After Before at Swimming Pool

by Jeriah Hildwine

After Before opened Saturday, February 27th from 7pm-10pm at Swimming Pool Project Space.  I was absolutely blown away by the work in this show.  According to the press release, “The exhibition subtly bends the space time continuum by making the future seem like the present or even the past,” and the works in the show “are all in conversation with another moment, another place, another realistic parallel now.”  While, as is often the case with thematic group shows, the alleged connections between the works were tenuous at best, each piece by each of the three artists easily stood on its own as a significant accomplishment.

Daniel Baird’s fallen Space Station occupies a large vitrine near the gallery’s entrance, and really dominates the space.  Made from an off-the-shelf (though rare, hard to find, and expensive) model of the International Space Station, Baird has dropped the space station into a non-specific woodland landscape made from model railroading materials:  carved foam, green flocking that simulates grass, miniature trees, and bits of artificial foliage made from foam or lichen or wolf moss.  The model itself has been distressed and weathered, the solar panels cut with an X-acto knife and the surface dirtied with layers of oil pastel.

The paradox in Baird’s work is that the Space Station could not be constructed on Earth (it was engineered for a zero-gravity environment), not could it survive re-entry.  The model, therefore, while evoking a post-apocalyptic scene like an Alexis Rockman painting or a distant future as described in the book The World Without Us, therefore serves not as a depiction of a plausible future even, but rather as a maquette for a highly improbable sculpture: Baird wants to build this thing life-sized, an exact replica of the International Space Station, here on earth, and leave it to decay for 200 years or so.  Of course, he is aware that this is logistically unlikely, and the futility and impotence of that unrealized, unrealizable potential is part of the power of this work.  Like Baird, I’d like to see this actually happen, so if you’ve got a spare million bucks laying around, or even some unused backup modules for the International Space Station, maybe rusting away in a warehouse somewhere, contact Daniel Baird and hook him up!

I’ve been a fan of Caleb Charland’s photographs for some time now; his work typically reads as documentation of science experiments, usually involving light.

His works in After Before, in which reflections or camera flashes are picked up by a long- or multiple-exposure photograph, creating a multiplicity of lights, have a science-fiction feeling to them, like something out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001, or The Abyss.

There is for me some similarity between Caleb’s recent work and some of Adam Ekberg’s, who has photographed such subjects as a disco ball in the woods, and a camera hung from a tree, its flash going off and giving the impression that the tree is taking a photograph of the viewer, or of the photographer.

Sherwin Ovid’s diamonds were the smallest works in the show, quietly occupying a section of the back wall.  The most unassuming works in After Before, their precision rewards a close view.  Their blue color suggests a cyanotype but the distressed surface evokes scratchboard. I didn’t get a chance to talk to the artist, and I have no idea how they were made, but they’re neat to look at.

I think of them now, when I drive by the Field Museum and see the advertisements for the Diamonds show up there now. While the works in this show did not, for me, “make the future seem like the present, or even the past,” they were all very rewarding to look at.  Each combined a well-thought out concept with meticulous craftsmanship to create a piece combining the best aspects of the conceptual and the aesthetic.  This is the strongest show I’ve yet seen at Swimming Pool, and one of the strongest shows I’ve seen in Chicago recently.  I heartily recommend paying it a visit.

After Before runs through March 21st at Swimming Pool Project Space.