The paintings of Thuy-van vu feature everyday domestic objects that are decomposed and fragmented. Objects such as chairs, beds, electric burners are defamiliarized as they are removed from any recognizable context. The artist’s recent paintings are based on photographs of abandoned buildings that are splintered into pure abstraction. The new forms reference dynamic disaster areas, where pieces of wood are stacked on top of one another to create an entirely new form.

Thuy-van vu received an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. The artist’s new paintings will be on view in the exhibition Introductions, opening this evening at G.Gibson Gallery in Seattle.

Corbett vs. Dempsey, known mostly for specializing in mid-20th century American art, with an emphasis on Chicago painting and works on paper from 1940 to 1970 delves into the current state of affairs with it’s current exhibition. Having opened this past week, Big Youth is an exhibition of thirteen emerging painters from Chicago. The exhibition features works by Isak Applin, Carl Baratta, Joel Dean, J. Austin Eddy, Jonathan Gardner, Dominick Garritano, Jason Karolak, Hounyeh Kim, Rachel Niffenegger, Joseph Noderer, Carmen Price, Benjamin Seamons, and Jenn Wilson.

The last five years have bore witness to a new wave of exciting young artists making uncommonly strong work in Chicago. This show culls thirteen of the best painters, all of them affiliated with the School of the Art Institute, many of them with its summer school, OxBow. Though all of the pieces in this exhibition are paintings, they are in a variety of media and sizes, on paper, canvas, board and a single painted object. Subject matter is similarly various, ranging from deeply considered abstractions and iconoclastic figurative canvases to wild, glorious landscapes. Reference points include earlier generations of Chicago art like the Monster Roster and Hairy Who and contemporary heavyweights like Richard Artschwager and Peter Doig.

The exhibition will remain on view until September 5, 2009

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On view through July 19th at Jane Kim / Thrust Projects in NYC is the exhibition UNHEIM, featuring drawings by Vienna-based artists Daniel Domig and Valentin Hirsch. Each artist utilizes a graphic sensibility, employing a palette of stark black and white. The drawings contain an anthropomorphic quality which calls into question both the human body and psyche. Hirsch builds upon and modifies the form of the elephant to explore that animal’s characteristics of strength and vulnerability, further questioning how these qualities apply to a human existence. The resulting forms exist somewhere between a Rorschach ink blot drawing and a natural history illustration. Daniel Domig creates seemingly primitive and crude drawings made with pencil, ink and oil. Each work, over thirty total in the exhibition, contains a certain urgency that is playful, while also being deeply phycological.

Daniel Domig was born in Vancouver and currently lives and works in Vienna. He has exhibited previously with Jane Kim / Thrust Projects, as well as in an exhibition at Museum Engen in Germany and “Austria con Temporary” at the Essel Museum in Vienna.

Valentin Hirsch is a graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and has exhibited with Galerie Karol Winiarczyk, Vienna 2008 and Siemens Artlab, Vienna 2006.

It’s unfortunate but rare that art, particularly video work, moves me to the point where I’m exaggeratedly weaving words like “love” and “obsessed” into conversations about it–confessions that some might say belong more within the confines of teenagers’ online message boards about “Twilight” than within the discussion of serious contemporary art. But such is the case with Allison Schulnik‘s claymation video Hobo Clown (2008). The few minutes that it runs are some of the most heartbreaking, kaleidoscopic, breathtaking and gracefully tragic that you might ever spend on viewing art. Schulnik has created a messily pinched and sumptuously colored world of upside-down-smile wearing clowns, dragging along a vast lonesomeness of delicate floral arrangements and faded landscape, to the mesmerizing music of Grizzly Bear. You just want to climb inside the video and wrap the folds of clay around yourself, maybe fall asleep to the heartbreaking guitar strums. Around the point when the song’s first lyrics hum “Why don’t you do any dishes?”–which surprisingly isn’t at all distracting, as is the case with much of the music played over video work–things turn psychedelic, but in an honest and fresh way. Hobo Clown is currently on view at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas.

Allison Schulnik lives and works in Los Angeles. She received a BFA in Experimental Animation at the California Institute of Arts in 2000. Her paintings have been exhibited internationally at venues including Basel; The Armory Show, New York; Rokeby Gallery, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica; and Bellwether Gallery, New York.

Opening this week in Venice, CA is Rogue Wave ’09 on view at the LA Louver Gallery. In the 4th installment of an ongoing exhibition series, Rogue Wave ’09 continues in the tradition of presenting the work of emerging artists that are currently working in Los Angeles. The exhibition is co-curated by Peter Goulds and Christopher Pate, and features work by 10 artists spread over the first and second floors of the the gallery.

On view will be work from Erin Cosgrove, Micol Hebron, Olga Koumoundouros, Richard Kraft, Annie Lapin, Dianna Molzan, Kaz Oshiro, Tia Pulitzer, Fran Siegel and Matt Wedel.

The exhibition covers a wide range of concepts produced through drawing, paintings, sculpture, video, installation and collage. Rogue Wave ’09 will be on view from July 16th through September 19th 2009.

Samuel Freeman, formerly known as the Patricia Faure Gallery, features an eclectic sampling of contemporary sculptures and a few token paintings at, Mostly Sculpture (Damn It). Mr. Freeman initially sought to show new paintings, but ended up with sculptures instead, hence the parenthetical “Damn It.” From the get-go, the show flaunted a hipster flare, offering an ice cream social in lieu of traditional wine and cheese selections at its late afternoon opening on July 11th. Gallery goers appreciated the oasis that the folks at Coolhaus conjured, queueing up outside the gallery to indulge in alternative twists to old-school ice cream sandwiches.

Inside the gallery, a plethora of contributing artists enliven omnipresent themes by transcendental means. For example, The Reverend Ethan Acres, an artist who has graced the gallery with at least 4 solo exhibitions since 1997, installed his own shrine. The small reliquary is partitioned off with plexi-glass and features relics like Weapon, a 6″ x 8″ x 6″ military tank. Acres used a bible to represent the tank’s turret and a horizontally placed crucifix as the tank’s main gun.

The press release for Mostly Sculpture (Damn It) states it “remains dedicated to the absurd, the delicate, and the impossible within contemporary sculpture.” Outstanding in the stated genres is Jheri Redding’s wall of 406 cast wax hammers hung 11 rows high. The hammers’ hues vacillate from crimson reds, through pastels and neutrals, to phthalo greens. Also living up to the Freeman manifesto are Cal Lane‘s plasma cut steel shovels. Lane uses a plasma torch to cut ornate, lacy patterns into steel objects. More of her work can be seen at the Foley Gallery in New York.

In addition to Acres, Redding, and Lane are the following artists: Todd Squires, Jake Longstreth, Michelle Wiener, Jessica Rath, Al Farrow, Rebecca Myers and Tim Berg, Kristian Kozul, Jae Ko, Hedi Sorger, Steve Hollinger, Jeremy Thomas, Kazuo Kadonaga, Ewerdt Hilgemann, Dustin Yellin, George Herms, Chuck Arnoldi, Masami Teraoka, Ana Rodriguez, and Billy Al Bengston. The show runs through August 29th, 2009.