Inventing the World
Preston Jackson
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Los Carpinteros (“The Carpenters”) are three artists who began working in the early 90s in Cuba, during its “special period”–a time of unprecedented hardship in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The collective’s midcareer retrospective, “Inventing the World,” features seamlessly crafted sculptural objects derived from furniture and product design as well as large watercolor sketches of variations on their ideas. In a classic Dada gesture, they transform familiar functional objects by juxtaposing them. The cast-resin sculpture Piscina Olimpica/Olympic Pool (2004), a miniature swimming pool set on sawhorses and lit from within by shifting colored lights, makes a political comment–pools are apparently illegal icons of bourgeois decadence in Castro’s Cuba–and also embodies a straightforward pun, the “pool table.” Panera/Breadbox (2004) is a lovely wooden model of a cruise missile with roll-top drawers, and Sofa Caliente/Hot Sofa (2001) is a shiny white steel “couch” with stove burners and dials instead of cushions. The combination of verbal and formal gags, domestic design, and menace recalls American contemporaries like Matthew Barney and Charles Ray. Though Los Carpinteros’s work tilts at both U.S. cultural hegemony and police-state repression, it seems to take pride in its Cuban context. It’s slick, it’s glib, but the touch is gentle and the effect is charming.
Of these exhibits at the Cultural Center, the most likely crowd-pleaser is Preston Jackson’s sculpture installation, “Fresh From Julieanne’s Garden,” which fills two galleries. His fanciful bronzes suggest allegorical vignettes featuring fictional characters of the antebellum and reconstruction south, usually amply proportioned females who seem heroines, victims, and earth priestesses, accompanied by unusual props, curious animals, and occasional men. Each piece is paired with a short text. While Jackson refers to African sculpture, his work owes its biggest debt to Kara Walker’s magical art-nouveau-esque silhouette dramas–though Jackson’s fables are less surreal. His grim narratives evoke the pedagogy of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker more than they do Mark Twain’s uncanny bleak irony. Many contain blunt generalizations, some obvious, as in “All women . . . experience the same subjugation to the whims of a man’s pleasure,” and some dangerously patronizing, like “Most people of her race and class knew well the earth and all its beautiful gifts.” Jackson’s figures offer little beyond a decent degree of competence in portraiture and composition. But his imaginative mini-morality plays are enough to draw most viewers into an hour or so of contemplation.
When: Through Sun 4/2
Where: Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington
