Work by Alberto Aguilar, Pamela Bannos, Viv Corringham, Adam Farcus, Regan Golden, Bill Guy, Kirsten Leenaars, Daniel Mellis, Ryan B. Richey, Michael X. Ryan, Fred Sasaki, Allison Yasukawa and Mary Lou Zelazny.

In today’s content-starved society of the “24 hour news cycle,” it is not unusual to see reality shows and headlines hyper-focused on “unexceptional” people—but what about an art exhibition? Re-creating this model within the context of the art world, This is Paul Halupka is an exhibition of artworks about one person—a young man named Paul Halupka, a near stranger from the curator’s past. Though not legitimized by media or celebrity culture, Paul’s identity has been ushered into a spotlight and granted symbolic value in the form of an art exhibition.

Jessica Cochran,the curator, asked 13 emerging and mid-career artists to get to know Paul Halupka in order to create a portrait. Embracing a less directly representational type of portraiture, artists’ projects reflect poetic and discursive approaches to the depiction of Paul’s identity through painting, sculpture, video, photography and mixed media installation.

A full catalog has been published on the occasion of the exhibition, featuring texts by Jessica Cochran (exhibition curator), Karsten Lund (independent curator and critic) and Fred Sasaki (Associate Editor, Poetry). An extension of the show itself, the catalog, designed by Ryan Swanson, features graphic marginalia based on statistics culled from Paul Halupka’s virtual presence on Facebook, tumblr and Google searches.

Running Room is based on Karl Kraus’s notion of allowing an idea / place / material / object enough wiggle room to change. Encouraging an active détournement of seemingly banal signs, we allow a space for viewers to experience the darkly humorous undercurrents that make up everyday life. If allowed “running-room,” a sculpture can become a prop for a performance, a film can be transformed by its very viewing, and an artwork can be built by its audience. Slowly populated by work over the duration of the show, the exhibition’s room is not only defined through Kraus but also by the exhibition space itself—its four walls, floor and ceiling—outside and in. We use the gallery as both a physical space for social interaction and a conceptual space for redefining the purpose of the exhibition. By way of four curated events that will take place each Thursday evening and the large (and changeable) amphitheater, we invite the possibility to turn an exhibition into this: a stadium, a staging ground, a public forum, and a theater.

Curated by Kate Bowen and David Oresick.

Work by Paul Chan, Olivia Ciummo, Coco Fusco, Jillian Mayer and Chi Jang Yin.

Certainly, political actors in control of public finances have frequently used infrastructure as the cornerstone of national renewal. Adolph Hitler, for example, was responsible for one of the largest infrastructure improvement projects in German history. In the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to reinvigorate the economy during the Great Depression through large power generation projects, including the Hoover Dam and the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) hired otherwise unemployed workers to build and maintain the country’s roads, bridges, and dams, and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) paid photographers to document this progress, with an eye toward conveying optimism. More recently, in an effort to rev up the sluggish economic recovery, President Obama has proposed billions in spending to improve the nation’s roads, airports, and railways.

The social dislocations associated with large infrastructure are sometimes commensurate with the scale of the projects. The Three Gorges Dam in China, praised for providing much of the country’s electricity and alleviating the threat of catastrophic regional floods, permanently submerged 1,200 cities and villages and displaced more than a million people.

Public Works examines geographically and chronologically diverse examples of built infrastructure captured through the lenses of mid-20th century to contemporary artists. Modern infrastructure shares with photography a peculiar history, as the medium is particularly well suited to documenting the grandeur of large public works. Cumulating from the Museum of Contemporary Photography’s permanent collection and the Midwest Photographers Project, as well as from external loans, Public Works includes works by more than 50 international artists. Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards collection and Merle Porter’s 1950s postcards of the Dwight D. Eisenhower interstate highway system draw our attention to how public infrastructure became tourist spectacle in the postwar era. Frank Breuer’s photographs of tangled and antiquated, but still essential urban power lines in US cities, along with Tyagan Miller’s astute observations of trees that have been pruned or dramatically truncated to avoid the telephone and power lines, stand in striking contrast to prevailing assumptions about this country’s technological sophistication. Tim Davis photographs the desks of Washington’s political insiders, oftentimes the decision maker for public-funded infrastructure projects. Video and performance artist Chen Qiulin makes poetic films of the chaotic dismantling of cities for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam and of the effects of modernization on the multiple generations living in the Sichuan province of southwestern China. Armin Linke has photographed major infrastructure projects all over the world, including the workers on a prayer break at the Ghazi Barotha hydroelectric plant in Hattian, Pakistan. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research organization based in Culver City, California has filmed the Houston Petrochemical Corridor, whose massive petroleum refineries and shipping yards inspire contemplation. And adventurous artists expose the public to hidden infrastructure systems that most people take for granted, as Gina LeVay goes 800 feet below Manhattan to document Sandhogs—the miners tunneling bedrock to create the 60-mile-long city water tunnel that will provide fresh water to New Yorkers. Generally regarded as profoundly boring, infrastructure, we see through this work, has complex political, economic, and social dimensions.

