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 Eye Exam Sign language
Imagine standing on a street corner somewhere in Chicago, say Belmont
and Clark, waiting for the pedestrian light to change. A quick glance
and something seems out of place. What's different? A sudden, nauseating
flash of recognition: the reflective green street signs are blank of
text. Not just that, but all the signs are blank. Completely blank. A
white sign on the traffic light post, blank. In the near distance, the
Walgreen's sign bears only the iconic blue mortar and pestle with its
sprinkle of magical white powder dancing up the edge. Blank. Across the
street sits the Domino's pizza shop, unidentified except for the brand's
single, iconic red and white domino tile.
This is Chicago-based artist Matt Siber's doppelganger Chicago,
showing at the West Loop's Peter Miller Gallery, a world of wholly
uncommunicative signs. Miller usually struggles to place artistically
notable work on his walls, but Siber's work heaves with inspiration.
Next to these images of a city robbed of its public language, he
positions large frames of the black-and-white text stolen from the
signage in his photos. Splashed across them in their original fonts and
styles, flattened out on the page, are announcements such as No Turn On
Red, Maybelline, United We Stand. Instructions, brand names,
information, mottoes. Gridded to sit in the frame approximate to where
they've been removed from the original, surgically Photoshopped image,
these word-photos represent floating signifiers in their purest, textual
form, detached and unconditionally meaningless except in the association
of names, pronouncements of law and coercive social convention as sales
tactic.
Travel anywhere through his inkjets on paper in this reimagined city
and the familiar suffers a newly minted sense of alienation. In
"Untitled #3," the sensuously posed women in a cosmetic stand displays
stare off into the distance or back at the camera over bottles of
unidentified lotions, polishes, and dyes. Mysterious balms, each
promising juvenescence and beauty restoration, are as completely and
meticulously stripped of their identifying marks as the models who
promote them.
Perhaps Siber's transpositioning of word from image makes a statement
about the absence of dissent through free speech. On an elevated train
station platform between stairways in "Untitled #12," for instance,
only no-smoking iconography speaks: an ad placard emblazoned only with a
towering blue-sky image of the statue of liberty superimposed with a
billowing American flag. In Union Station's great hall (a place many
holiday-goers will be visiting this month), an airline billboard makes
no statement, and the signs for travelers give no direction. Much as the
appellation "911" communicates nothing more than a state of emergency,
an immediate need for law enforcement or medical attention, the
conspicuous absence of language in Siber's imagery allows no direct
communication. Amidst this textual silence, at one end of the Union
Station hall, yet another, more massive American flag hangs, a powerful
symbol somehow equally muted by a missing power of expression. The age of youth
Usually, since artists must pay to compete for juried shows, the very
idea chafes. A potentially interesting one, however, takes place this
week at the Wicker Park neighborhood's Ukrainian Institute of Modern
Art. Called Juventus 2003 (a word meaning "the age of youth"), the
Institute's annual survey of young artists' work this year includes a
mix of twelve students and recent graduates from the United States and
Canada. Included in the exhibit will be photography, painting,
sculpture, prints and additional media.
Melissa Scherrer's large color inkjet print "Satellite" shows the
artist posing barefoot in white pants and turtleneck on a weathered back
patio in front of a pair of sliding glass doors. Turtleneck pulled up
over her forehead, sleeve pulled to cover her forearm and hand, she sits
facing the satellite receiver, evoking the eerily anthropomorphic shape
and bleach-whiteness of the dish and radial antenna casing in front of
her. Multilevel art-making
In "Pyramid Scheme: 31 Artists," opening this week at the West
Loop's Schopf Gallery on Lake, the scheme's the thing. Think Amway.
Curated by Chicago-based artist Vincent Como to maximize the hands-off
approach of those at the top, he devised a program whereby artists
selected two additional artists to invite to participate, dividing the
participants into five levels of selection for a grand total of 31
contributors. All artists were asked to produce works on paper, with the
intention of assembling a survey show of drawings from the broadest
possible cross-section of artists. More conceptual exercise than actual
curation, the results are by definition mixed, with any cohesion or
coherence rising out of themes and patterns typical to all of the
artists involved.
In any case, Como's approach fundamentally challenges the notion of
curatorial responsibility in recasting the role as a kind of
ostentatious huckster. At best, this strategy will manage to address the
field of contemporary drawing in terms of unexpected and lively mutual
enthusiasms and, at worst, should make for some good sport. Matt Siber shows at Peter Miller, 118 North Peoria,
(312)226-5291, through January 10. Juventus 2003 shows at The Ukrainian
Institute of Modern Art. 2320 West Chicago, (773)227-5522, through
January 18. Pyramid Scheme: 31 Artists shows at Schopf Gallery on Lake,
942 West Lake, (312)432-1630, through January 24.
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