Michael Workman

In the imaginary battle against Wicker Park's art community, now that The Pond and Standard Gallery have taken down their shingles for good, commercial interests have triumphed again in the battle for the soul of the neighborhood. It's a cruel cycle of openings and closings repeated throughout the city, and few spaces have managed sustainability much longer than five years. Among those that have, Heaven Gallery merits a visit now and again.

Heaven has long staked both its continued operation and artistic reputation on a messy, cultish program of street-worthy work that winces at any highfalutin' notions of fine art. At times, the wince-o-meter has been set at far below even art. After filmmaker Doug Lussenhop's departure, part-time director and founder David Dobie sought to change this by partnering with Matt McCarthy, a photography graduate of the Art Institute and employee of Alan Koppel Gallery. Whether or not the addition has proven successful depends, of course, on how you define success. A subtle shakeup in the program to include more photography seems to have proven effective: film and video screenings still occur regularly, but hybrids such as the gallery's most recent show, "A Great Midwestern," have crept into the picture.

In the first of two rooms of this show, Minneapolis' Tema Stauffer offers a series of quietly evocative outdoor images. At some point, however, everything starts opening too often onto nothing in her images, relying too heavily on a lack of specificity for atmospheric heft, and preferring empty space to any actual subject matter. Car lots, snow-blanketed driveways and empty streets at night accompany more than one shot of uninhabited gas stations out in the middle of nowhere. And nowhere's an accurate depiction of where Stauffer takes us.

Peter Haakon Thompson prefers self-portraits and the occasional visual novelty. Thompson often crouches or gets cut to pieces by an erratic and aimless framing technique that eventually has the effect of painful redundancy. As well, any narrative established by the pointlessly varied location of his self-portraiture ends up devolving into rambling and endless journeys: Thompson poses barefoot on a set of wooden stairs, hunched over in a field of shorn cornstalks, scaling a hill, a silo, a pile of stones. All energy and no focus. Hands cling to a board overlooking a lake, a harbor in the distance, mountains, a small town. A blurry figure gets cracked down the middle behind a scrawny maple.

Turn the corner into the gallery's main room and everything changes. Deborah Stratman was selected for this year's Whitney Biennial along with a number of artists who, it's worth noting, also work in film and video. It's not hard to tell why. A severed deer head, either ferociously slashed or crushed off at the shoulders, lies between lines, where it's been dragged through dirt and sand, atop a white highway stripe. Hers are watery, intense colors, dreamlike and encountered by viewers with the aura of a Satan flick. A jealous green's the dominant color, flooding a wastebasket in an empty corner, spotlighting a set of red velvet ropes in a theater or aglow out back of a cinderblock-built model-racetrack building. A stream of ants flows in and out of the wall behind an electric outlet, clearly marking pedestrian fear and pain as Stratman's subjects--and depicted with an intensity that may induce nausea. In one shot overlooking a deep gully with a river and trees in the distance, a gut-wrenching note has been posted to a weathered, graffiti-covered railing: "Susan Joyne Weiss/You Made Us Laugh/You Made Us Cry/We Will Always Love You." There's never any heaven, it seems, without first a little hell.

Love toys

Two performers are dressed in plush costumes: baggy, baby-blue sweatpants and puffy pink house slippers adorn figures with yellow and white Pacman heads in "Sweethearts," a video by Art Institute student Saya Woolfalk. A tongue runs from the mouth of one, seamlessly connecting the other, the two reclining figures eternally connected in a ceaseless, orally fixated self-pleasuring. Infantilized sexual desire reaches a casual narcissistic height in Woolfalk's installation, "Lovescape" at River North's Zg Gallery. In "Tricksters," a fabric sculpture, three plush figures pose with oversize red tongues extended, what resemble distended nipples in place of eyes. Vapidly sexual, these sculptures explore the form that commercial sensibilities take in expressive consumerism and tackle issues of race, class and the all-consuming potential of desire.

"A Great Midwestern" shows at Heaven Gallery, 1550 North Milwaukee, (773)342-4597, through March 27. Saya Woolfalk shows at Zg Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-9900, through April 17.

(2004-03-18)

Also by Michael Workman

Eye Exam
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
(2004-03-10)

The answer
Whereas fans of the online Slate magazine are curious news junkies, fans of that magazine's column "The Explainer" are curious about the castoffs or unanswered factoids
(2004-03-03)

Eye Exam
Playboy magazine has long held an iron grip on the identity of Chicagoans
(2004-03-03)

Tip of the Week
Careers are made and broken in Fiona Macdonald's "Museum Emotions," a video broken into ten ten-minute clips depicting art world machinations at work
(2004-03-02)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-25)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-25)

Tip of the Week
(2004-02-18)

The pulpit of poetry
(2004-02-18)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-18)

Tuman's
(2004-02-11)

Eye Exam
(2004-02-11)

Let's get it on
(2004-02-11)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment