Michael Workman

Now in its eleventh installment at Navy Pier, the Sculpture Objects and Functional Art show at Navy Pier touts ninety-some "international galleries and dealers" who'll showcase their wares for droves of hungry buyers. This year, the lineup's equally divided between the United States and galleries from the UK, Australia, France, Denmark, a spattering from Italy and Canada, and one each from the Czech Republic, Argentina and Sweden. As has been widely reported, Mark Lyman, president and founder of Expressions of Culture, Inc. (which produces SOFA) was in the running for the Mother's Day weekend art fair spot vacated by Art Chicago, a traditional kickoff event for the city's summer art events. Turned down in favor of Pfingsten, an Ohio-based company that will produce this year's Chicago Contemporary and Classic, Lyman made vague threats to organize competition for Pfingsten. Whether or not that occurs, for three days this week Lyman and Expressions of Culture will occupy the Pier's Festival Hall.

Not much has changed from previous years. Rather than stage an opening-night event to benefit a not-for-profit institution such as last year's Northwestern Memorial Foundation, this year the preview's strictly a private event. SOFA exhibitors were directed to invite their own guests, shifting the emphasis from philanthropy to giving the gallery's collectors "first choice." But that's about it. In art-world terms, it's a very specialized event, falling firmly on the side of arts and crafts. Visitors will, as the name suggests, encounter tons of sculpture of all shapes and sizes, especially glass, ceramic, wood and metals. Programming includes wood-turning demonstrations, where visitors can thrill to wood lathing and carving by the Chicago Woodturners, or meditate to the glowing performance of the Corning Museum of Glass's "Hot Glass Roadshow," as artisans puff and blow hot glass into shape.

There are gems here aplenty. As part of the "Whole Grain" exhibit at this year's show, New Yorker John Torreano offers his bug-eaten wood, the holes plugged with pearls. In the Association of Israel's Decorative Arts exhibit, Israeli artist Shlomit Bauman has used casting clay and transparent plastic to form a six-pack of pull-tab beer cans titled "Interiors." It's love for those loaded choices that elevates SOFA a step above the decorative-arts focus of similar fairs. And for those with a yen to know what an annual gateway weekend event organized by Expressions of Culture may look like, it's also an opportunity for a sample of things to come. Maybe.

Shane Huffman

In a little garage-sized studio on Rockwell Street in Wicker Park, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle has cleared out space to make room for a show of former UIC student Shane Huffman. The Florida-born artist was raised in South Bend, Indiana where at the age of 5, prompted by a next-door neighbor who offered to take him to a few meets, he took up competitive swimming. He participated on the swim team throughout high school, swam in summer leagues and now takes the experience as a "conceptual home base." That, and the light of the moon. "Swimming is otherwordly," says Huffman, who notes the motion of the tides move with the gravitational pull of the moon on the ocean's surface. The moon's also a dead object that reflects light in much the same way that photography captures the light from a moment, already dead in the instant of its making. In a series of wall-length gelatin-silver prints he spells out that fascination, photographing himself swimming laps with a light source that, in the time-lapse, marries the trail of light and the process of movement through the water as a metaphor for the passage of time. In his 5-minute video loop "Bedlam," a saturated window frame is pictured for the duration until we catch a flashing glimpse of a bird slamming into its glass window. That moment's a succinct statement on the consequences of confusing an image with reality and, according to a friend of Huffman's, the third leading cause of death for birds.

That cost of illumination of human experience is spelled out in metaphor through his use of light and darkness. In his diptych "One is Wise and the Other is Hungry," Huffman has assembled a grid of black pages, one with a gloss-surface, the other matte. Both are black and so absorb the light, darkened by their very reception of the information that visually alters our perception of their surface. But it's a strategic metaphor for Huffman, for whom even the subtlest movement from shiny or reflective to inky, absorptive black marks a key experiential concept: the accumulation of exposure to life. That garnering of experience, for Huffman, set the boundaries of one's vision or "mental knowledge," compounding over time until it reaches a horizon or limit. In point of fact, sunrises and sunsets, lit as they are with those millions of gorgeous hues, are actually produced by sunlight passing through lingering pollutants in the earth's atmosphere. It's another example of where, in judging something beautiful, we misunderstand its true nature.

Despite this moody metaphor, between his two black-page assemblages, Huffman has situated "Eclipse," a portrait of his 6-month son, Jedediah. In it, two arms hold the baby aloft, a fractured sunlight arcing through the infant's dangling limbs. It's a hopeful gesture about the wild unknown of new fatherhood. "It's part of my world now," says Huffman, for whom the light the child blocks out is a metaphor for past experience. "And it's eclipsing my sunshine."

SOFA CHICAGO 2004 shows at Navy Pier, 600 East Grand, (312)595-7437. November 5-7. Shane Huffman shows at Inigo Manglano-Ovalle's Studio, 1235 North Rockwell, (773)292-7372. Through November 20.

(2004-11-03)

Also by Michael Workman

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Toronto artist Scott Treleaven's fascination with nihilism holds a poisonous attraction
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In Chinese artist Maio Xiaochun's show "Phantasmagoria" at the Walsh Gallery, viewers may find themselves playing a game of "Where's Waldo?"
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The Barack and Alan Show
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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
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