Michael Workman

Many galleries apparently don't see any point in remaining open this time of year, with their patrons off at summer homes. However, Chicago wakes up from the spell of summer this time every year with one big push to mark the middle of the season. The aptly titled group show "Summer" at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery in the West Loop neighborhood is among the most compelling of the exhibits on offer.

The works of Chicago-based artists Paul Nudd, Leslie Baum and Mark Booth are the subject of the exhibit, with painting, drawing and video on display. Of the group, Baum's paintings seem the most incompatible with the others, though her incidental pastiches set the standard for depictions of imagined natural environments. Starting with oil-stained color fields on canvas, Baum then turns to drawings made on her apparently frequent travels, with the most recent series employing elements taken from a visit to Switzerland. Against her elegantly stained backdrops, Baum has interleaved images of stacked logs, hanging tree branches laden with snow and mountaintops that appear oddly miniaturized in the distance.

Conversely, as an ostensible enthusiast of the silly and absurd, Booth's drawings and nine 18-inch-square enamel paintings evoke a world seen through the lens of abstract experiment. Though Booth's formal drawings--often made using heavy black lines--seek to investigate, they don't appear poised to upheave, leaving whatever story line they allude to bobbing in an ocean of floating, mostly humorous signifiers. Booth's painting "Snail Headed Egret," an intentionally flat-looking image of a green speech bubble situated against a dark background, evokes an image of the fantastical creature of its title. The egret then gets put through a few other phrasal permutations in subsequent panels, eventually joined by a virtual bestiary, including the "Tentacle-Footed Tiger," and "Horse-Headed Elephant." These evocative fantasy-animal phrases sometimes turn up in cavernous spaces, which occasionally resemble stomach cavities.

An argument could be made that this series of Booth's work is significantly concerned with the image-conjuring power of speech, pronouncements that effectively grasp after otherworldly fantasia, and which hold the power to make something that exists only in the mind, but with definite effects in the physical realm. A corollary could be something like a priest's ability to make a husband and wife merely by pronouncing two people as such. It is the particulars of such pronouncements from which the textual element of Booth's image-making garner their force.

While Booth's images depict this internalizing process fantastically, Nudd's drawings of fiercely biomorphic forms--spiraling, tentacled, forming piles and grids resembling synaptic strings, all on white backgrounds--offer a more technical interpretation. Seemingly subject to a never-ending anachronistic process of mutation, these sloppy strings of green goo appear at times to be shedding unsuited cellular components or, alternatively, dripping blood, apparently from the failure of life to take hold. Nudd's work thus seems to attempt an analysis of raw genetics.

Similar in their graphical tendencies to Booth's drawings and paintings, these images portray a world of cellular accumulations perhaps fighting to realize their potential as fully realized organisms, perhaps fighting off disease. Either way, they are certainly dynamic in the artist's struggle to depict the living specifics of the micro-organic. Extrapolating from his drawings, Nudd has also produced a series of video works, some of which look like they were shot through an electron microscope, others of which appear to depict the shifting micro-bacterial interaction of lab cultures. Brimming with what resemble organs pumping whitish liquids, crumbling plaques, bubbling body fluids and mucousy-thick expectorants in a range of watery colors, these images are delightfully gross to watch.

Culture camp

This weekend, the public-art tent show previously reported in this column, organized in conjunction with local art collective Garden Fresh, will finally open at the Evanston Art Center. In the space between the Lighthouse Landing Park Beach and the 16th-century Tudor building that serves as the Center's home, the tents and their contents will be situated along a verdant stretch of grassy lawn.

Included in the show are Chicago-based artists Justin Goh, Brian Taylor and Alain Douglas Park. Goh has placed a full-sized front door flat on the ground and pitched his tent over it, from which speakers play the sounds of lawnmowers, doorbells and other such atmospherics of a suburban household. Taylor has constructed a kind of temple, modifying his tent by raising it up on 3x3s to create a canopy, which he has then run a tautened rope through the middle of. Only three or four inches off the ground, patrons will be encouraged to walk the tightrope. As curator Tom Burtonwood explains, "the desired effect of walking the tightrope in the context of the Art Center's tranquil, contemplative, relaxed lawn is to emphasize the empowering aspect of participation."

Park, interested in the subject of the universe in its micro/macro sense--that is, in which a legion of single blades of grass are needed to make up a field--has used his tent to construct a scale model of an Irish elk. Park's notion of using his tent as a sculptural element to construct a whole animal inverts the practice of hunting societies to find some way of using every part of a slain animal to serve the needs of their community.

"Summer" at Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery, 119 North Peoria, #2C, (312)492-7261, through August 16. "Recreation Ground" at the Evanston Art Center, 2603 Sheridan Road, Evanston, (847)475-5300, through July 20.

(2003-07-16)

Also by Michael Workman

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When you manage successfully to balance curiosity and intelligence in the same show--watch out
(2003-07-09)

Eye Exam
Attending the opening of "America's Best: Art Inspired by Pabst Blue Ribbon" at the March to the Sea Gallery in the Humboldt Park neighborhood this past Friday, I was keenly aware of the presence of a commercial network.
(2003-07-02)

Eye Exam
Attendance numbers at the opening night of any exhibition serve as no more an indicator of the success of the art on display than prowess at the game of Scrabble functions as a measure of literary talent.
(2003-06-25)

Eye Exam
An impressive amount of art is being done online, and some of the more interesting of these projects shine through as participatory in their approach
(2003-06-18)

Eye Exam
(2003-06-11)

Eye Exam
(2003-06-04)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-28)

Neo-religion
(2003-05-28)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-21)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-14)

Eye Exam
(2003-05-07)

Eye Exam
(2003-04-30)

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