The place to be last Friday was in West Loop, in the 118 n. Peoria Building for numerous gallery openings and receptions. Perfect on a snowy evening to spend the night cavorting from gallery to gallery and floor to floor, without having to go outside. Team member nepheley and myself were joined by a good humored Canadian who recently moved to Pilsen for love and marriage and the nearby school campus.
We started at the top floor (4th) and worked our way down. Our first stop was the Giola Gallery, featuring the work of Jeremy Black in the main gallery. Though the color palatte was well done, the work itself bordered on the somewhat disappointing plateau of repetitiveness and just barely escaped through use of minimalist lines and backgrounds and pieces with multiple sections to provoke interest.
Also at Giola was the work of Martin O'Connor, which seemed to be pencil and highlighters of ambigious looking figures interacting on a blank background (think Aha!'s Take on Me Video in pale yellow or green with less facial details). This work was fascinating rendered as a mural in a small room of the gallery, but lacked an emotional connection to the viewer. Finally, the Giola Gallery had work by Jason Ruhl, similar in style to Black, but with softer lines and colors, and more interaction between subjects on the canvass. The faded look resembled stencil or pressed inkwork, and had a very ethereal quality, almost as if the work captured the moment before a radio station was being tuned into clarity.
Our next stop was the gescheidle Gallery, which was featuring Fred Stonehouse (Songs and Dreams). His work involves high use of symbolism in an attempt to describe our culture. One piece titled Prepare to be Judged by the Almighty explored the supposed reality of screenwriting in Hollywood; or at least that's what we concluded. What else could a circle of people on their knees kissing the ass in front of them with a bag on money in the middle mean? Work like this is always a pleasure to view, especially because the artist seems to want to reach the viewer on many different levels. His work is slightly reminiscent of Andy Warhol. Michael Noland's work shared the space, but with pieces that make such a powerful visual and political statement, Noland's SouthWestern desert plants with bold lines and color palattes was largely overshadowed by Stonehouse's pieces. Finally, David Brody's Heads, oil on canvas had a slightly unreal quality about them that still felt appealing somehow, especially in a world of overly done celebrities and supermodels. The work was all from the shoulders up and had a very simple arresting quality to it.
Our next stop was the Walsh gallery, which had many installations as well as some photography, as a previous blog post mentions more in detail. The installations were cool, the sort of thing you might encounter at the Musuem of Contemporary Art. There were five or six different ones, all in different (seemingly unrelated) styles. The first, a kind of space age bachelor pad by Rodney Swanstrom, next a maze of wood and scaffolding by Wang Wei, then a series of mesh tents with scenes laid out by Wang Shugang, and finally, a bunch of vertical lightboxes with images of the five senses by Sheba Chhachhi. This gallery was by far the best of our trip and made me feel like a little kid.
Our last stop was the Aron Packer Gallery, where the giddy referential pop art of Hank Feeley graced the walls in big broad canvasses and bold colors and Salvador Dali-esque composition. The middle gallery walls were overshadowed, but a sort of Grimms brother fairy tale type work. In the last gallery space, a lot of pieces were collected together from different artists. We enjoyed Brian Detmer's The South Paper. I had too much wine by this point to remember (or write down legibly) why exactly. Also on display, a realistic wooden I-pod, wall art made from beads and more.
Hit:
gescheidle Gallery, Fred Stonehouse
Walsh gallery, (all artists)