COVID Reviews: Ana Prvacki, April Gertler, MoBella Russo, Suzanne McClelland, Yi Hsuan Lai, Erik Ruin

07/18/20

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 two weeks ago; the second and third came out with a week’s interval.

Ana Prvacki

The artist Ana Prvacki’s finest productions allure, confound and ultimately unsettle.“Multimask” is exactly that. Produced during quarantine for the 13th Gwangju Biennale and viewable online, the two-and-a-half-minute video purports to advertise a new type of face mask, perfect for our times of mass contagion, high stress and constant surveillance.As with all great satire, “Multimask” is almost believable, and in some sense you have to be in on the joke in order to get it.Not all Americans are there, sad to say, but if they were we might not need such thoughtful irony. Silver lining! Prvacki helps encourage critical viewership by designing her mask as a smiley face with terrifyingly tiny eyes, serpentine elastic bands, and a red filtering valve where the stub of a cigar would be. Anyone who actually walked around wearing such a device would look like an insane and dangerous clown, even if the interior surface of cucumber slices or honeycomb were soothing as can be. (It’s a 3-in-1 mask, after all.) I’m thinking of ordering a pack of ten.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-10 5:02 PM

April Gertler

Humans crave communication. Before Twitter, before instant messaging, before email, cellphones and landlines in every home, but after telegrams and carrier pigeons, there was the telex machine. Invented in Germany in 1926, it could initially sendup to 66 words a minute.Under lockdown this spring, and feeling the need to correspond with the outside world, artistApril Gertler renewed the spirit of the telex with an eponymously titled project. On a magenta banner hung from her fourth-floor apartment window in Berlin, she pinned a new word foreach of 66 days. Alternating between German and English, between news stories, social media and personal sentiment, she chose from the dictionary with care. By the end, on fabric that had faded to pale pink, her communiqués included such pertinent gems as BUOYANCE, WANDERLUST, MOODSWING, TEDIOUS, and PERSEVERE, not to mention the suddenly heart-rending BREATHE. One hopes that Gertler received some words in return, perhaps a note slipped under the door from appreciative passersby or piqued neighbors. But even if not, her words no doubt became a part of larger conversations already ongoing.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-11 4:11 PM

MoBella Russo

Art doesn’t need to have a purpose but, especially in times of confusion and suffering, intentionality can go a long way. MoBella Russo, a mother of two children and painter of abstract pictures living in Chicago, has spent the better part of the quarantine creating Paintings for Heroes, jazzy 5x7-inch watercolors dedicated to individuals nominated by family or friends.Videos of her process post to a dedicated Instagram account; the finished work is delivered to the nominee. Russo is at number 41 and counting, and thus far has gifted her neon-tinged creations to a wide range of people, most of whom could be your neighbor: a local food distributor, a nightshift ER nurse, a mental health counselor, a men’s center case manager, a pediatrician.Many of these people do heroic work in the best of times; if it takes a global pandemic for them to get the thank you they deserve, so be it. May it keep on coming, long after the discovery and distribution of a vaccine.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-12 4:40 PM

Suzanne McClelland

Do you believe? I don’t really, but I also don’t not. Who could be so sure? InTRILLION, a solo show of recent paintings by Suzanne McClelland, postponed and then open by appointment at de boer gallery in Los Angeles, I sense a kindred spirit of agnosticism. We’re talking numbers not god, mind you, and by numbers I mean statistics, formulas, time. Just the facts on which we constantly depend, ma’am. But McClelland makes palpably scratchy, washy, even chunky paintings, paintings whose brushy oils and polymers scrawl and swish and otherwise get up to no good. The numbers don’t stand a chance. They fly off clocks, tangle up chemical codes, and generally refuse to behave like the certainties they are supposed to be. Could 7284555 really be a healing code for panic attacks, as suggested by the title and content of a composition colored every shade of bruise? Probably not, but perhaps. Just in case, I’ll tuck it away in a safe place for later.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-13 11:06 PM

Yi Hsuan Lai

Surrealistically grotesque images made using one’s own body, dolls or other props seem especially well suited to pandemic production. Imagine Hans Bellmer or Cindy Sherman deep in the studio, barely noticing the shutdown of the outside world.Joining these ranks of the uncanny is Corporeal Signal, a series of photographs in which Yi Hsuan Lai interacts with somatic sculptures molded from pale beige Sculpey perfectly matched to her skin tone. Finger extensions-cum-orifices, bulbous knee-nipples, a fleshy and hairy hairbrush, a nose-vagina, and a giant vagina-face unsettle with their suggestion of being able to fulfill the sorts of human needs unmeetable during lockdown, especially for those quarantining solo. Loneliness isn’t caused byCOVID-19, mind you, only exacerbated by it. Regardless, the object in “Hand in hands,” held as tenderly as if it were an infant rather than an insectoid eight-pronged blob, can never be more than achingly sad.

—Lori Waxman 2020-07-14 4:36 PM

Erik Ruin

The aptly named Erik Ruin does well by printmaking’s longstanding history as the artistic medium of grassroots critique and political uprising. With all of his exhibits and performances cancelled for the foreseeable future, the Philadelphia-based shadow puppeteer and cut-paper artist has turned to making short videos for release on YouTube, complete with original scores by musician friends. Ruin’s animations are not for the faint of heart. “Survivors of the Plague,”set to a harrowing lament by Anna Roberts-Gevalt, aesthetically amalgamates our times with those of the distant past, whose stories of floods and pestilence seem suddenly relatable.“Erasures 1-5,” in which Ruin viscerally scratches out his own bold black-and-white portraits of Frank Rizzo, Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee and other great leaders of the racist enterprise, is complemented by the incessant video game shooting noises of Julius Masri’sCouncil On American Regicide. Ruin’s videos will not make you feel better, but they will make you feel.—Lori Waxman 2020-07-16 8:58 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).