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 Eye Exam Destination: Highwood
At the corner of Highwood and Waukegan Avenues in the sleepy northern
Chicago suburb of Highwood, a 2,000-square-foot gallery called Street
Level labors against the odds to import works of the imagination. Most
of the town's population don't get it and wonder openly if Highwood
natives Joe and Wendy Davis have a screw loose. Maybe they are a little
kooky, but Joe Davis, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute,
says he just loves the art he shows and loves showing it in his
hometown. The couple leapt in with both feet and Street Level Gallery
opened for business in April 2002, these days serving as a kind of
outpost of art and culture in a place all but totally bereft of both.
Highwood's rich with all the rough and smooth history of most rural
Illinois towns--and then some, for years legendarily crowded with an
astonishing thirty-plus places to drink. Saloons and taverns were
everywhere, all famously scandalous. Situated on a single square mile,
the town's many watering holes weren't meant as a benefit to
Highwood's
itsy population of 4,000. Rather, hemmed in on all sides by dry towns
and those regulated by so-called "Blue Laws," Highwood remained
staunchly wet. Thus it became known as an oasis for drinkers streaming
in after work and on weekends, including soldiers on furlough from the
onetime army base in nearby Fort Sheridan. Matter of fact, the building
that now houses Street Level Gallery was also once a tavern, first
known
as Santi's and then Moran's. Joe and Wendy Davis recall downing their
share of frothy brews at both.
Thanks to the Davises, art is now a significant facet of the town's
cultural stock-in-trade. But developing an audience has proven no easy
task. Redefining the town as a stop-off for city dwellers en route to
summer concerts at Ravinia has required, as with most small towns, a
series of wrenching exercises in obduracy. In the transition between
its
tavern and gallery incarnations, for instance, a disgruntled pair of
tenants, angry with the landlord, revenged themselves by splitting with
a chainsaw and carting away half the wooden bar.
After moving their graphic-design firm to an old mechanics' shop (and
before that, a Tucker dealership) on Highwood Avenue, it didn't take
long for the Davises to identify the former tavern as a potential
gallery space. That the building was a wreck only meant more of a
challenge for Joe, who delights in fretting over the architectural
details of hometown restoration projects. Davis has also long been a
collector of cultural ephemera, with tchotchkes and souvenir Americana
stacked everywhere in the Street Level Studio offices: a deck of Howard
Dean playing cards, dozens of toy plastic figurines, dashboard Hula
girls, an Elvis head. They line the walls, cabinets, desktops and the
narrow shelves of small wall-mounted altars. Combine all this with a
burgeoning passion for outsider art, and Davis's vision of an art
gallery starts to seem like an ideal labor of love. New works by Ginny
Krueger and Scott Okin open this Friday.
Okin coats his canvases with dozens of paint layers, adding thousands
of marks to delineate abstractly perceived forms, a process the artist
cites as influenced by University of Chicago's Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi's
concept of "flow." Okin paints in acrylic, working up his grids and
geometric patterns with thick lines in short brushstrokes. His color
schemes commonly alternate between bright greens, blues, orange and
purples. Krueger's sizeable encaustics on panel follow geometric
patterns often resembling checkerboards, interrupted and overpainted
with specs, curving lines and the occasional object, like the pair of
scissor handles in her piece, "Remnants." Each panel starts with a
layer
of beeswax that she then fuses together at the seams with a propane
torch which Krueger claims are "as much a tool as the paintbrushes." Two-Minute Interview: Vincent Como
Newcity: You've got the last-ever show at Standard Gallery
in Wicker Park, "Object (Subject)," and the installation you made for
it
represents a departure from those labor-intensive large black squares
you're known for drawing using a ballpoint pen.
Como: I have a serious affinity for the ideas about the
death of painting that Ad Reinhardt was working with. I'm still very
interested in this idea of a dense accumulation, and I think that comes
through. It was a very laborious process, taking photos every hour for
a
24-hour time period. I actually had to wean myself off coffee in
anticipation of being up that long, so that once I got near the end of
a
shoot, I could drink some and it would actually work. But I think this
show is more of an expansion for me. That it's Standard Gallery's
last
show was a very foreboding but happy accident--the genesis of this
project for me was an obsession with information that I saw in drawings
by Galileo and Copernicus. That led me to try the same sort of
fact-finding mission that these guys went on, thinking about their
position in the world and how that related to things in the universe.
Newcity: ` So that notion of scientific observation of the
stars in the sky was similar for you to looking at a painting?
Como: Right. I was thinking about wall-based artwork, which
I feel all ends up relating to the history of painting, unless it's a
documentary photo. In the end, I wanted to discuss the work as a
section
of the sky, a document of this "physical thing" that contains our
world
and then bring that into a gallery space as a cross-section that also
references the "Chicken Little" idea of the sky falling. Ginny Kruger and Scott Okin show at Street Level Gallery, 9
Highwood Avenue, Highwood, (847)432-8340, through June 2. Vincent Como
shows at Standard Gallery, 1437 North Bosworth, (773)486-1005, through
May 8.
Also by Michael Workman Tip of the Week
Eye Exam
Eye Exam
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Eye Exam
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Eye Exam
Eye Exam
The answer
Eye Exam
Tip of the Week
Tip of the Week
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