Author: ethokar

Still-Life, Playful-Life: A Visit to Frank Trankina’s Studio by Samuel Schwindt “I still can’t make an abstract painting!” Frank Trankina jested a little into our conversation at his studio. As I took my first looks at monumental displays of paintings within paintings, whimsical toys fantastically collided with art history. In one, Arnold Schwarzenegger ganders at quasi-Barbara Hepworth and Constantin Brancusi sculptures; in another, fictional history paintings glaze imaginary mansions; in another, post-modernist paintings are dogged in a sterile white-cube gallery; in another, superimposed limestone portraits cascade textiles rife with trade; further along, Godzilla is monumentalized in a still life.           Fleeting tokens, soaked in potential energy, are ready for realization in Trankina’s work. The seeming detritus of play—bobbleheads, action figures, folksy objects—stand resolute, poised to be immortalized in these still lifes. Trankina’s practice sleuths the quotidian and transforms it into wink-wink paintings that question performance within art spaces: where the limited space for playfulness daggers into the experimental         Trankina’s studio’s large windows could easily produce greenhouse light in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood. He haphazardly installed coverings to mask, demure, and dramatize, cocooning his production space. Free-standing spotlights punctured a cacophony of excavated ephemera, oil paints, and in-progress paintings. Darkened in the far back left were bobble-heads, a lizard ceramic head, toy superheroes, and other unidentifiable characters from an origin story that is perhaps, only a memory of a memory. A scrap area shyly slumps in the back-right of the studio: cardboards, woods, textiles, tapes. The centered performance stage is a statuesque easel marred with paint. Remarkably organized brushes in canisters and oil paints with all their caps securely fashioned are ready to produce. It’s an academic approach, I will say: Trankina is a professor at Northern Illinois University in painting. The ethos of a clean studio is on full display. The necessities of painting from life are all around, although with some irreverence.           But whether it is Schwarzenegger or a 17th century Dutch still life as inspiration, he combines the academic with the wistfully playful.         With his healthy respect for painting techniques and lineage, it is apt to begin with Trankina’s training. His mentor Ray Yoshida, a prominent Chicago Imagist, nurtured his burgeoning collecting process of toys and secondary market objects. “I was lucky enough for him to become my friend,” Trankina said in an interview. He began collecting figurines and folk objects from Midwestern antique, thrift, and flea markets, even before he arrived at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 1992). Then in graduate school, he and Yoshida probed the street markets: soon realizing collecting vernacular objects could integrate into his paintings. Trankina believes it is a remarkably Midwestern experience to claim these sources— in opposition to attitudes on the East Coast at the time. “We were kind of outcasts,” Trankina said. Jim Nutt even took years to make an impact in the New York City scene, along with other imagists to “see their day in the sun,” he said. With fond memories of Roger Brown, Barbara Rossi, and other founding members of the Imagists, Trankina remarked on an “honor of his lifetime”: his work joined the Kohler Foundations’ “Ray Yoshida’s Museum of Extraordinary Values” exhibition, and after, their permanent collection.         Among these sources, Trankina had the “cheap seats” subscription to the Chicago Opera in the 90s. Jim Nutt always played Operatic scores during his classes at SAIC (“they’re always rather long,” which was necessary for the long studio days, he said). When I remarked on the categories of Opera’s he witnessed, we jumped between comedy and drama—making light of versus making solemnity of.         In the incidental sourcing of the conceptual and aesthetic, Trankina always returns to recreation married to a disciplined realism (although Trankina laughed later that he’s not even sure what “realism” means in its overuse). “That’s the play, the play” Trankina said, as he gestured to the figurines, “and serious play.” The duality of the serious and whimsical humors his influences, I scribbled in my hard-to-read handwriting.           While holding the toxic green, ceramic, lizard head, as we talked, I worried about a limiting comedic reaction to his paintings. I confessed my fear that humor critiques can tarnish an artwork. Really, it’s “irreverence,” Trankina said. I scrawled in my notebook: “paradox.”         