Kit Wise, Arcadia, 2011, video still, assisted by Darin Bendall

For an Englishman living in Australia, artist Kit Wise has a lot to say about ecology and sprawl in America. In his new piece “Arcadia,” which is on display at the Hyde Park Art Center through April 8, he uses dynamic high-definition digital collages of aerial photos to explore the relationship between ecology and urban forms.

Translucent photos of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the 2008 Mississippi River floods are overlaid to form a surreal landscape. Dozens of photos are projected across the screens simultaneously. They drift and merge. The superimposition is disorienting and unsettling, as discrete sets of images overlap along the length of the projection screens. Displaced houses float along wind-slapped highways. Down a few screens, cows and cars peer through images of damaged forests. Vast bodies of water suddenly become ravaged subdivisions. The transitory and transitional nature of the projections produces an otherwordly effect that highlights the limits of human control.

The exhibition’s title, “Arcadia,” is an intentional misnomer. The term, which conjures visions of idyllic pastoral life, makes an ironic statement when used as a descriptor for a piece that foremost showcases images of destruction. Wise’s collage harkens back to a work by French classical painter Nicolas Poussin. Poussin’s piece “Et in Arcadia” depicts four shepherds amid tranquil wildlife peering into a tomb. The title, which means “even in Arcadia,” is meant as a reminder that even in paradise, death and destruction are imminent. Wise’s “Arcadia” reflects and reiterates this theme. As skyscrapers and subdivisions merge with inundated streets and ravaged forests, Wise reminds us that at any time nature can break through the veil of civilized order. For Wise, like Poussin, destruction is a constituent part of utopia.

Continuing his tradition of producing site-specific pieces, Wise’s digital collage was created especially for HPAC’s Jackman Goldwasser Catwalk Gallery.  Located on HPAC’s second floor, the Goldwasser stretches, like a bridge, above the larger gallery below. On one side, viewers have an aerial view of the artwork and museumgoers on the first floor; floor-to-window ceilings flank the other side. “Arcadia” is an evening-only exhibition. At 3pm, as the sun begins to set, these massive windows of the Goldwasser Gallery are covered, and the shades become projection screens for Wise’s piece.

Viewing “Arcadia” in this setting is a curious experience. For one, it is difficult to avoid drawing parallels between the aerial nature of Kit Wise’s piece and the aerial view the catwalk provides of the gallery below.While looking down over the gallery conjures feelings of omniscience and control, looking at “Arcadia” spurs a sense of smallness, confusion, and distance. The piece’s translucent, overlapping bird’s-eye-views offer no real perspective of the places it depicts, and instead of the viewer feels a palpable loss of control, as if being consumed by nature. This effect is undoubtedly enhanced by the viewer’s proximity to the piece. Since the Goldwasser is at most three paces wide, visitors are forced to stand close to the vast screens. From this perspective, it is impossible to view the entire piece at once. Instead, the viewer must turn her head and crane her neck to keep up with the shifting landscapes. Occasionally, visitors to the gallery even come into contact with their own shadow outlined against the light of the projector, a subtle reminder that their own action or inaction, too, is implicated by the destruction of Arcadia.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through April 8. Reception February 12, 3pm-5pm. Monday-Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Courtesy of HPAC

The upper-level exhibition space at the Hyde Park Art Center has gotten a lot groovier. Instead of the HPACs traditional lighting, black lights run along the gallery ceiling and the walls glow a gentle purple hue. The effect reminds one of bowling alley birthday parties and rounds of laser tag where black lights created a sense of otherworldliness. This extraterrestrial feel has now been captured in “Blaque Lyte”, a UV-light-themed exhibition curated by Chicago-based artists Chriss Kerr and Paul Nudd.

The show is a study in how light on the edge of the visible spectrum can alter our traditional notions of color, shape, and space. Kerr and Nudd commissioned pieces from 30 North American and European artists, assembling a surreal showcase that utilizes highlighters, gel pens, and fluorescent foam. Though handpicked by Kerr and Nudd for this exhibit, none of the artists had ever before made art for a black light environment. Many had to change the colors, shapes, and strokes they normally used.

