Resurrection
David Hodges
If Bonami’s “Unfinished History” evidences a rapidly industrializing world in which air travel is cheap due in part to cheap oil, “Resurrection” is a show concerned with what Stefan calls an “overindustrialized society” producing an excess of manufactured goods. Like the curator, these artists have stayed close to home in creating their work, in part out of materials found on Chicago streets. And rather than using high-tech video projection or hiring skilled craftsmen, as many of the “Unfinished History” artists did, these three make fairly simple, low-tech assemblages themselves.
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What strikes one first here is not the works’ cultural commentary or overall concept, as in most of “Unfinished History,” but rather the artists’ genuine affection for the junk metal, dried foodstuffs, and other common materials they use. The thin, upward-looking figure poised at the top of a pile of debris in David Cook’s King of the Heap is slightly kitschy and pretentious, but its contrast with the twigs, twisted metal, old floodlights, and other junk is charming. Still, it’s got a hint of a big statement, which places Cook’s work closer than Marci Rubin’s and Maire Kennedy’s to that by the “Unfinished History” artists.
Like Rubin’s, Kennedy’s framing devices make us reflect on the way artists in general select and arrange their raw materials. Even her unframed pieces–such as the cluster of knitting needles in Panic, which almost converge at their points–are organized to concentrate their energy. Though Kennedy’s work was conceived without reference to “Unfinished History,” it offers a kind of answer to that show: stop trying to understand the whole world as a grand narrative and rediscover the act of looking itself.
The color adds a tactility not present in the black-and-white sketches: a scene merely outlined in pencil suddenly comes to life in the color paintings. One image, of two older men watching TV in a kitchen, juxtaposes these two modes: the lower portion, including the men, is made up of uncolored outlines, but the color in the upper part of the background heightens one’s sense of color’s power–the subtly varying cream of the refrigerator is particularly seductive.
