Michael Workman

"Slang Minimal" at TBA Exhibition Space in the River North neighborhood will have a painfully short three-week run. Local painter Michael Jefferson takes slang as a metaphor for urban culture, exploring on canvas and in drawings and sculpture modernity's relationship to this fluid and ever-changing form of language. Modern city life informs the shape of the streets, those that people them and their use of words. Each finished canvas is the result of an unrevealed set of rules the artist employs for placing letters that form a slang word or phrase. "Fresh," for example, or "oh oh."

Bright colors cavort in, on, around the texts. Some words fall apart and fade back into the image while others remain overt. Small wooden sticks are used to construct little star-shaped structures (the cast of a Chicago diagonal-street intersection perhaps) and sculptures resembling electrical towers. Language and living space playfully collide. Bling bling. Jefferson's art rolls off the eye easily as a newly invented meaning off the tongue.

Michael Jefferson shows at TBA Exhibition Space, 230 West Huron, (312)587-3300, through December 13.

(2003-11-19)

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