Michael Workman

Walking along a wooded path takes on new meaning if you happen to have heard a report on the news that a tiger just escaped from the local zoo.

Not only do you have to worry about wildlife, or tripping over a loose root on the ground as you move along, but to navigate that path safely, now you also have to worry about the potential threat of a tiger leaping out of the brush at any moment. This dramatic example reveals how situational context vitally informs our perspective.

Encountering The Renaissance Society space at the University of Chicago for the first time, we are told by the catalog copy that Brussels-based artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (pronounced TUR-lynx) was struck by the context of the Society space. Housed in Cobb Hall on the university campus, the building is mostly used for undergraduate courses. Building her exhibition out of "that which is given," Tuerlinckx employs video and objects collected from the building in "Chicago Studies: Les Étants Donnés Space Thesis." Read by the curators as a response to Minimalism and Conceptualism, they suggest an affinity between Tuerlinckx's work and that of Marcel Broodthaers. Whereas Broodthaers' visual practice was framed by a sense of loss, curators instead suggest a sense of deferral with Tuerlinckx.

Rather than attempting to fill the perceived emptiness of conceptualism, Tuerlinckx alternatively uses objects from The Renaissance Society space and Cobb Hall in general--including post-it notes, paper towels and flyers taped to the walls--which also serve as a statement on the institutional context of her exhibition. Several slide and video projections of these found objects face the viewer immediately upon entering the space, rotating to appear in eight sequences of sixty minutes. In turn, these images alternate between the projections and several smaller monitors placed in study cubicles to the right of the entrance, and elsewhere in the gallery.

In one projected sequence on a small screen in the corner, inscribed in blue pencil on a white background, the characters A and B (which subtly recur in the exhibit) are slowly filled in and scribbled out, using the same blue pencil until a blue field of color is all that remains. Other video sequences document the artist's movements and observations: workers setting up walls, for instance, or the artist's point of view as she pokes her camera into copy-machine closets, storage lockers and finally even off-campus, riding in a car and then out onto Chicago streets.

A long table to the left of the entrance is filled with meticulously arranged objects: books, lengths of wood, wire assemblages, cardboard boxes, still-papered straws, some of these partially dipped in gray paint. Tuerlinckx's doubled use of these objects both as instruments of the site's own measure and as evidence of a putative process of classification serve as evidence of the artist's environment-charting methodology. Tuerlinckx appears mindful to gradually restrict any critical impingement of the unknown, infusing the space with her own imaginary blueprint through a procedural system of painstaking navigation, of encounter and appraisal upon which her visual practice is suspended. In doing so, she produces a catalog of odds and ends that represents her recipe for coping with the space.

Meaning escapes

To mark its five-year-anniversary, Dupreau Gallery in the North Center/Lincoln Square neighborhood has organized "Escape Vehicles," a group show exhibiting works that "capture the indeterminacy of meaning as it takes shape in metaphor and illusion." A pervasive theme in recent exhibitions, the problematic uncertainty of imaginative space staked out by Dupreau's exhibition is compelling. Included is work by such artists as Ken Fandell whose past work, including landscapes superimposed with self-denigrating phrases penned on post-it notes, has been compared by some critics to Ed Ruscha. Fandell's video "I'm So Excited," a fractal-like, split-screen video of surging streams of water imparts a sense of often subtly accelerating and decelerating advancement into fluid depths.

This sense of fluid movement is also evident in Kerry Skarbakka's hair-raising large-format photographs, shot with the help of a Hollywood stuntman, depicting figures plunging from back-breaking heights. Always suspended in mid-tumble--from the boughs of trees, upper-story balconies, rocky cliffs--these tumultuous frozen instances simultaneously inspire winces and raise grave questions about the moment of liberation. Skarbakka's prints correspond well to Paul Burns' contemplative architectural piece, an attempt at integrating sculpture and architecture. Burns has embedded an airplane window into a wall, inviting viewers to gaze out onto a constructed landscape modeled on an Antarctic wilderness of backlit sky and, using a fog machine, drifting cloud. Though admittedly artificial, for some viewers, the very notion evoked by gazing out onto such a sustained distance can prove as unsettling as any actual plunge to earth.

Joelle Tuerlinckx shows at The Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis, Bergman Gallery, Cobb Hall 418, (773)702-8670, through June 15. "Escape Vehicles" shows at Dupreau Gallery, 4229 North Lincoln, (773)528-6440, through July 12.

(2003-06-04)

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A graduate student at the University of Chicago has organized a conference at the U of C on the subject of video games and gaming culture...
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