David Mark Wise

Ed Paschke once described his work as "translation"—appropriating photos and other imagery from popular culture, and transforming them into his own idiom. His work is marked everywhere by an engagement with the world of photomechanically reproduced images, like those of photography, movies and television. "I’m interested in scanning and selecting from this reality," he once said, and by "this reality" he meant the saturation of commercial images all around us, everywhere, powerful and inescapable. When a whole lot of Paschkes are put in a small room, the pressure of this saturation is palpable. They make us notice, for instance, the inescapability of faces in this capitalist mediasphere: and this may be why Paschke’s faces are distorted into blank masks with cowrie-like orifices, or put into constricting bondage masks, or whose noses, eyes and ears have become Mr. Potato Head accessories. Many of the faces are painted in the inverted colors of photographic negatives: black, violet and lime. Paschke’s exercise of translation is one that preserves the original as a defeated ghost, and these pictures document those exorcisms. This is especially true of the later, more overtly political works, like "Force of Nature" from 1990 or "With God on our Side" from 2003. The show is split between the main gallery and a gallery annex, around the corner on 750 North Orleans. In the annex, early drawings show the influence of surrealism ("Green Buckle Shoes," 1972), Pop Art ("Top Cat," 1970), and underground comics ("Cleon," 1974). All of these come to a magnificent synthesis in "Janina," from 1974, which is in the main gallery—and this makes a trip back from the annex totally worthwhile.

Ed Paschke, "A Survey, Major Paintings 1969–2004," shows at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 West Superior Suite 115, through May 10. (2008-04-08)

Also by David Mark Wise

Tip of the Week
The career of James Bishop coincides with the great movements of Modernist painting in the last fifty years, but he never aligned with any of the strong personalities or dogmas from that era
(2008-03-25)

Tip of the Week
"Snooping for a New Lexis of Peace" is an attempt to discover a new vocabulary of imagery relating to recent U.S.-led military adventures. A lot of people have questioned the lack of "oppositional practices" in American art today—there is, unfortunately, only one Paul Chan—and so this experiment of James J. Peterson is timely. But this artist goes in a direction that is totally counterintuitive
(2008-03-18)

Tip of the Week
The current show at ThreeWalls is part of an artist exchange brokered between Detroit MoNA and Chicago.
(2008-03-05)

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