Curated by Kate Bowen and David Oresick.

Featuring work by Linda Montano, Duke and Battersby, Paul Kos, Oliver Laric and Kate Gilmore.

This body of work addresses a new process of thinking where artists play an informed and significant role through creating a cultural shift, a challenge to evolve and inspire a symbiotic contract with our spiritual and physical world.

Featuring work by Heather Ackroyd + Dan Harvey, Amy Balkin, David Buckland, Adriane Colburn, Sam Collins, Nick Edwards, Leslie Feist, Francesca Galeazzi, Nathan Gallagher, Marije de Haas, Robyn Hitchcock + KT Tunstall, Ian McEwan, Brenndan McGuire, Daro Montag, Michèle Noach, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Sunand Prasad, Tracey Rowledge, Lemn Sissay, Shiro Takatani, Clare Twomey and Chris Wainwright.

Curated by Arti Sandhu.

Meredith Malone, Associate Curator, Kemper Art Museum, will discuss her exhibition Chance Aesthetics (2009); Judith Goldman, Humanities and Harper-Schmidt Fellow, University of Chicago, will discuss chance from a poet’s point of view; Visual artist Robin Price will discuss the role of chance in her artist book projects. Art historian Simon Anderson, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will moderate the discussion.

A reception in the gallery will follow the panel discussion; this panel is held in association with Counting on Chance, a retrospective of work by Robin Price.

Midwinter is the day on the calendar when there is the least amount of daylight and the longest period of night. It is on this day when the balance between light and dark swings decidedly in favor of night. Inspired by this time of year the group exhibition MIDWINTER: Embrace The Darkness will highlight the work of artists who pull from darkness not only in the literal sense, but also darkness in the sense of what is out of sight, unknown, unknowable or overlooked.

With this in mind the work in MIDWINTER ranges from the investigation of the delicate beauty of ice forming on a windshield in the middle of the night to the haunting landscapes of abandoned Worlds Fair Grounds and the exploration of unsanctioned religious practices.

The work in MIDWINTER reminds us that we should not only celebrate what is made obvious by daylight, but also value the richness of the unknown and overlooked.

Featuring work by Miranda July, Dani Leventhal, Meredith Monk, George Kuchar and Walid Raad.

Curated by Kate Bowen and David Oresick.

These words appear during the opening credits of Kahn & Selesnick’s film Apollo Prophecies (2005), a documentary on the making of their project by the same name, providing entertaining insight into how the artists fancy themselves. Known for creating whimsical and elaborately constructed photographs, drawings, and sculptures, Nicholas Kahn (American, b. 1964) and Richard Selesnick (American, b. 1964) have been spinning wild visual tales together for more than twenty years. Their practice involves dreaming up complex fictional narratives based on real historical events and injecting them with a wry sense of humor, while sparking new considerations of history and time.

Apollo Prophecies (2004), for example, is based on a reinterpretation of the first world event of historical significance that the two men remember clearly. Both born in 1964, they were five years old when they watched the first American spaceship land on the moon. In their fictional version of the moon landing, the 1960s astronauts arrive on the moon only to discover that someone has beat them there, in this case Edwardian dandies who arrived circa 1905. Partly inspired by literature such as Victor Pelevin’s Omon Ra (1992), Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon (1998), and the classic French children’s cartoon Tintin, their Apollo project is a compelling mix of elements drawn from historical and science-fictional accounts of the moon landing, and those that Kahn and Selesnick simply dream up.

