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Chido Johnson: Tese e The standout for me in Johnson’s multi-faceted exhibit is Let’s Talk About Love, Baby , a collaborative project where different artists were asked to submit an artistically embellished (or mutilated, depending on your point of view) book into Johnson’s “Love Library.” You could spend perusing hours the collection. All the People I’ve Ever Loved is particularly amusing. When you open its purple cover a mechanical tally counter adds you to the artist’s love list! iMOCA through May 18 Blythe Hager: Gloaming e The final show at Carla Knopp’s gallery features the beautifully composed and unsettling paintings of Hager. In “Cages” you see three bird cages and a glowing TV screen against the dark green wall of an interior room. Perhaps this room — and the surrounding house — constitutes a cage for the unseen residents. Her landscapes are equally depopulated; even when you see people in them, they face away from you. In “Wonderland,” a woman is either playing croquet — or has momentarily stopped playing to gaze into the deep green swath of the woods beyond, where she has just overheard the Mad Hatter. Dewclaw Gallery through April 27 Exchange: Amy Reel e Reel uses family members and friends as models for face portraits in ink and conté crayon that are often much larger than the patrons who view them. Expressionistic touches sometimes convey the subtleties of human expression with compelling, hypnotic power. Gallery 924 through April 26
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Colored Vases and Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, part of Ai Weiwei: According to What?
AI WEIWEI, DISMANTLED BY JULIA NNA TH IB O D E A U X EDITORS@NUVO . N ET
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i Weiwei, one of today’s foremost artists on the world stage, has become a sort of spokesperson for what ails China. The retrospective Ai Weiwei: According to What?, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through July 21, explores in detail the artist’s trajectory over the past two decades, from early work influenced by readymade artists such as Duchamp and Warhol to recent largescale works exploring his complicated relationship with his own country. From the dismantling of Qing Dynasty temples, reconstructed into ethereal works of art using ancient joinery techniques, to iconic forms shaped into marble (such as a surveillance camera and construction hat), Ai has reclaimed and transformed the personal and the political. He’s created this arresting body of work under the watchful eye of a totalitarian regime: Ai was detained for 81 days in 2011, which only added to his mystique and world-renown. Even as China continues to modernize, its silencing of speech continues, proving once again that economic prosperity and
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AI WEIWEI: ACCORDING TO WHAT?
INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART THROUGH JULY 21
free speech do not go hand in hand. And yet tossing out tradition, particularly when that tradition is not the foundational source of such oppression, is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. This is what Ai so astutely observes, creating a dialogue between past and present in such works as Colored Vases (2007-10), a collection of Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE) vases dipped in brightly colored industrial paint. Tradition meets progress — and the results are jarring when one considers the ancient pedigree of the vases. (If one didn’t know their lineage, these could be the latest find at Pottery Barn.) To further fuel these tensions, a series of three life-size photos depict the artist in the process of dropping a Han dynasty relic, the final frame revealing the urn in smithereens. It is unclear whether or not Ai wants the viewer to applaud or abhor his actions — and this may be the point. Is tradition a form of stasis, or a
Thoughts on a retrospective of work by the Chinese artist and activist
springboard for change? The central work in the retrospective, Straight, in which 38 tons of rebar from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake are arranged in undulating waves, reminds us how quickly we forget: nearly 5,000 children perished under the crush of shoddy construction from which the rebar was reclaimed. Displayed alongside a wall listing the names of the fallen schoolchildren, also read aloud in a recording that sounds somberly throughout the gallery, Straight calls out not only the specific tragedy of complacency, but a more widespread tragedy, that throughout history societies — including our own have devalued human life in the pursuit of power and wealth. It is an enduring reality that such art created out of tragedy — Picasso’s Guernica comes to mind as an antecedent of Straight — is often the only means of remembering beyond the ephemeral news cycle. But what can art do beyond calling attention to and commenting on the world’s ills? Unlike history, which is written and rewritten according to the needs of the culture, art stands alone as a document to truth — and that, perhaps, is its greatest gift. As Ai has said, “…we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.”
Gabriel Lehman r Many of Lehman’s paintings show waiflike females set against the backdrop of strangely-lit alien skies. “Sweet Dreams” sees one nude waif hanging onto a VW Bug-sized teapot with one hand and the cords of a parachute with the other while falling from the sky. Perhaps this painting, with its naïve eroticism, underscores the fragility of all life, alien or terrestrial. Indy Indie Artist Colony through April 25 Stutz Open House Preview: First Look t There’s some good work to see here: a black and white, space-expanding abstract painting by Susan Brewer; a finely-rendered sketch by Jim Gerard of a figure in motion that’s more motion than figure. But some of the most compelling pieces such as Ginny Taylor Rosner’s photographs of windmills in Northern Indiana have already been featured in Stutz exhibitions. Raymond James Stutz Art Gallery through April 27 Spectrum t The wall text for Elizabeth Smith’s “Supernova” draws a comparison between supernovas and snowflakes. The thousand-odd beadwork “snowflakes” hanging on the gallery wall each have a unique design like snowflakes but without the Smith’s wall text, I don’t think I would’ve drawn any extraterrestrial or subatomic comparisons. Likewise with her dimensionally-titled, engagingly decorative paintings that you might describe as candyland arabesques. Sharing the space are Matt Kenyon’s stunningly beautiful glass vases that propose a certain unified field theory of design and function. Harrison Center for the Arts through April 27 — All reviews by Dan Grossman.
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