“Even though they had never worked under black lights before, all the artists actually managed to preserve their own unique style,” Kerr explains. “They had the skill to incorporate what, for them, was a new form of lighting into their work, rather than the other way around. At the end of the day, every artist came through and showed us why we picked them in the first place.”

This foray into fluorescence and neon seems to have paid off. Veteran contraption artist Nick Black captivates viewers with his eye-catching glass tower filled with a rising tide soapy foam.  Entitled “Bubble Tower,” Black’s piece confirms his reputation as a skilled contraption-maker. Under the black light, his work shows how lighting has a profound effect on our perception of motion and shape. As the glow-in-the-dark column of foam slowly overflows its glass confines, the black light exposes each stage of the foam’s gradually changing shape. Every bend and fold in the soapy foam is highlighted, showcasing a surreal beauty that would appear flat under normal lighting.

While Black’s pieces are light-hearted and vibrant, Hanna Andersson’s take on a darker tone. Her untitled collection of distorted Fimo clay sculptures cast onto a black backdrop unsettles viewers: the little monsters are not quite human, not quite animal, but a unnerving combination of the two. At the center, a totem pole stands with a dog with human lips and legs at the bottom and two elongated half-human, half-cat heads with tears falling from their eyes on top. If that isn’t eerie enough, a closer inspection of the other statues show two human busts connected to each other at the shoulder like Siamese twins and a clown lying stomach-down with an evil smile cracking through its purple lips. Each “anti-toy”—as Kerr refers to them—contains at least one detail meant to disturb, and those details are only accentuated under the sinister purple glow of the black light.

Apart from the bizarre and otherworldly, “Blaque Lyte” also contains elements from what Kerr refers to as “academic art”—an allusion to the classical paint techniques that have dominated art for centuries. For instance, Belgian artist Marie Rosen’s untitled painting of two bird-like origami figures combines the traditional simplicity of Northern European portraiture with florescent blues and purples. Under the black lights, Rosen’s blue origami figures  adopt a transparency that renders the painting  delicate and beautifully fragile. On the other end of the spectrum, the young American artist Nicole Northway blends reds, oranges, and yellows to produce a deep, aurora-like fog that sucks the viewer into a world which—with its vivid colors and powerful brush strokes—is at once intimidating and alluring. Stalactite-like structures invade from the top and bottom of the canvas, producing a picture of a color-filled cave that offers a robust counterpoint to Rosen’s delicate designs.

For other artists, the black light has sparked a fascination with geometry. In an homage to M.C. Escher, Joakim Ojanen’s “Holding Hands” offers its own spin on the mathematical artist’s tessellations with purple froglike and humanoid creatures interlinked on a bright-green background. While Ojanen’s monsters are already fantastical, the artist’s choice of color under the black lights causes certain parts of his painting to pop out and some to sink in, creating a visual wave effect that spreads from one end of the work to another.

By wowing viewers with vivid colors, unconventional art materials, and optical illusions, “Blaque Lyte” demonstrates how a change in lighting can challenge artists to expand their personal style. By pushing the limits of color, material, light, and shape, Kerr and Nudd have conceived a funky, ethereal world that proves there is still much exploration left to be done in art.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through January 9, 2012. Monday-Thursday, 10am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 10am-5pm; Sunday, 12-5pm. 773-324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Photo by Jon Lowenstein courtesy of HPAC

Spirited away to Munchkinland, Dorothy can’t help but remember Kansas as drab and dusty. Nonetheless, she soon finds herself missing dear Auntie Em. Lucky for her, it only takes three clicks and a magical phrase to bring Dorothy back home. Can it really be so simple?

