By AUDREY MICHELLE MAST

Glossing

at 1R Gallery

In an examination of surface and superficiality in contemporary art, tiny but impressive 1R Gallery assembled some of the shiniest work imaginable, including a life-size photographic portrait of an allover-tattooed, bikini-clad woman by Amanda Ross-Ho as well as Craig Doty’s sleek, gorgeously lit photographs of adolescent boys scrapping with each other. The most stunning thing, however, was a sculptural installation by Diana Puntar called “The Sunnyside Collection” (her titles deal with the “implied idealism” of cities’ names). These laminate-on-wood cubes, embellished with mirrored panels and yellow circles, looked like minimalist ’70s furniture, but with a deliciously tawdry edge.

Mixer 03: An Ornithological Group Show of Work in All Media

at moniquemeloche

A few happy coincidences led to a full-blown festival of feathers at Monique Meloche’s epononymous gallery. Highlights included a wall-mounted sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Carlee Fernandez, who altered taxidermied fuzzy little birds so their wings and legs extended directly into twisting tree branches. The result was a little grotesque, a little sad, and completely, bizarrely beautiful. Lane Hall and Lisa Moline installed gigantic laser prints of decaying birds on an entire wall, emphasized by punchy latex paint in sorbet colors. In stark contrast, Ann Craven’s small, sugary-sweet painting of a small salmon-colored bird surrounded by yellow flowers was astonishingly pretty. A few artists’ work was indirectly about birds, like Guy Hundare’s video “Ornithomancy,” in which computer-generated airplanes swooped silently and gently through a void, and Pamela Wilson’s oil on linen painting “Aviary,” a lonely, haunting grid of bars and bare trees.

Politics as Usual

at Aron Packer

An overwhelming number of artists were packed into the gallery for this politically-themed show, including Brian Dettmer, who modified prerecorded sound bites from George W. Bush which play on a giant iPod. Also featured were Sean Sorensen’s homemade burqas fashioned from American materials like denim or corporate-logo printed fabric; and counterfit stamps by Michael Hernandez de Luna, sent through the U.S. Postal Service and exhibited on their postmarked envelopes (one set features Chairman Mao in an Elvis suit). An arresting large-scale installation by Freise Undine of hundreds of small portraits of world leaders, rendered in a style that mixed the look of propaganda literature and tarot cards, was the focal point of the exhibition.

Summer

at Bodybuilder and Sportsman

The trio of Leslie Baum, Mark Booth, and Paul Nudd comprised this exhibition of painting, drawing, and video work. Baum’s smallish oil on canvas paintings are, as she describes, “those of the traveler and not the resident” — atmospheric landscapes (trees, mountains, buildings) floating in abstract space, rendered in washed-out pastels paired with Day-Glo colors. Booth, an instructor at SAIC, exhibited an enigmatic collection of enamel on canvas and panel paintings that feature weird juxtapositions of animal names (“Snail Headed Egret,” “Egret Headed Snail”), as well as works on paper. Nudd’s work, also on paper, was a feast of pseudo-organic shapes, including what looked like wormlike entities, cilia, intestines, and cells, rendered in yellows, greens, and browns. In a small adjacent room, a video by Nudd completed the playful gross-out theme: images of shimmering, oozing bubbles — vaguely soapy yet unclean-looking, a conglomeration of milky substances juxtaposed with acid-green ones, all undulating and popping violently by some unseen force.

Nitty Gritty: Slim’s Bike and the Street Art of Curtis Cuffie and Wesley Willis

at Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art

If you thought “street art” was just about graffiti, think again. Intuit’s poignant and witty exhibition of work made from and about the streets featured work by the late James “Slim” Thompson, New York’s late Curtis Cuffie, and Wesley Willis from Chicago. In the center of the gallery sits “Slim’s Bike,” a massive modified Schwinn that Thompson rode through Detroit’s gritty Cass Corridor, making himself a neighborhood legend. The bike is covered with patriotic flags, fur, pinwheels, plastic cups, and scores of pinup photos of scantily-clad women, which, like Slim himself, was an eccentric tour de force. Surrounding Slim’s Bike were assemblages by Curtis Cuffie, who was homeless for a large part of his life, but gained attention from students near Cooper Union in New York, where he often produced sculptural installations on fences. His sculptures were mostly vertical, often anthropomorphic conglomerations of discarded objects, like a carpeted cat playhouse mounted on a coat tree, topped with an old camera case, and a tripod decked with Christmas garland, scrap fabric, and stuffed toys. In stark contrast to the hodgepodge feel of Cuffie’s and Thompson’s work, Wesley Willis’ pen-and-marker cityscape drawings on posterboard are linear and ascetic, but completely engrossing. The drawings shown here were produced in the early ’90s and are a quick study in neighborhood change — his obsessive hand rendered the intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Damen when its main features were a shoe repair and a donut shop. Willis, who suffers from schizophrenia, became a well-known Chicago personality for his sketches as well as his habit of friendly head-butting. He has also released over 40 albums of songs including the cult classic “Cut That Mullet.”