21c Museum Hotel Chicago Free Admission Wednesday

Free Admission Wednesday from 24 hours a day at 21C Museum Hotel Chicago - see INFO below. Celebrity portraits may be the most easily recognized imagery in circulation today, though their ubiquity reveals more about our cultural obsessions than about the identities of those we admire. Most viewers today will recognize Lady Gaga as the star of Robert Wilsons video portrait more readily than the figure pictured in Mademoiselle Caroline Rivire, who was the subject of J.A.D. Ingress 19th-century portrait that hangs in the Louvre. While Lady Gaga accurately channels the impending mortality of the sitter (who died shortly after Ingres painted her), we will always see the contemporary pop star, whose image has been infinitely reproduced and disseminated by the expansive engine of 21st-century media, driven and fed by the publics desire. Aligning religious belief with the worship of beauty and fame that drives consumption, and enacting an obsessive practice, Graham Dolphin appropriates an advertisement for Dior perfume, onto which he meticulously inscribes the entire Biblical text of Exodus 1-25 as a shadowy, intricate outline on an image of Charlize Theron. Jacob Heustis painstakingly transforms press portraits of heiresses and socialites in his Debutantes series by engraving on mirrors with a diamond, distilling his medium and message into a reflection of public, aspirational value. Within the facial features and biographical inscriptions, viewers see themselves implicated in the creation of the media-driven identity of Paris Hilton and others. More Info below.