COVID Reviews: William Chan, Erika Nelson, Michael Aaron Lee, Carlos Salazar-Lermont
08/07/20
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, fourth, fifth and sixth rounds of 60wrd/min COVID reviews have come out each with a week’s interval. This is the seventh week.
William Chan intervening during Andrew Yang rally at Dover City Hall, New Hampshire, as reported and photographed by Maria Heeter of InDepthNH.org.
William Chan
William Chan went to Iraq as a soldier in the U.S. Army, believing that as an immigrant it was his patriotic duty to help make America and the world greater through this act of war. This experience led Chan not to a long career in the military but to an MFA degree and a book,TenYears After Iraq, pairing his dusty photos of combat “brothers” and Iraqi civilians by the roadside with phrases that bespeak his own personal humanity and the apology he felt he owed the Iraqi people. Before most public events were shut down due to COVID-19, Chan had begun a series of subtly interventionist performances, speaking out on the subject of U.S.military intervention at an Andrew Yang rally in New Hampshire and a Bernie Sanders one inIowa, as well as during curator-led tours of the exhibitionTheater of Operations: The Gulf Wars at MoMA P.S.1. He also hung out in the P.S.1 bookshop and approached patrons who’d picked up a copy ofTen Years.More recently, he’s been attending Black Lives Matters protests in Brooklyn to talk to police officers. Though uninvited, Chan has managed in each situation to prompt sincere dialogue in a country where real conversation, across not just party lines but also neighborly and familial ones, has all but stopped. It’s the sort of front-line bravery one would expect of a soldier, accomplished with words instead of guns.
—Lori Waxman 2020-08-04 8:41 AM
Erika Nelson, World’s Smallest Version of the Field of Corn, Dublin OH
Erika Nelson
America is not only the land of the free, it is also the land of the World’s Largest Rose Bush (Tombstone, AZ), Paper Cup (Riverside, CA), and Ball of Barbed Wire (Jackson Hole, WY). A national tendency toward the biggest things deserves a superlatively visionary advocate, and Erika Nelson is most definitively it. Nelson is the founder and proprietor of theWorld’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things, which includes miniatures of the above monuments as well as hundreds of others, all of which she has visited in person, researched and replicated in appropriate materials. Before the pandemic groundedNelson in Lucas, Kansas, population 407 and home to a dozen grassroots art environments, including her own storefront, the Roadside Sideshow Expo(road trip, anyone?), she had plans to travel her museum around the country, as she has done for half of each of the past twenty or so years, visiting art car parades, festivals, and making scheduled appearances. Naturally,Nelson has carnivalesquely kitted out a series of trunks, wagons and vans as mobile display vehicles for bringing the WLCofWSVofWLT to the greater public.May she be able to hit the road again soon.
—Lori Waxman 2020-08-04 9:14 AM
Michael Aaron Lee, “Freedom's Just Another Word,” 2020, ink and graphite on paper,15 x18 inches.
Michael Aaron Lee
The two artworks Michael Aaron Lee was meant to have on view in a museum show in Chonqing, China, now indefinitely postponed, defy categorization. They flirt with being low-relief sculptures, combine multiple decorative schemes, and suggest that they might be frames, though frames that frame only themselves. The effect is one of self-contained obsessiveness, as expressed by meticulously layered constructions of paper and wood tinted an eerie almost-black through an edge-to-edge application of graphite.Lee’s recent exhibition schedule has instead consisted ofQuarantine Folk, online in June and July at the Brooklyn gallery Calico, which included three new drawings from his Americana series. To create the monochromatic pencil and ink pictures,Lee intricately arranges scraps of text from folk songs and popular slogans with images from dusty attics and old-timey prints into unsettlingly dense and dark compositions perfect for right now. Begun in 2017, the suite is as fraught as its name, though it isn’t exactly prescient. This is exactly where we’ve been headed all along. Lee, to his credit, appears to have seen it coming.
—Lori Waxman 2020-08-05 9:04 AM
Carlos Salazar-Lermont, “Rigor Mortis,” digital photograph,100 X 104 cm / 39 x 41 in, 2015. On view until August 30 at Chuquimarca Projects, open by appointment.
Carlos Salazar-Lermont
Is everything meaningless? Has it all been done before? These perennial questions emerge in Carlos Salazar-Lermont’s solo exhibition at Chuquimarca Projects in Chicago, Ecclesiastés 1:2, named for the corresponding biblical passage.The Venezuelan artist presents the remains of a half-dozen performances in which he uses his own body to probe between life and death, symbolism and reality, permanence and ephemerality. “Rigor Mortis,”a photograph of his arms, reveals one to be in rosy health, the other worryingly, but temporarily, blue and limp from a tourniquet. In “Memento Mori/Vanitas,” Salazar-Lermont inklessly tattooed those portentous words across his torso and back, recording their eventual disappearance as his skin healed; for a reprise, Instagrammed live last week, his chest was imprinted with Ecclesiastes1:9, essentially repeating the message. Though fiercely unsettling, some comfort can be drawn from these gestures, even—perhaps especially—those in the two-channel video “ICHTHYS II.”There Salazar-Lermont forcefully jabs his finger into a dead fish and into his own torso, damaging both but ultimately confirming the resilience of the living human body. (Curated by Wil Ruggiero.)
—Lori Waxman 2020-08-06 10:06 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).