Dragging the Leash & Diatonics, Doilies and Diseases at Linda Warren

By Lee Ann Norman

A couple years ago, I went to a “Talking Point” program at the Hyde Park Art Center.  It was my birthday, and a friend suggested we meet there (because Juan Angel Chavez was speaking) and then get a drink after to celebrate.  I vaguely knew about Chavez because he still has this wonderful piece installed at Marquette Park, created from a workshop he conducted with youth and their families some years ago, and I’ve seen his handiwork in many a CTA train station.  I was familiar with his public art projects and community-based work as a teaching artist, and I was curious to learn more about other aspects of his practice.

The Speaker Project blew me away not only because of its massiveness of course, but also because of Chavez’s stories about how he came to acquire the materials for it and much of his artwork: found objects that are mined, foraged, scavenged, rescued, repurposed, or “borrowed” indefinitely.  This intervention of sorts – to rescue the cast offs, orphans, and extras and give them new meaning and purpose- made me remember my high school friends who would sneak about our town and steal traffic cones just to keep in their bedrooms, just for us to giggle about when stories were retold or when we would shut the door and look at the spoils of these adventures.  The purpose behind Chavez’s night (and sometimes broad daylight) excursions for items ranging from traffic barrels and cones, to jute, coir, fur, broken old dolls, and pieces of decorative iron fences, however, are much more mature, much more loving, and meaningful.  Having learned that, I was excited to visit his latest exhibition and see what he’s been up to.

“Dragging the Leash” is filled with collages, installations, and assemblages that try to make meaning out of the complexities of the human existence.  We are animals after all, despite our “domestication,” and like the rest, we too, are just trying to find our way and survive.  Our tether (the leash) keeps us civil (mostly) in those efforts, and mitigates our ability to behave in animalistic ways.  That said, many of the pieces in this show are small and compact, almost showing restraint in their construction and attention to detail.  These are carefully arranged, assembled, and orchestrated works that seek to reflect that inner balance we must maintain between our civility and basic instinct.  The light boxes in the exhibit take on more expansive and traditional structures, using fewer organic shapes, instead favoring lines, sharp corners and angles, to reflect upon this inner struggle.  Like feral cats zipping in and out of alleyways searching for scraps, sometimes humans fall back on our instincts too in order to survive.

Chavez uses woodcut shapes that echo stenciling throughout as the basis for most of these pieces.  These stencil like forms contribute to the meticulous and restrained feel of the work despite his use of other artistic devices (such as the organic shapes and forms, straight lines and 90-degree angles) to communicate how close we are to the edge of order or chaos, beauty or grotesqueness.  Collages and assemblages are combined with wood glue, augmented with paint, fur, or feathers, and finally held together and wrapped with loving care by bungee cords or pieces of cloth, as if to protect them somehow.

The idea of “ship in a bottle,” or that particular way of collecting and preserving objects, has never really connected with me.  Chavez, though, moves the practice away from quaint kitsch and creates poignant vignettes of chaotic beauty.  How he crams so much detail and material into such small spaces, I’m not sure, but I smiled when I walked around to the other side of one to peer more closely at its contents and saw a tiny white dog figurine inside, perched on one of the ledges making up this miniature towering collage inside glass.

Shannon Kerrigan maximizes the gallery’s intimate project space with her latest work “Diatonics, Doilies and Diseases.”  Kerrigan works primarily in metal, welding steel.  The delicacy of her hand drawn, plasma cut and burned creations is a striking contrast for the medium.  Each piece stands on its own even though they are installed cluster-like in the project space.  Her pieces end up evoking choral reef, simple organisms, viruses, flowers, microbes and plagues.  These pieces are incredibly powerful upon closer examination and underscore the resonance of line, shape, and form in nature that is echoed in art.

Chavez’s and Kerrigan’s works cause us to reconsider our definitions of beauty, to examine how we ascribe value to objects, and justify our designations of junk and treasure; waste and surplus; ridiculous and sublime.  Perhaps reverting to our “feral” selves every now and then will allow us to enjoy a freedom where we have the space to contemplate birth and rebirth; growth and decay; life and survival in ways that our good manners do not.