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 Eye Exam Unreal World
Upon entering "No Big Cowboy Can Do the Little Things I Do" at the
West Loop's Julia Friedman Gallery, a wholesale visual assault gets
conducted by things clambering up out of what, at first glance, seems an
erratic attempt to configure a shared activity. After gazing a moment,
things start to get sorted out and most visually attractive among what
remains is "Two Alike #2," a pair of black vipers on a white pedestal,
poised to strike, fangless mouths agape. It takes a few seconds before
being jolted into the realization that they're not two separate vipers,
but one with a head at each end of the same body.
With wall paintings, the gallery has been transformed into a backdrop
for the collaboration between Brooklyn-based artist Marc Swanson and
Swedish artist Johan Zetterquist. An eagle, mid-flight, endures a
searing strike to the back by a crooked bolt of lightning. On the wall
across the room, a shadowy-faced figure in short-sleeved shirt and
trousers stands atop a craggy, stair-stepped peak hefting aloft a sword,
lightning connecting with the tip of his blade. Below, smaller peaks map
a landscape otherwise interrupted by a few smoke-belching mountain peaks
and a handful of motionless windmill towers.
Swanson's work includes "State of Emergency," a dirty red deer with
black eyes made of polypropylene foam, paint and glass, kneeling on an
actual whitetail deer pelt, and "Lunar Eclipse," a collage made using
color copies, hockey and cellophane tape. Keeping with the tree theme of
"White Hole," another hockey-tape collage in the back room centered on
the moon glow behind a thicket of trees, this piece depicts a
medium-distance shot of a raging forest fire. "M.D.S.," a graphite
drawing on cured, cracking deerskin, adds a physicality to the exhibit
but Swanson's other three graphite and colored pencil drawings, "Don't
Give Up the Ship," "Shooting Star" and "Consciousness Is the
Ultimate Mystery" deserve more attention.
In these works lay the transcendent heart of the show. Motifs are
repeated throughout each of the drawings, each with striking
similarities of theme and content: they could nearly form a tryptich. In
the farthest left, a photograph of a browned skull has been adhered, a
sharpened stick driven through the nose-hole. Throughout the drawing,
lines jointed with dots meant to evoke constellations have been lightly
drawn in pencil out from behind a tableaux of caverns, hills,
waterfalls, boulders and rainbows. The middle drawing pictures a slew of
constellations crammed into a strip of sky beneath a shooting star. Joy
in sadness, wishfulness in death. A photo of a vulture has been pasted
center-left in the third drawing, against the drawing of a bird of prey
depicted iconographically head-on above a smoky landscape. In all three
drawings, texts instruct the viewer, for instance, to "Live Free or
Die," arguing that "Death is Not the Worst of All Evils," then going
on to ask "What if I Told You I was a Vampire?" This theme continues
in the middle drawing, where text inquires of the viewer, "What if I
Told You I was a Werewolf?"
Zetterquist also has drawings in this show, though his sculptural
objects, "Schools Out For Baxter," "Soccer Sucker (adidas)" and
"Soccer Sucker (squadron)" are the standouts. Made of found objects,
foam, epoxy, metal, clay and acrylic, the two soccer pieces have been
placed side-by-side against a wall of the gallery. They look as if
they've either been blasted with a laser or have gestated some
plant-like alien life form, since burst through the skin scurried off
into the world. Instead, as demonstrated by basketballs at the front of
the gallery, these holes are access-joints for what resemble the coiled
metal water lines used to connect shower heads. Strange and wonderful,
these metallic lines have been attached to the basketball at several
points and then draped out over the floor as if to display a specimen of
some insectoid. A worker in the competition hive, perhaps, once smugly
"in the know," now lifeless and splayed out for gaping at by a curious
public.
Taken together, this show marks the successful collaboration of two
artists with very different sensibilities. Effortlessly skeined together
by the consolations of another, less vicious world, each work functions
as the head of a singular venomous will, poised to defend against the
hated possibility of a fallen reality. Fool's cool
Is it better to remain silent and let one think you a fool than to
open your mouth and remove all doubt? Certainly a hard mantra to live by
for video artist Eric Fensler, audiences will be rewarded with plenty of
laughs for suffering the fool lightly. Awarded a modicum of fame for his
G.I. Joe Public Service Announcements, his more serious video pieces
have languished in obscurity. Perhaps rightly so, but these works are
oddly contemplative and many of Fensler's pals from the video-editing
studio where he works make appearances, adding a certain gangly charm.
Not only are most difficult to sit through without a chuckle or two,
they're also a flatly unintentional jumble of every possible concept of
cool--with the result that most of his pieces need never have been made.
But of course there's something profoundly wonderful about that fact. Johan Zetterquist and Marc Swanson, "No Big Cowboy Can Do the
Little Things I Do" shows at Julia Friedman Gallery, 118 North Peoria,
(312)455-0755, through April 24. Eric Fensler, "FenslerFest" shows at
Heaven Gallery, 1550 North Milwaukee, (773)342-4597, March 13 at 8pm.
Also by Michael Workman The answer
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