Michelle Blade: Cast & Cascade and José Lerma: The Lightweight
@ Western Exhibitions
119 N Peoria St, 2A, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Friday, April 8th, from 5PM - 8PM
On view through Saturday, May 14th
Michelle Blade brings together painting and sculpture to create an environment in which the past and present are interlaced. Influenced by Romanticism and West Coast utopic idealism, Blade’s mystical paintings mine the nostalgia of a bygone era, simultaneously marking a passing moment while looking forward into an unknown with cosmic reverie.
Using a variety of materials such as Dura-lar, lace, wood, paper and found objects, the resulting installation is a meditation on dualities: the real and unreal, light and dark, presence and absence. Painted wall tapestries, urns containing the ashes of past burned paintings, assorted paintings of anonymous figures, book covers, and Tarot card sessions rest on top of wooden shelves. Along with a white lace sculpture of a chair, these items call to mind the theoretical discourse concerning painting’s own life and death. These works seek to create an engagement with individuals while simultaneously questioning the effectiveness of its methods and the potential of all such quests. Ultimately, these works serve as a reminder of man’s persistent isolation and the persistent and timeless desire to connect with something beyond ourselves.
In The Lightweight, also the title of the show, José Lerma has screenprinted a cartoon, published in 1880 in the French satirical newspaper “Le Charivari”, relating to the Salon Exhibition of that year, in varnish, on a section of a large reflective curtain that is stretched to look like a painting. The caption from the cartoon reads (translated from French):
“A painter whose work is badly placed installed a telescope so that art lovers can see his picture for two sous…which he gladly gives them.”
This cartoon image, in clear varnish, will only be viewable when one is in-line with a light source. Mimicking the source material, Lerma points a telescope towards another stretched section of the reflective curtain which displays moth-holes on colorful cut-out circles taken from the artist’s old sweater. Lerma states: “I was interested in the idea that, at the time of the salon, reputation and physical placement of a work were the same thing.”
For the second piece, titled Rampant Mid-Careerism, Lerma stretches a Vietnam-era training parachute over several blank canvases that are hung salon-style and a larger photograph of a painting. The piece then rests on a synthesizer, set to arpeggio-mode, playing random “glass harmonica” sounds.
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