The abridged guide to Spring Gallery Night

Officials from the Madison Museum Of Contemporary Art say this year's Spring Gallery Night is the biggest yet, encompassing an assortment of art shows spread out across 59 spaces—not to mention some of the non-event-affiliated shows that always pop up—between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. this Friday. Just looking over MMOCA's complete listing of events is overwhelming, so Decider surveyed the night's options and sorted out a few that look promising.

Downtown
Downtown’s Gallery Night offerings run the gamut from installation to painting to wearable sculpture. What you’re likely to remember isn’t the form they take but the forms and ideas they take apart.

Eric Shows’ In The Way Of The View at the Memorial Union’s Porter Butts Gallery uses layers of paint, double-sided chalkboards, and distorted photos to blur the distinction between finished and unfinished work. David Raine's wall installations, displayed next door in the Class Of 1925 Gallery, challenge printmaking’s boundaries by resembling landscapes rather than self-contained patterns. Downstairs, the Lakefront On Langdon Gallery gets uncharacteristically sassy, daring you to dig into the gritty, the ugly, and the grotesque through a collection curated by Kaity Kropp and Katie Reshel.

Across Library Mall, the Chazen Museum Of Art puts the daring, twisted, and outspoken work of R. Crumb, Kim Deitch, and Art Spiegelman, among others, under the microscope in Underground Classics: The Transformation Of Comics Into Comix, 1963-1990, turning visitors into characters from, say, American Splendor for at least a couple of minutes. At Ancora Coffee's King Street location, Looking Down Town, a set of kite aerial images by local photographer Craig Wilson (discussed in a previous Decider article) that are displayed next to similar shots taken a century earlier by George Lawrence, will either induce vertigo or at least make you wonder what’s been lost in the downtown area’s modest attempts to appear modern, from the construction of Monona Terrace to the remodeling of the Capitol. Also, MMOCA itself will be marking the opening of Return To Function, a show in which several artists subversive side of everyday objects, from Post-It notes to scissors.

East Side
Art Surge, a collective of Wisconsin-based political artists founded a year ago in response to the war on terror, is back with a new installation at Jackie Macaulay Gallery in the Social Justice Center (1202 Williamson St.). Their new show Global Instigations takes on the conflict in Northern Ireland and the plight of workers in Mexico, and, in a surprising turn, even looks warily at the Obama administration. The show is a stylistic mix, but doesn’t lack for collective incisiveness. For less aggressive artworks, check out the abstract photography of Dave Tilton at Carta Studioworks (2001 Atwood Ave.). Tilton’s moody landscapes appear to be large paintings, but are actually multi-layered, digitally manipulated photographs that draw on color and textures, while retaining only hints of the natural elements from which they originate.

Absolutely Art (2322 Atwood Ave.) always overflows with vivid paintings and doodads from folks in the community, and Laura Meddaugh’s Tin Menagerie fits in as a series of acrylics going heavy on whimsical elements to tweak more famous paintings. In Meddaugh’s world, Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” becomes “The Peck,” and features two chickens in heavy embrace. Also showing are Susie Feest’s purses made from repurposed neckties. For refreshments, Absolutely Art will be joining with neighbor Café Zoma (reopening Friday) for a DJ'd party with food catered by Bunky’s Café.

The Wisconsin Council Of The Blind And Visually Impaired (754 Williamson St.)  will host some art even less beholden to tradition. Visually impaired students will display their tactile art pieces, alongside oil paintings by visually impaired artist Albert Schmiege and photographer Barell Dykhuizen. Local recording shop DNA Studios (2057 Winnebago St.) will split its 4,000-square-foot space between two inventive musical shows. In the first, Sid Frenchman Quartet will play avant-garde jazz with a twist—each musician will be hearing different through individual sets of headphones. In the back room, interactive performance piece “She Was Me, I Was Her” will include experimental music loops composed by Brian Daly (DNA's co-owner and frontman of local band Sunshine For The Blind) that are triggered and altered by Marina Kelly and Susan White as they move within the space. Over at the Project Lodge (817 E. Johnson St.), Chele Isaac’s Things Are Supposed To Get Increasingly Beautiful Starting Today (not an official Gallery Night show, but still bringing an interesting twist to the evening) will be shown as a four-channel video installation viewable only from portals on the street, focusing on a winter Issac spent in Buenos Aires.

West Side
On the west side of town, exhibits range from the utilitarian ruggedness of discovered objects to the abstract interactivity of installation artworks and performance pieces. Tracy Doreen Dietzel will be hosting a retrospective of artists' book installations in the DeRicci Gallery at Edgewood College (1000 Edgewood College Dr.), where visitors will be able to contribute to interactive installations, including a phone booth lined with rainbow stripes and circuit boards, on which guests are invited to scribble rants about cellular phones. Dietzel will close the night with a short performance piece involving lip-synching and hula hooping, something she refers to as liphooping.

For those who appreciate old-worldliness, Unearthed (2501 University Ave.) will be dusting off the ghostly remnants of bygone eras, including framed wool swimwear, an autopsy table, and a set of emu eggs. In line with the ideals of sustainability, TileArt (1719 Monroe St.) will host MadHAUS: The MadCityWay To Make Homes Artistic, Utilitarian, And Sustainable. Showcasing the company's collaborative efforts with the burly-sounding Red Beard Lumber to combine beautification and green building techniques, TileArt wants people to have their rain barrels and enjoy looking at them, too.

South Side
Gallery-goers looking to get the whole shebang in one sitting can take in Spectacular Spectacular (1414 S. Park St.) and see 11 MFA/MA students unleash their thesis statements upon the world. Promising "sculpture, painting, print, photography, performance, video and everything in between," this event encompasses just about all the different media the art world has to offer, with just a touch of grad-school feistiness on the side.