Michael Workman

Make a wish. Blow out the candles. It's a ritual tinged with an aura of sympathetic magic that's performed every year by most everbody to mark their birthday. As we get older, the failure to extinguish all the candles on one's cake in a single gust suggests the strain of senescence, of life's spark fading along with our strength to extinguish the tiniest lights of our past life. Dallas-based artist Andrew Bennett's intriguing new installation "While My Neighbor Sleeps" at Klein Art Works uses birthday candles mounted in beeswax panels as a metaphor for time, aging and the fleeting duration of human life.

In his six-minute video, rows and rows and rows of miniature birthday candles smolder, buckle and collapse beneath an unseen heat source. Time passes with the fall of each candle, symbolically robbing memory of the moments that filled the years they represent. The video's soundtrack, consisting of ambient electromagnetic and radio frequency recordings of a suburban neighborhood's night noises mixed with the dim distant sounds of household appliances, adds a poignant sense of the mundane acceptance of life's loss. Seen from above, the melted candles resemble a shag carpet of curled, melted wax. Six wall-mounted pieces also employing birthday candles round out Bennett's installation. The timing of a show that so closely examines the forces bearing on our own fragile mortality takes on an even deeper significance during the holiday season.

The taming of

A shrew, a mouse-like rodent no bigger than your thumb, lies sideways on the living-room floor, tiny legs and tail folded in a furry shroud. Another lies on the sunlit front porch. In the backyard, yet another tiny body perfectly placed in the center of a large stone. "My cats would bring them to me as presents," says Maine-based artist Pam Larson. "Sometimes they would bring me three or four a day." Each shrew looks like it simply dropped dead. They're perfectly preserved, not marked with even the slightest evidence of an attempt to eat them, or of their mauling.

The photographs of the rodents are stored in one of three hardbound archival folios, this one marked "Shrews," taken on Penobscot Bay, an island in Maine where Larson's been spending her summers for seven years. She's been photographing the environment there for three. Another folio, marked "Holes," takes her curiosity for animal interruptions in nature beyond her own backyard. Foraging along trails through thicket too small for humans, Larson records diminutive holes in piles of grass, heaps of foliage and twigs. "You find them walking along these paths, which cut right through the woods," explains Larson. "I'm trying to understand how they're living on this land, how they're seeing it. The island's becoming more and more inhabited by people and the paths are running right into their habitats." In one image, a hole peeks out from a swirling center of a sprawling field of dry grass, emptily framed in the bottom right-hand corner of her lens, connecting the expanse of earth beyond.

Larson's five-minute 8mm video transfer, "Paths," gives patrons a critter's-eye view of the woods. Lugging the camera inches above the forest floor, parting the grasses, turned corners quickly dead-end into virgin forest then open in new directions, past a number of quickly flashing burrows. Fallen trees, rotting leaves, stones and slabs of wet moss mark out the thriving landscape. Larson's last folio, marked "Deer Beds," holds a stack of photos taken on deep forays into woodsy corners, to record the aftermath of spots where deer have slept hidden behind shrubbery or hunkered down between a copse of trees. "I never came face-to-face with a deer," she laments. What Larson did occasionally find was a stack of empties left by hunters: Pabst, Coors. Beer cans with labels that depict wildernesses teeming with life, herds of high-antlered bucks darting boldly past through the brush.

Blowing up

Taking his turn this month at the MCA's local curiosity show, "12x12: New Artists/New Work," Chicago artist John Parot peaks out. Past works on paper include a highly acclaimed series of vaguely anthropomorphic mountain peaks, crystalline and ascending sharply to terminate in razor-sharp crests. Snowy white, or purple on backgrounds of pink, red, green and black. The showstopper comes when you realize that these mountains are not made of rock and earth but of cocaine. Parot's drawings serve as metaphors for the mountain-sized degrees of self-indulgent despair sanctioned by modern culture, especially the garden-variety brand of pity emulated by rundown, burned-out conspicuous consumers everywhere. Substance abuse and emotional garbage-canning are the keywords here: Parot often crowns his peaks with cryptic phrases resembling blank verse, arranged in what viewers could easily read as poetic stanza, heavy with despair and longing, such as the fatalistic "Oh! You pretty things! Don't get me wrong life is miserable and oh so very long."

And should there be any doubt as to the source of the artist's willful self-destruction, he offers this zinger: "Cigarettes & Cocaine Lines, Don't worry about me I'm feeling fine, billowing clouds of gray & white cover the sky and block the light summer slowly creeps towards fall still waiting still hoping maybe you'll call." Unrequited love, the unchallenged champion of despair, retains its title as the most potent narcotic ever.

Andrew Bennett shows at Klein Art Works, 400 North Morgan, (312)243-0400, through January 3. Pam Larson shows at New Catalog Gallery, 119 North Peoria, (312)829-6220, through December 19. John Parot shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, through January 4.

(2003-12-02)

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