The Plethora Effect
Janusz Walentynowicz
Artists have addressed this problem in various ways, often by making works that sprawl. Multipanel paintings, sculptures with many parts, and installations cannot be grasped all at once. All five artists in “The Plethora Effect”–which doesn’t look like a student show even though the participants are recent MFA graduates from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign–make work that’s dispersed in space. Kevin Kaempf not only designed the wall sign announcing the show but also redesigned the announcement card and catalog. Kaempf’s interventions are interesting, but the other artists’ works are more moving, specifically counteracting reductive seeing.
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Two artists have created wall-mounted multipaneled works in which each part undercuts the authority of the rest. J. Todd Allison’s House Beautiful has 21 wooden panels on two walls–though often the panels are so thick they’re more like blocks. One side is finished as if it were fine wood while the other is generally painted a solid color. Each is also mounted on hinges so that it can be swung out perpendicular to the wall. The title underlines the piece’s humor: it resembles yet mocks the sort of decorative painting that reduces art to kitsch. Most intriguing is the way Allison straddles the categories of fine art, interior decoration, and catalog shopping: one can’t quite decide whether these are paintinglike objects, sculptures, or samples of paint colors and furniture finishes.
A gallery selling fancy glass objets d’art can be a good place to see “art” that’s little more than a sterile, lifeless commodity. But some glass artists, among them Chicagoan Lance Friedman and the Polish-born Janusz Walentynowicz (who now lives in Bloomington, Illinois), escape and even undercut the safe domesticity of contemporary work in glass: Friedman’s 13 pieces at Habatat all contain little autocritiques.
In other pieces Walentynowicz combines different types of imagery. Nine squares on a single panel are arrayed in a grid in Composition: Blue Star, each containing a different image or object. Several have women painted inside, as in Respite; there’s also a star design, leaves on branches, and in the center a glass sculpture of a bird. Walentynowicz transforms what might have been mere kitsch–pairing women and nature is not exactly a new idea–by using muted colors and the peculiar light-generating glow of glass, creating an almost mystical view of an imagined sky: in addition to Walentynowicz’s literal references to the heavens, the women’s figures seem to radiate light, almost like clouds.