Trankina then interrupted: casting a yellow spotlight onto an in-progress work in the center of the room. Large, parallel, and flattened pink destabilized foreground, middle ground, and background in it. Drooping funerary flowers wreath a toy turned to face a blank wall. The dual godzilla silhouettes are dialectical pairs. A marble figure reminiscent of Hellenistic greek sculpture fades into the background of army-green (Trankina and I remarked, though, how much we both hate green).         The painting is about “flatness,” he said. And it demonstrated a fear he and I both have when mentoring young painters: their unacknowledged luring into digital images as source images. It’s the painter’s job to do the translation of the real to the pictorial, we agreed. This disregard to sourcing can alter the painter’s mixology—something Trankina is hyper-aware of even in the history of still lifes.         These battling painting techniques and subsequent mentorships are pervasive in painting history. Still-life painters have always been evolving as inventors of devices: the 1630s-40s Golden Age of Holland saw a twisting of the naturalism of their subjects. Soon more interested in illusionism, painters like Anthony Claesz II and Hans Bollongier drifted away from their predecessors. With fantastical light and drama almost reminiscent of baroque painting, they collaged disparate flowers and objects.1 This germinated from an earlier hodge-podge approach of creating small studies of different objects, due to economic and environmental concerns. In flower still lifes, many flora were perennials: and, as in with Tulipomania,2 highly prized and expensive. Painters would have

Nothing that is Not There: Mark Ryan Chariker 1969 Gallery, New York, November 14–December 21, 2024. by Charles Venkatesh Young At the opening of Mark Ryan Chariker’s latest show at 1969 Gallery, an oddball line of poetry by Patti Smith repeated in my head: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Smith, a lifelong Christian whose oeuvre is laced with biblical references, proved with this utterance that her faith could only be bested by her punk-rock bravado. Chariker’s current show proves him to be a kindred spirit, whose discerning eye holds in equal esteem the sublime and the laughably incidental.         Chariker has long been inspired by Rococo France, where painters like Jean-Antoine Watteau gained fame for renderings of frolicking dilettantes in verdant outdoor spaces. Indeed, many of his older paintings were almost identical to Watteau’s characteristic fete galantes in subject matter: figures tumbling over one another in the rustic outdoors while doing nothing in particular. Chariker’s most recent show has split Watteau’s signature pictorial motif in half—the figure paintings are one thing, the landscapes another. I’d forgive anyone who assumed they’d always been separate—the former’s angsty twenty-somethings can seem antipathetic to the beauty of the latter’s effulgent foliage.           Though Chariker’s landscapes maintain an air of revelrous impressionism, on the whole, they’re more akin to those of Song Dynasty China than Western Europe. Fusing the omniscient grandiosity and austere color palette of the North with the intimate vistas of the South, he conjures paradises which are impossible in their greatness but plausibly inhabitable—an odd collision of the sublime and the quotidian that’s liable to effect befuddled chuckles in viewers. (I know it’s unlikely that Chariker is explicitly drawing inspiration from the likes of Fan Kuan and Ma Yuan, but the parallels are too many to be completely accidental. Like the greatest of the Northern Song, he incorporates stairs, paths, and entryways throughout his landscapes, beckoning viewers to imagine themselves traversing each one. And his tendrilly, crab claw-like branches bear striking resemblance to those of Song legend Guo Xi.)          Chariker’s figures, however, are more Grant Wood than Guo Xi—their self-serious exteriors are constantly belied by inscrutable mien. Each seems vaguely schizophrenic, constantly aware of the fact that they’re being watched—by fellow subjects, or worse, viewers—and making the necessary physiognomic adjustments. In one work, a man (though in Chariker’s paintings, they never really ceased to be boys) with a conspicuous neck tattoo—a guillotine—stares at another, who uneasily reads a book. Another depicts two vaguely exasperated women, whose empty countenances place them in the awkward moments between emotions. (Chariker gives us a hint here with the title, A Pause in the Argument, but most of the time he isn’t so forthcoming—the majority of this show’s paintings are untitled.) We’ll never know what big feelings weigh on the hearts of Chariker’s subjects—they’re too embarrassed to tell us.          