“No Place Like Home” examines the “dissonances between the ideal and the reality of home,” according to a statement written by the show’s curator, Dawoud Bey. To the dismay of audiences everywhere, Bey claims, “the secure, idealized place [Dorothy] wishes to return to is one that exists largely as a mythic and nostalgic construct.” In other words, there really is no place like home.

Jon Lowenstein’s portraits of the South Side are all weeds, cracked sidewalks, and cement walls. Mirroring the grit within the image, the physical prints are themselves distressed as if infected with the virus of urban decay.  Easy as it is to imagine a bleak social reality burning behind each frame, Lowenstein animates and complicates his pictures with the teeming energy of children at play. In one scene, a desolate street is overrun by a stampede of children. In another, an unkempt yard serves as the backdrop to an endearingly familiar scene—a young girl plays hide and seek, attempting to fully conceal herself behind a much-too-narrow telephone pole. Finally, in another, a teenage couple tenderly embraces above fractured asphalt.

David Schalliol, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, has also chosen the South Side as his subject, though he takes a different angle on the landscape. Schalliol’s photographs unearth the aesthetic value inherent in an urban planner’s worst nightmare—a solitary building surrounded by empty lots. His meticulously composed series of “Isolated Building Studies” revels in the beauty of classical portrait arrangements. The void that planners claim attracts vice offers each scene symmetrical swathes of negative space that frame the homes. In one image, a stately two-story  home stands illuminated before a dark, fog-drenched street. In the back, a cement wall partitions the neighborhood, while a chrysanthemum of light blooms over two parked cars. While the photograph is beautiful, few people would like to see this from their living room.

Instead of finding beauty within urban disarray, Jason Reblando’s photographs examine the issues lingering beneath the manicured lawns of planned suburban towns. The photographs reveal how the process of place-making can in fact destroy a sense of place. Focusing on the communities of Greenhills, Ohio; Greenbelt, Maryland; and Greendale, Wisconsin,. the side-by-side images appear plucked from the same community, even though the towns they depict are time zones apart. Leaves, lawns, lakes, and strip malls—these scenes are clearly American, but nothing else is so clear. In “Daffodil House,” a quaint row of identical white homes line a gently curving scene. Innocuous and pleasant, to the greenery offers no clues to whether it is of the Midwest or East Coast.

Focusing on alternative conceptions of the word “home,” Lisa Lindvay’s photographs of her family complicate the image of a proper domestic space. Unbalanced by the absence of Lindvay’s mother, the home becomes overrun by an entire ecosystem of depleted soda products. Acknowledging the disgust such debris might inspire, Lindvay nonetheless claims “for [my family] this is comfort…is there anything wrong with soda?” Images of videogame wires running over and under cans, bottles, and cups conjure up a peculiar sense of beauty—a still life fitting of the American teenager. Likewise, Lindvay’s portrait of her father resting on the floor, his arms stretched across the dog, might at first glance inspire pity. It is easy to assume that in the absence of his wife he has been reduced to this state. The photograph, however, also reveals a powerfully natural sense of comfort—a man at ease with his dog, elevated by simple pleasures.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Through January 8. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm. Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm. Sun, 12pm-5pm.  (773)324.5520. hydeparkart.org

Courtesy of HPAC

On Easter Sunday, Conrad Freiburg, an artist-in-residence at the Hyde Park Art Center, sat atop his twelve-foot tall harmonograph eating rabbit paella. Occasionally he put aside his lunch to strum his ukulele, or, when the machine’s spiral drawing was finished, to tend to the three formerly swinging pendulums that hung below him. “Pendulum Driven Drawing Machine,” Freiburg’s interpretation of the 19th-century invention called the harmonograph, uses the motion of pendulums to create geometric images. The pendulums hang from a triangular platform that is surrounded by a heptagonal fence. The sculpture dominates Gallery 1 at HPAC. Yet even with the imposing presence of the harmonograph, Freiburg’s exhibit “It Is What It Isn’t” somehow feels spacious.

