Michael Workman

The jetlag from my previous week's trip to Basel was still fresh as we set out for a Saturday night on Division Street. What better to shake off the dust of the international art road than a night hanging with the locals. We'd heard from friends that there was some action at the Splat Flats artists' studios (www.thesplatflats.com) in buildings on either side of the L. Miller and Sons lumber yard shop at 1815-25 West Division Street. The flats officially opened about a year ago in the pair of buildings formerly used as single-room occupancy spaces for the homeless, now filled with artists happily reposed in clean(ish) new work spaces. As with most studio facilities, it's a mixed bag of quality, more about reifying the communal feeling that artists thrive on. In that sense, it was happening: the artists and their management had paired up to stage "LumbArt," a one-night event modeled after notions of the classical Chicago street bazaar, with art piled in amongst all the newly cut lumber of the yard.

Entering through the open gates to the north side of the building, artists sitting at a table greeted visitors and served up conversation. Beer flowed freely. To the left, in recessed alcoves, artists manned tables against a backdrop of shelves chock full of tagged two-by-fours. Two men worked a DJ table on a second-floor area to the right. Between the stacked shelves and down a short walkway, people were sitting in rows of chairs facing a projection screen. They were awaiting readers, who at the moment were lost in the crowd. Video screens and projections were playing both in the hall and in partially obscured recesses. Back out into the open-air commons, a few steps to the back led us to a room down a small set of stairs. Here was a more traditionally wall-hung type of exhibition, with work by a variety of Splat's studio artists.

Overall, the event was a mix of craft-based and fine art types of work. As a one-night event, it was precious, with the atmosphere of a summer fest. Among artists with spaces in the building, Jeremiah Ketner (www.smallandround.com) remains the most consistent. Ketner's a prolific artist whose work is an endless elaboration on a floating-in-space playground of flower stems, weeping pistils and endlessly various graphical flourishes he invents to trick out this imagined space. Amongst these flourishes wander childlike, pear-headed figures, perhaps facets of the artist's persona, which appear to fall through this space, smiling, meditating. His figures are distinctly Asian, as is his graphical style of work. Ketner looks to have entered this world a few years after graduate school at Carbondale and has remained there ever since. These canvases were among the most finished on display, and three were marked sold early in the evening.

Feminine Harvest

Find time to stop by the 118 North Peoria Building this week for "Mixed Fruits," the newest drawings and oils on canvas from Chicago artist Lorraine Peltz. They share an interesting similarity in their approach to content with that of Ketner, though more varied in subject matter. Where in one series she may choose women's shoes and the attendant concerns of femininity and fashion, here she has chosen instead to frame her monologue around an effort to offset her earlier work through pictorial depiction of naturally occurring patterns. Mainly, she does this through a simple juxtaposition of fruits and flowers. Culled from her 2005 Roger Brown Residency in New Buffalo, Michigan, these images mix pictorial elements with elements of pop and abstraction, effectively shifting each of these as distinct painterly interests into a kind of symbology of psychosexual portraiture. While you'd expect this kind of subject matter to come across as brash and in-your-face, Peltz always somehow manages to make her point discreetly. Her "Red Plums/Lightning Strikes," for instance, stands out: repetitive petaled flowers foreground the canvases, stitched between with cartoonish "speech bubbles." A pair of slender women's legs appears in one, the majority of the plane filled-in with zigzagged bolts of lightning. In the lower left hand of this grouping she has placed a tiny pair of plums. They seem to occur almost as afterthought, but they're the key to the entire image. Whereas Ketner foregrounds the necessity of innocence and play as a unifying thread, Peltz conjures up realms of fecundity and the potential for decay, illustrated in the distance between natural and synthetic forms, but also in the often striking distance between different types of nature.

(2006-06-27)

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