Joy Episalla’s most engrossing series of photographs are the “portraits” she made by shooting subjects’ bookshelves. But close behind are comparatively vacant images of hotel rooms in different cities she has visited. The spaces all are reflected in blank screens of the rooms’ television sets, so in a sense, from the book pieces to these, Episalla has moved from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Newton Minow’s “vast wasteland” with little diminution of interest.
Nine of the television C Prints are on view at the Carrie Secrist Gallery. They are, I suppose, minimal portraits of the artist, who presumably has perceived something of herself in each room through a glass darkly. But aside from the disarray of bedclothes, viewers will have difficulty in determining just what aspects of personality Episalla has seen.
I like the pictures more as atmospheric studies with distortions imposed by the position of the TVs and convexity of their picture tubes. These, plus hard or soft, cold or warm light, suggest some existential adventure pursued alone in strange places, and it makes for a low-temperature sort of romance oddly suited to our times.
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At 835 W. Washington Blvd. 312-491-0917.
Dennis Lee Mitchell’s welded clay pieces at the Dubhe Carreno Gallery come to us under the title “Human Nature,” which succinctly evokes the two influences at work virtually throughout the exhibition: Wall-hanging fragments of human bodies are suggested through the assembly of armorlike plates that look like sections of peeled bark.
In most cases the “bark,” which is close to super-real representation, forms a front view of torso from shoulders to waist. Had there been a head and arms, several pieces would have been in the shape of a cross. Still, there is in several pieces the sense of extended arms felt through tension in the bodies Mitchell has “clothed” with various shades of bark. If initially expressive, this position proves by the end of the show too much of a good thing, despite skillful variations in surface treatment.
A few other pieces, naturalistic but not representing body parts, break the formal monotony, as do in their way the appearance of remnants of branches protruding from torsos. In “Gesture,” however, the stubs press from one torso into another as if they are agents in communication. This is the sole instance where the artist’s anthropomorphism becomes sticky and is unredeemed by form or surface treatment.
At 1841 S. Halsted St. 312-666-3150.
Five years ago Scott Anderson showed a group of drawings that brought together different styles of illustration with nods to sci-fi comics and 1950s interior decoration. His exhibition of recent paintings at the Kavi Gupta Gallery now indicates considerable growth, even if the work still traffics in romance, nostalgia, irony and (probably) nihilism, with synthesis being more important than any of the individual parts.
These pictures are in what we might call Anderson’s William Castle phase, named for the master of schlocky horror films from the ’50s and ’60s. In other words, the exotica and “spiritual searches” are pure show-biz, but, hey, what’s not to like about disembodied heads, allusions to alchemy, medieval pilgrimages and rediscovering ancient wisdom?
It appears close to impossible that the artist intends us to take any of this seriously. But it has comic-book color, ambiguous space and variations of scale that tease the eye and in the painting called “Summoned” create a monster as engaging as the head of a Chinese parade dragon. Elsewhere, the Hollywood trappings seem mainly to develop a language of painting in which sprayed and brushed passages coexist adroitly, if not to a significant expressive purpose.
At 835 W. Washington Blvd. 312-432-0708.
Joel Sheesley is a representational painter who for decades has made first-rate art out of his own quotidian experience. At the Finestra Art Space he now uses one of those paintings as the basis for an installation that explores his theory of how visual connections made between disparate objects can give poetic insight into “a larger reality.”
The painting is from 2006 and is called “Human/Nature.” It depicts a child’s inflatable swimming pool on a lawn, with the water in the pool reflecting a silhouette of a man who raises his hand, palm outward.
The actual pool has been set on the floor before the painting, empty except for a globe of the world positioned at its center. Suspended above the globe, at approximately its center, is a small light that hangs from cord supported by a stick propped by a wooden ladder. The part of the ladder that keeps the stick in place also holds a roll of toilet paper that almost has run out.
This may sound as incongruous as the classic surrealist encounter of an umbrella and sewing machine on a dissecting table. But the effect — not without rawness from the toilet paper and peril from the electric cord being close to the “water” — is beneficent, even benedictory. I have no idea if that is Sheesley’s “larger reality,” but the positive suggestion here is strong and largely unexpected.
At 410 S. Michigan Ave. 847-977-0526.
EXHIBITIONS
Joy Episalla at Carrie Secrist Gallery through April 12
Dennis Lee Mitchell at Dubhe Carreno Gallery through May 3
Scott Anderson at Kavi Gupta Gallery through April 12
Joel Sheesley at Finestra Art Space through March 28
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