For their disparate subject matter, the paintings are held together by Chariker’s one-of-a-kind technique—he doesn’t paint a picture as much as he stipples it into existence. His facture is uniform and granular, as if he’s pecking the canvas over and over again. While the technique bears similarity to Seurat’s pointillism, Chariker’s subjects, figures and landscapes alike, are tangible in a way that Seurat’s misty compositions don’t come close to achieving.           To label Chariker’s brushwork “obsessive” would be like calling water wet—it’s clear viewing the painstaking movements of his wrist that every ounce of his life-force goes into a painting. Obvious as it is, I can’t help but laugh at the idea: in many cases, Chariker’s spiritual outpouring has produced scenes fraught with quotidian awkwardness, not the transcendent masterpieces one might expect. In his use of otherworldly means to produce a remarkably worldly end, Chariker’s practice much resembles one of his little-known influences: online message boards. He’s specifically cited a fascination with the fanatical fanbase of Under the Silver Lake, who scour the film’s every millisecond for near imperceptible cryptographical clues. (They’ve gone as far as to scan its fireworks patterns for subliminal messages in Morse code.)         I like to think of Chariker’s figurative subjects as these netizens, taking as their muse his breathtaking corpus of landscapes. Directionless as it may seem, the deep affectedness in their eyes had to originate somewhere. Why is it that when encountering something beautiful, we find only the repulsive, manic parts of ourselves? I don’t know, and Chariker doesn’t either. But his canvases are gorgeous, excruciatingly so, and worthy of the obsession they’re inspired by.   Charles Venkatesh Young is a Chicago-based journalist of the arts interested in fusing art theory with bodily experience. He has contributed to the New Art Examiner, Chicago Reader, Newcity, and Whitehot Magazine.  

Hygienic Dress League“Cross Pollination” By K.A. Letts In March 2024, Detroit artists Dorota and Steve Coy bring their satirical, enigmatic brand of multimedia art to Toledo in an exhibition entitled “Cross Pollination.” The artist partners pose ethical and philosophical questions about social structures that inform how we live now, as well as proposing some thoughts on how we will navigate the future as a species. The vehicle for their investigation is a conceptual corporation called Hygienic Dress League—a multi-year, multi-media, ongoing art project. A Brief History of the Hygienic Dress League Corporation         A mural-sized advertisement for something called Hygienic Dress League appeared on city walls in downtown Detroit at the turn of the twenty-first century, immediately signaling that something was up. These “urban interventions,” as they were called by their creators, often featured a young couple in business dress, their faces obscured by industrial respirators. The image deftly suggested corporate dystopia, and indeed, that is what the principals of Hygienic Dress League Corporation (HDLC) were trying to communicate. Officially registered in the state of Michigan in 2007, this conceptual corporation has progressed through multiple iterations in service of their mission to brand and promote a new art form using street art, video, online platforms, magazines and newspapers, multimedia events, and installations.           The recurring motifs that define HDLC’s corporate brand include industrial artifacts like bedazzled respirators, gilded shopping carts and televisions, mirror-encrusted fashion mannequins, and other objects that both fetishize and critique late-stage capitalism. Over time, as they have become more interested in environmental issues, pigeons, elephants, and rhinos, along with human/animal hybrids, have entered their visual vocabulary. Steve Coy describes the aesthetic of HDLC’s projects as “dystopian glamour.” Ultimately, the projects have become ever more ambitious in scale and have taken on a surrealist edge.           