Every technology possesses its own inherent accidents. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and theorist whose focus is on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media specifically. She describes these as “the uncanny, brutal structures that come to the surface during a break of the flow within a technology; they are the primal data-screams of the machine.” Working at the experimental junction of glitch, noise, and new media art, Menkman creates glitch work and writes texts about codecs, interpolation, and compression going awry. This evening, Menkman will introduce a selection of videos followed by a real-time performance. Rest assured, the equipment is working, though it may not look like it is. This presentation coincides with GLI.TC/H, an international noise and new media conference taking place from September 29 to October 3 at various locations around Chicago.

Trinidad-based, British artist Chris Ofili rose to prominence in the 1990s when The Holy Virgin Mary, his controversial collage of paint, glitter, magazine clippings, and elephant dung was included in the traveling exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. Ofili has exhibited internationally and received the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize in 1998. The Arts Club’s exhibition of works on paper will cover Ofili’s oeuvre with his particular iconography drawn from traditional African techniques and ideologies, as well as, contemporary culture. This will be the first Chicago exhibition for the artist.

A solo exhibition of Chicago photographer Caitlin Arnold. This marks the two and half year point in Arnold’s project, engaging a portfolio of young women from across the US living in rural, suburban and urban environments. As these girls strive to represent their growing femininity for the photographer (and thus the audience), the viewer is left faced with the awkwardness, confidence, and misplaced maturity involved with the development of a young girls’ life. The result is a thoughtful body of portraits accurately portraying a broad expanse of girls experiencing and relaying their maturity.

Arnold’s artistic practice of meeting and spending time with each girl allows for an intimate atmosphere for these portraits. A common thread of confidence in the girl’s statures and trust in the artist to allow these expressions to unfold, results from the time spent between artist and subject. Although unintentional, body language and expressions repeat through this series remarking on Arnold’s thesis that a girl’s maturity is a defining and lasting shift. With a host of girls ranging in ages, the viewer can see the beginning, awkward development and confident acceptance of their burgeoning womanhood.

New works by Tom Torluemke.

Thad Kellstadt, Corinne Halbert and Carmen Price in Gallery 2. Curated by Edra Soto.

Chicago-born and educated artist Leon Golub (1922–2004) is known for his provocative large-scale paintings addressing issues of power and violence and a figurative style inspired by a diverse iconography, from classical sculpture to journalism and mass media photography.

Live & Die Like a Lion? is the first major museum exhibition to focus on drawings from the last five years of Golub’s life, as declining health prevented him from working on large canvases. With bold text, erotic imagery, and depictions of human figures, lions, dogs, and mythic creatures, the small but dramatic and colorful works bring the themes of Golub’s career to a more intimate level.

The exhibition also includes the only existing unfinished Golub painting as well as examples of the artist’s source materials from a variety of magazines and publications.

Haunting and hilarious by turns, the works of Chicago artists Kent Lambert and Jesse McLean remix the banal debris of television culture into striking meditations on our mediated public sphere. In SECURITY ANTHEM (2003), HYMN OF RECKONING (2006) and SUNSET CODA (2006), Lambert culls footage from “Lost,” his own home movies, and the vocal stylings of former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to explore the vagaries of national security in the age of international terror. McLean considers the possibility for genuine connection within the blur of televised emotion in her Bearing Witness trilogy–THE ETERNAL QUARTER INCH (2008), THE BURNING BLUE (2009), and SOMEWHERE WE ONLY KNOW (2009). This evening also features a brand new collaboration between the two and the North American premiere of McLean’s tricky MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS (2010), among others.

Considered among the most important political artists of this decade, The Yes Men (Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) are a group of culture-jamming activists who practice what they call “Identity Correction.” By posing as spokespersons for prominent organizations and powerful entities, The Yes Men create spoof websites and appear in conferences and TV shows to highlight how corporations and government organizations often act in dehumanizing ways toward the public.

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.

Work by Will Goss & Jessica Bardsley, Daniel Eatock, Clint Enns, Je Je Ji Yeon Lim, Justin Kemp, Andrew Norman Wilson and Jon Rafman.

Co-Curated with Brook Sinkinson Withrow.

As a culture we routinely use video as a language, whether or not it is acknowledged. This dialect has evolved from customary communication and presentation, overdetermined by the conventions of television, advertising, and web-based imagery. These artists communicate through this language to address our mediated experiences and to articulate expressions of the everyday. The video works unpack and transform the contexts in which we communicate with others – from the simple act of typing on our keyboards, to saying “I love you,”- and make formats such as reality television and Youtube video mash-ups personal. These artists, by talking in video, simultaneously address and communicate with the language we are culturally accustomed to.