The Grotesqueness of Desire at InsideArt, through May 1
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Most of the works in this exhibit by 14 Irish and American artists, curated by Clodagh Kenny and Marjorie Vecchio, address the issues of looking and being looked at; most of the artists are aware that the very act of making an artwork involves some distortion of the subject matter. This is perhaps clearest in Michael Merrill’s photo Sink Drinking, which shows a plump man kneeling on a countertop, drinking out of a sink like an animal at a water hole; some lotions on the counter suggest that the bathroom is a woman’s. Perhaps this hapless fellow was caught enacting some strange fetishistic ritual, but it’s more likely that the image was staged–which further foregrounds the theme of display.
Much of the art in “The Grotesqueness of Desire” posits that the very act of looking at objects–or arranging them to be looked at–irretrievably changes them. This is just as true of the more modest works, mostly by Irish artists, based on fragments of nature. Alice Maher’s small, elegant Shelf of Thorns juts out from the wall, neatly arrayed thorns projecting from all five surfaces. Removed from plant stems, they’re arranged just irregularly enough to suggest natural patterns but densely enough to make clear that this is an artist’s construction. Of course the thorns negate the function of a shelf–the piece’s hostile-looking surface distantly recalls the aggression of DeGenevieve’s camera.
Installations by Shuko Wada and Arthur Myer, the two Chicago artists presented in “All and Nothing,” occupy all four rooms of the basement apartment that is Margin Gallery. Wada’s use of the front room is the most effective: she restates on a more conceptual level the issues raised by many pieces in “The Grotesqueness of Desire.” Redoing this small living room mostly in white, she’s covered the floor with Styrofoam blocks taped together and the two windows with white chiffon, calling them “Window Paintings.” Floor Painting is a block of the Styrofoam cut to the same size as the windows and hung on a wall.
Like Wada but even more explicitly, Myer is foregrounding the act of viewing: he tells you what you’re seeing. And even though his demeanor is gentle and unassuming, there’s something unsettling about his presence: viewers who enjoy the anonymity of art exhibits, the ability to spend as much or as little time as they like, will certainly be challenged by the artist’s impromptu performance.
