Michael Workman

It's amusing that, on a weekend with so little of the white stuff actually around, there's a preponderance of art about snow. At the Renaissance Society, Yutaka Sone's show "Forecast: Snow" opened this past weekend, filling the room occupied by the Society with the smell of pine trees. Filling the hall, in fact, with actual pine trees, exactly 100 of them, their triangular boughs creating the immediate illusion of a nighttime walk in a pine forest. Walking through during the opening late Sunday afternoon, it was difficult to ignore the sacral atmosphere projected by this roomful of trees. Students stood aside the walking path carved out by the hardened foam mounds into which the bases of the trees have been inserted, and one thick man with long white imitation-Einstein hair puffed through, gnawing his teeth as if perplexed. How can such beauty, of seemingly such precise design, exist at random? It's a question originally posed by Wilson A. Bentley, the catalog essay explains, the Vermont farmer who conducted the first scientific investigation of snowflakes, producing over 5,000 photographic documents of individual flakes, along with detailed notes "about the atmospheric conditions when the photos were taken" compiled in a single 200-page volume, "Snow Crystals." It's this research that was seized upon by popular culture to produce the well-known aphorism "no two snowflakes are alike."

The Japanese-born, Los-Angeles-based Sone has created this fantasyland of the symbolic tree of Jesus in which to situate his fascination with the snowflake as a unique and temporary object within nature. Against this backdrop are art objects that take as their subject the crystal symmetry of the snowflake, placed in various plastics on pedestals, ranging in size "from several inches to a few feet in diameter." These are his answer to Bentley's study, an attempt to relocate the beauty of the snowflake in a less representational mode than photography, larger than life and exaggerated in crystalline formation. Walking through this hoary forest set atop fake hills of dirty white snow and snowflakes of shredded plastic, visitors encounter them on elongated bases, as if mountains rising from frozen earth, snowflakes remade to resemble geo-planetary forces of culture. Indeed, Sone's work takes as its point of departure not the snowflake as natural phenomenon but as a cultural metaphor for individuality.

A metaphor he wishes to destroy. Why? As the former frontman for The Snowflake Band, Sone has sought diverse outlets for his fascination, devoting all of his work over the past three years to the liberation of the snowflake from its kitsch captivity. That attempt's reflected in the diversity of this show as well, comprised alternatively of the artist's examples of sculpture, but also in paintings of ski lifts hung on the wall to create a sightline from the walking path that recalls a view of the mountain sky. There's also a snowman with exaggerated stick arms and carrot nose, and a sculpture that at first blush resembles a kind of magical ice palace framed with white pines, another ski lift with little people riding the cars to an imagined platform in the beyond. All these apparitional creations, moments made of or from snow, the viewer slowly realizes, are meant to approximate the complexity of that temporary stuff that is the material of Sone's craft, the pure lightness of this escapist experience.

Snow Adrift

And yet more snow. Driving home the other night on Chicago Avenue, my wife and I noticed something strange about the last remaining display window of the Goldblatt Brothers building at the corner of Ashland Avenue. Yes, we confirmed in a quick double-take, that's a snowdrift inside the building. It's actually a conceptual piece by Chicago artist Tony Tasset, commissioned by the city's percent for art program which allocates 1.33 percent of all renovation projects on municipal buildings, and Tasset's piece, a typical snowdrift produced for realism down to the grime and the coffee cups and matchbooks buried in the pile, adds a touch of humor to the typical snowy hell of the Chicago winter. It elicits mixed emotions because it's hard to see the aesthetic value in memorializing the snow that's insufferably present, but it will probably wear much better in the summer months. With $160,000 allocated to art, that's a goodly sum, though it'd have been nice to see some of the cash going to under-recognized artists. As it is, the list includes well-established names such as Tasset, Don Baum, Stephanie Brooks and Art Shay. That's not to say that these aren't fantastic artists whose projects will no doubt prove worthy additions to the percentage for art legacy, just that they were easy picks with proven track records. In any case, once the dozen commissions planned for the building are installed, they're permanent. That will make the Goldblatt Brothers building one of the most public-art-rich locations in the vicinity, and a welcome gift to the neighborhood.

Yutaka Sone shows at the Renaissance Society, 5811 South Ellis Avenue, (773)702-8670, through April 9.

(2006-01-31)

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