COVID Reviews: Leah Mayers, Janny Taylor, Marina and Cecília Resende Santos, Michelle Handelman, Autumn Ahn, Anne Labovitz, Reid Silvern
08/02/20
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 and fifth rounds of 60wrd/min COVID reviews have come out each with a week’s interval. This is the sixth week.
Leah Mayers, “Cloud Walking,” 2020, 4 x 6 in.
Leah Mayers
Since the beginning of the pandemic, Chicago book and paper artist Leah Mayers has been working on Syncope, a series of palimpsests created by layering pairs of photographs, one from before COVID-19, one from after. The resulting 4 x 6 image meldings manifest the surrealistic unthinkableness of current times. In “Sing Sign over Jeff,” a poster announcing a sidewalk community sing-a-long is positioned over the face of a friend, nodding to a new type of social gathering while conjuring the masks that have become required outdoor gear. In another picture, the pavement of a downtown Chicago street, loosely filled with protesters demanding rent forgiveness, uncannily fills with thick clouds, marking the unreality of it all. “Claus at Work” is the series’ eeriest, a gritty black-and-white portrait of a person in head-to-toe PPE, a single-point-perspective hallway receding behind their head with terrible finality. How might Syncope evolve as the months, maybe years, tick by? Although Mayers’s image pairings have a before-and-after conception, the after isn’t after COVID-19, it’s after its discovery. For now, we remain in a state of during, one that will be endured at least partly through art.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-24 10:52 AM
Janny Taylor, “Lillian Is Thinking,” no. 106 in the series Collaging My Way Through the Virus, collage, 2020.
Janny Taylor
Out in Tucson, AZ, Janny Taylor is keeping busy with Collaging My Way Through the Virus. Each composition includes at least one invented character, including Marisa and her fashionista face mask, a pink-and-orange warrior woman from the future, and Savannah, a science journalist who wears a microscopic lens over her eyes. There are worse ways to deal with a pandemic than to make collages at home, using materials already in one’s possession and the readily available display space of Instagram. Indeed, Taylor’s may be one of the better tactics for riding out the threat of contamination and respecting the rules of social distancing, while also meeting the very real need for critical expression. Taylor accomplishes this last with style, quite literally:a majority of her source material appears to be fashion magazines, some of them vintage, and the tone of the very short stories that accompany each composition read as if lifted from those same pages. Their content, however, has elements of biting irony and reflexive fantasy that no self-respecting women’s rag would ever touch. Too bad for them. Think one part Martha Rosler, one dash Haruki Murakami, a bit of Max Ernst, and a splash of Barry Yourgrau. Taylor recently completed number 108 in the series. Needless to say, there’s no end in sight.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-25 8:29 AM
Open sheds used for what? is currently in its second location on the corner of Sangamon St and Cullerton St, in Pilsen. August is the project’s final month, with a full schedule of installations and performances (updated on Instagram).
Marina and Cecília Resende Santos
Add together a rusty six-foot-tall octagonal steel frame leftover from a previous installation, an empty lot overgrown with grasses, a dozen artists recently released from stage 1 quarantine, and what do you get? All sorts of possibilities. Marina and Cecília Resende Santos’s project, Open sheds used for what?, intends its titular question. The answers have varied since the sisters installed the eight-sided structure on June 6 in the Bridgeport neighborhood of Chicago, and they have kept coming as it split in two, became enclosed, and was dismantled on 4th of July. The shed was taken apart and moved to a new area in Pilsen, after the owner of the vacant lot said that he would put up fencing. It has since been rebuilt, with more iterations to come until its planned disbanding in late August. What this has looked like is as diverse as an open system can hope to be. Marina took the octagon as a prop within which to dance. Hanna Gregor used its widened interior to bake and share flatbread. Graham Livingston draped its walls with sod, creating not just an earthy space but a material continuance between the shed and the ground on which it rose. May it keep standing as long as there is need for it. And may there be more to come.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-26 9:06 AM
Michelle Handelman, still from “These Unruly and Ungovernable Selves,” 2020, single-channel video, color, sound, runtime 06:00
Michelle Handelman
What’s an artist who regularly dives deep into queer dystopias to do while stuck in quarantine? In addition to checking in remotely with her real-life friends, Michelle Handelman also found a way to visit with the characters that populated her films of the past decade. The result was exhibited online at the New York gallery signs and symbols: “These Unruly and UngovernableSelves,” a six-minute video collaged primarily from pre-existing footage, including one eerily prescient scene of an old lady bewildered at her isolation in a futuristic ticket booth. Everyone, including the old lady, who happens to be drag legend Flawless Sabrina, remains remarkably sultry, edgy and punk, despite the apocalyptic situation we all currently find ourselves in. One gets the feeling they’ve known it all along and, while most folks have been busy leading“normal” lives, they’ve been developing tactics for dealing creatively with a world in which “we are being asked to do things that are tearing at our souls,” when “separateness was an achievement,” our days filled with “the jangly nervous tension of doing nothing” and a “wish to obscure the reality of death.” These and other unsettlingly apposite phrases appear in between clips. Together they add up to a production that feels most of all like a trailer for the horror movie that is life right now, just a little bit sexier.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-27 9:12 AM
Autumn Ahn,“Tomorrow #8,” ink and acrylic on Rives BFK, 32" x 40", 2020.
