A husky man in a puffy coat, a pinch-nosed woman attempting to walk forward, a throng of other humans trying to move in various other directions, and a wall–these things had me pinned for a full minute on Friday night at Van Harrison Gallery. For one scary, thrilling instant it actually felt like it could’ve turned into another Chicago trampling disaster. People kept spilling plastic cups of wine on my new dress, and Van Harrison himself kept having to nail art back to the wall that’d gotten knocked askew or completely off. I would have felt bad for him if he weren’t about to pack up permanently for New York, the bastard.
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When he moved here in 1999, “everybody was opening galleries in their apartment or garage”–including his own gallery, Apartment 1R, which was housed in his Pilsen home for a year–“and then it sort of all disappeared. Chicago goes in waves: there’s a very strong alternative scene and then it shrivels up. These spaces would exist longer if someone just put some money down. A lot of times you’ll find Chicago collectors going to New York and Los Angeles to buy Chicago artists because they don’t have the confidence to buy them in Chicago. It’s a whole status thing, which people have to get over.”
It was the third Friday in a row I’d visited that monolith of hipster monoculture known as 119 North Peoria, which houses Van Harrison and other fashionable galleries whose openings are filled with art students staring at incomprehensible pieces of eye candy–Bucket Rider, Three Walls, Bodybuilder & Sportsman. I love going to openings in that building–there’s something comforting about how predictable they are. But this particular opening, for “The Four Color Pen Show,” was full of surprises.
This wasn’t the first time the world had been treated to these glorious achievements of the four-color pen: half the art at Van Harrison was shown in December at Locust Projects in Miami while the other half was up at Milwaukee’s General Store, a gallery, boutique, arts-and-crafts space, and party venue owned and operated by Tyson Reeder. The shows opened on the same night, and Hubbs and the Reeders wanted to do some kind of live feed between the two, so they passed around cell phones to strangers, who, says Scott, talked to other strangers, saying, “Yeah, I’m looking at four-color art. Cool.”
