Of all the materials used by contemporary sculptors, glass is the most immediately seductive, as an industry in decorative works will attest. Occasionally an artist will go beyond the seductiveness of the material, though it does not happen often and rarely meets with success.
Josiah McElheny’s glass sculpture at the Donald Young Gallery is a case in point. The primary pieces are five mirrored tables on which are arrangements of mirrored objects in blown glass. Each is called a “landscape model,” as the objects–anywhere from 12 to 18 of them–look much like pillars, escarpments and other strange geophysical formations.
Their smooth surfaces blend with the tabletop as their surfaces reflect the environment in which they rest. The effect is somewhere between art and interior design, as the references range from Brancusi and Tanguy to the beakers and decanters of a cocktail set.
McElheny himself addresses the design issue in two mirrored shadowboxes that contain objects recalling flagons from the 1950s and ’60s. He then subverts the mirror as a motif in art with a series of “drawings” that fractures or otherwise distorts reflections.
But with what are we left? A suite of not decorative objects, but ones that seduce easily, nonetheless. The kind of game with taste played by Jeff Koons’ chrome bunny does not happen here. The material prevents it, in all the usual, slick, fragile, instantly appealing ways.
At 933 W. Washington St., through April 3. 312-455-0100.
Maurizio Pellegrin
Maurizio Pellegrin’s “painted walls” and sculptures at the Carrie Secrist Gallery have the quality of cultural ruins that have been brought together less to say something “new” than to celebrate the continuum of art history through acts of poetry.
As it was when the Italian artist first showed here in 1991, the method remains assemblage, that is, the bringing together of objects and artifacts from several cultures with stenciled numbers from a numerological system with Pythagorean and Kabbalistic sources. Now, however, some of the arrangements take place within rectangles Pellegrin has painted directly on gallery walls.
These site-specific pieces at times approach mural size and are formally persuasive even while remaining hermetic. Viewers may be tempted to proceed by accretion, assuming each component added to another will inevitably add up to some sort of “meaning.” But as the pieces are not puzzles, they cannot, in fact, be solved.
They are more like portraits of the interior of the artist in which he is caught in acts of visual free association. So they do not reveal as much as evoke and suggest. And as with all ruins that have been shored up there is an equal sense of devotion and longing, which is different from a feeling of nostalgia and not at all easy to convey.
At 835 W. Washington St., through March 20. 312-491-0917.
Two at Rhona Hoffman
Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz’s sculpture and photographs at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery make up one of those projects in which a form of kitsch is treated so differently from the norm that it is meant to be given a serious aesthetic function. Here the kitsch is a knickknack common to all souvenir shops: the snow globe.
The artists present 18 of these miniature sculptures that for full effect have to be shaken. The “snow” then swirls around scenes quite unlike the ones viewers will be used to. Here, though landscapes still have a cartoonlike quality and figures are painted in happy colors, the incidents depicted are menacing, criminal or desolate.
Several color photographs enlarge the scenes, further emphasizing their dark emotional tone. The knicknack thus is relieved of its previous associations and made a legitimate artistic object, except for one thing–the strategy doesn’t work. It never does because kitsch associations are so strong that they’re impossible to overturn, and we find ourselves honoring the efforts more than results.
Tania Bruguera’s installation, sculpture and two-dimensional works show an awareness of the expressive potential of materials that is unusual in contemporary politically oriented work. Sight, smell, and touch all are engaged in the installation, and though the emphasis of the piece lies elsewhere, it is nonetheless enhanced for being embodied not just in “ideas” but a stimulating handmade environment.
At 118 N. Peoria St., through March 7 (Martin and Munoz) and March 13 (Bruguera). 312-455-1990.
