Reviews

The World of Things In Themselves and An Incantation for Eternity at Vega Estates 

by Gretchen Holmes

 

Google Searching For God at ebersB9

by Jeriah Hildwine

 

Ghostly Echoes at Evanston Art Center

by Jeriah Hildwine

 

Two Closing Receptions You Should Be Sorry You Missed

by Jeriah Hildwine

 

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The World of Things In Themselves and An Incantation for Eternity at Vega Estates 

by Gretchen Holmes

Joe Grimm and Ben Russell, in Saturday’s one-night installation at Pilsen space Vega Estates, provided a caffeine boost for Chicago’s fatigued sensory receptors, weary after a summer of Olafur Eliasson and the Burnham Pavilions.  In this fleeting high, both Grimm and Russell presented subtly experiential, formally austere pieces built, primarily, from 16mm projectors and analog sound systems.  Entering the apartment gallery’s dank basement to view Grimm’s The World of Things In Themselves or climbing into the equally dank garage for Russell’s An Incantation for Eternity felt like eavesdropping on strained conversations between light and sound. 

Initially, The World of Things In Themselves and An Incantation for Eternity seemed virtually identical—not just the materials and aesthetic, but each piece’s phenomenological, visceral bent—and, if not for the PR, I’d have assumed this was a one-man show.  Both artists manipulate the mechanics of these somewhat obsolete AV devices in ways that show a parallel between the equipment and our own bodies: Grimm first slows down each projector’s shutter speed until our eyes perceive its flicker, then amplifies the flicker’s rhythm, sped-up until our ears perceive it as varied tones. Russell projected five black film loops cut with a single clear frame through five prisms onto five mirrors.  An amplifying feedback loop, initiated by popping noises created as each projector spun through the clear frame, cracked and hummed in the background.

It’s no surprise to find that Russell and Grimm collaborate frequently; however, each artist balances subject matter and spectacle uniquely.  Grimm’s title, The World of Things In Themselves, accurately betrays the artist’s predilection for phenomenology (referencing Husserl’s mantra, “To the Things Themselves!”), and the visceral experience—replete with afterimages and retinal fatigue—easily dominates sentimental ones suggested by the exhausted, failed translation between obsolete technology and our own increasing obsolete bodies.  In An Incantation for Eternity, Russell introduces prisms and the pentagram: references to rainbows and death metal.  This comical juxtaposition is a portal, inviting us beyond the physicality of light and sound to the momentary convergence of Abbie Hoffman, Morbid Angel, Sir Isaac Newton, and Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.  Grimm and Russell’s convergence at Vega Estates is, unfortunately, momentary as well.  Falling easily into dialog, The World of Things In Themselves and An Incantation for Eternity make a great team, illuminating a vast spectrum of concepts and reference points within their narrow margin of formal variety.  

Vega Estates is located at 723 W 16th St.

 

Google Searching For God at ebersB9

by Jeriah Hildwine

Jason Ferguson’s current exhibition, Google Searching for God, at ebersb9, features evidence of his attempts at finding a higher power through an Internet search engine.  The evidence presented consists of two 24x36” digital prints, and a hand-built light table displaying a scroll of typewriter-embossed paper.

The prints, titled God Sighting A and B along with an address, show two results of a Google map search for “god,” one in Germany, the other in Virginia.  No information is provided as to why God was found in those locations, although the standard Google point-marker shows exactly where He is.  The high-quality archival prints, mounted on aluminum, lend a touch of seriousness to what is essentially a found digital image.

The scroll on the light table, entitled Wikigod, is a sixty-foot scroll of paper, embossed using an inkless typewriter with the entire hypertext transcript of the Wikipedia entry for “God.”  The light table is topped with a sheet of plywood.  Small cutouts in the plywood correspond to each occurrence of the word “God” in the text, allowing the light to pass through and illuminate the paper.  The effect is both a pun on “illuminated manuscripts” and a clean and elegant aesthetic presentation of an attempt at understanding what God is.

The slightly misplaced reverence for an artifact of technology perhaps inadvertently recalls Walter M. Miller Jr.’s book A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which a post-apocalyptic monk lovingly copies (and illuminates, with flourishes and gold leaf) the blueprint for a minor piece of technology he cannot even remotely comprehend.  For Ferguson, however, technology is a means to an end:  the finding and comprehension of God.

