Emily Severance
Image Auto at 221 W. Chicago, through March 1
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I ran into her a few months ago in the grocery store and asked her if she was still writing. “I’m in art school now,” she said. “I’m in ceramics.” I fell for it. I actually believed she’d forfeited her demons, and her ambitions, for a more modest pastime. A couple hours a day on the wheel, very meditative; some glaze, yes; and now let’s drive it over to the craft show. But when I got a chance to see her work, in a group exhibit of current and recent MFA and BFA students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Gallery 2, there wasn’t any glaze at all. Severance’s installation, Covering Ground: The Honeymoon, offers an even bleaker and more mortifying vision than her writing did a decade ago.
The artist calls Covering Ground a tribute to her mother, who is now ill but who used to enjoy traveling. I suspect she saw it as an escape from a tedious domestic existence. There’s water in the rusted basins, and at the bottom of them is sand in which Severance has written the names of places her mother liked to go. Travel brochures litter the ground under one of the ladders. The other has books lined up on its rungs. The title on the spine of one of the older volumes says it all: The Real Guide: Able to Travel.
Below the signs are four enlarged “drawings,” hybrids Montgomery pieced together from illustrations in car manuals, books on old toys, and plastic-surgery texts. Each drawing contains multiple conflations of anatomy and technology–the pelvis as oil pan, the retina as an array of electrodes, the thighbone as a shock absorber. Seen from a passing bus, Image Auto is extremely convincing: it looks like an ordinary storefront, especially at night. From the sidewalk, however, it’s possible to study the drawings and to consider their philosophical implications and satirical intentions.
