Are You A Foreign Artist? - Round Three
05/23/20
By Lori Waxman
“Are You A Foreign Artist?” is a series of reviews written by art critic Lori Waxman, in partnership with Li-Ming Hu during her solo exhibition DISCOmbobulation at Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The following reviews were written between 3 and 9pm on Saturday, February 22th, 2020.
Round 1, written on February 1st, and Round 2, written on February 22nd, have also been published on Quarantine Times.
Farah Salem, Against All Odds, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.
Farah Salem
Landscape has long been considered a genre of art making separate from others—portraiture, history, the nude. Not so in the performances, videos and installations of Farah Salem, where landscape is revealed in all of its intricate connections. “Mirage” emulates the Kuwaiti children’s game “Bar/Bahar,” in which players shift their body position based on which word is called out—bar means desert, bahar means sea—only here it is Salem’s body that is being transformed, and with the added elements of actual sand and water, ceremoniously poured into her voluminous skirts by the audience. In “Caustic,” Salem wanders the Arizona scrublands in a black abaya, then uses a bucket of bleach to transform it into something more at one with the dusty hills. The five painted abayas she and other performers wear in “Disclosed” have been transformed to better match their environments, too: a ship for the ocean, fronds for a palm grove, small yellow flowers for the desert. The body—the female body, at least—and its surroundings are one.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 3:44 PM
Adnan Faysal Altunbozar, Interior Irruptions, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Adnan Faysal Altunbozar
What is the space of desire in a world of online dating, chat sites and digital porn? In “Interior Irruptions,” his solo exhibition at Amazigh Contemporary, Adnan Faysal Altunbozar offers the curious viewer a chance to enter an anonymous erotic encounter—quite literally, beginning with the poster announcing the show, which mimicked a certain kind of ad found on Instagram. Having DM’d for the address and hours, take the elevator up and find the very first artwork on view: a pair of spiky steel conches at the end of an extra-long keychain. Follow the chain and find a key to a door to an apartment. Turn it to explore what’s inside: prints of a man’s arm tattooed with a depth gauge—a nod to the outdated average-man stats according to which architecture used to be sized, and a very different nod to the not-so-average-man stats for fisting. A bright blue table holds a cluster of large jars—the kind for selling protein powder to bulk up men to meet some of those stats—remade in delicate ceramic, some with bulging veins. Two smartphones, elegantly mounted on a tripod, scroll the deeply intimate text “SOON I WILL BE IN YOU,” letter by letter, which is how it sometimes goes. Slow can be good. One thing at a time can be good. The whole city lies out below the gallery’s thirty-third-floor glass window-wall, while way up above an encounter not of desire but about it is happening.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 4:27 PM
Dan Miller, Handkerchiefs and Flowers, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Dan Miller
Chicago has a long history as a city of magic, or rather a city of magicians. Artists Dan Miller and Aaron Walker slip seamlessly into this lineage with “Handkerchiefs and Flowers,” a spry exhibition at Roots & Culture that slyly performs a series of tricks on the unsuspecting audience. Some of these feats are architectural: a room vanishes where there was one, two triangular closets materialize where there were none. Some are decorative: curtains move from their usual window perch to become the backdrop of a theatrical stage. Some are human: audience members suddenly become performers, in subtly comical costumes, able to transform objects from one thing into another. But the best are, as always, the props: a half-dozen colorful custom packaway tables that, when grabbed at the handle—by those surprise performers—instantaneously go from flat thing to functioning table with a click-click-snap. Is it design? Is it art? It’s magic, that’s what it is, and if you think magic ain’t art, well, I’ve got a bunny just waiting to jump out of a hat and into your arms.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 4:53 PM
Sahand Heshmati Afshar, Local Cat, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.
Sahand Heshmati Afshar
A maker of delicate and idiosyncratic objects that often reference food, the body, and their containers, Sahand Heshmati Afshar is also the holder of a fine sensibility about cultural appropriation. It is perhaps not entirely unexpected then, that when invited to host a dinner at 6018North as part of its Justice Hotel, a program of events organized on social justice themes, he would balk at simply presenting Iranian food for the taking. Because too much has historically been for the taking in terms of Iranian heritage, as evidenced in Afshar’s “OI Toilet Papers,” an installation that projects a slide image of Persian artifacts in the famed collection of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute above a globular arrangement of toilet paper rolls. It’s a shitty situation, in other words, and the twelve-plus guests at Afshar’s “Kolempeh” dinner were not going to get off easy. Instead of the cultural communion they were expecting, they got lettuce, raspberries, pepitas, engraved copper plumbing fittings and salt, plus black tea to enjoy. It could have been so much worse.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 5:32 PM
Xu Han, Five Facts About Tears, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Xu Han
If our tears are fake, if we cannot be seen, are we still human? In her experiments, Xu Han poses these and other questions about the mysteries and assumptions that lie somewhere near the core of our understanding about what it means to be a person. For “Cocooned” she lived inside a giant handknit body-stocking, emerging only after twenty-one days of drinking through straws, being unable to speak, not caring how she looked, having severely limited vision, and needing immense amounts of help. Does any of that make her less than human? It may ironically have made her more so, by certain measures. In “Five Facts About Tears,” Han tries out a quintet of devices that use or alter tears to produce speculative gestures about our ocular discharge. One employs tiny fans to create a cooling effect via evaporation; another collects the tears for sprinkling on fruit; a third fills goggles up with saltwater until vision is occluded. And so it goes—our pain and suffering, the causes of crying, do indeed alter how we feel, the way we see, our capacity for enjoyment. It is to Han’s credit that she has found novel objects through which to express these observations.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 6:15 PM
Sara Abbaspour, Untitled, from _II_, 2019.
Sara Abbaspour
What can a photograph really tell us about the people and the places delimited by its frame? If we no longer believe that the camera offers a window on a particular truth, nevertheless we continue to hope that in the accumulation of images, even sometimes in between them, others sorts of truths might be revealed. An ongoing portfolio of black and white pictures by the Iranian photographer Sara Abbaspour offers emblematically more than a simple description of its subjects: a boy twisting at a roadside, a young woman and her mother in the mirror, two women perched moodily on a rooftop at night, an empty lot, a boy lying across a sofa back, shadows at the top of a set of stairs, the bottom half of men sitting in a living room, forlorn women on a bus. Shot in the artist’s home country of Iran, the images taken individually are many of them quite poignant, but they mostly seem unrelated. Abbaspour, however, puts great faith in sequencing, and considered one after the other her photographs begin to tell stories about who can do what where, what we feel indoors and out, where we go and where we come from. Indeed, the very name of her series points to the importance of order and connections: ingenuously titled “II,” it begs the questions, what was “I” and will there be a “III?”
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 7:17 PM
Zhiwei Pan, Mad Smurf (Side), 2018. Image courtesy of the artist.
Zhiwei Pan
If the number of brushstrokes needed to create a believable image of a lemon is in direct proportion to the skill of the artist who painted it, Zhiwei Pan has expertise to spare. “Shy Couple,” a wee oil by the classically trained Chinese painter, could make you salivate, and after breaking down and squeezing a glass of lemonade, you might be refreshed enough to notice just how few gestures actually compose her canvas. Likewise pictures of an avocado, an orange and an angry Smurf (yes, one of those little blue guys, probably Grouchy). Cleverly, many of these come complete with dabs of paint straight from the palette, and the astute viewer can put one plus one together to understand the deftness with which Pan combines colors to create realistic forms. Not that Smurfs are realistic, but still!
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 7:35 PM
Theo Macdonald, Time Theft, 2020. Image courtesy of the artist.
Theo Macdonald
Work. It just sucks sometimes, doesn’t it? And most of us have to do it in order to eat and to pay the rent, regardless of our very high-quality university degrees. Ideally, though, the skills and concepts learned through those degrees, as well as through equally necessary autodidacticism and independent experimentation, can help us to deal with our workaday miseries. Theo Macdonald achieves this and then some in “Time Theft,” a six-minute slideshow of photographs taken in the basement of the retail shop where he has worked for the past sixteen months. According to the voiceover, he has to wear a gas mask down there because of what management calls “toxic dust,” and he also has to endure racism, dishonesty, faulty plumbing and wiring, outsourcing, and other grotesqueries of corporate commercial culture. The source of this wretchedness appears, based on the merch in storage, to be an art store, so it is ironic that Macdonald has turned to art making in order to exhume, transfer, and otherwise process his experiences. I suppose it’s either that, stand-up comedy or the Department of Labor—but then he’d probably be out of a job.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 8:06 PM
Isabella Dampney, This Is New To Me, I’m Here To Listen. Image courtesy of the artist.
Isabella Dampney
Lately I have been depressed about the state of the world, and precious little makes me smile. So thank you, Isabella Dampney, for cracking me up with a series of oil paintings that probably shouldn’t make me feel any better yet nevertheless do. Comedy is for sadness, and it turns out that what mine requires is your picture of a male dog named Jerry adrift in a yellow, white and light blue abstraction of Niagara Falls. (Is it piss? It’s not, but it is.) Also your portrait of a different canine at the wheel of a navy blue sedan, a fire hydrant in the distance, a totally sincere word bubble coming from the pup, who exclaims, “This is new to me, I’m here to listen.” Indeed, it is, and indeed, I am. I am here to listen, because I don’t know what the hell else to do, as the school bus (of the world) drives off the cliff, as it does in one of your paintings. Help! And thank you for the help. I need it. We all do.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 8:24 PM
Pelenakeke Brown, Conversations, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist.
Pelenakeke Brown
The disabled Samoan artist Pelenakeke Brown works with what is given and pulls from it what is needed and true. Her artist book, “grasp + release,” redacts her own medical files, leaving legible words of her own choosing from which she composes a series of found poems, including the glorious passage: “it was/ her/ resistance/ revealed.” Blackouts normally mean censorship, removal of information, but Brown reverses that to make them revelatory and additive. It is a remarkably positive practice she achieves elsewhere, too, and through a surprisingly broad array of tools and approaches. Her portraits of people are composed through conversations about and drawings of their hair rather than their faces. Her writings employ the standard keyboard but use its strikes to create rhythmic patterns and its commands to forge rich and literate flows of ideas. “I press/ enter return/ enter return/ I am yet to return.” I will never look at medical records, hairdos, or the keys under my fingers in the same way again.
—Lori Waxman 2020-02-22 8:58 PM
Lori Waxman (b. Montreal, Canada) has been the Chicago Tribune’s primary freelance art critic for the past decade. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a Ph.D. in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts in New York. Her "60 wrd/min art critic" performance has been exhibited in dOCUMENTA (13) and a dozen cities across the U.S. She has received a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a 2018 Rabkin Foundation award, and is the author, most recently, of Keep Walking Intently(Sternberg Press), a history of walking as an art form.
The reviews in “Are You A Foreign Artist?” will be published in Lumpen Magazine #136: Artists Run Chicago, produced in conjunction with the Hyde Park Art Center exhibition, Artists Run Chicago 2020. Both the exhibition and the production of the magazine have been postponed due to the COVID-19 lockdown, but visa application deadlines have not. While the print magazine cannot come out, Quarantine Times will publish those reviews in three installments, one for each Saturday of the project.