Many an art lover in Chicago claim Peter Miller Gallery as a favorite. Since 1979 the gallery has shown emerging and established contemporary artists at the forefront of the cutting edge. One of the pioneers of the now exploded West Loop art district, Peter Miller moved his space from River North to the 118 N. Peoria building in 2000. This whopping 3,500-square-feet space incorporates three exhibition rooms. If you're not into the main show in the front room, be sure to venture to the two back galleries where a smorgasbord of work by represented artists is always on view.

Peter Miller Gallery manages to balance an array of emerging Chicago artists, fresh from the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College, with a more experienced batch that regularly gets museum shows and print copy in Artforum and Art in America. Though the media shown ranges from photography to installation to video to sculpture to painting, there is a common thread that weaves throughout all the work: post-pop. Each artist is invested in pop culture, whether through the use of its elements in their visual vocabularies or in the examination of the role of the media, consumption and the commercialization of culture in contemporary society.

While the entire list of represented artists is exciting, a few to really watch for are Jason Salavon, Laura Ball, and Laurie Hogin. Salavon reconfigures "masses of communal material" such as major motion pictures like "Apocalypse Now" and "Taxi Driver" (word has it that Leonardo DiCaprio purchased his "Titanic" piece), high school yearbooks and consensus data to create new digitized images out of them. Laura Ball blurrs the line between violence and play with a series of beautiful watercolor paintings that show her sisters and mother battling with toy guns in fantastical settings. Laurie Hogin (Chair of the Painting and Sculpture Program at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) paints, in the detailed tradition of Flemish master realists, fantastical animals, wildly rendered and colored from the affects of pollution and consumer culture.

Centerstage Reviewer: Joanne Hinkel