In the last few years a number of artists working in different media have approached American industry only to show it on the wane, as a sign of the last days of American empire.
That’s what I suspected Terry Evans was up to in her recent series on steel mills in the United States, but it couldn’t be further from what one perceives in the 11 large color photographs on view at the Catherine Edelman Gallery.
These are romantic pictures, though they’re not in the spare, gleaming, optimistic tradition of American Precisionism. Evans seems after something more shadowy and mysterious. Her steel plants are like vast Wagnerian caves in which the world is transformed by fire. You don’t have to know what the machines and sparks are about to sense it’s something primal, large in scale and irresistible.
Sometimes it’s best, in fact, not to know the function of things, as in, say, Evans’ “Basic Oxygen Furnace,” which may be read as an object like an ancient vessel until one notices a dolly propped against it that shows it’s actually immense and, in the original sense of the word, awesome. I don’t like to think how this power inspires fear as well as reverence, at least, not these days in relation to America and world politics. But it has made here for some impressive pictures.
At 300 W. Superior St., 312-266-2350.
One of the promising Midwestern sculptors of the 1980s, Gary Justis now is closing in on his mid-50s, which clearly has involved some looking back in the pieces that make up his first solo exhibition in Chicago in seven years, at the Alfedena Gallery.
The playfulness that long coexisted with a machine aesthetic here is softened by upholstered shapes meant to convey some of the comfort of childhood memories. However, comfort is not often a sought-after quality in art intended to be challenging. Henri Matisse could evoke it by comparing his art to a familiar armchair. But that had in it not a whit of nostalgia, as nostalgia can make even austere things soft and emotionally sticky.
Justis does not escape stickiness in “Community Machine Gun,” the most complex of his three large pieces on view. The childhood memory of his father making a machine gun to shoot rubber bands has led the artist to a gigantism based on little but feeling, and all the piece’s components — metal, upholstered and video — seem overblown in relation to what is, after all, a highly personal memory of not enough import to merit transference.
The comparative formal simplicity of “Splash” works somewhat better. But perhaps the real stars of the show are many small, wall-mounted aluminum castings from studio detritus in which Justis occasionally evokes say, the essence of childhood toys without the more bothersome feelings of childhood attachment.
At 434 W. Ontario St., 312-944-4340.
Jungjin Lee’s first exhibition at the Andrew Bae Gallery in 2005 introduced the former painter and ceramist from Seoul with examples from three photographic series, all printed large on rice paper that gives a look as soft as prints or charcoal drawings. Her show at the same venue now brings selections from three more series — wind, buddha and road — with the identical technique that evokes the early modern period.
As a seeming paradox, the most successful pieces are ones in which the artist’s old technique is exercised on behalf of contemporary subjects, such as a trailer truck, buildings and trees encountered on the road. The dingier the subject the better, in fact, as it serves to counterbalance the romantic mistiness, firming it up, if you will.
I do not much care for the artist’s images of apparently ancient sculptures, in large part because her process does not yield strong black and whites to differentiate between myriad nuances on the sculptures’ surface. Still, these are comparatively direct images, shot head on, whereas the pictures called “pagodas” rework architectural details to create forms not originally present, and they do not turn out to be stronger than the member would be in undoctored form, on its own.
As before, how one responds to the images is dependent on one’s allegiance to the modern position that said photography’s clarity was more essential to the medium than self-consciously “poetic” effects.
At 300 W. Superior St., 312-335-8601.
“Drawing Now” was a 1977 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that radically admitted as drawing virtually any mark made by any means on any surface. “Paper Now,” an exhibition 30 years later at the I space Gallery in Chicago, is more conservative, exploring through the works of 10 artists contemporary uses of paper that, as befitting our artistic moment, occasionally look unusual but seldom radical.
Paper here is, of course, the support for many kinds of markmaking, large and small, figurative and abstract. The range is represented by Paul Nudd’s tiny sheets bearing imaginary insects, to the modestly sized interlocking picture puzzles of Mark Murphy to the large fleshy watercolor abstractions by Robert Horvath and the mural-like scrolls by Chris Kahler (who brings expressionist gesture to bear on seemingly enlarged microscopic organisms) and Sally French (who deals in fantastic figurative narratives).
But along with those are paper cutouts, of children’s dolls (Julie Farstad) as well as cartouches made from adult logos (Geoffry Smalley); paper constructions that proceed from model-building (Murphy) to architecture (Anna Kunz); paper sculpture that relates to the human body (Jill Downen); and the orthodox simplicity of a surface for preparatory drawings (Gina Ruggeri). So there’s something engaging for everyone.
At 230 W. Superior St., 312-587-9976.
Terry Evans through Nov. 3. at Catherine Edelman Gallery
Gary Justis through Oct. 6 at the Alfedena Gallery
Jungjin Lee through Oct. 6 at the Andrew Bae Gallery
‘Paper Now’ through Oct. 13 at the I space Gallery
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aartner@tribune.com
