Macerate
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Curated by Currency Exchange (Nicole Sorg and Liz Rosenfeld), “Macerate” is largely a showcase for the kind of half-ironic, half-straightforward youth-nostalgic “rocker” art that’s become increasingly common in Chicago’s independent galleries over the past five years. Really, the theme of rocker art is always adolescence–white suburban adolescence, that is–and its commodified symbols of belonging and alienation. An almost self-aware parody of atavistic identity art a la Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman, rocker art replaces propaganda with nonthreatening, digestible imagery. Familiar as its subjects are, though, the variety of media in “Macerate” and its overall lighthearted energy keep it from feeling stale.
Several pieces dealing directly with popular music suggest that something operatic and grandly affirming in our collective inner child is somehow being stifled. Frank Ebert in his untitled works uses accomplished drawing and painting techniques not to be illustrational or photorealistic but to comment on the endearingly juvenile fetishization of such techniques. In a romantic oil painting reminiscent of J.M.W. Turner, he depicts a voguing Cyndi Lauper dwarfed by a plume of what might be a gulf war oil-field blaze. And in a pencil drawing suggesting a New Yorker cartoon, he shows a long-haired guitarist hitting a power chord beneath a stone arch being demolished by a jackhammer operator. In Sara Ferguson’s As Big as Missy Elliott, an electric fan inflates a pink flowered muumuu repeatedly emblazoned with the title phrase, evoking the star’s long-bygone days of flaunting her “big ass.” In Andy Roche’s Use Your Illusion II, three monitors display video documentation of an electric guitar performance by a man with a blanket over his head and no pants. The monitors manage to claustrophobically contain the tiny windowless room in which he wanders, strumming his instrument.
More: Closing night, July 1, features a performance and film and video screenings.