In a somewhat ironic twist, the Coys have begun collaborating with corporations that are the subject of their social critique. In 2018, they cooperated with DTE Energy to realize their speculative vision in “Value Proposition,” transformingDTE Energy’s de-commissioned Connor’s Creek site in Detroit into a public art installation and three-day performance. Spirit of the Forest, with seven cast, bright red human/deer hybrids illuminated from below and emerging from the darkness, formed the centerpiece of the project. A striking light sculpture, Diamond II, levitated above the site. The project is only one of many that have been commissioned from Hygienic Dress League Corporation worldwide. “Cross Pollination” at River House Arts in Toledo         The objects on display now at River House Arts are a sampling from several of HDLC’s recent installations. The artists describe the collection of objects in the gallery as a kind of museum, or perhaps a mini retrospective, of their previous work. Tucked into a corner of the gallery, we find a video of Homosapien Goddess, a version of which was shown recently at Detroit’s Wasserman Projects in an extended installation called The Five Realms. A similar ram-headed female figure, The Deity, is now located in Port Austin, Michigan, as part of the 53 North Art Project.   (Left) The Deity, 2020. Port Austin, Michigan, 53 North Art Project installation. Photo, courtesy of the artists. (Right) Homosapien Fossil, 2022. Ceramic, 5 × 8, inches. River House Arts, Toledo. Photo: K.A. Letts.         Also, from The Five Realms is a row of small artifacts embedded in stone-like substrates, displayed in wall-hung boxes. These Homosapien Fossils are disposable (and disposed of) artifacts—a plastic fork, a water bottle, a tiny Lego toy—from our human present re-imagined as precious objects that will be displayed and viewed by a future civilization.         The idea that seems to animate the Coys in much of their work is the notion that human beings have been on the earth for only a moment in geological time. And that in some distant future when the human race has disappeared, an alien civilization will view and interpret—or misinterpret—the detritus of our culture. In the distant future, the time we experience in a linear fashion will be compressed into an eternal “now” in which a classical Greek bust will share a collapsed history with an industrial respirator. The idea is humorous in a way. “We love the symbolism of these culturally loaded objects,” Steve Coy says. “We kind of ride the line between, ‘Ah, we’re joking,’ and ‘no we’re very serious.’”   (Left) Lover of Wisdom (night) left, 2022. Concrete, gold leaf, enamel, 24 x 12 inches. Cosmos Portal, right, 2024. Acrylic on canvas with gold leaf, 36 x 24 inches. River House Arts Toledo, photo: K.A. Letts. (Right) Sunny Day Simulation, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 80 x 48 inches. River House Arts, Toledo, Photo: K.A. Letts.         HDLC’s musings on humanity’s past and present share gallery space with artworks proposing a hypothetical future. Several paintings are paired in two-part mini installations with editions of a classical Greek bust of a young man wearing a respirator. The medium-sized canvases depict skies, stylized suns, or gradient hues in improbably intense and unsettling saturated colors. Clouds and flowers are pixilated; nature is mediated by technology—shorthand for the Anthropocene. Another recurring image for the HDLC is an elongated, mirrored pyramid which first appeared in a 2021 installation at TOURISTS sculpture park in North Adams, Massachusetts, in collaboration with MASS MoCA. The archetypal apparition has now reappeared in the gallery as a skeletal gold-leafed portal in a painting entitled Cosmos Portal and in a digital video, Simulated Portal.   Simulated Portal, 2022. Digital video in acrylic framed player, 7.5 x 11 inches. River House Arts, Toledo. Video: K.A. Letts.         For an audience new to Hygienic Dress Leagues Corporation’s art practice, “Cross Pollination” is an opportunity to become familiar with HDLC’s themes and methods, and it provides a glossary of images that will no doubt recur in their future cultural conversation.   “Cross Pollination” is on view from

“Free Your Mind: Art and Incarceration in Michigan” Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, MOCAD April 14–September 10, 2023 by Marissa Jezak Distant memories, imaginative fantasy, juxtaposed with a severe reality, collectively inspire “Free Your Mind: Art and Incarceration in Michigan,” a diverse showcase consisting mainly of two-dimensional art by individuals currently or previously incarcerated in Michigan prisons. Co-curated by Steven L. Bridges and Janie Paul, the show opened April 14th, and ran through September 10th of 2023. The artworks depict scenes of day-to-day life in lock-up, men sitting in groups playing cards and chess, passing the time. Some pictures reflect a more introspective personal narrative with elaborate illustrations evoking intense mental suffering, anguish. The intensity and crowdedness, the feelings of confinement and conflict portrayed in the imagery contrast starkly with the comfortable domestic setting in MOCAD’s Mobile Homestead, a separate addition to the museum which was designed as an exact replica of artist Mike Kelley’s suburban childhood home. Through the living room, dining room, and ­narrow hallways of this small “home,” visitors encounter the creations of artists who have lost precisely that—home, at least temporarily.           