Michael Workman

In Chinese artist Maio Xiaochun's show "Phantasmagoria" at the Walsh Gallery, viewers may find themselves playing a game of "Where's Waldo?" But before that happens, you'll see a striking statement about the nature of time in a kind of Zeno's-arrow moment, one of trauma and imminent danger. It's all captured in the portrait directly inside the door, a 145 x 296 cm lightboxed transparency titled "Stumble" that depicts the artist's son coming out of a subway station. His movement blurs in time to the foremost image of the boy stumbling forward. It's a blue morning on this otherwise empty street, a rickshaw already having disappeared into the background (though the blur of its presence remains). The boy's face remains frozen at the realization of his momentary miscalculation, bobbling on his RollerBlades and only at the first second of a painful descent to the pavement. In one hand, he holds a soft drink in a paper McDonald's cup and in the other a sack of French fries. What to make of this?

But hold on. Xiaochun's imagery evokes this sense of dream movement, of time made still and distilled of any reality. Further inside the gallery are more large-scale images, such as "Journey," measuring 260 x 102 cm. In it, what at first appears merely an interior shot of an airport slowly unloads its visual cargo: a huge glassed-in box framed in the middle of the image holds a mannequin on a reclining airline seat holding a laptop. It's a display kiosk for United Airlines advertising their flight seat capacity, obviously, and at first the image appears to be a testament to the artificiality of consumer culture.

But a second later, the mind registers this odd figure in the background, opposite the viewer's perspective: who's that man standing there? He appears half in motion, his long robes perfectly cone-shaped from his neck, in profile. His outstretched hands grasp the bar of a luggage cart. It's Xiaochun's portrait of a traditional Chinese scholar, a figure that the artist refers to as "Him," an enigmatic and humorous character that Xiaochun hides in the frame of his huge scenic photos. Here, he stands along a street corner, staring into the camera; there gliding up an alleyway while a worker looks on. In my favorite, he stares off into the distance, peeking out from beneath the roof of a sky lift, unnoticed by the passenger of a gondola passing in the opposite direction. It's an absolutely delightful image. What these wandering portraits of "Him" and the artist's son have in common, as the title suggests--phantasmagoria means "a bewildering sequence of fantastic images"--are a sense of startling discovery in some previously unrevealed future moment. Where's "Him" hiding in this one? And in the next? We must look, search. Then we find "Him."

Mix Master Fiore

Where Xiaochun's exhibit plays with the subtle distinctions of perception, this show seeks to overwhelm and saturate us with spectacle. Not so many years ago in Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery's old space on Division Street, Rosemarie Fiore had an opening from which few people left without a sample of her work. She'd cooked up paint in a waffle iron, trimmed the edges, and stacked the results in a box in a corner of the gallery. How many kitchens do those waffle pieces hang in now? Plenty. Fiore's collaboration with the precision and functional certainty of machines continues with "Good-Time Mix Machine: Scrambler Drawings," opening this weekend at the gallery's current location in the West Loop.

In case you're wondering, the Scrambler's a carnival ride that has turned legions of innocent stomachs on many a small-town midway. Its blue and red buckets and yellow suspension rods should prove a familiar sight to anybody who's ever spent the day at a county fair, visited a Six Flags or taken an afternoon off at Coney Island. Brought up from a show at Grand Arts in the thriving Midwest art outpost that is Kansas City, the carny ride of Fiore's newest work is the ill-famed Eli Bridge Scrambler. Designed in 1955, it's a center-torque machine with four pinwheel seat arrangements fan out from the central axis. She replaced the passengers with an airbrush-like mechanism secured to one of the Scrambler's bucket seats, and while the ride was in motion fired the jets using a remote control to generate spray onto a canvas below. Her final product was a kind of action painting, full of reds, greens and blue, resembling a child-drawn Spirograph. They arch and curve, drive out to points and move in a curvilinear fashion along an interior point along the ride's gravitational center. It's a work that's simultaneously whimsical, triumphantly adolescent, and rooted in the exactitude of a machine built to thrill.

Maio Xiaochun shows at Walsh Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)829-3312. Through November 27. Rosemarie Fiore shows at Bodybuilder and Sportsman Gallery, 119 North Peoria, (312)492-7261. Through December 4.

(2004-10-20)

Also by Michael Workman

Tip of the Week
This is the first time an outside group has been allowed to use the Vietnam Veteran's Museum space, since its founding in 1996, for anything but works of soldiers in that tragic war
(2004-10-13)

Huong Ngo
Born in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, Ngo's parents, originally from Vietnam, fled to North Carolina
(2004-10-13)

Eye Exam
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
(2004-10-13)

Big brothers
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...
(2004-10-06)

The Barack and Alan Show
(2004-10-06)

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
(2004-10-06)

Eye Exam
(2004-10-06)

Tip of the Week
(2004-09-29)

Eye Exam
(2004-09-29)

Chicago--yes, Chicago--Fashion Week
(2004-09-14)

Eye Exam
(2004-09-14)

Eye Exam
(2004-09-08)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment