Michael Workman

Who'd have thought that Jinx Café, the popular coffee culture shop on Division, had any compelling art to see? A few entertaining tabletops maybe, such as that one made to resemble a board game, covered with two-dimensional characters like the mysterious E-Head. Otherwise, grueling paintings of dead bugs embroidered with rosebuds and moody graphites of brooding male figures in clean, not-so-well-lighted places set the tone.

But, wait. Hidden beneath the stained, gold-sprinkled clamshell sink in the bathroom, an art show awaits. It's a hell of a spot. Smelly, walls covered with paint marker graffiti, limericks and in-progress bullshit contests. Free-range absurdity reigns here, seasoned with a touch of the bizarre. Crouch down and open the door of the cabinet below the sink. Toilet brushes, yellow sanitary gloves and gallon bottles of industrial cleaner serve as camouflage. Reach back into the darkness. At first it's hard to locate. Maybe on the opposite side of the decorative wooden drawers? No. Reach further back, into the darkest region of the cabinet, against the left inside wall. There, Velcroed in a clear plastic slipcase hangs Portland-based artist Eileen Finn's "Postcards From the Ends of the Lines." Housed in a slender black folder are a series of postcards manufactured by Finn, who rode TriNet bus lines to their end stops.

Twenty postcards in all provide a record of her various bus-traveled destinations, depicting places as unvisited as the underside of the Jinx Café sink. A wooded reservoir at the 73-Washington Park Shuttle, or a scene of truck beds piled with scrap metal and idle semi trailers, framed in the distance by a spindly overpass. Trim green lawns, rivers, thick foliage and forest trails mesh with winding roadways lined with towering telephone poles and industrial sprawl--or its remnants. Finn's hidden postcard book is part of art group Red76's Black Market Exhibitions, a project that consists of "individual artists' work surreptitiously placed in public spaces." Members Sam Gould, Khris Soden, Matthew Yake, Katy Asher and Jen Rhoads head up Red76 with the help of friends and collaborators. As a gray zone between public and private, bathrooms seem to figure prominently, acting as what the group refer to as "single-occupancy galleries." Also participating in the project, for instance, Chicago artist Mike Wolf has a piece in the Bite Café restroom, this one planted behind the mirror, which must be lifted away to view the wall-mounted piece behind.

Black Market shows aren't just local, either. Planning a visit to the Big Apple? Stop by 26 Broadway outside the New York Stock Exchange. Two unassuming green U.S. Mail boxes are stationed just in front of the statue of the bull. Reach under the box on the left to view Gabriel Mindel-Saloman's project. Aside from these, finding out the location of future exhibitions requires a little research (see the listing at the bottom of this column for instructions).

Art in an elevator

If digging around in public restrooms for art isn't satisfying enough, try viewing some through the windows in the doors of a freight elevator. After a bite to eat at the Artist's Café on Michigan, head up to the eighth-floor lobby of the historic Fine Arts Building. Painting and Drawing Dept. Professor Candida Alvarez has commandeered the freight elevator there as a space for artists' experiments in site-specific installation. It's a rich conceptual challenge to artists, who must account not only for the smallness of the exhibition zone as well as the meddlesome mobility of the space they're using. But the elevator's movement from floor to floor mirrors the artistic process, in that the elevator "tracks a transitional space as it moves between a starting point and a desired final destination."

Dubbed SubCity Projects, Steve Cordero offers up the inaugural installation on the floor of the elevator. A video projection of a stairwell, filmed from "the top floor of a four-story apartment building in Humboldt Park" that zooms in and out as the elevator travels, vertigo's clearly not an issue for the artist.

Red76 Arts Group, "Black Market Exhibitions" shows at select locations. Visit www.red76.com or call the BME hotline at (773)381-6565 for more information. Steve Cordero, "Revisited, Lifted, Elevated" shows at SubCity Projects, 410 South Michigan, 8th floor Lobby, (312) 386-1186, through May 9.

(2004-04-14)

Also by Michael Workman

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