COVID Reviews: Sonja Thomsen, Kirsten Leenaars, Olivia Petrides, Carrie Scanga and Emily Rapp Black, Sarah Krepp, Janelle Rebel

08/24/20

By Lori Waxman

This summer, art critic Lori Waxman writes reviews for artists whose work was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first, the second , third, fourth, fifth , sixth and seventh rounds of 60wrd/min COVID reviews have come out each with about a week’s interval. This is the eight week.

Sonja Thomsen

Where do the human body and the physical world intersect, and how does that meeting impact our knowledge of the world and ourselves? In her exploration of these fundamental questions, photographer Sonja Thomsen reads Margaret Fuller and her grand-nephew Buckminster Fuller, gives pride of place to Lucia Moholy, and experiments with prisms of her own design, through sculpture building and picture taking. Her images sometimes involve her and her loved ones’ bodies, though far more gently than did Isaac Newton, whom she notes once attempted to stick a knife into the back of his eye in order to create the image of a rainbow. The result of all this research is You Will Find It Where It Is: A Reader, an artist book published—finally, after variousCOVID-related printing and release delays—in an edition of 300by Poor Farm Press, the imprint of artist-curator-gallerist Michelle Grabner.Spiral bound and filled with half pages, vellums and unusual papers, Thomsen’s book is itself an instance of the thing with which it is concerned:direct human experience of the world. No two people will handle it in exactly the same way.

—Lori Waxman 2020-08-09 9:11 AM

Kirsten Leenaars

The combination of an avant-garde Dutch artist, a diverse group of high schoolers from Lansing, Michigan, a couple of video cameras, plus lots and lots of cardboard and colored paper and scissors and tape, should really not add up to much. And yet, under the boundless social and technical capabilities of Kirsten Leenaars, those elements, brought together for three weeks during the summer of 2019, equal some of the most touching, hopeful, and creative responses I have yet come across to the disaster that is contemporary American life. On exhibit for far too short a time at the Broad Art Museum at MSU,The Broadcast presents the kids’ pitches for hypothetical movies, quiz shows, expert panel discussions and sitcoms, all inclusive of diversity and political content that would shame standard television. Also included are views of games they played and protests they staged around Lansing, testing out different tactics for making their voices heard. As much full of giggles as articulate dismemberment of President Trump and his need to build walls and separate families, The Broadcast proposes that the youth of this country have voices that badly need to be heard amidst the noise and chaos of our media landscape. It’s time the rest of us listened.

—Lori Waxman 2020-08-11 9:15 AM

Olivia Petrides

What do field guide illustrators create when given leave of the clarity and correctness their documentary work requires?In the case of Olivia Petrides, the results are abstract ,chaotic, tenebrous, and nevertheless evidence of an unshakeable fealty to the natural world. In a series of medium-to-enormous drawings, whose display at OS Projects in Racine, WI, was cut short by the pandemic, Petrides achieves an endlessness of stunning and convulsive detail as overwhelming as are most natural elements when seen up close. Made by repeatedly soaking and sanding paper of ink and gouache, her pictures conjure tidal waves, bodies replete with feathers, wild fur patterns, ancient bark, torrential rains, blinding whiteouts, astonishing auroras. Though their source is the artist’s travels to some of the more primal and remote landscapes of the earth, full of icebergs and volcanoes and geysers, their spirit is far from that of the 19th-century sublime, when humans felt safe enough to terrify themselves in front of nature’s might. This is the 21st, when humans should tremble at their own success in rendering the environment so very vulnerable.

—Lori Waxman 2020-08-15 10:24 AM

Carrie Scanga and Emily Rapp Black

Socially-engaged and participatory projects have arguably been the hardest hit visual art of the pandemic, dependent as they are on a proximity between strangers that is no longer safe. Novel ways of conceiving such endeavors will eventually appear, but in the meantime let’s acknowledge Sanctuary, an artwork as badly needed as ever. Closed one week after it opened at the University of New England, Biddeford, ME, and meant to travel to medical and art centers across the country, paper artist Carrie Scanga and memoirist Emily Rapp Black’s installation is both a haven and about them. Visitors are invited to sit at a writing desk enveloped by diaphanous banners cut with briny shapes and to record a story about their own medical experiences. Future iterations will interpret those submissions into new cut-paper banners and incorporate them into an essay, to be printed in a zine.Here’s what I’d share, if I were able to attend their exhibit in Maine: the memory of me floating on my back in a pond high up in the mountains of northern Vermont and how many terrors it has calmed me through; a mural-sized photograph of a tulip forest, brightening an underground hallway in aChicago hospitalI dreaded entering each day for 12 weeks; reading with my children, everyone fitting tightly together, no matter where we are. That last one isn’t a medical experience, but it is the truest sanctuary I have from the world right now.

—Lori Waxman2020-08-16 10:36 PM

Sarah Krepp

What’s black and white and red all over? The sculptures, paintings and drawings of Sarah Krepp, including the entirety of her recent solo exhibition at Governors State University in Illinois.Closed before it even opened, tatting--tearing featured examples of the veteran artist’s signature work, as vigorous and overwhelming as ever. Deconstructed tires, flayed and woven, burst from an exploding panel of hefty orange and crimson marks, tangle into an impenetrable wall of rusty spikes, and crash in a fiery spiral of old rubber and metal. Enormous compositions in oil and acrylic fill to capacity with simple, muscular gestures that sit uneasily atop dense grounds of words, snatches of NPR-speak the artist scribbles down as she paints, as indecipherable as the24/7 news cycle. The overall effect of Krepp’s show is of endless distraction, mass confusion and grisly road wrecks, a dismal but verifiable portrait of America in its waning years. That is what’s black and white and red all over: this country, awash in black death, white noise and so much blood.

—Lori Waxman 2020-08-19 8:54 PM

Janelle Rebel

Uncle Sam said it first: I want you.

Gross or not, there’s an erotics to American politics, to its pretence of one-on-one communication, of direct eye contact, of representation, of solicitation. Artist Janelle Rebel plays hard and fast with this state of affairs in her Dear Vern web archive, where since March 2018 she’s been collecting the InstaPolls sent out weekly by her congressman, Vern Buchanan, a Republican from Florida’s 16th district. She also occasionally writes him love letters of a vanguard sort, which tip the scales of weird obsession toward a public figure in remarkably uncomfortable ways.(But hey, they’re really asking for it.) Because Buchanan’s polls remain active, anyone can still weigh in on the death penalty, defunding the police, socialism, Trump’s impeachment, colonizing the moon, and other issues of yesterday and today. The results appear immediately, addictively and terrifyingly. Give me parliamentary-style democracy any day.

—Lori Waxman 2020-08-20 8:24 AM

The 60 wrd/min art critic is a project by Lori Waxman, the Chicago Tribune’s art critic and a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her most recent book is Keep Walking Intently (Sternberg Press, 2017).