Eighty years after American artists optimistically looked to the promise of industry, another generation is surveying the ruins, in paintings, photographs and even sculptures of dazzling, unexpected beauty.
Darris Lee Harris’ photographs of the Homan Square Power House in Chicago, at the ArchiTech Gallery, are a particularly good example. Harris, a working architectural photographer, was one of several lensmen who went into the early 20th Century plant that currently is being renovated into the Henry Ford Power House Charter High School. He documented both the overall disposition of industrial equipment and details such as instrument gauges, machinery insignias and left-behind union buttons.
Harris shot all of the vistas of the building in several exposures 15 to 20 minutes in length. Then he made the color prints digitally by seamlessly piecing together sections of the various negatives to keep everything — there is a tremendous amount of information in the 40-by-50-inch prints — in perfect focus.
The results are documents as physically beautiful as those of Chicago’s movie palaces. But they also cause something more, an ache that comes from the knowledge our industrial might has passed into history. Other artists in recent months, in painting as well as sculpture, have pressed on this sore spot, but none have surpassed the gentle poignancy evoked here.
At 730 N. Franklin St., 312-475-1290.
Oliver Held is a video artist in his late 30s who lives and works in Cologne. The three pieces screened at I space are each brilliant in their own way, though united through repetition and the gradual unfolding of something like a test.
For the 2006 “Finder,” Held sent his mother to the police records department of Bremen, where she describes Held’s face to a detective who tries to construct a computerized portrait from the data. The process is preceded by a brief shot of Held, so anyone who retains it — and it’s difficult — will watch his family member getting farther, then closer, then farther from it.
Similarly, the 2003 “Building — 1” questions and requestions an actress who only gradually becomes aware that she plays a woman who has professed to shoot her husband accidentally. The repetitions of the interrogation admit a growing number of contradictions that inevitably accrue and, ultimately, unmistakably, reveal the shooting was a murder. “Gone — 1,” from 2005, again uses an actor and repetition to comment on a life-and-death situation, this one from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film, “Blowup.” If artists are going to take inspiration from artifacts of popular culture — and there seems no going back on that — it should always be done this subtly and intelligently.
At 230 W. Superior St., 312-587-9976.
James McNeill Mesple is a contemporary explorer of ancient myths. Occasionally he has updated them, setting them in present-day Chicago. For his exhibition of paintings on paper at the Printworks Gallery, the updatings, which can be campy, are at a minimum, perhaps because he has maintained a pretty tight focus on two mythological figures.
Venus, the goddess of love, and Iris, the goddess of color, inspired Mesple’s series, for which he used a variety of media. Most of the lavishly colored pieces have elaborate artist-designed frames in addition to extravagantly decorated mats. Restraint is not their strong point.
Mesple is at his best, I think, when he combines all his gods and goddesses’ attributes in an enchanted landscape such as the darkling one in “Procreation.” The going gets rougher when he constructs allegories around the role of the artist and seems determined, as he is in “Venus Paints Iris,” to visualize a range of verbal associations including anachronisms.
The majority of pieces are not concerned with making myths “relevant,” and that is all to the good. The vision is an acquired taste, so those who take to its hothouse atmosphere will submit to the narrative elements for the sake of bathing in steamy chromatic luxuriance.
At 311 W. Superior St., 312-664-9407.
Old Town was once Chicago’s Greenwich Village, and it long has had artistic celebrants, the most notable of whom was Francis Chapin. That line continues in Norman Baugher, who for decades has designed the posters and programs for the Old Town Art Fair, in addition to illustrating books on the neighborhood by his wife Shirley. The third of them, a cookbook with chapters on Old Town artists, has just been published, and several of Baugher’s paintings and drawings of food make up an exhibition at — where else? — the Old Town Art Center.
These still lifes are not excuses for chilly essays in form. Baugher is more a celebrant, employing styles to visually praise food and make it look irresistible, lusciously good. The best pieces are the simplest in motif and most direct in expression. When figures appear, they seem unnecessary, and results prove a little too sweet. When Baugher crosses into pure abstraction, exhilaration goes out of the pictures and they look more like commercial design.
At 1763 N. North Park Ave., 312-337-1938.
Darris Lee Harris through June 9 at the ArchiTech Gallery
Oliver Held through July 7 at I space
James McNeill Mesple through June 30 at the Printworks Gallery
Norman Baugher through May 31 at the Old Town Art Center
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