Michael Workman

Kansas City artist Peregrine Honig's watercolor drawings of hypersexualized prepubescent girls, usually rendered with all the relish of a slap in the face, have a transitional feel at this show at the River North neighborhood's Gescheidle Gallery. They're still worth viewing: her little girls titillate while they condemn the male gaze with brutal fantasies of sexualized innocence. But the work of Kentucky-born artist Darrel Morris is the real reason to attend. Patrons with a soft spot for drawings will feast on the accumulation of twenty-one-years worth of works on paper. Best known from his embroideries, Morris clearly has a talent and a passion for drawing as well. Though penned in the style of cartoon panels, his portraits and cluttered, almost doodle-like scenes depict crowds of people who look almost exactly the same and portraits of disturbed-looking individuals with their often erratic thoughts spelled out in text on the page. His use of white-out in his drawings as if it were paint adds a pleasing touch. In one drawing, a small boy lies curled in a fetal position on the floor, covered except for his head and legs by a huge turtle shell, its scales rendered using copious amounts of white-out. The tortoise shell's impenetrable surface rises almost sculpturally off the paper, all but overpowering the simple line-drawn child beneath.

Peregrine Honig and Darrel Morris show at Gescheidle Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-0600, through June 5.

(2004-05-18)

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