Michael Workman

Upon first viewing Gaylen Gerber's installation and painting exhibition at Donald Young Gallery, patrons may notice similarities in the work with Kay Rosen, Michelle Grabner and Joe Baldwin. Except those aren't just similarities: those artists actually painted these canvases. So why then is this Gerber's exhibit? Because his "support" of these artists and others he has collaborated with, for a total of eleven artists, is a core part of what he does. At first, it's hard not to think of postmodern artist Sherrie Levine, much of whose work has been concerned with appropriation, including reproducing several Walker Evans images then showing them as if they were her own. Except what Gerber does has more to do with resituating the works' inner structures, then leaving it at that. He doesn't take them as his own, nor does he really recode what's going on with them. It's more like a participation in the process and a kind of appreciation or attempt to offer a helping hand by, for instance, providing a neutral gray base for them to layer their paintings over. As he puts it, a "support." In some finished pieces, the gray shows through, in others it doesn't. But by providing a neutral gray backdrop, he references the visual language of institutions, or what he refers to as the norms of our "visual language."

Take the largest piece in the exhibit as a starting point: "Backdrop/Everybody," a 16x20 billboard-sized piece, made in collaboration with the art group, M&Co. In the 1992 incarnation of this piece, M&Co fixed a row of chairs to it and placed it in New York's Times Square where patrons were offered a place to take a breather from the bustle. Then Gerber invited M&Co to remake the piece over a backdrop he provided for them, with its dimensions measured out to precisely reflect the dimensions of a wall in Copenhagen's Charlottenborg Exhibition Hall (though the piece, when shown there, was moved outdoors). Here, though still the same dimensions as that wall in the Charlottenborg Hall, the chairs have been replaced by log seats made by the collaborative group N55. Many of the collaborative canvas titles, all of them prefixed with a "support/" and then the participating artist's title of the canvas, indicate the fundamentally cooperative element of the finished works. This includes, by the way, the sensuously full marijuana plant portrait that Gerber made in collaboration with Chicago artists Robert Davis and Michael Langlois.

In this way, "Backdrop/Everybody" offers a uniquely Chicago context, one in which artists are encouraged to work together and deepen the strength of regional and intensely personal ties. Not only that, but given the scope of the basic conceit--that this work aspires far enough to include "everybody"--it's also a hopeful statement as to our basic human connection with the expansive potential of art.

Mother Mary
Trying to grasp Disney's 1964 musical "Mary Poppins" as a feminist film yields worlds of irreconcilable contradictions. At the core of that film, the first movie that Chicago-based artist Molly Briggs ever saw "on the silver screen," are questions of illusion and motherhood. In her show of paintings, "SEE-Through" at ZG Gallery in River North, Briggs casts the magical aspects of her own motherhood and of her relationship to her own mother as a flaring, gridded pattern in "Mary Poppins Trees I." Her red leaf pattern on a background of beige and brownish-gray suggests connectedness and a natural framework that recalls the blocked-in spaces of a stained-glass window. Her second canvas in the series, "Mary Poppins II," inverts the scheme of neutral spaces, and expands on the basic structure by adding a second layer of sinuous, reaching vines that extend outward from a central thatch or leaf-clumped blossom.

Briggs compares her work to the suspension of disbelief that viewers allow for when they take colored light projected on a screen as actual experience. In her paintings, that kind of seeing-through occurs momentously in her own experiences of motherhood. In those experiences, whatever abstract notions about mystical forces at play in motherhood and, concurrently, whatever social-critical notions she may have held, have since given way to a more balanced understanding of the necessary role of physical reproduction and the natural, often painful process of growth and disillusionment that so many of our ways of understanding the world have been conjured up simply to hide.

Gaylen Gerber shows at Donald Young Gallery, 933 West Washington, (312)455-0100, through November 15. Molly Briggs shows at the ZG Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-9900, through November 13.

(2004-10-13)

Also by Michael Workman

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Carrying brushes four feet in length that at first glance could be mistaken for spears or clubs, two shirtless Chinese men with long, flowing black manes of hair...
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