Entry #3: West Loop Gate Gallery District, Visited on 3/23/2011

I started writing, “What an eventful day!” and then I thought to myself, “Sarah, what has happened to you? This sounds like a Mom blog! No clichés!” So I will reformulate that sentiment into something more suspense-thriller, beginning with the moment when I when strips of bright silver pushed through the slats of my blinds to awake me from my slumbers. 8:45! A fog was descending on the Gold Coast, covering the coastal dwellers in shell of hazy white Lake Michigan effluvium. Something was rotten in the state of Illinois, indeed: ye cruel fates seemed to be ignoring the popularly known fact that March twentieth—three days prior to today—marked the official beginning of spring. And yet! Temperatures were dropping to the mid-thirties, babes’ cries rang out in the train stations, and my suede boots slowly assumed a shape not unlike that of an elephant snout crushed by an unapologetic steamroller. It was hump day, all right. Hump day indeed.

 

But, with the help of my good friend Art, the day was spun back into the warm clear light of positivity. I met Martina and our mutual friend/CAP alumnus Giulia Hines for an afternoon of gallery-hopping in the West Loop Gate Gallery District. As you can see from the two pictures above, I was taken by the colorful street art flanking an alley near one of the gallery buildings. The painted wall reads "barriers / vast realities / unconfined / by line," which is interesting since each phrase is boxed in by such harsh, thick black lines that they almost look imprisoned. But it is the issues, the concepts, that are unconfined by their medium, whether that media drawing, a painting, or the side of building on the street. The worn-out posters, with bits of paper peeling off of them, acted as a strange mirror to the galleries next door. Though the galleries are more professional and more kept up, they are still constantly peeling back layers, replacing old shows with new ones. The remnants of change just aren't as visible. 

Above is Giulia at our first gallery, the Thomas McCormick Gallery. The sculpture series was so playful that just looking at it felt freeing. Below are close-ups of the sculpture that's second from the right, a creation by artist Andrea Meyer. This particular sculpture attracted my attention; I find that the buildup of layers--but floppy layers that would be limp on their own--creates a beautiful dynamic between reaching upward and falling downward. It manages to rise and melt at the same time; it is at once liquid and solid. And Martina and I had a great conversation about being here now, and how the experience of being in a particular place at a particular time and trying to absorb it is such a major theme of art. I am constantly grappling with trying to appreciate things as they happen without ruining the present by turning it into a memory already. And I have no clue if this is what the artist intended with the piece at all, at all, but isn't that the absolute beauty of abstract art? That I, in my current state, in my being here now, can take that away from something that might look to someone else like an over-the-top rainbow waterfall? I think yes.

After Thomas McCormick Gallery, we kept moving around to many more. Visiting galleries in this style can be almost like a mini museum trip in the sense that one building can house four or five different galleries. Cross the street and there are four or five more! I've been seeing one or two galleries at a time, but it was much more stimulating to take in so many different galleries in relation to one another—to immediately sense the changes in mood, layout, and style. Martina and Giulia also made the trip was more enjoyable and certainly more educational; group visits make the viewing process a more active conversation in various perspectives and tastes. Also, Martina just knows way more about the gallery scene than I do, so she can give me lots of insights.

Above, Martina and Giulia at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery.


We crossed the street to Three Walls Gallery, where there was a show by artist Ben Russell called "Uh-Oh It's Magic." (Yes, as in this song, which I had heard before, but may I give my highest recommendation that you, reader, watch it just to see the lead singer? 80s pop was truly a magical world.) A record played music while I strolled around looking at what appeared to be very small photographs or gelatin prints of people doing martial arts. The images were each given a large mat and a thin blue frame on a green wall. Martina and I had started talking about the notion of the "white cube" earlier that day. This is the idea that the "best" way to display art is in a cubic room with white walls. I couldn't believe that I'd never even considered it! I started reading about the cube and how some galleries are straying from it. It was so fitting, then, to walk into Three Walls and be able to think about how the green wall worked with the paintings. I wondered, was it possibly giving them too much aid? Making them more exciting than the would be on the cream color of my apartment walls? (Green and blue are my two favorite colors, and so I was immediately more enticed by Three Walls than I might have been if it were Three White Walls.) Is it the job of the gallery to make art as attractive as possible, even if it means that it's shown in a setting vastly different from my living room? So many questions. 


Turns out Ben Russell is a filmmaker. According to the gallery website, his show "gathers together seven instances of sound and image that speak to the varying possibilities of belief and mysticism within a global construct." I never would have known this without the description, so I will not pretend that I understand it fully. It "points towards the persistence of a culturally Western hope/belief in the existence of Magic." I guess magic is meant to be perplexing.

Above, a piece from Ben Russell's show at Three Walls.