According to the artist, “It Is What It Isn’t” is an attempt to “systematize and compartmentalize a huge concept: the void.” Freiburg breaks the void down into three categories: absence, loss, and the unknown, which respectively correspond with the numbers seven, five, and three. Absence, Freiburg claims, connects to musical harmony (Freiburg’s research for this exhibit included an investigation into funeral music), and the number seven corresponds to the number of notes on a harmonic scale. Loss breaks down into five types—or objects—of love (self, lover, family, friend, and absent). The unknown contains three “philosophical manners” (active, passive, and absent). His classification of the void is certainly complex, but Freiburg succeeds in conveying a sense of the void that feels, strangely, complete.

This multifaceted understanding of the void manifests itself in the physical structure of the exhibit’s pieces. Seven heptagonal “Chimes of Pythagoras” hang along three of the gallery’s walls below a row of 108 spiral drawings (one drawing for every harmonic interval between two notes) that Freiburg drew with a smaller version of his harmonograph. The spiral drawings differ only slightly from one another.  “Each represents a 3/16-inch increment of height of a pendulum,” he explains, and “in phase or out of phase motion creates the difference between a perfect spiral and a straight line.” These drawings, hung well above eye level, are only accessible through the “Telescope of the Indirect,” a gesture towards astronomy and its understanding of the void as outer space, interstellar emptiness.

While much of the exhibit, and in particular the harmonograph, focuses on geometric organization and continued creation, Freiburg also explores destruction. Standing next to the exhibit’s second-largest piece, the “Self Contained Unit of Entropy” (SCUE) he asks his visitors, “Would you like to smash something?” That Sunday, he instructed them to build sculptures from scraps of wood and then placed them on the apparatus to be destroyed by a falling cement slab. With this mechanism, Freiburg offers his viewers an immediate experience of loss by allowing them to destroy their own creations.

Although Freiburg himself is not usually part of the exhibit, he emphasizes the human element in his art—both in theory and in practice. On Sundays, Freiburg participates in his own exhibit. While he’s there, he interacts with his viewers as if they were his good friends and explains his exhibit to them directly. On Easter, he pointed out that a student’s glasses were the same brand as his and photographed two brothers’ sculptures before helping them smash their creations. His creations are, by his own definition, human-powered mechanisms. According to the artist, both the harmonograph and “Citizen Void #1,” a scroll drawing which depicts the only human figure in the exhibit, represent the “development of a geometric language and its relationship to the human body.” And Freiburg fits within his algorithm of the void: he claims on HPAC’s website that nothing is in his bones.

Art, Freiburg suggests, cannot exist by itself, independent of its context. It cannot be separated from its artist or from its audience—“Pendulum Driven Drawing Machine” and the “Telescope of the Indirect” would be nothing without someone to set the machine’s pendulums into motion or to look into the telescope’s eyepiece. “A picture of a mountain,” Freiburg says, “fails to be a mountain. Art is inadequate as a metaphor but it can hold up as action.”   The void is anything but action, of course: the void is emptiness, darkness, absence, and nothing. But yet, “It Is What It Isn’t” reveals an active quality of the void that is present in everything.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave. Through June 26. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. 773-324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Adam Shuboy

The command comes and goes, puncturing the quiet of the gallery every seventeen minutes before the video, “State of Incarceration,” descends again into a less audible decibel range.

The film is a component of “Police and Thieves,” an exhibit currently on display at the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) that investigates American precepts of criminal justice. Like the exhibit, the film attempts to overturn the taken-for-granted division between right and wrong.

Excerpts from a play by the Skid Row-based theater troupe Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) appear in the film, seeking to elicit a sense of self-examination. The play depicts prison inmates and corrections officers, many of whom are played by former convicts. They prowl the aisles of a mock-up cellblock as they chide and taunt each other, exhibiting and lamenting the humiliating debasement of incarceration.

