COVID Reviews: Christalena Hughmanick, Cassie Tompkins, Selina Trepp, Tin Wai Wong, Brandon Sward, Perennial Space

07/24/20

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 and fourth rounds of 60wrd/min COVID reviews have come out each with a week’s interval. This is the fifth week.

Christalena Hughmanick

Last year, Christalena Hughmanick toured Hungary as part of her project, “Freedom Quilt Hungary.” She gave lectures on American quilting traditions and their relation to cultural identity, creative expression, and storytelling, combined with workshops in sewing and appliqué techniques. Along the way, experienced members of the Hungarian Patchwork Guild contributed elaborate blocks of traditional indigo-dyed kékfestö cloth to a large communal artwork sewn together in a public quilting bee at a museum in Szentendre, a town north of Budapest. Two-thousand-nineteen was also the 30th anniversary of the end of socialist rule in the country, the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the guild, and the electoral setback of populist dictator Viktor Orbán. In the end it’s all connected—freedom of expression, freedom to congregate, political freedom, aesthetic and human diversity—just as the 108 unique blocks in Hughmanick’s “Freedom Quilt”have been stitched together with care to make a single enormous, strong and utterly vibrant textile. Would that our basest politicians—American,Hungarian and otherwise—would stop trying to unpick it, and our populaces could work together to halt them.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-17 8:42 AM

Cassie Tompkins

The title of Cassie Tompkins’s exhibition at Lillstreet Art Center in Chicago feels apocalyptically prophetic, though the art itself is mostly hushed and soothing. Originally planned for March, now rescheduled for mid-September, At Sea consists of seven dreamy dye paintings on silk panels, the all-over flora and strong horizon lines inspired by Midwestern landscapes and a restored prairie path in local Horner Park that the artist walks regularly. The storming indigo streaks of an immense eighth piece, designed to be hung in a corner, were created using the Japanese arashi shibori method; worrisome brown blooms were achieved by wrapping the wet canvas around rusted scraps.Earlier this year, climate change and rising seas seemed like the foremost threats to existence on planet earth; to this we must now add our current global health pandemic and all of its associated ills, with more to come.We are nothing if not at sea right now.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-18 8:18 AM

Selina Trepp

If I were an artist, I would want to create animations like those of Selina Trepp. Actually, what I really would like is to be the animations of Selina Trepp. In her wondrously zany productions of the past few years, repurposed artworks and leftover materials come alive when no one is looking. “WHADOIDO,” made during quarantine in Chicago, features a riotously floral painting remade as a podium, a polka-dot papier-mâché base turned lady, a naughty light blue stick, and loads of other revived stuff of a fruitful studio practice.Also included is a sequence of Trepp’s delightful abstract cartoons, in which luminous lines and shapes dance across a black screen to the electro tunes of Trepp and her partner Dan Bitney. Trepp’s local Art on the MART commission—for which she’ll project her rainbow shapes across the entirety of The Merchandise Mart’s block-long façade, bringing the building’s hidden life to light—has sadly been postponed until next year. It can’t come too soon.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-19 8:55 AM

Tin Wai Wong

Translation is a strange thing, whether one plays it for laughs or not. The Beijing/New York-based artist Tin Wai Wong handles it deadpan in such performances as “what to say, how to say, where to begin,” in which a speaker attached to her stomach broadcasts the internal sounds of digestion, providing an alternative to trendy food-speak. The caption for “Salty water” lists only washing machine and salt, but the tightly framed video of an open washer reveals a brown paper package (presumably containing the aforementioned salt), which by the end of the 14-minute cycle has been rendered into a nasty pulp rather than some mythic ocean brine. Wong also tackles words themselves. After apprenticing in a Chinatown print shop, she acquired the skills necessary to translate the 108 dishes of the famous Manchu-Han Imperial Feast into American Chinese takeout menu lingo. In an unexpectedly touching video performance, she gravely repeats the recorded phrase “My––is very good” dozens of times in as many tongues. After nearly 7 minutes of this, language becomes nothing but a wave of sheer sounds, wearing down the ever-solemn Wong with its endless babel.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-21 8:40 PM

Brandon Sward

What to do while quarantining in your late great-uncle’s house, together with your grandmother, who has dementia, in Big Timber, Montana, population about a thousand?If you’re Brandon Sward, you dance in quiet careful swoops, because grandma is sleeping downstairs. You also perform a gay fantasy puppet show using whatever’s at hand, like a wallet-size portrait from boyhood and one of those handsome Burt’s Bees hand salve lids.For a little fresh air, you go to the local park to play with the one friend you can hang with in person, a brown baseball cap decorated with a horse. In each of these instances, you reveal something about the place you’re in, the people who live there, and yourself. You do this in different ways, by telling stories, drawing maps, stating the facts, and walking around while real things are and aren’t happening. And, of course, you videotape and title it all, distributing these musings via Vimeo and your own website, because that’s what you’ve got to do these days, to continue thinking, making and feeling, all the while keeping yourself and others safe.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-22 3:04 PM

Perennial Space

How to show art during a pandemic? Instead of bemoaning the loss of traditional in-person viewing experiences, the first-year sculpture grad students of the School of the Art Institute ofChicago founded Perennial Space, a collaborative web gallery now presenting its second and third exhibitions. The site is refreshingly easy to navigate, inventively themed, and complete with such excellently titled shows asThe First 30 Seconds in the Morning Before You Remember Who You Are. I wish I’d written that phrase. Fresh displays include Cara Dunkerley’s artwork-in-a-car and FÁTIMA’s soul-in-a-bowl. FeRrELL GaRrAMoNE offers intimate iPhone video musings on four-leaf clovers and other precious finds. Sungho Bae creates a not-quite-white plushy out of strangers’ dryer lint. Some work, like Charlie North’s imitation aluminum tread sheets, furrowed with mysterious grooves, begs to be seen up close, but that’s okay, too. Making do and getting by doesn’t have to mean pretending everything’s alright when it’s definitely not.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-23 10:36 PM

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).