italy, through January 29, 2011.