However, the film attempts to blur the role of the villain, as both inmates and guards don the same costume of black jeans and a white T-shirt. As the wielders of authority and the criminals subjected to it become gradually indistinguishable, the viewer is challenged to reconsider previous notions of justice. At times, however, the film becomes bloated, even risible (audience members are visibly chuckling are various points), its clarity and meaning diminished by occasional bouts of hyperbolic grandiosity. To put it in other words, the exhibit might be called “Police and Thieves,” but it sometimes comes across as “Cops and Robbers.”

A high point of the exhibit is Arnoldo Vargas, a California native who presents two pieces, “Notice to Appear—Defendant’s Copy” and “In Memoriam: Bike Misdemeanor Leads to Post-Injunction.” The former presents a series of 21 tickets for truancy and traffic violations, hanging below the photographic high-school portraits of the perpetrators. Among them: a new mother clutches her baby; a teen beauty flashes a magnificent smile; a young man’s defiant eyes stare out from beneath a fitted baseball cap. The faces, full of emotion, dramatically resist imposed uniformity—these are portraits, not mugshots. The composition is one of the exhibit’s more subtle achievements, as it successfully tackles vexing issues, like mass incarceration and fear of youth culture, without clubbing the viewer over the head with ham-handed anti-authoritarianism.

Not every piece in the exhibit is so successful. Amitis Motevalli’s piece, “Shohadha,” recreates the shrines devoted to Shia martyrs that reside in her home country of Iran. The 5-foot-by-9-foot installation piece depicts ten victims of police shootings, stenciled onto paper with checkered patterns evocative of Persian tiling. Among the enshrined is Darius Pinex, whom Chicago Police Department officers shot to death during a routine traffic stop on January 7, 2011.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of her subject material is muddled by her decision to present their deaths as martyrdom, which creates the inaccurate impression that her subjects died for a cause in a purposeful act of self-sacrifice. The notion directly undermines the more compelling of the piece’s moral observations: the sheer senselessness, the total absence of purpose or reason, with which these people were killed.

“Before the Revolution,” a piece by Italian-born artist Gusmano Cesaretti, is loud yet elegant and offers one of the more effective articulations of the show’s premise. Bigger and brasher than Vargas’s “Notes,” “Revolution” assails the viewer on multiple fronts with a polychromatic array of Christian iconography and Communist agitprop, arranged along four rows of copy paper. Interspersed among the crucifixes are fragments of a reconstructed Los Angeles—not just the barbershops and auto shops, but also the bare-armed, tattoo-clad cadres of neighborhood gangsters flashing their chrome-plated handguns at the camera.

The piece has neither a distinct beginning nor a satisfying end. Its vibrancy and fickle juxtapositions disorient: in one picture, a mural of the Virgin Mary is menaced by the silhouettes of dangling chains, while next to it, a young woman sneaks a kiss on the cheek of her older companion, possibly her mother. Such joyous images as the latter, interpolated with violence and urban decay, capture the piece’s—and the exhibition’s—most resonant message: no criminality exists without context.

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave. Through May 29. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

Kate Rouhandeh

Climb the stairs to the second floor of the Hyde Park Art Center, and you will find a series of walls completely painted over by solid, bright colors. The light apple green contrasts with moonlight blue while pure white walls fill the space between them. Turn your head to the first wall on your left, and letters begin to form in thin yellow paint. “SLapthisophon”, they say in reference to their creator, the last few letters blending into another string of black paint that spells out “SQUIDPEASSALTSAFFRONTHYMESAGE”.

The string of ingredients is only the first sight in Dallas-based artist Stephen Lapthisophon’s fascinating exhibit at the Hyde Park Art Center, “Construction of a National Identity.” Through the use of paint, food, and sound, Lathisophon’s work challenges viewers to re-examine the relationship of self and place in their own lives. A graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lapthisophon says that “Construction of a National Identity” is part of a long line of exhibitions inspired by people and their interactions with one another and their surroundings. “I’ve always been interested in how people relate to each other, so for me the next step was to explore the concept of how we relate to culture,” Lapthisophon explains.

