COVID Reviews: Maria Gaspar, Sue Havens, Tony Tasset
06/26/20
By Lori Waxman
This summer, art critic Lori Waxman writes reviews for artists whose work was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Maria Gaspar, Reading for Experimental Sound Studio, June 2020.
Maria Gaspar
“House this two story / in the open into a story / to form one city turned over.” It’s not a stanza you’d expect to find in a poem written about a jail, certainly not the third-largest in a country ruinously overrun with them. Artist Maria Gaspar, who has been producing art about Chicago’s Cook County Jail for the past decade, has in this time of total population confinement—in which prisons are some of the worst hot spots for COVID-19—devised a combination lo-fi/hi-fi ways to continue her work. Over the course of a thirty-minute video, commissioned by the Experimental Sound Studio and streamable here, she reads out descriptions of Divisions I through VI, printed off the jail’s website onto pieces of plain paper that she then cuts up with a pair of scissors. Sliced first into sentences, then individual phrases and words, her actions imitate how the architecture and hierarchies of the jail divide its inmates. But Gaspar, a sensitive thinker about this place outside of whose walls she grew up, in the Little Village neighborhood, knows just which words to keep and which to discard. Watching her clip, re-arrange and scotch-tape them into new configurations offers some hope, however patchy and poetic, for the future.
—Lori Waxman 2020-06-22 10:28 AM
Sue Havens
How do you continue to make art when your university studio is shuttered, your young son’s school closed, and you the sole breadwinner at home? Alas, this is no longer an unfamiliar situation, and no two artists will have the same solution. No two artists ever have the same solution. Sue Havens, whose friendly abstractions owe a debt to early and middle though thankfully not late Frank Stella, with a bit of Philip Guston and various Chicago Imagists thrown in for good measure, is perhaps better set up than most to weather the changes. Though she’s been building painted ceramics for a series of now-cancelled shows in New York, Las Vegas and Gyeonggi, South Korea, her three-dimensional work essentially builds her previous two-dimensional pieces out into the round. There’s a deliberate flatness to them that can give up being a clay sculpture for the sake of being makeable in an ad-hoc garage studio while a child paints nearby. The result are compositions on 22 x 30 inch paper heavy enough to allow Havens to not just paint but carve, bury, shape and discover compositions suggestive of faces, masks and vases out of neutral geometries jazzed up with neon flourishes. She’s made about twenty so far in a series that is, for better and for worse, ongoing.
—Lori Waxman 2020-06-23 2:57 PM
Tony Tasset, “The Weight,” solo exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago, 2020.
Tony Tasset
Irony of ironies: when the Kavi Gupta Gallery of Chicago went dark, shuttering “The Weight,” Tony Tasset’s most recent solo exhibition, it locked up the sculptures we deserve. A kitschy golden sun relief, the kind your grandma’s neighbor might hang on the side of her house, gone hideously psychotic, its pupils and teeth bursting with flames that will burn our planet up, alongside global warming. A massive black steel crow, part Ab Ex plop art, part Calder mobile gone limp, its body flattened and dying, like so many wild animals the world over. A nightmarish knot of dozens of taxidermic, plushy and rubber snakes, too many to count, as impossible to untwist as real has become from fake, reality from simulation. The head of an eagle, stern and classic, hulkingly cast in concrete, fallen over on the ground with little hope of being raised up again, like the broken country it symbolizes. Irony of ironies: when Dallas protesters recently graffitied “NOW UC US” plus the initials of George Floyd onto Tasset’s thirty-foot tall fiberglass eyeball, they changed a trippy public sculpture into the one we need right now. Let’s hope for a day when none are necessary anymore.
—Lori Waxman 2020-06-24 6:57 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).