Two Views on Tumult at Peter Miller Gallery

Last week Peter Miller Gallery held an opening reception for Tumult, work by Steven Hudson. It was so popular around the proverbial CAM water cooler, we ended up with two FNAs not only visiting the exhibition, but choosing to write it up as well. So, without further ado, Two Views on Tumult – Jeriah Hildwine and Caitlin A. Schriner:

Steven Hudson, Laurie Hogin, Laura Ball, and Caleb Weintraub at Peter Miller Gallery

by Jeriah Hildwine

Chicago has been a good place for painting lately, with some of my favorites including Robert Hovarth at Packer-Schopf, Peter Drake at Linda Warren, Gregory Jacobsen at Zg, and my former classmate Ben Duke at Ann Nathan.  The recent Studio Art Open Session on Painting at CAA, put together by Michelle Grabner, was another recent highlight, the affiliated exhibition featuring a couple of very strong works by Susanna Coffey.

One Chicago gallery with a really strong group of painters in its stable is Peter Miller.  On a recent visit to the gallery I was rewarded with lots of good painting, not only from the artist whose solo show was opening in the main gallery, but also from the other artists whose work was up in the numerous nooks and crannies of Peter Miller’s new space.

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In the main gallery space “Tumult,” a solo show of paintings (and a few terracotta sculptures) by Steven Hudson.  Hudson’s paintings, and especially the tumbling poses of the characters in them, bear a passing resemblance to some works by Nicola Verlato (who showed a piece at the Hyde Park Art Center in Signs of the Apocalypse/Rapture), although Hudson’s figures are rendered with a choppy, almost sculptural markmaking.  It’s perhaps surprising then that the terracotta sculptures, worked with a roughness much like his painted figures, are a recent departure for Hudson:  his first explorations in the medium, the sculptures were finished mere days before the opening.  Hudson’s work isn’t particularly challenging or demanding of the viewer, but it’s quite well painted, particularly the fires in some of the backgrounds.

One of Hudson’s works, surprisingly an older work, stands out as exceptional.  In this piece, which is quite small, the physical texture of the surface is enhanced by the inclusion of what seem to be clumps of actual human hair.  Clogged with oil paint, they take on the appearance of a post-Valdez sea otter’s fur, revolting but alluring.  Contrasted with the rendering of the skin, which in his older work is smoother and more detailed (rather like an Odd Nerdrum), the effect is stunning.

In a strange, square little back room like a freight elevator or bank vault was a cycloramic installation of small paintings by Laurie Hogin.  I met Hogin at the reception for 39 Verbs at Packer-Schopf gallery, where she was displaying some of her “bunny rabbit” paintings behind a desk strewn with the brightly-colored packaging from various junk food products (sugary breakfast cereals and the like).  The bunnies were color-coordinated with the junk food wrappers, and some suggestion was made that these rabbits were being contaminated in some way by the aesthetic of our industrial food system.

In the powerfully claustrophobic project space at Peter Miller, Hogin has quite a few paintings of angry, screeching monkeys.  Here, the influences of culture on nature were more overt:  one holds a little flag adorned with Microsoft’s Windows logo, another, a tiny video camera.  Nearly all are garishly colored and most are baring their teeth in a display of something between terror and rage. (Her bunnies didn’t appear terribly cuddly, either.)  Hogin falls somewhere between Alexis Rockman and Michael Pollan for me, guiding and warning us as a culture while holding our interest with the skill of her craft and the passion of her singular vision.

Elsewhere around the gallery were paintings by Laura Ball and Caleb Weintraub.  I first saw Ball’s work on the cover of New American Paintings, and then caught her show at Peter Miller’s old space, on the top floor of 118 N. Peoria.  The works of hers with which I’m most familiar are large paintings of women riding carousel horses, brightly colored and rendered with diverse marks, from airbrushy wisps and blurs to tightly rendered details in the faces.  Currently up is Last Lap, from 2008.

Caleb Weintraub’s work reminds me a bit of Ben Duke’s, both in its painterly roughness and in its quirky, illogical narrative subject matter.  Weintraub, like Ball, also explores themes of youth and play in his work:  children wear paper plate masks, ride horses, and fight battles.  Up right now is Down With Escapism, a large painting of kids in the woods with guns.

Both Laura Ball and Caleb Weintraub work in a distinctly representational manner that is nevertheless somehow “beyond realism,” adopting strategies and tactics from 20th Century Modernism.  Drips, smears, blurs, and rough textured paint contrasted with slick airbrushing or blending, all show the legacy of the past century of art history.  Together with artists like Laurie Hogin and Steven Hudson, they make Peter Miller Gallery an excellent place to see what’s happening with painting in Chicago right now:  abandoning neither the traditional techniques of representation nor the innovations of Modernism, these artists draw freely from the entire Western tradition of painting, with results that are distinctly contemporary.
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Steven Hudson at Peter Miller Gallery

by Caitlin A. Schriner

Recreating the image of “humanity existing after some unspecified cataclysm”, the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Steven Hudson’s Tumult meld the earth and flesh tones of landscape and body, while the vibrant primaries of surviving synthetic polymers compete for importance within the frame of images.  With Hudson’s return to Peter Miller Gallery he brings a collection of haunting beauty in a vacant and destroyed landscape peopled with plump and shamed bodies lying in the dirt. The unharmed plastics in Hudson’s recent collection remind us that our waste is more permanent than flesh.

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Tumult is an image of two brightly lit mangled bodies in the foreground of a smoldering muted village of distant homes.  The figures backs are facing the audience, as in many of the images, and the positions are uncomfortable. It is unclear as to whether they are stationary in these obscure positions, or if we are capturing them in some act of falling.

In Restless we again find one of Hudson’s victims in this “half-landed” position, as another town appears to billow with flames and smoke.  However, in this piece, we see Hudson’s purposeful inclusion of plastics.  The blue and yellow of the children’s chairs are radiantly bold compared to the dull placid skin of the figure in the foreground and the smoky browns of the background.  The two plastic chairs dull even the red of the flames.  The figure reaches out and clutches one leg of the yellow chair; an interesting embrace of what is less fallible than oneself.

While many of the images are similar in post-apocalyptic aesthetic, Land and Water strays from this and relates a sense of calmness. Two of the plump forms lie in relaxed position as the land and sea meld at tide.  An object (perhaps a refrigerator) is in the background and a simple blue mug frames the left corner.  This blue is reflected in the thick veins in the legs of the figures, but the delicate browns of sand and blues and yellows of the water provide a sense of calmness, and ultimate desolation.

In the piece Overboard we again see the familiar figures, and again the familiar plastics.  However, the inclusion of actual found objects (the collection of plastic products applied in the right corner) and the abundance of mixed wastes such as old soap bottles, a two-liter bottle, plastic cutlery, and

plastic wrapping overtly reference world-trash issues and the piece is less successful compared to the delicate arrangements of other pieces.

In all, Hudson’s collection is cohesive and deliberate.  The flesh of these tortured bodies is dulled by the brightness of the plastics he has chosen to include.  The subtle inclusion of these objects is purposeful, and direct and the resulting in a collection work is both desolate and uneasy, but eerily beautiful.
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Tumult will be on view at Peter Miller Gallery through March 27th.