Two Headed Spoon

With video instillations, performance-based work, photography, painting, works on paper, and space filled instillations, the New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work from recent School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) alumni and current SAIC students was sophisticated and yet unsurprising.  Some of the four exhibitions in the show had obvious themes, like the grouping that dealt with food (or consumption) and We Must Indeed All Hang Together that tries to reconcile the vast and rapid changes in our time.  The other exhibitions seemed less cohesive with some outstanding individual pieces.

The food exhibition had at its center an installation piece with two small dining desks facing each other.  Each desk had a plate and napkin. Spanning the space between the two desks was a long rod with a spoon on each end.  Each spoon was resting in the plate of the facing desks.  The initial and obvious implication of this arrangement is that two people could not eat simultaneously.  A possible interpretation of this set-up is that one person’s consumption can possibly inhibit another’s.  Other works in this exhibit integrate wine and coffee stains into drawings.  Welling Up by Elise Goldstein is “transubstantiated wine on paper”.  The two large and efficiently contour drawings surround areas of red wine.  The wine has an uncanny resemblance to dried blood.  The top piece is an image of a bed in a corner of a room and a dresser with faded crimson wine dripping from the wall into a puddle on the floor. The bottom piece is the bottom half of a nude female shin deep in the dried wine.  The contrast of the simple line drawings mingled with the various red shades is striking.  The two drawings together evoke a feminine right-of-passage.  This may be obvious, however the red being dried wine gives it other dimensions, possibly religions, or maybe the more simplistic alcohol induced indescresions.

"Conterfeit Crochet" by Setphanie Syjuco

In what seemed to be the largest of the exhibits We Must Indeed All Hang Together, a reference to Benjamin Franklin’s response to John Hancock after signing the Declaration of Independence, had more socio-political work.  The outsourced, reworked, crochet luxury items titled The Counterfeit Crochet Project by Stephanie Syjuco is reflective of our current situation.  Each knockoff piece in theinstallation, a Louis Vuitton belt, Channel purse, Burberry scarf, etc., was crocheted by different individuals through collaboration.  Using outsource and counterfeiting as an art form to illustrate the desire for luxury goods the drives people in the developing world to produce and the developed world to consume such items at a possible cost to both.  Luke Stettner’s piece Untitled, a mirror sculpture, more literally touches on reflection.  The box has five mirrored sides and one glass side allowing the viewer to peer in.  Inside there is a photograph in the middle of a second piece of glass.  The photo seems to be floating, both reflected and the real.  The illusion shows the viewer the concrete and the reflection, with the viewer as part of the mirage.  In the modern cultural dominated by multi-stream media, what is real, what is a reflection of what is real, and what is not real is not always clear, which can make it difficult to see ourselves.

"Untitled" by Luke Stettner

Other pieces that stood out in their own right were Hesitations by Emily Hermant and both Mindscape photographs by Hyounsang Yoo.  Hesitations, a large instillation of thread strung up and down on nails resembled a rawrshack test or visual representation of a sound wave.  The sheer size, meticulousness, and blending of lines was magnificent.  The vibration of the contours gives the viewer the sense of a southing roar. The Mindscape photographs were equally as comforting and rhythmic.  The digital prints are photos of landscape, similar to what’s seen from a moving car along the flat Midwest. The color had a muted quality with a soothing tone.  The anywhereness and nowhereness of these two photos are relatable and direct without being boring.  They border on abstract without abstracting the photographed forms.  The viewer becomes engaged without being complicated.

While two of the little exhibitions within the larger had solid continuity, the over all exhibition seemed more difficult to grasp and hard to walk through.  The space on the seventh floor of the former Carson Pirie Scott building is great for an exhibition, though this particular show seemed to have a complicated layout.  Worth going to for a few gems, but again, no real surprises, this is not necessarily a bad thing since all the work was solid.

 “New Approaches: Four Exhibitions of Current Work” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Sullivan Galleries at 33 S. State Street, 7^th floor in Chicago will show through this Saturday, September 26.