“No More Worlds”

Luke Painter, Woodlot House #2, 2008.

It’s exciting to witness the start of an apartment gallery with so much promise. Concertina Gallery occupies the second floor of a building where concertinas (accordion-like instruments) were once manufactured. Some of its first exhibition’s seven artists specifically engage its unconventional space. Madeleine Bailey discreetly embeds zippers into the walls for her installation Mourning’s Glory (2009), for example, creating a sense of both comforting enclosure and suffocation. Jessie Mott scales down her Black Rainbow series so that her installation’s heavy unstretched canvas and papier-mâché globes lose some of their usual bewildering impact but still give you the impression you’ve stumbled across the remnants of a mysterious ritual.

Alex McLeod’s disorienting landscapes and performance artist Shana Moulton’s dryly humorous video Whispering Pines 6 are the show’s strongest works. While the scenes in McLeod’s prints appear to be carefully constructed miniatures—with clouds suspended by strings as in a B-movie set—their realistic surfaces and textures are digitally rendered. Moulton, in character as Cynthia, a bizarre mix of cat lady and hipster, evokes cable-access shows’ awful special effects and artificial interiors as she undergoes a string of psychedelic and sad experiences, surrounded by heaps of thrift-store kitsch.

“No More Worlds” feels remarkably fresh because it combines such trendy work from Brooklyn, Toronto and other cities with pieces by emerging artists such as Bailey and Mott, who recently finished M.F.A.s at SAIC and Northwestern, respectively. If more curators bring Concertina Gallery’s level of professionalism to Milwaukee Avenue’s many empty storefronts, Logan Square may finally fulfill its potential as an art district.

• More Art & Design reviews
• More Art & Design articles