Chris Uphues
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Local artist Chris Uphues, whose work appears this month in the 12 x 12 space at the Museum of Contemporary Art, is clearly an exponent of this recent trend, especially in the two of his four works here using found objects. One of them, Swarm, is a supernova of small plastic lids of various sizes affixed to the wall. On these lids Uphues has pasted facial features cut from comic books and other print images, giving each one a persona of sorts. Many of the lids are dented, punctured, or otherwise mangled, which adds pathos and maybe an element of sadistic glee. Among many other recognizable images are Pinocchio and beloved Japanese cartoon cat Doraemon, reconfigured in new colors, proportions, and patterns. Playful juxtapositions lend the piece a slight surreal uncanniness, but even with the dings and holes, these miniportraits can’t be said to have a theme, sinister or otherwise.
Like Swarm, Uphues’s Rainbow is a modular piece composed of painstakingly constructed tiny elements. He’s drawn animals, people, and their surroundings in colored pencil on bright three-color Behr paint swatches. Often he’s directly inspired by the names of the colors–for “sun-dried orange” he drew a shriveled orange–but he also finds visual and symbolic rhythms within and between the swatches. His sense of color is pleasing, his lines are confident and clean, and the overall feeling of the piece is warm. There’s also an appealing cleverness to deploying the cheap, mass-produced ephemera of home beautification to create a unique, carefully handcrafted object whose aim still seems to be domestic tranquility. Deliberately or not, the characters and objects in Rainbow look every bit as prefabricated as the swatches themselves, giving the work a light, inoffensive irony. Together the bits create one Donald Judd-like horizontal spectrum traversing, of course, the colors of the rainbow. Showing the requisite entrepreneurial zeal, Uphues has also self-published Rainbow as a book, just as he published a volume on what is perhaps his most ambitious piece, a series of giant cartoon features painted on grain silos in Montana and documented by a photographer. (Both books are available at the MCA gift store.)
Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Carl Hammer Gallery Chicago, courtesty of Dr. Michael Uphues.
