Michael Workman

A wall knocked out, windows exposed. A mysteriously darkened courtyard, plump upholstered chairs and sofas, blazing chandeliers. Groups of five or six swarm the wine table, men in suits leaning into doorways, students with satchel bags examining freshly inked brochures. Esther Grimm stands before a candlelit fireplace, welcoming all to the first exhibition in the new Three Arts Club galleries. High time, too. After a seemingly ceaseless volley of artist's protests, administrative imbroglios, public outcries and painful evictions surrounding the Three Arts Club's renovation effort, a little sunshine has finally managed to peek through.

Aside from Grimm, that's partly thanks to the involvement of three women, including board president Christy MacLear, who also co-directs Pilsen's Fleur Gallery, and Unit B Gallery Director Kimberly Aubuchon, recently lured from her position at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The Three Arts Club also wrangled the participation in a planned multiple-part exhibition series of Hyde Park Art Center curator Annie Morse. All good hires, even if the patchwork of institutional transplants does leave room for interpretation in the overall curatorial strategy. With a planned reopening date of 2006, the current tandem art exhibition of Candida Alvarez and Kim Mitseff in the building's front rooms marks the beginning of a long run-up to completion of the board-dictated renovation project. Among the changes to the previously women-only artist's residences will be a coed admission policy and an annual program of art shows.

The exhibition space exists in two separate rooms, what Morse refers to as a "bicameral space," that serves to defuse the significance of the curatorial effort and seamlessly present artists whose career distance otherwise might chafe. Such is the case with Alvarez, recently tenured at the Art Institute and Mitseff, who will graduate soon from the same. In some ways, their work really couldn't be more different. Mitseff constructs miniature dioramas out of blocks of sugar cane or hunks of candy, melted and shaped into island-like blocks. Alternatively clear, filled with marble swirls, and opaque white, she sometimes seals toys or assorted tchotchkes into them: a Radio Shack metallic blue and red toy submarine dives into a reddened pile of flailing plastic frogs. Inch-tall bottles of party-favor-sized Stoli Raspberry bob in a froth of solid apple sour across the way from a submerged pair of red and blue-lensed 3D glasses. Around these sugar isles dance crowds of little figurines: girls in pink, boys in blue.

One room over, Alvarez offers a more somber vision: a single piece of black fabric hung tapestry-style from the wall. A faceless, eight-foot-tall ballerina has been painted in hues of purple, light blues and watery green glitter, suspended in a half-curtsey. The metallic surface shifts and shimmers, as fragile and tentative as the figure of the ballerina, pointed out the window toward the light that makes her visible. Alvarez's minimalist use of negative space evokes the omissions of memory and her use of glitter to create an amorphous surface alludes to the complexity of creative thinking. As a whole, both artists' work characterize the decisiveness and generous energy sure to mark the Three Art's Club's attempt to meld a revitalized historical involvement with the city's art communities to an equally inspired future.

Wolfe whistle

Erstwhile editor of the online art periodical Interreview.org and would-be polymath Ginger Wolfe offers a show of new works at Pilsen's Dogmatic Gallery, counting as many shared sympathies as she does Plexiglas vitrines. Wolfe's a glumly considerate artist and credibly whipsmart. She's also done her homework. Initially, her work reads as a fascination with the differences between manual and intellectual labor. The two sawhorses in the gallery's main room contrast with the show's wall stencil, made from a collage of letters clipped from articles in small-run papers such as Chicago Journal and F Newsmagazine, pinned to the opposite side of a castered wall. All of the articles are about Dogmatic and Director Michael Thomas (one written by this reporter) whose "old man" persona accounts for the gallery's name. Since Thomas is also Wolfe's boyfriend, the clippings provide a sufficiently ironic confession to a belief in the pungent romance of art-world relationships; sleeping with artists, after all, does come with the guarantee of a spicier social scene than, say, that of a stockbroker.

But all this provides a context of social anthropology for the painted-text canvases standing in as title cards for her wall-hung cast bronze sculptural pieces on exhibit downstairs, including a "slag hammer," finishing hammer and railroad stake. Each is delicately posed, like artifacts from some history-making archeological dig or mass-transportation building effort memorialized at the Field Museum. Wolfe did research on standards for analysis and presentation there and it shows, assigning each of her objects a letter-number designation and mounted each piece on squares of Honduras mahogany, acrylic and felt. Two copies of Scientific American are also on display downstairs: one from the late-nineteenth century and the second a more recent vintage. The word "scientific" in the title has been cut out and exchanged, symbolizing the great equalizing effect of this kind of thought. Through the scientific lens, terms such as young and old, new and familiar, intimate and detached lose their usual connotations, collapsing social relationships into an inert material, primed and ready for dissection.

Candida Alvarez and Kim Mitseff ,"Vanilla," shows at Three Arts Club Gallery, 1300 North Dearborn Parkway, (312)944-6250, through April 22. Ginger Wolfe, "New Work" shows at Dogmatic Gallery, 1822 South DesPlaines, (312)421-1917, through April 10.

(2004-03-25)

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