Michael Workman

This week, the MacArthur Foundation announced its annual "genius" grant awards, honoring each of the twenty-four chosen for advances in creative thought with $500,000 over five years. Those awarded include professors of chemistry and physics, human-rights workers, computer scientists and sculptor Sarah Sze--all thinkers who have contributed to shifts in how we decipher the world around us. Two exhibits this week offer similar but ultimately contrasting views on the nature of our relationship to the world around us and how we metabolize that experience to make sense of our place in it.

Creature comforts

"Don't Fail Me Now" at the TBA Exhibition Space in the River North neighborhood addresses the way people artificially inflate their self-esteem through identifying with larger institutions and mythologies. Curators Keri Butler and Lisa Williamson examine what prompts people to reach for advertised comforts, from the familiarity of T-shirts emblazoned with the names of unreachable Ivy League universities and ball caps celebrating multinational companies to the ironic use of brand-name clothing.

The exhibit doesn't stop at a critique of fashion victimhood, however. David Altmejd contributes a number of severed and decomposing werewolf heads adorned with hair, glitter and costume jewelry. Local artist Andy Moore's 7-foot sculpture of White Stripes drummer Meg White takes the hero worship of rock stars to the limit. Constructed with tape, pages ripped from magazines, cardboard and foam, the artist has given his sculpture the title "Meg White is So Hot for Me." Probably not, but imagining the adoration of the gods goes back to the trysts of Zeus, often disastrous for the objects of the immortal's affection. Even gods created by the popular media have a special allure.

Molly Smith's cut cardboard work, "Mountain," a night image of a craggy peak ascending to Olympic heights through cloud and stars superimposed with a handwritten script from which the show takes its title, suggests the home of a jealous, supernatural being looking down on creation in disappointment and anger. The grandeur of Smith's vision contrasts in both scale and sensibility to Chicago-based artist Amanda Ross-Ho's "remnants of the ordinary." A collection of the leftovers of daily life, the artist singles out Dixie cups, scrap paper and other such nonessential items endearing to the everyday.

Tiny creatures

This week "At the Edge: Innovative Art in Chicago," a series at Gallery 400 at UIC, features Chicago-based artist Sumakshi Singh with "Void." Singh creates "microenvironments" that approximate the response of living organisms to the intrusion of architecture. Rather than following the division of walls and floor, vegetation exploits cracks in the wall or holes in the floor--scraping and shaping globs of paint, leaving tape, scuff marks and fixing mixed material assemblages resembling mold sprouts or fungus to the walls.

While stuffing a few holes in the wall may not equal bloody revolution, it's a start. Except how such works are meant to subvert the gallery space remains fuzzy. Couldn't such organisms also subvert the sterility of a name-brand restaurant or shopping mall? Probably. Of course, we'd expect such vegetative growths in a gas-station bathroom, where sterility is in doubt, but how does a gallery qualify as a fruitless, unimaginative space?

Granted, the traditional "white cube" exhibition is an easy model to replicate, but sterility isn't a given. What happens in the space, whether gallery, apartment or hotel room, actually matters; discounting the space as an artistic strategy, frankly, has been replicated pretty much as frequently as the opening of new "white cubes." Singh's representations of nature, while meant to cast the space as less than well-pruned, may not rise to subversion, which requires ruination, complete and utter destruction. Execution is everything, however, and a few "new large scale installations and other smaller dispersed works" are also promised. These could make a difference, or the work could be as void as the white cube strategy it seeks to subvert.

"Don't Fail Me Now" shows at TBA Exhibition Space, 230 West Huron Street, (312)587-3300, through November 8. "Void" shows at Gallery 400 at UIC, 1240 West Harrison, (312)996-6114, through Oct 18.

(2003-10-08)

Also by Michael Workman

Eye Exam
Tectonic shifts are taking place across the art-world map, movements intended to resuscitate dead cities and transform the future of mass art exhibition
(2003-10-02)

Eye Exam
As a society, our simultaneous disassociation from and obsession with images of death and destruction are legitimately driving us insane
(2003-09-25)

Tip of the Week
Filling the gallery walls with arrows made of blood wood mounted with Swarovski rhinestones, Larson transforms the masculine arsenal of arrows and snare into a collection of "feminized" objects that would make even Liberace proud
(2003-09-17)

Eye Exam
Two current exhibitions probe the convergence points and essential nature of architecture and sculpture
(2003-09-17)

Tip of the Week
(2003-09-10)

Eye Exam
(2003-09-10)

Eye Exam
(2003-09-04)

Pencil pushers
(2003-08-27)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-27)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-20)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-13)

Eye Exam
(2003-08-05)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment