COVID Reviews: M. Carmen Lane, Eli Bornowsky, Rachel Epp Buller, John Salhus, Ellen Rothenberg, Lily Prince

07/03/20

By Lori Waxman

This summer, art critic Lori Waxman writes reviews for artists whose work was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first round of 60wrd/min COVID reviews came out last week.

M. Carmen Lane

Rituals can provide solace and closure in the face of loss. That’s why Jews sit shiva, why the Irish hold wakes. But some traumas can be too contemporary, too enormous, or even too personal to be adequately covered by given forms. They demand original services conceived by the grieving. For “AMALA: She Could Not Stay (in their Black Bodies),” an exhibition at Praxis FiberWorkshop Gallery in Cleveland, M. Carmen Lane tenders a haunting series of sculptures, oblations and words to mourn the loss of black babies and the destruction of the natural world in which they could have thrived. The babies are many (in Cuyahoga County,African American babies are 3.5 times as likely to die as others) and they are few (the show is named for a daughter the artist miscarried sixteen years ago). The gallery is hung with fourteen cradleboards, each of which bears a tiny FEMA body bag, in that heartbreaking shade of Great Lakes blue.Interspersed among them are bunches of wildflowers picked in the zip codes with the highest infant mortality rates in the county. A sound piece, spoken inLane’s rich and deep voice, calls it what it is: structural racism, going all the way back to the salty ocean of the Atlantic slave trade.—Lori Waxman 2020-06-26 3:46 PM

Eli Bornowsky

I’m as OCD as the next art critic, so I can stare at Eli Bornowsky’s paintings for hours. That’s what I’d be doing if his exhibition at King’s Leap Projects in New York City hadn’t been postponed due to the quarantine. Likewise I peacefully zone out in the presence of Islamic tiles; I obsessively play Sudoku and Scrabble; I loved MC Escher prints as a teenager; I would give a lung for some De Stijl furniture; and when hard-pressed I will spend an hour or two meticulously filling in a page in a coloring book. Why my inclinations are pertinent is in their relationship to Bornowsky’s carefully marked gesso patterns, with their playful mathematical obsessiveness and idiosyncratic color schemes.Six-pointed stars overlaid with circles in shades of mint, ochre, navy and dusty rose; triangles arranged into hexagons, some filled with a curve, mystifyingly shaded in black, white, pale pink, red and various shades of aqua. But what do they mean? Please. Nobody asks such things of Delannoy numbers or Rietveld chairs.The fact that some kind of system, some set of rules, underlies their beauty is enough.

—Lori Waxman 2020-06-27 11:27 PM

Rachel Epp Buller

Do people still write letters? I miss them dearly. Emails don’t really count, I mean sometimes they almost do, but rarely and never entirely. A letter is a handmade thing, touched by one person and sent to another through the magical system of the post. Countless aesthetic choices exist—lined paper or patterned stationery, pencil or green felt tip pen, American flag or LunarNew Year stamp—and that’s not to mention the possibility of collage, drawings, and the inclusion of small flat objects. In this time of isolation, of the world slowing down so much it can seem as if it has stopped, Rachel Epp Buller has made a daily practice of this outmoded form.Today she’ll have mailed off letter number 105 of the “Pandemic Epistles,” marking 105 days of quarantine and 105 acts of communicative care. Each is penned on a piece of paper Buller has marbled, moody folios that under present conditions recall viruses more than paisleys or waves. She sends them to someone, somewhere, in a gesture that feels just right for right now:safe, steady, social and blessedly screen-free. With gratitude to the mail carriers, whose motto may need to be amended beyond snow, rain, heat and gloom of night to include threat of contagion.

—Lori Waxman 2020-06-28 11:02 PM

John Salhus

Despite the promise of its title, John Salhus’s exhibition at NE Sculpture Gallery Factory inMinneapolis is far from paradisal. “Reaching the Islands,” which opened under social distancing measures after being postponed for a month, is filled with paintings of desolation and destruction: splintered wood beams, scarily bulging moons, drowned and storm-tossed canvases, littered flora. Salhus applies paint with a trippy, heavy hand, filling canvases large and small with visible brushwork from top to bottom, toxifying everything with neon highlights. Bits of Surrealism crash against cartoonishness and rub up against Pop. Looking feels exhausting, incessant, and deliberately punitive: a wooden sign in one picture exhorts, “SEE HOW WE ARE.”As we all must, if it isn’t already too late.

—Lori Waxman 2020-06-29 10:39 PM

Ellen Rothenberg

For those of us used to looking out at the world and being constantly productive, quarantine has forced a slowing down, a taking stock, a reconsideration of what is already there. Ellen Rothenberg has turned to her own archives, photographs printed over the past five years but never exhibited.No longer organized according to place, events or people—a condition sometimes permitted by the passing of enough time—they have been pinned up on the wall in novel salon-style groupings that forge connections aesthetic, poetic, associative, and sometimes private. Between a streaming ceiling fixture and a streaming sink hangs the word “Damen,” which, given Rothenberg’s long-time shuffling between Chicago and Berlin, could be a street name or a sign on a bathroom door.Pretty floral still lifes join tangles of black cable, rosy ruched curtains, and a hand holding a yellow-and-green wrapper, three copies of which hang upside down and right side up. It’s poignantly impossible to know which are which.

—Lori Waxman 2020-06-30 11:16 PM

Lily Prince

Painting one place while being in another might sound somewhat schizophrenic, but it’s a long and storied practice of landscape artists. It isn’t always practical or even possible to do more than sketch en plein air; the wandering artist can then bring these drawings back to her home studio and apply acrylic to canvas for as long as she needs. For a solo show at Thompson Giroux Gallery in Chatham, NY, now postponed until October 2021, Lily Prince traveled the AmericanWest and Southwest, scribbling large candy-hued pastels on the side of the road and in the hundred-degree heat of the desert, wherever she found a spot of great natural splendor. Back home in the Hudson Valley, she’s transformed those pictures into even more riotously colorful and patterned acrylic canvases, whose aesthetic debt lies somewhere between Song Dynasty scrolls and Wayne Thibault’s dessert-ification of all things. Despite their good looks, though,s everal paintings in theAmerican Beauty series run incongruously with drips, as if the trees and mountains were shedding tears. As well they should: no matter how magnificent, there’s no pretending environmental and social destruction hasn’t and isn’t happening in these places, too, ever since the first settlers arrived to decimate indigenous populations.

—Lori Waxman2020-07-02 9:17 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).