Autumn Ahn
How we read images, especially abstract ones, has so much to do with context: the artist’s, the viewer’s, that of the artwork itself. Since early on in the pandemic, Autumn Ahn has been making ink drawings out of a woodland studio in western Massachusetts. I have been writing reviews from a house in the mountains of northern Vermont. Ahn’s grayscale studies, sent to me via email, appear in photographs taped to a tall wood panel with a background of sun-dappled greenery. I don’t know what I would see if this were all taking place in a white-walled gallery, but under the current circumstances my awareness is of glittering spiderwebs, tracked foot-and pawprints, infinite stars above, frog spawn, tight pinecones and finely feathered wings, the jellied loops of salamander eggs, and stones—so many stones, picked up in the river bed, tucked in pockets, stacked in place, infinitely findable and manifold. It is to Ahn’s great credit that looking at her drawings close up is as rewarding, as full of surprises and variances, as is studying the natural objects themselves.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-28 9:31 AM
Anne Labovitz,“5.22.20.3,” 48” x 48”, acrylic on canvas, 2020.
Anne Labovitz
Anne Labovitz has made an art career by mixing together social relations and abstract painterly gestures—successful enough to have landed her the keys to Duluth, Minnesota, and its five international sister cities. So what’s a humanistically minded artist to do during a global viral pandemic? After recovering from her own scary bout with COVID, Labovitz retreated to a newly set-up basement studio and got to work painting, just good old painting, no outside participation necessary. The results, perhaps not unsurprisingly, look just as winning as her public work, brimming with brash color in a variety of marks big, small and all-over. Especially notable are a trio of large square canvases that appear to have been cut straight from a wall of rainbow-hued graffiti, full of confident tags, cloudy sprays, and drippy brushwork. Could there be a more fitting subject for an artist equally concerned with interhuman relationships and non-objective creative expression?
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-29 9:03 AM
Reid Silvern, from the Stay Home series.
Reid Silvern
It should mean that the message “Stay Home” has gone mainstream when vanilla soft-core pornstars start delivering it. If only that were true. While waiting out the pandemic in Tucson, Arizona, Reid Silvern has been busy creating pen, pastel and oil paintings full of the sexy blondes and brunettes of yesteryear, the kind found posing on the covers of pulp fiction novels and old-school pin-up posters. The ladies, all sultry smiles and come-hither eyes, practically promise extra special treats if you’ll just stay home and do your part in keeping the greater community safe and healthy. Unfortunately, these seductresses are about as real as is the claim that the U.S. is dealing responsibly with the coronavirus.It’s all pure fantasy, based on fulfilling the desires of heterosexual white males of a certain age.Maybe Silvern could start a campaign to finally convince our “grab ‘em by the pussy” president to take the recommendations of medical experts seriously by sending these pictures to the White House.If the fact that as of today more than 150,000 Americans have died of COVID-19 doesn’t sway President Trump to provide care and security for the people of this country, perhaps a bunch of hotties will.
—Lori Waxman 2020-07-30 12:08 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).