Walking up the driveway to the gallery, yellow yard signs display statistics such as “At least 20% of Michigan’s incarcerated population has been identified to have a mental health disorder,” setting the tone for the exhibition ahead, which clearly intends to educate viewers regarding the subject of incarceration. Beginning in the garage section of the homestead, a table displays dozens of ’zines full of drawings and poetry, collaborations from workshops made up of college students from Michigan State University and inmates from local penitentiaries. Also, in the room is a film and two paintings, which transition smoothly into the rest of the show. In Rehabilitation, an acrylic painting by Phillip Crowley, two prisoners are depicted behind bars in a haunted cell, surrounded by ghosts and what appears to be Jesus on the cross. A large clock divides the two figures, with the scales of justice below it, holding two books, one of which reads “God’s Law.” The resemblance between the men, one appearing young and the other old, combined with the symbol of the clock, infers the artist may be referencing the long passing of time and aging process that’s happening to him on the inside. (The controversial length of prison sentences is another point raised by the informational plaques throughout the show.)           Descriptions next to the artworks communicate that many of the artists were employed in skilled trades prior to their imprisonment. This fact is demonstrated in the special attention to detail and technical accuracy visible in the works. The exhibition represents a blend of genders among its artists, including a mix of men and women. A wall text elaborates on the incarceration of women specifically, stating, that in recent years, the percentage of women being locked up has steadily increased, as well as have the lengths of their sentences. The text highlights the fact that women’s biology can make their time served harder to bear due to childbirth, breastfeeding, motherhood, and dealing with menstrual cycles. In the painting, Why My Baby? Dara Ket addresses the pain felt by a mother whose child has been locked away. The child, strikingly depicted as an infant, is dressed in a prison uniform and is shown talking to its mother through the wired glass visitation window. In the artist’s statement, Ket speaks from the heart, “This painting is dedicated to those that are in prison for the rest of their lives and not going home. I feel their pain. I feel the number on their shoulder, not knowing when you’re going home. You can’t put it in words to know that you’re gonna die in prison.” Similarly, a father’s perspective of this scenario is drawn out in the family portrait, Father’s Responsibility by Samuel Hendley. In this painting, the artist depicted himself at home in his living room, holding a little girl, with another child and baby painted beside them—an idealized view of where he should be, as a protector of his home—not showing the reality of where he is now, in prison.           Coincidentally occurring at the same time that Detroit’s new Wayne County jail is being built, this exhibition not only draws attention to the problems of the prison system and the activists trying to change it, but more importantly connects the public to the humanity of the artists—the imprisoned people who are stripped of their personhood and reduced to a number or statistic, and used as pawns in political warfare—their exploitation fueling the grimy machine of capitalist greed that lies at the heart of the prison industrial complex. Throughout the show, the theme of suffering is heavily present, as it is intertwined with the experience of a dysfunctional criminal punishment that has been fabricated by our society. In these artworks, the sense of loneliness, scarcity, and pain is real. The hearts of the prisoners are displayed in a sensitive space of openness that demonstrates survival in its rawest form.     Marissa Jezak (b.1992, Harrison Township, MI) is an artist and writer based in Detroit. She earned a BFA in photography and critical theory from the College for Creative Studies in 2014. Marissa Jezak’s writing has been featured in publications such as Detroit Research and Runner, and she has exhibited artworks internationally. Her ongoing research focuses on illness, trauma, and gender politics.