Lately I have been working on a self portrait project, which has involved turning small drawings into a much larger portrait with sprawling lines and cross hatches that build up and up. I am fascinated by the transformation of forms in art, like the transformations in the artwork by Caleb Weintraub below, from the Peter Miller Gallery. In the first photo, you can see a two dimensional collage piece, made with graphic printing paper. The seriousness of the figure's face makes the piece seem almost like a jungle Pieta, or at least something very emotional and maternal (Mary Cassat?) In the second photo, we see two children like Hansel and Gretel in a forest, with the same leopard leading them. In the third photo, the same artist has taken his visual lexicon and transformed it into sculpture. And even though the materials are different--string! shag rug! glitter!--the spirit of color, adventure, and fairytale is still present. It excites the viewer in a very different, but I would say equally effective, way. 

The final thing I will mention is Dennis Lee Mitchell. This guy is a crazy rockstar blowtorch pioneer. Yes, he works with a blowtorch to make art with smoke. It was like nothing I'd seen--I thought at first that it was brush and ink, but there were too many fine lines for that. Mitchell's art didn't really make me think or question in the way that other art does, but I really appreciated it simply for its coolness factor. And it really was visually impressive; Mitchell's marks are beautiful, and they manage to go from oh-so-soft to dark and menacing--almost like pieces of a machine, or just like something mechanical, non-human and non-soft--within inches. In the piece below, I can imagine the organic--bird wings, wisps of wind--alongside the darker, manmade things. The blowtorch, for one, is a product of man, but I also see sharper, less natural things in those dark clots that sprinkle the page.

Entry #2: Hyde Park/University of Chicago Area Galleries, Visited on 3/15/2011

Today before seminar, Martina and I went to the Hyde Park Art Center (HPAC) and then to the University of Chicago Renaissance Society. HPAC had a number of different exhibits in their various galleries. On the main floor, there was a show that seemed to Martina and me to be an examination of gender roles through the language and imagery of competitive sports. Most of the pieces were found or constructed sports objects where the artist had added arts and crafts elements. For example, a hockey stick might have been wrapped in a garland; shoulder pads might be laced with pink ribbon. Thus, the pieces were made stereotypically feminine not only through the notion of craft, but also through the utilization of cliche "girly" elements, like pink. One of our favorite pieces was a sports pennant that said "GO BITCHES" in hand-cut letters. Usually, when we see things like jerseys or helmets on display, it is to commend some heroic athletic feat--something that seems almost superhuman. To see these sports objects with frills and lace, then, made a mockery of the silly macho quality of it all in a very subtly smart exhibit.

Upstairs in Gallery 4 of HPAC had an exhibit called "Police and Thieves" that dealt with all the struggles of crime in an urban environment. My favorite piece was a sculpture by Ben Stone called "Neighbor" (2010). According to HPAC-provided information:

"the impish sculpture [...] is based on the popular symbol for crime nicknamed 'Boris the burglar', featured on community watch signs posted in neighborhoods all over the country. The figure is neither menacing nor comforting and raises questions about what constitutes suspicious or acceptable social behavior."

The sculpture was smooth, short, and all black. Its mystery made it alluring; it looked at first like a black traffic cone, then more like a cloaked chess piece sliding into unknown territory. It is this kind of ambiguity that is central to the nature and the language of crime.

At the Renaissance Society, the show was called "The Age of Aquarius." It was, according to the Society's website, meant to address the "lingering cultural fallout of the 1960s." The show included a number of different types of work, including film, 2D and 3D. At the exhibit entrance there was a fantastical smattering of small objects, the kind of things you might keep in a little box for memories (only beautiful enough for an exhibition).



In the main room, there were life-size black and white standing cutouts of a man who seemed to be in various stages of either dancing or climbing stairs, but probably dancing. (Distraught voice: I don't know what this means!) Sandwiching these figures from either side were large black and white 2D pieces. One of them, pictured below, could be a Vietnamese woman or maybe just a woman to represent the generalized "other." She is holding dolls, though one of them seems to be sitting up on its own. Dotted lines that could be viewed as either rays or stitches radiate from the right corner of the painting so that it looks patchy and sewn.





In the other rooms, there were more 3D pieces, one made with string to provide a geometric representation of the sun, another made with peacock feathers. There was also a film piece about a man and a woman who experimented for years with a swinger lifestyle typical of the romanticized group love lifestyle of the 60s.

