Michael Workman

People wandered the streets between galleries in River North this past weekend unaffected by the cold, listening as a homeless man piped arrhythmically on his harmonica for tips. Bright shop windows illuminated storefronts, and out front of Perimeter Gallery on Superior a small, nattily dressed crowd gathered to smoke. Inside, gallery director Frank Paluch went patron to patron in dark suit and tie alongside a massive, multiple-panel, wall-hung mixed media work by Keiko Hara, "Topophilia Imbuing In Monet." At 74" x 504," the exhibition's showcase piece runs the length of the gallery's front room. It's Imax on canvas, and clearly Hara means it to act as an immersive experience of Monet's style, with all the color-flecked patterns repeated across a visual field that captures center, foreground and periphery.

On the other side of the El tracks at ZG Gallery, a Valentine-theme show was in full swing, with the mainly decorative canvases of Beth Reitmeyer on display. Reitmeyer likes to explode the repeating surface patterns she so meticulously drafts onto the surface of her canvases into full-blown, room-sized installations manufactured from a variety of materials. Her earlier "Sunshine Makes Me Happy" transformed the rear of the space, the gallery's administrative offices, into a fantasyland cottage with walls draped in a cross between bright sunlit flowers and florescent-yellow ivy. In "With Love," she narrows her focus to love as decorative subject. Visitors will first encounter several acrylic and glitter canvases, almost all of which use hearts. If you're a Valentine's Day hater, this show will probably make you gag. But if you can get past the fuzzy, unicorn-girly aspects of the show and enjoy the work based on the sheer range of its obsession with cheaply prettified surfaces, then the holiday theme almost seems secondary. Reitmeyer's installation for "With Love" swallows the gallery's back room whole, all four walls draped floor-to-ceiling in fabric-covered wire twisted into heart shapes. Across the room, plastic wires are arranged like clotheslines, on which hang row after row of index-card-sized works on paper by the artist. Information on a table at the entrance to the room instructs visitors to fill out one with a sentence or two of their own on the subject of love and then trade their index card for one of Reitmeyer's. Wandering through this field of index cards emblazoned with sentiments both syrupy and serious (one warns an unnamed boyfriend that a breakup is on the horizon) provided one of the more satisfying moments of the evening.

Around the corner on Wells Street, crowds gathered at Roy Boyd Gallery. The new series of canvases by Teo Gonzalez are satisfying examples of the artist's highly meditative, process-oriented work. His signature style is labor-intensive, seemingly infinite replications of tiny, tiny grids filled with dotted paint, ironically resulting in abstract forms from a method that approaches science in its process. Gonzalez's works are experiments in near-mechanical reproduction, knowingly reaching for what the human hand is physically unable to accomplish. It's an experiment that produces beautiful aberrations in the patterns from an imperfectly placed touch of the brush.

Across town in the West Loop, the opening at Monique Meloche Gallery seemed to lose no steam despite the late hour. While there's much to recommend in this show, with its unwieldy title of "Sublime, soft-core Monkey butts and Scarlett Johannson on Skull Island," most intriguing are the images in Chicago artist Allison Ruttan's new, loosely anthropological "monkey" series. Along the wall hang a number of headshots of her subjects, some of whom live in the wild, some in captivity. Monkeys kept in captivity, the artist told me, will pick their scalps to individuate their hairstyles, while those left out in the wild have a natural growth pattern that remains largely unchanged animal to animal. Ruttan has drawn their scalp hair in with ballpoint pen to illustrate the phenomenon, showing in her drawings how wide the hairstyles of those kept in captivity actually range. No two are alike.

And last but not least is "Feast and Courtship" by Noelle Allen at Wendy Cooper Gallery, where Noelle has packed the room with graphite and aquacryl drawings on Mylar. These works all resemble photographs of liquid in varying states of agitation, as if in mid-splash. These seemed like sketches in preparation for the sculptural works on the floor and leaning against the walls in the far back room of the gallery: tree branches coated in a thick, paint-like liquid that look like they've been dipped then left untouched until dry. Delightful and fun, they resemble branches broken from trees caught in a rainbow-colored oil spill.

Keiko Hara shows at Perimeter Gallery, 210 West Superior, (312)266-9473, through March 11. Beth Reitmeyer shows at ZG Gallery, 300 West Superior, (312)654-9900, through March 11. Teo Gonzalez show at Roy Boyd Gallery, 739 North Wells, (312)642-1606, through March 14. "Sublime, soft-core Monkey butts and Scarlett Johannson on Skull Island" shows at Monique Meloche Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)455-0299, through March 11. Noelle Allen shows at Wendy Cooper Gallery, 119 North Peoria, (312)455-1195, through March 11.

(2006-02-14)

Also by Michael Workman

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It's something we need a whoooole lot more of in the art world these days: a sense of humor
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