Michael Workman

In popular video games such as iD software's "Return to Castle Wolfenstein," players roam long narrow hallways and scale lookout towers from which to pick off opponents at a safe distance, using a rifle and scope.

Hopefully no such shootings will take place when Chicago-based artist Christine Tarkowski's exhibit, "Administrative Bunker + Rook," opens this Friday at the Hyde Park Art Center.

In any case, curator Annie Morse warns patrons to prepare themselves for a loose interpretation of the building that looks a lot like a siege. "We joke about how our administrative offices are tucked away in the 7 1/2 floor from that movie, 'Being John Malkovich.' When people come out to the Art Center, they walk up the spiral staircase looking for our administrative offices and it's kind of this `Dark Shadows' experience." Tarkowski wanted to address how administrative offices are hidden away in art spaces and explore the defensive notions that are implied. Her solution was to construct a 3D installation, including the fourteen-foot-tall structure that Morse describes as a siege ladder but that Tarkowski insists fits her concept for a castle rook. Comparatively, it's a massive imposition on the space: at its height, the Art Center's vaulted ceiling only rises to eighteen feet. The rook sits alongside an equally tall "bunker" that resembles a silo, made of steel and sheathed in a digitally printed fabric that patrons must enter and rise up through in order to enter the Art Center's balcony that the administrative offices sit behind. Morse says that both Tarkowski structures sample elements from beaux-arts architecture to comment on the decorative elements "that architects call `spinach' when they're being funny."

Accompanying these structures are six four-foot-tall cardboard "anti-tank elements" resembling jacks that patrons will recognize as the steel-girdered structures the military places on beaches to prevent the advance of mechanized weapons. All this military hardware gets "imposed on the playground" of the Art Center's ballroom, simultaneously modifying and commenting on the institution's current use, which required that the space be converted from its previous incarnation as a hotel. There are still bank vaults, a vestigial architectural element from the space's days as a hotel, tucked away in the offices. That would explain how Tarkowski's defensive interpretation of the Art Center coalesces in an experience at once "antique and nostalgic and completely new."

Pop-up art

Local comix patriarch Chris Ware pops up at two shows this week, including "The Paper Sculpture Show," which opens early next week at the University of Illinois' Gallery 400. This traveling exhibit depends on involvement from patrons. On exhibit are two-dimensional works by some thirty artists, including Olav Westphalen, Helen Mirra and McArthur "genius"-grant-winning sculptor Sarah Sze, designed for assembly into a three-dimensional paper object. Inspired by the popularity of paper-doll cutouts and Mad Magazine's famous three-fold page, patrons can settle into one of the workstations custom-designed by artist Allan Wexler and assemble, for instance, one of Minerva Cuevas's fake Ids or one of Aric Obrosey's blade-fingered Freddie Krueger workgloves. For those worried about ineptitude with scissors and glue, no need to sweat: each of the pieces come equipped with a sheet of instructions.

Opening at the same time in the gallery's project space, "POSTChicago: April 2003-April 2004" will examine the public poster initiative that helped to launch Chicago artist Vincent Dermody's recent "I (Circle) Chicago" controversy. Also included in this one-year survey of POSTChicago's are projects by Andy Hall, John Neff, Philip Von Zweck, "Lint" art collaborative's Rena Leinberger, and Michael Wolf of the Network of Casual Art.

Hammer time

Ware reappears in "Glasses Are Free: Eight Artists Between Page and Wall" at River North's Carl Hammer Gallery. No doubt Ware will feel more at home here among fellow comic-style artists such as Gary Panter and David Sandlin. The latter's oil paintings more closely resemble the schizoid thought experiments of Ivan Brunetti than the psychological interiors of Ware. "A Sentimental Education," for instance, depicts a squinty-eyed man in a dunce cap levitating over a bonfire, encircled by a coterie of grinning, alien-eyed figures in tighty-whiteys. A sign in the distance marks the place as Eden Gardens, the legs and thighs of a man and woman visible in the periphery. Above the scene looms a dark, billowing cloud. Populated with talking heads, the central figure gets cajoled with a stream of one-word commandments to "Cry," "Lust," "Obey," and "Hate." A leering foreground figure warns the viewer that "You may already be a sinner." That there's no way to tell for sure reveals the biographical heart of Sandlin's paranoiac vision of self-loathing, a perhaps unfortunate side-effect of this now-mainstream approach to the medium.

"Administrative Bunker + Rook" shows at The Hyde Park Art Center, 5307 South Hyde Park , (773)324-5520, through February 21. "The Paper Sculpture Show" and "POSTChicago: April 2003-April 2004" show at Gallery 400, 1240 West Harrison, (312)996-6114, through February 7. "Glasses Are Free: Eight Artists Between Page and Wall" show at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 North Wells ,(312)266-8512, through February 7.

(2004-01-06)

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