“Amy Vogel: A Paraperspective,” currently on view at the Cleve Carney Art Gallery of the College of DuPage, is an odd duck of a show. Not that there are any ducks on display, outré or otherwise. Copulating monkeys, glittery swans and chickens, cool rabbit girls and lots of dead bunnies, yes, but no ducks.
One anomaly announces itself from afar: the title. What, exactly, is a paraperspective? Joseph Grigely, Vogel’s husband and sometime collaborator, explains in the exhibition pamphlet that a paraperspective is a drawing of an object, like a building, that is three-dimensional but without single-point perspective, giving both a sense of the overall space and of moving through it. This is the main conceit of the exhibition, and it’s a good one, once you get past the awkwardness of translating an architectural drafting term into an exhibition philosophy.
Basically it means that Grigely, who also acted as the de facto curator of the show, is interested not just in the finished work of art but everything that might have come before, during and after it: the sketches, the notes, the experiments, the failures, the alternate installations, the proximity with other artworks, the storage, the breakage, the packing materials. All that’s been left out of the picture seems to have been the dust that must have accumulated since 1998, the date of the earliest work here — everything sparkles clean, even the bubble wrap. Moreover, not everything’s quite what it seems: the slapdash storage table at the center of the gallery, on and under which dozens of artworks lie jumbled, is itself a carefully considered artwork. Look for the diaphanous table leg that isn’t a two-by-four but one cast from crystal urethane.
If “paraperspective” still jars, try an alliterative trick: replace it with parapluie, which means umbrella in French, and think of Vogel’s exhibition as having an umbrella perspective, one that both contains many different parts and protects from the rain.
The rain? Yes, the rain. Because Vogel’s art — unfinished or complete, in storage or hung up, failed or successful — ultimately concerns itself with nature and the ways that humans have devised to live in and with it. Forget the glories of the Sierra Club or even the Adirondack Trail, however. Vogel, who was born in Washington, DC, spent her teens in Colorado and has lived in Chicago since 2002, has a focus that is far more domestic, settling on trailer homes and animal traps, mounted deer heads and cords of firewood. She has files on lawn ornaments and bins of unfinished knitting. And far more pictures of trees than an artist who’s not a landscape painter might be expected to have produced. Some of these, natch, are tucked into a cardboard box between layers of protective foam, but at least another dozen and a half, painted at different times over the past decade, line the walls of the gallery.
The forests provide a backdrop for Vogel’s stories, observations and reproductions. Many of them are also gorgeous, painted in delirious candy-colors by an artist who knows how to conjure a convincing tree trunk from a single stroke of washy paint. But even a rainbow palette can’t ward off the sense of foreboding, or even morbidity, that lurks between these trees. Depending on the vista, cute little monkeys hang by their necks while a drunken rabbit looks on; a pair of empty ankle chains lie staked to the ground; or the artist plays dead in picturesque lakes and rivers.
It’s all so pretty, though, one can hardly refrain from wanting to walk right in — as seems to have happened to the deer whose head and hooves are mounted on the wall amid so many framed sylvan settings. With neon paint dripping from its horns and down its forehead, the poor thing looks like it took one right between the eyes, from a paint gun. Its kin above the gallery doors, where two sets of antlers hang, fared only a little better. Covered in custom knitwear, they could be the victims of a deft knit bomber.
They could also just be way more fabulous than they were originally, when they were the trophy remains of some hunter’s foray into the woods of Upstate New York or the Upper Peninsula, two areas Vogel and Grigely have summered for the past 18 years. Great thanks for that stylish transformation would be due to the wielder of knitting needles and paintbrushes, model magic, wax molds, pots of glitter and gallons of urethane — i.e. the artist herself. That’s the other way to take the sculptures Vogel has produced over the years and gathered here in a few brilliant heaps: a life-size flock of swans, swan parts and chickens, in an array of sparkly disco colors; the aforementioned dead hares, which appear in shades of swirly gray and white or splotchy pink and mustard; piles of gleaming, silvery logs; a few pastel tire planters; and a group of small boulders splattered with paint. Everything is cast from something else — the tires and boulders are urethane, the logs zinc, the fowl wax — and everything is a thousand degrees cooler than its original.
The only objects not remade in a funkier mode are a set of cast parrot lamp bases, mostly left beige. These were made uniquely by Grigely, who appears indifferent to chic. But not Vogel, who brandishes it like a weapon against both the wilds of nature and the ticky-tacky ways of those who’ve parked their trailer homes and ranch houses nearby.
“Amy Vogel: A Paraperspective” runs through October 25 at the Cleve Carney Art Gallery, College of DuPage, 425 Fawell Blvd., Glen Ellyn, 630-942-2321, cod.edu/gallery.
Lori Waxman is a special contributor to the Tribune, and an instructor at the School of the Art Institute.
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