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.