Depending on the lens through which one views this work, it either gently reminds the viewer of the inadequacy of the human mind (and of human artifice) in finding and understanding God, or else mocks the futility of the search itself.  For me it does both.  Neither evangelical nor heretical, Ferguson’s work provides us with a fresh angle on a pervasive human activity.  It is worth a look, even if you’re not sure what you’ll find.

ebersB9 is located at 1359 W. Chicago Ave. Apt. B9

 

Ghostly Echoes at Evanston Art Center

by Jeriah Hildwine

Featuring the work of Jesse Avina, Larry Chait, Alice Hargrave, and Eric Holubow, Ghostly Echoes  showcases the work of these four local artists, all of whose work depicts desolate spaces, barren, unoccupied, and seeped with an uncomfortable sense of decay.  Curators Alan Leder and Bruce Rogers have done an impressive job of finding and presenting the work of four individuals whose distinct images unite as an impressive investigation of this theme.

Of Jesse Avina’s photographs, my favorites are close-ups of a diorama of a World War I trench system created and exhibited in his MFA thesis exhibition in 2008.  The diorama was an engaging and exciting spectacle, particularly when Avina crawled beneath the structure to manually initiate an “explosion” of dirt and charcoal dust.  The photographs on display in Ghostly Echoes trade in the original diorama’s playful sense of fun for a quieter, subtler experience.  The vapors from dry ice stand in for smoke, fog, or poison gas, which hugs the ground and fills trenches and craters with eerie verisimilitude.  The diorama stands up surprisingly well to extreme close-ups, creating an ambiguous sense of scale that both immerses and disorients the viewer.

Larry Chait’s body of work for this exhibition consists of images of roadside structures, taken from a moving vehicle.  The structures are sharply focused, in contrast to the rest of the image, which is intensely blurred.  The selective focus of these images appears to transcend the effects of distance and movement, mimicking instead the selective focus of human vision and attention.  The absence of inhabitants and the isolated, rural settings emphasize the ghostly transience of these places.

Alice Hargrave’s series Untitled (family pictures) read as personal snapshots of a family vacation home, with the inhabitants almost palpably conspicuous by their absence.  Like a Zen koan on trees falling, they are a quiet meditation on the private lives of our spaces when we leave them.

Eric Holubow’s photographs of abandoned interiors are powerful, as photographs of these spaces inevitably are.  It is easy to take a good photograph in an abandoned building; it is Holubow’s technical prowess that lends these images their excellence.  Of particular merit is his The Great Room, a distorted panorama in which multiple images of a giant domed interior are seamlessly stitched into a single image, rich in detail and awe-inspiring in its vacant grandiosity.

Evanston Art Center is located at 2603 Sheridan Rd.

 

Two Closing Receptions You Should Be Sorry You Missed

by Jeriah Hildwine

 

Earlier this month (Saturday, 8/1) I was fortunate enough to attend the closing receptions of two excellent shows.  The first was a brunch reception for The Diorama Show at Home Gallery in Hyde Park.

 

There were many excellent works in this show; one that appealed to my tastes in particular was Drue Langlois' Casual.  In this small-scale painting in a shallow box construction, a retro stereotype of a cave girl, complete with leopard skin and a bone in her hair, feasts on the flesh of a severed human head.  Her arm rests on an animal skull much larger than herself.  The skull, which would be about life-sized if it had belonged to a chihuahua or a large rodent, alters the perceived scale in this work.  While dioramas frequently depict a scene at reduced scale, Casual seems to show a miniature woman trapped in a Cornell-like box construction with a the skull of a regular-sized small mammal.  This nuanced manipulation of scale lends a complexity to the charming humor of the quaint vintage syling and unabashed savagery.

 

Albert Stabler's Faggot Fence also uses scale to its advantage; the depiction of a hate crime becomes approachable enough to be effective when presented very small, but high on the wall.

 

Nicely if coincidentally timed to immediately follow this reception was the closing of Aspen Mays' Concentrate and Ask Again at Golden, in Lakeview.  Mays' work deftly balances the conceptual with the aesthetic.  In particular, her large-scale digital prints reward prolonged visual contemplation.  Untitled (Fireflies inside the body of my camera, 8:37-8:39PM, June 26, 2008) is an almost Rothko-esque field of color, shifting from cool yellow to acidic green.  I saw this piece at Mays' MFA thesis exhibition and it was presented at Golden at a larger scale, at which it is even more rewarding.

 

Home Gallery is located at 1407 E. 54th Pl.

Golden is located at 816 W. Newport Ave.