Michael Workman

The "Red Trees" project by Chicago artist Lee Tracy, curated by the Hyde Park Art Center, appears now at the Cook County Administration Building in the Loop. It's perhaps one of the few shows patrons will have to view under armed guard. You may recall the Cook County Administration Building as the location of the fire that recently killed six people and was a key factor in the ousting of Fire Commissioner James Joyce.

It's an interesting choice of location for Tracy's project. Before entering to view the exhibit, patrons must pass a phalanx of security personnel. Up the hall past the guard desk, a total of twenty-four nylon fabric "shrouds"--twelve per wall--are hung with thumbtacks on either side of the lobby, opposite a pair of descending escalators. They resemble small parachutes unfurled into vertical rectangular shapes, each frayed at the edge as if shorn into swatches from a larger bolt with a pair of dull scissors. Pocked and layered with a fine grime, they're blackened and look burnt in spots. An intense blood-red color, the shrouds are emblazoned with jagged white, geometric patterns. Each bespeaks calamity, the imprint of a place and time in lost life, crisp in their abstraction as the photographs of an as-yet unforgotten tragedy.

Ways of coping with tragedy figure heavily in the "Red Trees" project. Each faded starburst was formed by chemicals released from the Oregon treestumps around which the shrouds were wrapped back in August of 2000. According to Tracy's documentation of the project, the trees stood on "bought land that had first been sold for its logging rights." Preserved in ambiguity, a sense of preventable wrongdoing is implied in these memorial shrouds. Was the land's purchase intended to circumvent the preservation clauses that regulate logging industry practices? Not necessarily, though it's a distinct impression. But Tracy instead emphasizes the need for a confrontation with loss, raising questions about "stewardship, commitment and hope."

They're disquieting in their present context because of the Administration Building's recent history of loss, evoking the process of recovery as an "emotional trajectory of empathy, acknowledgement and commitment." Who can we hold responsible for the laws we make and how they affect the health and safety not only of a place, but of its people? "Red Trees" charts the course of lessons in failed responsibility, passing through phases of purification that has involved placing the shrouds in an airy exhibition hall, a water tower atop a public building, and on the shore of a lake in Maine. Their display at the Administration Building represents the fifth and last phase of her project, simultaneous with a display at North Avenue, just west of Lake Shore Drive, as part of the Park District's "Art In the Garden" program.

In the final analysis, Tracy's shrouds are perhaps most disturbing because of their commentary on our presently troubled condition of self-government. As the building that holds the board of commissioners of Cook County, it houses such branches as the Board of Ethics and Human Rights. Of all the questions posed by "Red Trees," the most difficult to answer will be whether the public can find the strength to answer such questions as those put to it by this art.

Gallery stop

Those who take the El through the Merchandise Mart station in River North should take a few minutes in their daily commute to visit the In-Transit Gallery housed at the top of the stairs. Run since 2001 by Columbia College through the CTA's "Adopt-A-Station" program, "Created Spaces," up now, features the work of the school's photography department.

Two of the photographers have constructed their own scenes of interior spaces and photographed them as if real. Nichole Fedorow's images, however, have a slightly contrived feel: bathrooms with overflowing laundry bins, a jar of Vaseline peeking naughtily from an open cabinet door. Another depicts a living-room floor in front of a sofa, carefully detailed with a Candyland game board, sneakers and discarded juice boxes. Hmm. Do kids live here? Yet a third depicts a messy nightstand upon which a romance novel entitled "Saving Grace" lies surrounded with tubes of lipstick, tampons and a can of unscented Aqua Net. A Nagel hangs stereotypically on the wall. A teetotaling middle-aged woman obsessed with sexual fantasy, perhaps? Maybe a little lint in the hairbrush next time to make it convincing.

Amanda Bertany's photographed interiors play on the volumetric illusion of light and shadow. An examination of modernist logic pervades the grays and whites that shift through railings or leap forward in ceiling corners. Formally distinct though indecisive in their minimalism. Logan Ross's similar photographs of vacant interior spaces more successfully grasp a decisively haunted sense of presence. An entryway skirted with billowy, ethereal blue curtains stands in tension next to a doorway with a dark interior, facing a rectangular opening in the floor. It's a singular illusion, with each architectural space photographed from miniatures constructed by the artist.

Lee Tracy shows at the Cook County Administration Building Lobby, 69 West Washington, (773)324-5520, through August 7. "Created Spaces" shows at In-Transit Gallery, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza at the Merchandise Mart El station, (312)344-7321, through June 1.

(2004-05-18)

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