Lapthisophon depicts culture in a physical form, tickling all five senses and alerting us to the extent of culture’s influence. In a pile of rice partially covering a collection of Spanish stamps as in a simple photo of a man and woman dancing the tango, Lapthisophon, encourages us to taste and feel all that we encounter. By demonstrating how culture dictates the sounds we hear, the objects we touch, and the sights we see, Lapthisophon’s goal is to make culture both touchable and larger-than-life. To fully capture culture’s tangible nature, Lapthisophon purposely deviates from traditional art methods and explores more contemporary media to convey his message, such as building a curious sound contraption mounted with string on a wall. “The piece itself has a lot of odd materials,” Lapthisophon says. “I mean, there’s paint made of saffron on the wall, there’s salt on the floor…For me, the piece operates on the physical components and that’s what I want people to concentrate on.”

Lapthisophon’s words ring true as one passes through the gallery and the physical components he speaks of begin to show themselves one by one. The words “NIGHTNACHTNOTTENOCHE” painted harshly in black ink make the individual experience of language a direct experience; viewers who speak different languages will see the same letters very differently. Utilizing objects and concepts we encounter in our everyday lives, Lapthisophon makes tangible the links between us and the cultural elements that are constantly shaping who we are. “[The exhibit] is meant to force people to ask questions because I think that for me, at this moment, we aren’t singular people of any kind. You have your identity based on your family but also by where you grow up.”

Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S Cornell Ave. Through May 22. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm. Free. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

"Poisoned Optimist" by Kim Piotrowski, photographed by Kate Rouhandeh

The nerve endings of Piotrowski’s pieces lie at the intersection of beds and guns. Although hung close together and side-by-side, Piotrowski gives each piece its own space, never mixing more than one image into a single work. Originally, there was no plan to combine the illustrations of beds and guns in the same exhibit, yet after she examined her body of work, the idea was born. What brings the pieces together is not the stylistic compositions of her images, but rather the powerful psychological snapshots into what the artist describes as “very private thoughts about the big issue.”

Piotrowski draws inspiration from big issues—including tragedies such as the hotel bombing in Mumbai and Hurricane Katrina—and the expression of social consciousness gives her works an added dimension. In this case of beds and guns, Piotrowski says, “I wanted to examine the intensity in both subjects side-by-side, and when I did see crossover, whether an issue of suicide, homicide, domestic murder.”

Her renditions of beds in pieces such as “In the Fold,” “Night Beat,” “In the Evening,” “Love in Plasma,” and “Pillow Road” show a hint of a mattress consumed by lava-like mounds of cloth folds and wrinkles. Forms as recognizable and comforting as the folds of a bed and pillow are lost in these foreign, imaginative whorls. The beds are usually given a solid outline that grounds the painting before a fantastical takeover in neutral tones melts across the paper. These oozing, vibrant forms take us to a realm of fantasy and free desires that we rarely see in waking life, while allowing subconscious truths to grow from real-world norms.

The truth emerges with blunt force in Piotrowski’s representations of weapons. “Arm in Arm and Arm” is a charged piece that transfers energy and commotion from swirled color to the flesh-toned butt of the gun, inviting the viewer to experience the firing of a weapon. The powerful release expressed in the beds’ surfaces in the miasma of out-of-control forms explored in “Roll Back” and “Lakeside Arsenal” depict an explosion of violence and smoke in dynamically angled lines and spaces.

Piotrowski goes wild using a variety of materials—from gouache to permanent marker, India ink to conté crayon. Even wallpaper and denim make an occasional guest appearance. The wide spectrum of media is used in ways both transparent and mysterious to the casual gallery-goer—easily readable brushstrokes capture a sense of action that allow the viewer to participate in the creation of each stroke, smear, smudge, and drip. Bright, flat stretches of color appear in every painting to accentuate glossy fields of paint that somehow still appear wet, as if the paintings were alive and in progress.

