University Galleries of Illinois State University – serie

In their own highly individualistic styles, Illinois natives Mark Forth and David Hodges combine the mundane and the absurd, producing paintings that vividly conjure Middle America.

Jane Dickson's luminous paintings of Times Square explore the links between voyeurism, desire and the lure of the urban night. She portrays lone pedestrians enveloped in neon glow, with a rare feel for social complexity, and a determination to excavate the neglected undersides of familiar places.

Appearances of blinking ellipsoids, whirling orbs and other such sinister sightings have been reported throughout history, but nowhere has the idea of contact with extraterrestrials taken hold so powerfully as in the postwar United States. The UFO Show presents these phenomena in a fresh context, as inspiration and subject matter for contemporary visual art. Creating two- and three-dimensional work relating directly or symbolically to discs, saucers and other related images, 12 artists including Mariko Mori, Ionel Talpazan, Keith Haring, Panamarenko, Oliver Wasow, Claire Jervert and Paul Laffoley confront a culturally ingrained (and commercially lucrative) millennial obsession.

In the typology of fairy tales, women are routinely reduced to caricatures of innocence or evil, either impossibly saintly and self-sacrificing or malevolent in ways that only the male sex would project. That said, fairy tales also provide a wealth of inspiration for art, and the work in Pixerina Witcherina transforms these polarities into whimsically abstracted visual yarns (the title is taken from an invented language used by Virginia Woolf to share secrets with her niece, and refers to this polarization of women’s roles as either pixies or witches.). These women embrace the power of myth while deconstructing it, re-imagining its pungency for our times. Pixerina Witcherina features work by Meghan Boody, Amy Cutler, Margi Geerlinks, Claudia Hart, Julie Heffeman, Julia Latané, Tracey Moffatt, Maria Porges, Amy Sillman, Elena Sisto, Karen Arm and Katharina Fritsch.

Siebren Versteeg creates computer-driven video installations that situate the viewer in paradoxical realms where the real and the virtual seem to interconnect. At once humorous and unsettling, his works feed real-time online data culled from CNN, the AP, and Internet diaries into video animations with digitally produced sound. This full-color monograph, which comes with a DVD, is the first devoted to Versteeg's work.

In this volume, contemporary visual artists investigate sadness through painting, sculpture, photography, and video. Sad Songs features a diverse collection of works unified by their melancholic tone and characterized by isolation, nostalgia and emotional desperation. From Katy Grannan's haunting photographic portraits in which the subjects are locked in some mysterious exchange with the unseen artist, to Keith Edmier's sculptural meditations on lost adolescence, the artists here continue a long tradition of romanticizing the somber. Also included are Justine Kurland, Jack Pierson, Robert Blanchon, René Ricard, Whitney Bedford, Robert Blanchon and Benjamin Butler amongst many others.