And art from the University of Chicago Smart Museum, also free, which we visited after seeing the Renaissance Society and eating spinach feta croissants from the Medici Cafe:

Water Lilies No. 34 by Donald Lipski 

Water Lilies No. 34 by Donald Lipski

Great explanation given for Water Lilies

Totem III, Claire Zeisler

Entry #1: Jennifer Norback Gallery, Visited on 3/13/2011

On Saturday afternoon, following a morning of Saint Patrick's Day festivities, I took the 22 bus towards Howard to get to the Aldo Castillo Gallery on North Franklin Street. I had found the gallery on a basic Google search, but despite the prosaic manner of our meeting, I was sure that Aldo Castillo could offer me something appealing: an introduction to Latino art in Chicago. Yet as I walked by the gallery's Google-give address for the third time, searching for an door that wasn't locked and covered in brown butcher paper, I became less and less convinced that this would be my gallery for the day. The most wonderful thing about being alone and without a schedule is that I could flit right over to the next best things, which happened to be another art gallery about a block away. 

This was Jennifer Norback Gallery. The gallery shares a building space with an upscale restaurant; the restaurant is up the stairs and the gallery is down the stairs. 

I had been told that the gallery scene can seem intimidating for a young person. The trick is to remain nonchalantly confident in the face of gallery owners or employees who ignore, snub, or condescend to anyone who doesn't appear to be able or willing to drop $7000 on multicolored smears of oil paint. Independent and assured, then, I walked down the stairs and into the gallery. Unfortunately for me, the gallery floor was quite stealthily raised, about half a foot higher than the floor at the foot of the stairs. I announced my presence with the loud thud of my boots hitting the floor's edge, then attempted to make up for my misstep by gracefully gliding in front of the nearest painting. 

There was a hip, twentysomething woman sitting at the desk wearing a colorful checkered blouse, perfect winged eyeliner, and shiny dark hair. She asked if she could help me with anything, but I told her I was just looking. Here are three different versions of what I think she looked like, from my memory:

There were quite a few different things to look at in the gallery, but the current show (March 4 - April 7) is "Art from Romania," featuring art by Aurel Patrascu, Emilia Persu, and Claudia Lazar. The only unifying elements I saw between these three artists were that they are all Romanian they all work with abstraction in some way (i.e. they are not realists). Other than that, their work is dissimilar. 

Persu's art looks like experimental compositions with shapes, where certain common forms and colors--rounded triangles and gold--can be found amidst mixed media canvases of paint and pencil. It has a childish quality of craftiness and imprecision. The shapes do not come together to create or even suggest anything whole, like a landscape or a group of people. Instead, they are only really suggestive in themselves, and otherwise float about in an abstracted orbit. Persu's work is not as precise as that of Miró, Klee, or Kandinsky. 

Lazar's work seems inspired by Monet's Water Lilies series, perhaps. It has very atmospheric qualities. To me, its swatches of colored marks on a colored backgrounds suggested certain types of skies or bodies of water. 

Patrascu's work--the gallery's favorite for advertising the show--is figurative in a warm, tribal-mythological sort of way. It is not clear exactly what the pieces are supposed to be, whether they are body parts of simply shapes, but they are reminiscent of human or animal bodies. If I didn't know that Patrascu is Romanian, I would be inclined to think she is from the American Southwest. Her color palette--rusty reddish browns, golden yellows, and turquoise blues, among others--reminds me fondly of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Patrascu's imaginative detail and textile-quality patterning is truly impressive, but it wasn't as interesting to me as some of the non-featured work that I found in the back room of the gallery.

Aurel Patrascu

Aurel Patrascu

This was the work of Herbert Murrie, a contemporary abstract expressionist. In a process pioneered by modern greats like Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaller, Murrie pours paint. He doesn't, however, pour it onto canvas, but onto acetate, starting with polymer resin and then layering the resin for a three-dimensional effect. To create further visual excitement, he contrasts airbrushed backgrounds with sharp, crisp foreground shapes. His work looks extremely glossy and sharp, almost like a cut-open geode. I love his work for the fact that I could find a hundred things in just one of his paintings. In this one below, I could show you an eclipsed moon, molten lava, the underside of a caterpillar, a browned marshmallow...

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie

Herbert Murrie, Dying Butterflies

Dying Butterflies detail

The only other thing I have to say about this gallery is that it really illuminated for me the importance of setup and space. In the hallway pictured below, I could barely take in the entirety of a painting without getting dangerously close to hitting the opposite wall. I didn't mind this too much, but I imagine that if I were seriously considering buying some of this art, I would want to be able to see the whole piece from a reasonable distance. A viewer should be able to "take in" a painting without being bombarded by its neighbors, and a cramped gallery space can ruin this option and make very attractive artwork far less appealing. I've begun to consider it much more now that I'm looking for these things, and it's all a game of sales. Placement, lighting, and space are pivotal, but sometimes they seem to be forgotten, either out of ignorance or necessity (i.e. too many pieces for the space). 

back room of the gallery

compared to front room

First gallery visit is now complete, not to mention that now I know the exact location of the famous Gino's East pizzeria and can hopefully visit the area again soon, this time for non-artistic purposes.