Michael Workman

Descend the rusty stairs to the swimming-pool pit of the West Loop's Monique Meloche Gallery showroom floor and you will have to pass behind a white floor-to-ceiling curtain to find former Chicagoan Cindy Loehr's newest work.

Three pan lights are clipped to boards lying on the floor to illuminate the three sculptures, mounted on high pedestals containing speakers in the right rear corner of the space. Three sculptures of bluebirds rest atop the pedestals, each large, faceless, featureless figure skinned with plastic garland. A three-channel audio recording plays in a loop. Listening, viewers will think Gregorian chant. Looking, they'll think Greek chorus or something similarly mystical--and they'll be right. Except for Loehr, the mystery evoked more specifically has to do with the persistence of severed family bonds.

But step back a moment. Passing behind the screen isolates you with the sculptures, forcing you to listen to a vaguely accusatory song filled with such refrains as "You cannot be saved/Wrapped up in your sorrow." Bearing such spiritual advice, these singular figures seem like a visitation or an angelic host in the form of pagan animal figures--which is funny, since most people won't expect a sort of religiosity from a figure adorned with plastic. But their gospel intonation has this effect all the same. After awhile, their song falls silent and the bluebirds seem to recede to basest figuration, like a temporary monument to a god or goddess of flight and Miss America tackiness. Then their six-minute, three-channel audio CD kicks in again with a start. The voice on the soundtrack is that of Carlos Lama, a wheelchair-bound member of the Education Department Faculty at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston who put Loehr's words to music. He's pictured in "Carlos and the Bluebirds," a 24x24 archival digital print that you must request to view. Dressed in blue shirt and dark slacks, hands folded in his lap, a pale Lama stares back at the camera, center in front of the pedestals. Behind him, the bluebirds appear strangely expressive, flattened against the white background, resembling soul singers in low-cut beaded tops.

"Bluebird Burden" recalls two of Loehr's earlier works, "Public Address" and "Songs for Birds." In the first, a piece reflecting on her brother's suicide, chairs were set up in a lecture hall at the University of Illinois' Gallery 400, facing an AV cart with a stereo in front of 8-foot purple satin banners. The stereo broadcasts an eight-minute sound loop of Loehr telling her brother's story as a warning against denying depression. In the second piece, a live performance, more than 10,000 slides were shown in pairs of birds taken during vacations to Florida by the artist's grandfather, Robert Loehr. The images were separated by a vine that branched in two directions, reaching up to a balcony from which Laurie Shuh performed three songs a capella: "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Memories of You" and "Goodnight Sweetheart." Each of these earlier pieces provide the framework for "Bluebird Burden," a work that simultaneously addresses these familiar issues for Loehr and successfully transcends them.

House of Mirrors

On display in the main showroom of the West Loop's Donald Young Gallery are Josiah McElheny's "Landscape Model for Total Reflective Abstraction," numbers I-V. A playful diversity of loops and spindles, blobs, pyramids, droplets and sponge-cake-shaped objects are arranged atop circular and geometrically cut tables, each sitting low to the floor. All of the objects fade at the contact point with the surface of the tables into their own reflection, some made complete, others simply altered in appearance. Some objects have been cast at odd angles, others are made to reach out towards each other and still others appear to cringe from the viewer's gaze. Each piece speaks individually as a whole visual response to its surroundings, with strings of the gallery lights reflected decoratively in their shiny reflective surfaces.

In the back room are "Modernity circa 1952" and "Modernity circa 1962," both subtitled "Mirrored and Reflected Infinitely." This room is eerily dark. At first, the wall-hung display cases lit from within with a dim green light appear to contain reliquaries, the sides and back of the cases arranged to create an infinity effect. The hand-blown and silvered glass objects inside the chrome metal cases--bottles and stoppers, jars and bell-shaped pieces--are reproduced in perpetuity. Viewing them straight on gives the illusion of gazing at perfectly identical, lined-up rows of each object in pairs of two that recede into a background darkness that curves off into an impenetrable blackness. The major difference between the objects in the two cases is a dimpling of the surface of one set of objects.

Across from this, in yet another room, are twelve rectangular "mirror drawings" of uniform size with varied lines and scratches carved into the surfaces--viewers see their reflections in these mirrors, which interacts with the modified surfaces, fracturing the reflected image like water in a pool. Taken as a whole, these and the other silvered glass works of "Total Reflective Abstraction" are expressively literal in their artistic task. In a mere few instances they attempt to transform the reflection on McElheny's abstract formula into a totality, as his wildly spiral-scratched pieces do, acting to preserve the reflected image through a kind of visual veil. Much of what cannot produce a reflection thus provides the basis for what remains outside the abstracting influence of the mirrors, unimpeachably tangible.

Cindy Loehr shows at Monique Meloche Gallery, 951 West Fulton Market, (312)455-0299, through March 13. Josiah McElheny shows at the Donald Young Gallery, 933 West Washington, (312)455-0100, through March 6.

(2004-02-11)

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