Ray Pride

Dusk Saturday night and the Milwaukee Avenue storefront between a botanica and Rodan glows white from within, an exhibition that will last only the night. Furnishings shop Fenway Gallery vacated the day before, and artist Melina Ausikaitis and her friends were up until 5am assembling "Melina's Big Drawing." The commissioned piece, its sprawl of scrawl seemingly invisible until you're up close, although its nine panels are three high from floor-to-ceiling on two walls, is graphomanic succession of floral patterns, insect tracks, migrations of marks, reminiscent of Kerouac's legendary scroll manuscript of "On the Road," but instead of keystrokes and language, it's tracks and burgeoning glyphs.

Ausikaitis, 30, describes her style as "repetitive patternmaking, mark-making." Ausikaitis worked for a year, with a commission as unusual as its mayfly ephemerality. Her style began while in art school about a dozen years ago on a cross-country train voyage with a friend from Boston to Los Angeles. "My friend can sleep anywhere. I was alone a lot of the time. Staring at the scenery, it had a pattern to it. I wanted to see how many pages I could fill up with it."

More recently, Urs Trepp, the lawyer father of a friend, a bear of a man with a quiff of white hair, was in Chicago and made a studio visit. "We were walking from my house and [he] says, 'I want to give you this commission. I want a thousand square-foot drawing. But I have some conditions,'" Ausikaitis remembers. "His condition was I had to quit both my jobs, at Rodan and Skylark. He asked how much I made in a year. I thought about it, I said 'Thirty grand.’ 'Okay, give me your bank account info and I'll wire it to you when I get back.' We went to Rodan and had some drinks and I told my boss I was quitting. I've never met a guy with that much money before. I just felt really out of my territory, with somebody who would do something like that. I didn’t ask any questions!"

What is this piece? "It's just pencil and paper," she says. "It's just one person drawing the same thing over and over again for a year. I wish it had been smaller since it was so difficult to hang. It's a face-value piece except for how long it took. It's almost like you're at a lookout point, 'Those clouds up on that mountain ridge are kind of cool.’ Our only goal was to get it up and see what it looked like."

Introduced to her patron, I ask Trepp his inspiration, what does he admire about Ausikaitis' art? "I like her legs." I know that smile is the only answer I’m going to get.

(2007-10-02)

Also by Ray Pride

Heart of Larkiness
"Into the Wild" is an adaptation of Jon Kracauer's 1995 nonfiction bestseller about Christopher McCandless, who, after graduating from Georgia's Emory University in 1992, hit the road without telling his parents or sister, abandoning his plans for graduate school, forsaking possessions, giving his $24,000 education fund to Oxfam and burning cash on the side of the road. He wants to hitchhike to Alaska. Does he want to find himself? Some deeper meaning to life? Was he naïve? Did he make choices that could mean he was a little unsettled mentally?
(2007-09-25)

Tip of the Week
"Manda Bala" is a wicked eyeful, but I wouldn't count on it for absolute veracity, even while discounting the keepers of cinematic purity and of the Brazilian soul that have been perturbed
(2007-09-25)

Tip of the Week
A much, much better movie than "The Yes Men," Czech film students Filip Remunda and Vit Klusak manage to pull off something more in the vein of that group of social provocateurs’ ongoing pranks-cum-critiques-of-capitalism with their "Czech Dream"
(2007-09-18)

Mush From The Wimp
The Toronto Film Festival came and went, and I couldn't go. I read first dispatches from Canada way, where more than 300 programs would allow any attendee to find a ready twenty or so movies that make any filmgoer's year. From the flood of studio prestige releases to potentially fine new work from Europe and Asia, 2007 will have as many sources of lasting joy as any cinematic annum. Yet a lot of recent writing and posting shows a strange resentment in the air which writers are constantly, compulsively confessing and describing and concerning themselves with their process rather than that of filmmaking
(2007-09-18)

Long Live the New Flesh
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
(2007-09-11)

Tip of the Week
(2007-09-04)

Pulp Infraction
(2007-09-04)

Bitter Biter Bit
(2007-08-28)

Tip of the Week
(2007-08-28)

Under My Umbrella
(2007-08-21)

Needing the Eggs
(2007-08-21)

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