Choose Your Own Adventure at Fill In The Blank

by Claire Haasl

Characters

I had been meaning to make a trek up to Fill in the Blank gallery ({fib}) for quite some time.  It’s a fairly new fine art gallery/community art center with programming that ranges from neighborhood scavenger hunts, to film screenings, to screen printing classes.  And although their focus is on fostering creativity with their community, Lincoln Square, {fib} has been exhibiting some very talented emerging artist since they opened in January.  In addition to the exhibition space and the educational programming offered each month, {fib} runs an online blog that discusses the artists they exhibit and promote.  So if you’re feeling shy about heading all the way up to 5038 N. Lincoln Avenue to check out {fib}’s next show, the blog will offer a little more information on the kind of artists and work they exhibit.

Dali, Yunnan Province, China

This month {fib} is showing the work of Gretchen Huffman, a printmaker whose work is enveloped in storytelling.  Her prints are both large and small, but the detail that goes into each one is what stood out to me the most.  At a distance I saw the stories that Huffman is visually portraying, but as I drew nearer I felt as though I was getting a stronger sense of the story of the artist.  Each etched line; every tiny mark seemed like a phrase or sentence in Huffman’s diary. As I studied the works closely, I felt as though I was Alice falling through the rabbit hole on my way to a mystical land of fantasy and imagination.

Damn Squirrels

Huffman’s belief that “stories grow out of (everyday) events and, far from being a didactic retelling of the factual events, good stories are ‘delivered’ replete with embellishment” is apparent in her work through the layers within it.  When you look at the whole picture, you can see the broader, perhaps more factual version of the “story” that’s happening within each piece.  But if you focus on any of the characters (I use the word character instead of subject because the subjects of her prints are alive with personality and substance.) within the broader picture their individual tales come forth and the story within the story is told.  Even Huffman’s simpler prints of single characters drawn without a scene or narrative surrounding them have a whisper of personality within their actions and facial expressions.

Choose Your Own Adventure

The workmanship and time that goes into each of Huffman’s prints is undoubtedly apparent, but perhaps a more impressive aspect of her work is the fact that we get a sense of who she is, what she appreciates as an artist, as a storyteller, and because of the way the characters she creates seem to speak through her, as an audience herself.  In the piece, Damn Squirrels Stealing MY Pecans! you see an older man in the midst of his breakfast pointing a shotgun out the window at a somewhat frightened, somewhat proud squirrel who has been caught steeling the man’s nuts.  Although the subject of this work is a man about to shoot and possibly kill a squirrel for a nut, the humor in the piece is abundantly clear and I got the sense that man is more or less just warning the varmint, rather than threatening his life.  Perhaps the most important thing to recognize within this piece is not the narrative you see, but the story you hear being told, how it was told to Huffman, and how she is telling it to you.