Elijah Burgher and Michael Milano: Magician Logician
@ PEREGRINEPROGRAM
500 W Cermak Rd, 727, Chicago, IL 60616
Opening Thursday, December 10th, from 6PM - 9PM
On view through Thursday, January 7th
The two-person exhibition Magician Logician showcases drawing projects by local artists Elijah Burgher and Michael Milano.The PEREGRINEPROGRAM exhibition, curated by Jeff M. Ward, marks the first time either project has been publicly displayed. Burgher and Milano share similar approaches—employing formulaic rubrics—to arrive at drawings interested in the irrational and mystic aspects of artmaking.
The Sigil drawings of Elijah Burgher are colored drawings that follow a template for magical signification originated by early Twentieth-century occultist Austin Osman Spare. In these drawings, Burgher arranges the letters of a phrase, which encapsulates his wish or desire, into an aesthetic abstraction. Arrived at intuitively, the sigils reference abstract painting—as well as that mode of production’s transcendent aspirations—while not adopting abstraction’s pomposity. Burgher’s sigils are a clever, playful interrogation of artwork’s capacity to materialize and encapsulate our hopes.
The Twill drawings of Michael Milano reproduce the aesthetic found in mathematical truth tables, but they eschew the definitive meaning of the logician. In these two-sided grid drawings, Milano alternates the letters T and F into a diagonal rib design, similar to a template for weaving known as a twill pattern draft. Designed prior to execution, the twills recall the irrationality sought by Sol LeWitt—who systematically followed pre-determined methodologies to arrive at his art—but stresses the resulting object more than a Conceptual artist would. Milano’s twills are structured, workmanlike suggestions that an art object’s value need not lie in significant utility.
Considered together, the works in Magician Logician exhibit a concern for scholarship and meaningful artwork tempered by suspicions about current art that is physically ambitious or conceptually rigid. Burgher and Milano’s drawings are modest in material and scale, and both practices are studious in nature, referencing books. These particular twill drawings are made for eventual binding in a handmade book; the sigils began as a series in the artist’s sketchbook. Each practice deftly mobilizes existing aesthetic methodologies to highlight art’s unconscious, which relies on the irrational and magical and is not reducible to appearance or usefulness.
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