New York artist David Packer’s first solo exhibition in Chicago, at the NavtaSchulz Gallery, looks to be a display of sculpture and drawings on macho mechanical themes, although the dominant note becomes poignancy.
He shows actual-size ceramic automobile engines and miniature wood Hummers along with outsize ceramic hearts that look like they’re of metal. The conjunction suggests a 21st Century elegy for American industrial might and the Precisionist impulse that once was so optimistic in modern American art.
There is in the work a certain flexing of muscles but also an awareness that the time of the idealized worker has passed and, with it, the notion of automotive power emanating from Detroit. One collage/drawing of engines has as counterpoint the words of a workers’ lament, and Packer’s Hummer models bear comic names — one being “General Turgidson,” taken from the lampooned military man in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.”
The hearts, which are the size of human torsos, are particularly disquieting. Hanging nearby is a collage from an old medical text and Packer’s similarly naturalistic drawn version. The ceramic pieces, however, look mechanistic, as if only the shape of the organ were retained for something purely functional, cold as clockwork and far away from the poetic center of human emotion.
At 1039 W. Lake St., 312-421-5506.
Kim Curtis’ paintings at Kasia Kay Art Projects are, as they were a year ago, landscapes that have had their underlying abstract elements uncovered. Form, light and color are paramount in them, but they are not without atmosphere and, apparently a new concern, the instantaneous summing up of a scene that takes place as we drive through a landscape, identifying things only as we move past, by our peripheral vision.
I especially like “Ink and Shadows,” which seems a perception received in a flash of something akin to one of the great glass-and-steel arches of a 19th Century European railroad station filled with, say, the bustle and steam of a painting by J.M.W. Turner. None of this is, of course, literal; it’s more like an echo or evocation of a scene caught on the wing and frozen while fleeting.
As before, the best pieces are small, long and only a couple of inches high. They are streaks of landscape in which just enough remains of the topographical elements to escape being abstract swipes. There the visible world is reduced to essentials, and the effect is persuasive.
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The quality of light in a number of the best pictures is wintry, and capturing that remains her forte, though Curtis produces dusky scenes in more than one season. The larger pictures still do not register on me as powerfully as the smaller, but a scene around a pond in which color patches are tightly interlocked, shows a benefit in having been cast as a triptych.
At 1044 W. Fulton Market, 312-492-8828.
Shane Huffman’s photoworks at the Skestos Gabrielle Gallery descend from the more experimental ones of early modernists, in that they are less concerned with such orthodox matters as darkroom technique and print quality than with unusual modes of picture making such as camera-less images that may be used in combination with drawing and bits of text.
The motivation behind this seems to be an attempt to align personal rhythms with various natural cycles involving, say, the tides and the heavens. Some of the pieces therefore focus on the artist’s practice as a swimmer, while others turn to science. But the dominant look of the works on view, recalling charts with different kinds of annotations, indicates that science, or something that passes for pseudo-science, has the upper hand.
At its most appealing, the impulse has produced “Mantras for the Moon,” a series of 12 pieces created by the heat and moisture expended in verbal chants that becomes a zodiacal calendar. At its most solipsistic, it has resulted in a tediously paced slide show on the artist’s aquatic athleticism and a pair of charcoal drawings of minimal graphic strength.
Throughout, the artist gropes toward a kind of poetry that he means to be firmed up, as it were, by science. But there also is a touch of humor in this process that, I suspect, time will prove as a lapse.
At 212 N. Peoria St., 312-243-1112.
David Packer through May 26 at the NavtaSchulz Gallery
Kim Curtis through May 26 at Kasia Kay Art Projects
Shane Huffman through June 2 at the Skestos Gabrielle Gallery
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