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 Eye Exam Gender render
Fans of small art spaces will want to check out the current show at
Lobby Gallery, its penultimate exhibition before director Matthew
Robinson closes the doors for good. Robinson, himself an artist, has
finally decided to focus on making his own art. The final show of
paintings by Kathleen Voitja opens March 10, but up now are two distinct
series by Chicago artist Christa Holka: one for the most part clean,
crisp and tidy in its fictions, even if the subjects themselves are
often disheveled in appearance; the other messy, crowded examples of
documentary. Connecting the two is Holka's impulse to study her friends
as a kind of surrogate queer family. Her dual series, "boys will
be..." and the Snapshot Series offer two points of view on the subject.
In the first, she stages her friends in telling poses, for instance, two
transgendered women-turned-men arm-wrestling, and clearly her intent is
to focus on the visual "gender fuck" of queer appearances. These are
behavioral statement pieces: whatever our thoughts on gender identity,
we know absolutely nothing about the personality the body harbors and so
all assumptions based on gender stereotypes are rendered specious at
best. If this portrait depicts two farm boys roughhousing, that's one
thing, but what if under all that facial hair and those shaggy ball caps
it's actually two (former) women? Of course the larger point is that the
disproving of gender stereotypes gets canceled out not only as
associated with queer identity, but as related to gender at large. This
not-knowing that viewers encounter also mirrors the "second
adolescence" many of her subjects themselves experience getting
comfortable in their new skins. In that sense, these images are
satisfying confrontations with gender, but it's also mostly safe work on
accessible subject matter.
It's not until her Snapshot Series that Holka takes solid risks.
What's obviously at stake for her is exactly how a rich tapestry of
personal experience trumps any and all generalizations about both queer
and straight. It's a point she recognizes when she tells us in her
artist's statement that "my life, my pictures are
shockingly--regular." Shocking, perhaps, for someone who expects
documentary work about queer identity to unearth treasure troves of
gender difference. This series happily sails past Holka's previously
limited analyses of identity as social fiction and into the realms of
Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie's queer domestics. It's a largely
inconclusive experiment, the price of such a broadening, with the risk,
of course, that she may lose her framing mechanism, her way of
"looking" that gives the work its innate sense of direction. It's a
step that she'll need time to get a firm handle on.
Holka's intermediary solution is to frame them not by identity but by
moment, in a sense widening the focus from "personality" to
"person," trying to clear away all the cultural signifiers used to
identify people with specific backgrounds--middle class, lesbian,
whatever (sometimes by centering them, like the pack of Parliaments
sticking out of one woman's cleavage)--and trying to "skew the
moment," to catch something revealing about these people. She's
drawing from a relatively large pool. What images appear in this show
were culled from some 5,000 snapshots taken over an undisclosed amount
of time. These select snapshots hang on the wall in grids meant to
represent a single event, a single day or night. What's noticeable is
how often the same faces recur in them night after night, party after
party--the same group of friends. Matter of fact, it was amusing to
notice that those faces were there opening night, watching visitors look
at them. It's not much, but it's a start. Winter Colors
Sunday afternoon drivers may have noticed the three-stories-tall
swath of sewn fabric hanging out of the window at 2019 North Humboldt
Boulevard. A patchwork, this four-story "Rapunzel" was the work of
Amanda Browder, Chicago artist and co-editor of the Bad At Sports art
podcast (www.badatsports.com). Sewn together out of fabric collected
over the last four years, it was a kind of memory cloth that interrupted
the gray space in the walk-up between the buildings, covered in gray
snow and ice. In order to enter the building, it was necessary to trod
over the drapery, sullying it even further, which seemed no express
concern for the artist who, four stories above, was enjoying hot coffee
and tea with her visitors.
It was somewhat disconcerting, once inside, to notice that this
hefty length of fabric was secured with a single knot to the foot of the
bedpost in Browder's studio apartment. But no one seemed to mind, least
of all the artist who demonstrated its sturdiness by leaning out the
window and tugging and pulling on the lengths of cloth to rearrange
them. Even with such faith in its secure placement, she admitted that,
though she owns a rappelling harness, she thought better of using it as
a method of escape to the sidewalk below. Whether for escaping her cabin
fever or brightening the view for passers on the boulevard, Browder's
public-art project provided a way out of the doldrums, and there's more
to come: look for a project from the artist on February 4 at the home of
Bonnie Fortune, 828 North Winchester from noon to 6pm, as part of the
forthcoming "Dormant" series. Browder's project will be a blue Tyvek
"tear" that visitors can warm themselves in using electric blankets.
Call (773)412-2501 for more information. As with Browder's solo project,
it's a series with the purpose of lifting sodden winterized spirits.
Soup will be served. Christa Holka shows at Lobby Gallery, 731 North Sangamon,
(312)432-4327, through March 4.
Also by Michael Workman Eye Exam
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The Collectors
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