Emerson Dameron

The opening for "Jesus Saves" at Wicker Park's Buddy Gallery has attracted a healthy crowd for a frigid weeknight.

Dustin Mertz's wall of dead rock stars stares down a hipster couple lounging alongside Katherine Baker's fetish-garbed mannequins. Gregory Shirilla bends a stranger's ear on his series of A-list martyrs, each packed into a portrait with their respective paraphernalia of self-destruction. Rococo prayer candles stand opposite half-tapped bottles of red.

Baker, Shirilla, Mertz, Jeremiah Ketner and Michael Coleman planned to top off "Jesus Saves" with inflated mockups of Jack T. Chick tracts (the guy who draws the tri-colored pamphlets that witness to you from payphones and public johns), positioned on Buddy's rear rooftop for optimum Blue Line visibility. This outdoor "Nativity Scene" was to echo the ambiguity of the exhibition as a whole. Two days before the opening, though, city officials ordered the "graffiti" scuttled. Under threat of legal action, the jumbo tracts came down. Two now serve as mannequin platforms. A few snapshots of the original are posted at the center of the room, with actual Chick booklets scattered beneath. No one's snapping these up. They must be part of the art.

This is an intimate gathering, says Shirilla, arms extended, more jovial than Christlike. The big bash is tomorrow night.

(2003-12-16)

Also by Emerson Dameron

Subterranean sport
Megan is one such "urban explorer," who enjoys researching and visiting Chicago's deserted structures. She isn't a tagger, a vandal, a voyeur or a terrorist.
(2003-04-15)

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