Mickey Gallery: Five Years of Experimentation Mickey, Chicago, July 14–September 10, 2023 by Michel Ségard This gallery is new to this writer but has intrigued me since I heard of it. It is a gallery for emerging artists of a certain style. Its architecture has a Manhattan ambiance that I found a little odd for Chicago—extremely minimalist with small works widely spaced and unlabeled on stark white walls. The Gallery is housed in a renovated, modest sized, one-story commercial building in an (as yet) undeveloped commercial street.         Mickey shows mostly young artists who are still developing their style. This show, “A Summer Group Exhibition,” features artists that have shown at Mickey in the past five years as well as invited artists. It includes works by Marcel Alcalá, Rachel Bos, Michael Garland Clifford, Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire, Michelle Grabner, Paul Heyer, Leonardo Kaplan, Michael Madrigali, Vanessa Maltese, Zach Meisner, Ryan Nault, Emma Pryde, Emma Robbins, Nick Schutzenhofer, Chloe Seibert, Joe W. Speier, Amy Stober, Neal Vandenbergh, and Kevin Weil.         Some of the work appears to be conceptually and/or technically unresolved. Closer inspection suggests that the “unfinished” character is often part of its style—a self-conscious nod to outsider art and a repudiation of the highly polished output of many high-priced art superstars. This strategy doesn’t always succeed—some of the work just looks slap-dash or sloppy and, therefore, insincere to the eyes of a more mature or uninitiated viewer. But, a younger, hip audience might be attracted to the seeming rebelliousness of that approach and might be unaware that it could be a marketing ploy.           That is not to say that the work at Mickey is necessarily sub-par. Marcel Alcalá’s Club Q is a crudely painted homage to the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub where five patrons were killed in a hate crime mass shooting in 2022. Alcalá approximates the club’s logo as depicted in its road sign. The hurried and “casual” manner in which the piece is painted suggests an emotional turmoil going on in the artist’s mind over the event—something he could not endure for the time it would have taken to do a more precise rendering. The concept was set down; grieving done; don’t dwell on what you can’t change.         Across the room is a small painting by the late Michael Garland Clifford titled OJ Goes to Disney from 2015, the year before his death. The piece, all in blacks, grays, and beiges, depicts a four-fingered glove, very crudely rendered with a top and bottom border that is a not-quite Greek key motif. This motif appears in many of his paintings—all done in a casual, child-like style, and most having some allusion to death. Sadly, OJ Goes to Disney is not his best work. It would have been more dramatic to include his piece Michael Was Present, done the same year. That piece indirectly foretells his untimely death at the age of 27 and, as such, is in the company of works like Larry Stanton’s 1984 drawing Untitled (Hospital Drawing) [I’m Going to Make It] that was included in the ARTAIDSAMERICA Chicago show held in March of 2017. (See “ArtAIDS American Chicago: The Anguish of Remembering,” New Art Examiner, Volume 31, Number 5, May/June 2017, pages 26.)           History rears its head again in the piece by Paul Heyer from 2022 titled 01203. At first glance, it recalls the early paintings of Christopher Wool with its silver metallic-looking background and an image rendered mostly with black paint. A closer look reveals that Heyer’s work is nothing like Wool’s. First, the background is not metal but a glittery silver lamé fabric. The “image,” the paths of a pair of butterflies collaged onto the painting, suggests the persistence of nature in an urban environment. Ultimately, the butterflies bring color and life into an environment that is uniformly gray.         Neal Vandenbergh gives us an entirely different view of nature. His portrait, Mickey, includes a cobra’s head inserted over the forehead of the subject (presumably the gallery owner). The cobra head—representing the goddess Wadje—adorned the headdresses of Egyptian pharaohs. Rendered in graphite, pastel, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper, the piece has a very soft focus. Mostly muted greens and blues with some beige, the eyes of the cobra and the subject are depicted with warmer tones of orange and red so that they stand out. Is Vandenbergh commenting about the role of a gallery dealer in the lives of artists?           A piece that has overt religious symbolism is Emma Pryde’s Morning Star. This acrylic and pencil drawing on paper at first seems derivative of Marc Chagall’s paintings with floating bodies and pastel shades and, because of the wavy form of the figure, of Munch’s The Scream. But this is actually a crucifix—a crucifix of an androgynous “Christ” with cross-shaped stigmata. There are two locks and keys floating in the swirling universe that is the background. One lock is suspended from a beaded “chain” (a rosary?) while the other, winged and heart-shaped, seems to pair with a heart-shaped key hovering above it. Clearly, this image is meant to provoke reflection on the meaning and social effect of Christianity. I wish it had been executed more carefully. To my eye, the casual style diminishes the seriousness of its intellectual content.         Next to Morning Star is a piece by Chloe Seilbert ­titled Lovers. It consists of two images, one above the other, of two creatures engaged in a passionate embrace. In the lower image, the figures, reading female, are depicted as grotesque with long, hairy, pierced ears, pointed teeth, and cat-like faces. In the upper image, a pair of hands are digging into the buttocks of the other being. It is a grim piece that made me think about the base and carnal nature of sex. Next to this on the adjacent wall is a much calmer Untitled image by Nick Schutzenhofer. Schutzenhofer