Michael Workman

"The grand old patriarchs, those mighty elms, before which I often, when alone, and without affectation, bowed my head, and could without shame have knelt and kissed the turf at their feet--where are they now?"

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, "Typical Elms and Other Trees of Massachusetts"

On a mid-summer day half a decade ago, wind blows through the elms lining an idyllic stretch along the 600 block of South Taylor in Oak Park. Branches shudder, leaves rustle. Children's voices can be heard in the distance, laughter and shouting. Lawnmowers. A sharp charcoal smell. Except for the shade provided by the trees, it's hot. Hotter than hot. But it's not the heat that's killing things in this Chicago suburb, it's a tiny bark beetle carrying a lethal strain of fungus known as Dutch Elm Disease.

UIC School of Art & Design professor and one-time Oak Park resident Esther Parada finds in elm trees an abundant symbol for loss and change. Three years in the making, "When the Bough Breaks" completes the work she started as a fellow at the Bunting Institute in 1997 and 1998. Her two-part installation, "Canopy: A Meditation on the Demise of the American Elm," at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, served as her basis for research as a UIC fellow at the turn of the century. Her research into contemporary landscape techniques found an acceptance of the tendency to fetishize elms, a tendency that led to planting large numbers of them closely together. When the disease struck, it easily traveled between a tangled network of roots to wipe out whole populations. All of Parada's earlier work informs her present effort, opening this weekend at the West Loop's nonprofit Gallery 312.

The show's title may refer to the tendency of elms afflicted with Dutch Elm Disease to develop weaknesses in their trunks that lead to the tree's collapse. Such collapses are highly dangerous events, the suburban equivalent of skyscraper ice, when huge sections of the canopy break away and leaden slabs of wood come crashing to the ground. More generally, it's also a metaphor for the phenomena that Parada refers to as the "cataclysmic collapses in New York and Washington D.C.," catastrophic examples of system failure and breakdown. Parada openly wonders about the necessity of restoring what she refers to as "yesterday's elegance," a response to Dutch Elm promoted by the Elm Research Institute, and "When the Bough Breaks" can be read as an attempt to pry open the cultural history implied by the manipulation of horticulture. A huge, 14.5' x 40' photo mural on the gallery's main wall imparts all the stately grandeur and vague menace implied by the elm's imposing scale, its night-lit height an impressive outgrowth of nature's vital forces. Parada juxtaposes this with an image of a fallen elm, its branches crushed and snapped to pieces, serving as a temporary playground for delighted children.

Against this, Parada juxtaposes photographs of her Oak Park neighborhood and childhood in Michigan and includes information on scientific work underway to produce disease-resistant elm hybrids. Science exists to make human life easier, and catastrophe defines the space between science and community, allowing us to discern strength from weakness. Yet, everything could change in an instant, reversing the rules of survival and loss, allowing a beetle to bring down a tree.

Pirate treasure

Curator Staci Boris wants you to shake your moneymaker. Or at least that's what you'll think when you check out "Atmosphere," a new exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Central to the show's concept is a video installation by Wolfgang Tillmans titled "Lights (Body)" that mimics the environment of a dance club. Fans of Tillmans will be tempted to see how the artists handle this, his first video installation.

Filling out the program are works by Ed Ruscha, Richard Prince and others, dragged from the museum's permanent collection vault. Judy Ledgerwood's "Driving Into Delirium" captures the persuasive combination of light and form that constitute an aesthetically suggestive environment, one that perhaps limns a hypnotic state. Add a dose of Charles Long in the form of an interactive sound sculpture, and it's a show likely to instill youthful urges in even the stodgiest of viewers. Right. Now: shake it!

Tea party

Past work by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (partner of novelist Achy Obejas) has used eggs, cowry shells, soil and human hair to address a wide range of issues including war, suicide and guilt. Not afraid of making political statements, Bruguera has staged art performances, for instance, in mothballed military prisons--a performance shut down by the Cuban government. This weekend, the artist comes to West Loop's Rhona Hoffman Gallery with "Dated Flesh." Her exhibit will include an installation using video and tea bags. Hundreds of tea bags, their dried, shriveled skin stained with wet tea juice, individually steeped by visitors to the tea salons Bruguera staged at the Art Institute. Arising from her experience living in Modinagar, India, the tea bags refer to the role of power in the suppression of cultural difference. Despite the encouragement of xenophobia in our country's wartime environment, this show should generate a little heat and light of its own.

Esther Parada, "When The Bough Breaks" shows at Gallery 312, 312 North May, (312)942-2500, through March 13. "Atmosphere" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 East Chicago, (312)280-2660, through May 9. Tania Bruguera shows at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, 118 North Peoria, 1st Floor, (312)455-1990, through March 13.

(2004-02-03)

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