Piotrowski’s experience will soon be unavailable for view, as “Beds and Guns” closes January 30, culminating in an artist’s talk by Piotrowski herself. As an exhibit, the almost happenstance comingling of both subjects presents a unique discovery certainly worth seeing before the month is out.

Hyde Park Art Center. 5020 S. Cornell Avenue, Gallery 4. Through January 30. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. hydeparkart.org

“S***, Shower and Shave” was Plummer and Bancroft’s latest joint effort. Since 2009, the two have been working together as part of “Garage

Spaces,” a collaborative of performance and installation artists. Their most recent piece—on display at HPAC for one day only—was a white inflatable enclosure that viewers could enter and then spray the s*** out of each other with shaving cream. While the title may seem misleading to some, Bancroft and Plummer’s explanation makes a great deal of sense: the work is a tongue-and-cheek inversion of the banality of a common morning routine. Bancroft described the intended effect as “very playful and very meditative.”

The sense of wonder and mischief that pervades the piece is directly influenced by child’s play. Both artists work in education—Plummer works for the Chicago Public Schools while Bancroft runs a nonprofit that teaches kids about art. Bancroft and Plummer take inspiration from the way that children take mundane objects and use them in a way that subverts their original intent. According to Bancroft, “creation [is] a way of exploring.” Plummer agreed, stating, “I ask questions as an artistic practice.” When asked if he would classify himself as an artist, Bancroft thought for a second then proclaimed with a chuckle, “ne’er-do-well and mess-maker.”

Their art is not just fun and games, however, and under the surface of silliness, the projects that the duo undertake have a more profound social purpose. Central to their work is a desire to bring people together through shared participation in art. When pressed about the success of the installation, Bancroft commented that their works are, “only as strong as the people in them.”

The reactions from passersby spoke to the community’s willingness to indulge in cathartic shenanigans. Upon observing a group of children gearing up for battle, a woman suggested with a smile, “You guys are going to have fun in there,” to which one of the children gleefully affirmed, “I’m going to get in there and go crazy.” Watching Plummer and Bancroft help the children prepare for the coming onslaught reinforced much of what they discussed as the installation’s intent, the synthesis of mischief and playfulness. As the children began to chase each other, shaving cream canisters aloft, it seemed a foregone conclusion that we could all use more of these mischievous spaces.

“Ground Floor,” true to its name, currently occupies the first floor of HPAC, but walking into the show doesn’t feel like walking into a gallery. The show is a collection of diverse works rather than a focused exhibition. Your eyes wander the room and you see an array of works in paint, photography, sculpture, and television installation. On your left the work is happy and on your right it’s morose, and there’s nothing definite to feel except curiosity.

The first paintings you see are by Adam Grosse, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His painting entitled “Play Thing” is an abstract image of a cup; its dark center draws you in as you try and make sense of the broad strokes of the geometric figures that make up the foreground. This combination of the large, fairly concrete image of a cup and the abstractions that fill the rest of the painting make the experience slightly disorienting. The soft pink and white background has a surreal, dreamlike quality that contrasts with the sharp central figure, and this effect of uncertainty is characteristic of the show as a whole.

Other paintings by Jesse Mot, a Northwestern student, depict a series of forest animals. It’s silly imagery, and the animal shapes could have been taken from coloring books. The colors are bright and fill the borders almost like watercolors. On first glance the work could be called cute, but the animals stare directly back at the viewer, daring you to call them sweet and fuzzy. The paintings become dialogues with the animals, who seemingly ask us to take them seriously.

Upstairs in the “Pushing Boundaries” exhibition, the work gives off similar movement, but to a greater degree and from a different place. The artists come from a variety of backgrounds, from the best art schools in the country to muralists with the Chicago Public Art Group. They all enrolled in a class at HPAC to explore large format canvases, and the paintings on view are the products of their studies.