Kahn & Selesnick’s most recent project, Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea (2010), features two female protagonists wandering aimlessly in a bizarre Martian landscape. As in the Apollo project, someone has been there before them, and they encounter detritus from the mysteriously vacated civilization including pyramids, obelisks, giant balloons, and concrete boats. Comprising photographs taken by NASA’s Mars rovers and by the artists themselves in the Nevada and Utah deserts, these landscapes have a surreal quality. Inspired by Edmund Burke’s quote from 1756: “Terror is in all cases the ruling principle of the sublime,” Kahn and Selesnick’s view of humankind and the universe is as frightening as it is beautiful. By blending references to various time periods, both past and future, their work probes our conception of time as a linear phenomenon. In their absurdity and ambiguity they reveal our deep-seated need to cling to what we think we know, and provoke us to let go and experience the fanciful.

Lumumba became revered as a liberator of independent Africa, and streets that bear his name in western and southern Africa have come to represent both the idealism and decay of an African dream. Originally a photojournalist, Guy Tillim has spent a large part of his career documenting social conflict in Africa for media agencies including Reuters and Agence France-Presse. Yet Tillim seeks not only the action and drama typical of a journalistic approach, but also quieter scenes, allowing his work to straddle the media and fine art worlds. His images from the series Congo Democratic (2006) of the Congolese election, for example, were shown in Documenta 12 and also appeared in Congolese daily newspapers.

In Avenue Patrice Lumumba, Tillim avoids intense action entirely, and instead focuses on the architecture, landscape, and people in African countries where the legacy of colonialism forms a backdrop but does not capture the essence of individual lives unfolding. His pictures portray the crumbling institutional buildings—post offices, schools, hotels, and offices—that were built by colonial governments in Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, and Mozambique. As Tillim explains, “There’s a ten-year period in the late modernist world where there was this grand colonial architecture built in Francophone Africa and Lusophone Africa. It was this strange contemporary mythological time. These buildings are impressive, for all their inappropriateness they nonetheless form part of a contemporary African stage. If you look at them in a certain way, they’re just kind of floating worlds.”

Printed in a muted palette, Tillim’s photographs address the idea of faded idealism in an atmosphere that is both melancholy and dreamlike. Chipping paint, worn materials, toppled statues, and makeshift repairs tell stories of modernist spaces that have been neglected. Yet Tillim was conscious of not wanting to become “a connoisseur of decay, or come up with some sort of Havana-esque vision.” Instead, he includes people and their personal effects, reflecting the humanity within these shells. In his own words:

These photographs are not collapsed histories of post-colonial African states or a meditation on aspects of late-modernist-era colonial structures, but a walk through avenues of dreams. Patrice Lumumba’s dream, his nationalism, is discernible in these structures, if one reads certain clues, as is the death of his dream, in these de facto monuments. How strange that modernism, which eschewed monument and past for nature and future, should carry memory so well.

Work by Kelli Connell, Dana DeGiulio, Daphne Fitzpatrick, Mary George, Allison Halter and Leeza Meksin.

Work by Natalie Bookchin, Jesse McLean, Nicolas Provost, John Routson and Sterling Ruby.

Curated by Kate Bowen and David Oresick.

Work by Michael Hyatt, Andy Kropa, Yoshua Okón, Heriberto Quiroz, Juan Pacheco, Antonio Perez, David Rochkind, Marcela Taboada and David Taylor.

Curated by Bill Linehan and Terence Hannum. Work by Stephen Cartwright, Sean Dack, R. Luke DuBois, Lynn Hershman, Andreas Kratky, Golan Levin, Lev Manovich, Mark Napier and Paul Slocum.

The first-ever traveling solo exhibition of The Yes Men, KEEP IT SLICK presents The Yes Men’s body of work including their elaborate costumes fabricated for their bold interventions, slapstick videos and PowerPoint presentations at business conferences, outrageous posters and props, scripts, sketches, research materials and selected publications and ephemera from their personal collections.

The MoCP is proud to present a retrospective of renowned artist John Baldessari’s prints, spanning the four decades of Baldessari’s “post-painting” period, 1970s to the present. This collection of prints is on loan from the Portland, Oregon-based collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer.

