Michael Workman

It's one of those typical unseasonably warm nights in Chicago. New faces and old crowd the streets and sidewalks at the corner of Peoria and Randolph. Most all the galleries on the block are opening new shows, but it's extremely hard to ignore the new video by Chicago artist Alison Ruttan on display at Monique Meloche Gallery. People are doing their best, of course, but the massive video screen in the gallery's picture window depicts two oversized figures, a man and a woman, both stripped down to their underwear. They're rolling around in a half-naked state atop what resembles a wrestling mat, arms and legs flailing, grappling wildly. It's a deeply sexual image, yet plainly combative. Once inside the gallery and past the first screen, the gallery opens into a three-channel video-projection triptych, three massive screens with images of three different couples--two white, one black. While watching, the perspective shifts as the camera, moving along a circular track, moves with them. As viewers, we're drawn into this mysterious interaction, almost as if meant to imagine ourselves making a threesome. But then dark hair and bare skin flash as one of the men lunges, grabbing for the woman's hips, misses and reaches for her shoulders. He grabs for her ankles, hand moving over the soles of her feet. They're tickling each other, we realize, tickling until their skin's flush and bright red, mopish expression on their faces, bodies sprawled on the floor in a fit of passive aggressive exhaustion.

Ruttan's very specific: we're told she's after a moment of surprise that leaves us speechless, unable to respond. It's a significant detail then that each of the couples in this video, called "Love Me Not," are romantically involved. It's their "bodily expression," as Ruttan calls it, that reveal the "misleading intentions" of what most of us recognize as otherwise innocuous play. But a disagreement lingers beneath the surface, a disappointment that intimates the inexorable sameness of coupledom that starts off numbered in days, then extends into months and years. What happens once the bloom comes off the rose? Those surprise moments get rarer and rarer, that promise of revelation fades into ever more distant memories. Or does it? What happens as our personal boundaries become less and less distinct, as demystified as those old, forgotten desires? Interesting that these men and women, in the act of tickling, are also touchy subjects, protective and abusive at the same time, vulnerable to an uncertain mix of emotions, neither fully a feeling of repulsion nor desire, love nor hate.

Faking It

Couples in love also play a part in the new exhibit at Three Walls, "Take My Hand," curated by Ruba Katrib. Or at least love, that is, as "depicted in the media through film, television, advertising and the Internet." It's the first exhibition curated out of Three Walls' "Artist Files," a physical and online database project (accessible through the "Artists Files" link at www.three-walls.org) to make the work of emerging artists available to a wider audience. It's no surprise, when news of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's breakup garners popular sympathy, that New York artist Kathleen Kranack's inkjet watercolors, titled "US Weekly," are oft-vicious if easy potshots at celebrity couples. Few are left out: we've got Ozzy and Sharon ("Most Devoted"), Britney and Justin ("Heating Up Again!") and that most distasteful pairing of all, Liza Minelli and David Gest (whose picture appears torn down the middle with the text "Who Gets the Gifts?").

More compelling are Berlin artist Larissa Fassler's photographs of fresh-faced "Teen Couples" such as "Lizzie and Henry," embracing in pose for the camera, cautiously oblivious even as they gaze into one another's eyes. In an attendant video of the photo session, the couples are shown hanging out and chatting politely. In self-consciously preparing themselves for the camera, they drop their conversation, work up as blank an expression as they can muster and assume a number of choreographed poses, most straight out of fashion or perfume ads. It's easy to imagine these youths imitating TV and Hollywood in their personal lives as well, performing a laundry list of prescribed romantic behavior that includes instructions to give "exalted kisses, and act secretive, endearingly nervous, and impulsive." None of which registers as anything more than a behavioral tic, of course (except maybe the exalted kisses).

The Potato Lover

Few young Chicago artists have such promising bodies of work as Rena Leinberger, whose persistent investigation of the quotidian in everyday life steadily yields ever-less-inconspicuous results. For "It Will Be Enough," opening this week at River North's ZG Gallery, Leinberger has taken up an intriguing fascination with a food that's everywhere: potatoes. It's perhaps difficult to enlarge upon the prominence of the potato in popular culture, (who hasn't eaten French fries?) but Leinberger's got them spilling out everywhere: a piece called "Wake" has them lined up on top of and under a bed, and in "Harvest," they're nearly spilling from an armoire beneath a neatly pressed suit. They're tucked in under and rolled up in looping strips of wool, cotton, silk and alpaca scarves in "Mulch/Scarf" and poking from the ends of absurdly elongated stockings in "Close Enough, Squirreled Away."

Her potatoes also take on a religious air in two sandpaper-on-Douglas-fir-fiber panels that depict them as oblique shapes beneath the ground, with titles such as "Valley of the Shadow" and "Besides Still Waters." And it's as symbols for Leinberger's prosaic devotion, something enough for her and presumably for us all, that this show is at its most delicious.

Alison Ruttan shows at Monique Meloche Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)455-0299, through March 12. "Take My Hand" shows at Three Walls, 119 North Peoria, (312)432-3972, through March 12. Rena Leinberger shows at ZG Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-9900, through March 12.

(2005-02-08)

Also by Michael Workman

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