These paintings are about process, and when you look at them you can feel the movement of the painters across the canvases; there seems to be limitless space on these surfaces. The works by Barbette Loevy are particularly striking—her expressive, abstract surfaces are covered in layers of blue, green, and violet. The colors don’t vibrate off each other—they blend, moving your eye gracefully over the painting as a whole. It brings serenity out of its own disarray. You feel something specific, and you think it is what the artist must have felt, but it’s hard to give it a name.

“Pushing Boundaries” has a powerful sense of experimentation and discovery. Next to many of the paintings is a paragraph about the painting and what it was like to work on large canvases. Student artist Jam Lindell wrote, “Painting with a large canvas offers a greater sense of freedom,” and most of the artists’ statements included a similar sentiment. You can feel this sense freedom when standing in front of the paintings. The works are the representation of a process, defined by nothing but their lack of fixed boundaries.

The artists in “Ground Floor” and “Pushing Boundaries” are still developing and learning, and maybe have yet to find their niche. But it’s a beautiful thing to witness. On the whole the pieces in the show are raw, genuine, and unafraid, and many can throw you into places that more professional work might have polished away.

5020 S. Cornell Ave. “Ground Floor” runs through October 31; “Pushing Boundaries” runs through January 23. Monday-Thursday, 9am-8pm; Friday-Saturday, 9am-5pm; Sunday, noon-5pm. (773)324-5520. hydeparkart.org

The text on a sign posted outside of the Hyde Park Art Center was the only advertisement for the exhibit “Signs and wonders shall appear” by New Zealand artist Maddie Leach. The work consisted of several milk crates full of apples sitting on a dock at Jackson Harbor, almost two miles away from the sign. Viewers had to make the trek. To demand this kind of persistence from one’s viewership seems to confront the usual one-way relationship between art and its audience, but visitors were rewarded; everyone could take home up to two pounds of ripe, delicious art objects. Leach humbly described her ideal viewers as “people who want to make pie.”

The show, which lasted from October 7-10, was one of several projects executed as part of an ongoing exhibition called “Close Encounters,” made up of commissioned pieces from eight New Zealand artists who were given a year to create works inspired by the city of Chicago.  As an alien, Leach was unsure of what she could do that would be of relevance to the Second City. She expanded her geographical and conceptual scope, and focused her project on a more remote location—Beaver Island, Michigan.

Situated in the northern part of Lake Michigan, Beaver Island has historically been a religious retreat. Several religious organizations called it home during the first half of the twentieth century, including a group of monarchical Mormons and a utopian faith called the Sons of David. The faithful planted apples, and Beaver Island now contains several orchards of wild, unclassifiable apples, which serve as tasty relics of Beaver Island’s unique history. Leach became fascinated by these apple trees and by the almost mythical place occupied by apple pie in American culture. With her piece, she sought to combine near-universal aspects of American life with the unique history of the island. Leach used her outsider status—both as a stranger to the island, and as a New Zealander in the United States—to shed new light on American culture, and the idea of local culture in general.

Leach describes her project as having an absurd, even comedic quality. What happens to the apples that aren’t given away? They go back to Beaver Island, where they are fed to the local deer population. Indeed the natural response to the exhibit— crates of apples set out over the water, labeled with the names of the orchards they came from—is disbelief and awe.

The exhibit’s odd focus may seem as distant from the city of Chicago as Beaver Island itself. But the collaboration between artist and viewer is very much in the Chicago spirit. To find their apples, visitors have to trust a hand-painted sign on the door of the Hyde Park Art Center whose origins and purpose are anything but obvious. Leach has faith that passersby will discover her project for the right reasons—not necessarily because they have a background in conceptual or installation art, but because they want to make pie. “If only one person comes here for the right reasons, wanting to make pie, I will be happy,” Leach said of her exhibit. At the time of the interview, the show had attracted exactly that many visitors, and Leach seemed content with the tiny community her art had forged.