Into the Woods
Marco Casentini
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Emblematic of the general tendency is Jeff Carter’s Segment, a group of aluminum “bamboo” stalks set to swaying by little motors in their bases. Never mind the quaint fact that an art lover can buy the stalks singly or in discounted multiples, there’s something disconcertingly restful in the sight of these tall, segmented columns riffling in a nonexistent breeze. It’s like one of those videotapes of a roaring fire. That the stalks have a white metallic sheen somehow doesn’t mitigate their pastoral calm; it simply disengages the pastoral from any sense of a pasture.
Nature becomes cartography in Cadence Giersbach’s painting Niagara Falls II, which has the look of a topographical map. It turns binary in Scott Wolniak’s pencil drawing, Light on Water, which reduces the phenomenon of reflection to something resembling a first-generation computer printout. It’s undercut by a media-savvy punch line in Jason Lazarus’s untitled photo showing a gorgeous moonlit beach with the words “currently represented” written in the sand along the shore. Andreas Fischer pushes it over into kitsch with Her Parents Told Her That She Could Be Anything She Wanted When She Grew Up so She Told Them That She Wanted to Be a Seal, an acrylic-on-canvas image of a nude woman in an arctic setting with a seal mask covering her head. And John Parot relegates it to the status of a screen saver in his modified photographic work by placing forest scenes behind bizarre collaged images of women.
Where: Thomas McCormick, 835 W. Washington
Where: G.R. N’Namdi, 110 N. Peoria
