Michael Workman

Many of the paintings in Laurie Hogin's show "Pathological Colours" at the West Loop's Peter Miller Gallery seem taken right out of "Where the Wild Things Are." If these images depict a fantasy, it's one based on a converse in the bedrock of emotional experience. Her oil "A Natural History of Chromophilia" (according to Stedman's Medical Dictionary, chromophilia, from the Greek meaning "to love," means "the property of most cells to stain readily with dye") depicts a social display of animal instinct. Chimps wearing hooded animal-skin disguises mingle with singing zebras and other horse-like creatures in a copse filled with crocodiles, writhing snakes, antelope and brightly-colored lizards. Striped and polka-dotted skulls litter the ground. Two other oils are equally grotesque: each are portraits of snarling, furry pink guinea pigs grinding their pointy fangs and staring wild-eyed into the distance. That's creepy enough. But once informed by the titles that the guinea pigs are dosed on Wellbutrin and Prozac, the childhood nightmare quickly telescopes into a voyeuristic adult pathology that irremediably colors the whole of our experience.

Laurie Hogin shows at Peter Miller Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)951-1700, through April 24.

(2004-04-22)

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