Manifest is an urban arts festival celebrating the work and creativity of Columbia students. Each year it attracts an audience of students, faculty, staff, parents, friends, alumni, patrons, donors, industry professionals, neighborhood residents, and the Chicago arts community. The festival is free and open to the public and features music, exhibitions, screenings, presentations, performances, and much more!

“The persistence of artistic geometric forms hints at a continuum, or a legacy, or some coy deity made present in this world by his shadow, cast as a polygon, on the eyeball of the artist,” writes Jason Foumberg in the exhibition’s essay.

Participating artists include Jesse Brown, Nick Butcher, Jeff Canham, Jacob Hashimoto, Maya Hayuk, Cody Hudson, Steven Husby, Barbara Kasten, Chad Kouri, Nadine Nakanishi, John Parot, Sam Prekop, Archer Prewitt, Geoffrey Todd Smith, Jason Urban and Vanesa Zendejas.

Let There Be Geo is curated by Elizabeth Burke-Dain.

Instead of creating brightly colored, large, splashy digital works that dominate much of contemporary photography, they make quieter works, generally gelatin silver prints using traditional chemistry and film, a trademark that extends the rich black and white photographic tradition of their country. Although there is arguably an interconnectedness between artists working in the same city in a relatively small country, who know each other and were taught and influenced by some of the same mentors, it is not our intention to argue that these artists are primarily a product of their nationality. Rather, the exhibition is intended only partly to consider how the pallor of historical circumstance—in this case stereotypically “grey” post-communist society—might impact artistic production. More importantly, it may provoke a reconsideration of how a nationalist label affects an artist and an exhibition in a more general sense.

It is also an exploration of what the word “photography” brings to mind and what it means to “reconsider” it, and what parallels can be made between contemporary artists whose works deal with some of the most compelling questions artists can ask: Where is the edge between abstraction and representation? What is the relationship between time and space? Between two and three dimensions? What sorts of spaces in the imagination are opened up by paring down information and exposing the basics of photography? These, among other concerns, occupy these artists who deal with ideas of fragmentation, time, space, narration, and perception in different, and extremely compelling ways.

Work by Štěpán Grygar, Jasanský/Polák, Markéta Othová, Michal Pěchouček and Jiří Thýn.

Recent Acquisitions of Czech Photography from The Baruch Foundation features work by Vaclav Chochola, František Drtikol, Josef Ehm, Jaromir Funke, Emila Medkova, Jaroslav Rossler, Jan Saudek, Adolf Schneeberger and Josef Sudek.

Visual artists are grappling with this concern and expanding the discourse in provocative and enlightening directions. Dis/Believer gathers a diverse selection of media in a conversation that spans from the origins of life to ethics in biotechnology, and from predictions of apocalypse to technology’s role in faith. The grouping of artists offers a fresh and fascinating perspective on the complex debate of science and religion.

Curated by Neysa Page-Lieberman. Work by CarianaCarianne, Compassionate Action Enterprises, Teresa Diehl, The Glue Society, Industry of the Ordinary, Kysa Johnson, Marci MacGuffie, Joe Meiser, Trong Nguyen, Joshua Thorson and Sandra Yagi.

In her diary, Anne Frank often reflects upon a chestnut tree, the top of which was her only connection to the outside world. She wrote, “….from my favorite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind….as long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless sky, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy….” With this poignant moving image, Lazarus invites viewers to share in the act of looking.

Reversed Images is divided into three thematic areas. The first looks at the romantic notions of Shanghai’s past and how it flourished as a center of commerce for trade between the East and West—represented by the illusion of Shi Guorui’s large-scale camera obscura photograph. It also examines the city’s shift from the past to its development into a hyper-modern city. This theme is represented in the exhibition’s sub-sections: Upside Down/Progressing and Glorifying the City Present/Future. The second theme, titled Artist: Urban Comments, explores how Chinese artists are interpreting their role in Shanghai, living within a contradictory environment that imposes limitations while also producing an extraordinary stage for artistic exploration and visual/conceptual research. The third section, simply called Interiors, describes the secret spaces and unexpected privacy in a city of eighteen million people. The exhibition includes architects, urban planners, and graphic designers, as well as artists using photography.