RECOMMENDED Megan Sterling’s wall-sized drawings of legs and arms, hands and feet, imply certain situations, but an underlying duality draws the viewer into a thought experiment. The apparent agony with which a giant hand contorts as it reaches from the ceiling by its arm contrasts with the poised hand beneath, appearing to press up from the floor. The incongruity of the hands’ posture allows introspection into one’s own interpretation of the limbs, and the space between. In a separate drawing, the position of two feet that hang from the ceiling is contrasted by toes curled upward toward the ceiling, constricted tendons noted by shadows. Do the legs belong to a child, whose toes are stretching as the feet leisurely swing? Do they belong to a criminal hanging in the gallows, with toes contorted in a last spasm before suffocation? Or are the legs not dangling, but lying on a floor? The shadow of muscles and tendons that appear to work both separately and together may prompt a viewer to consider the ideas of force and acquiescence, work and leisure, constancy and change, and whether the space (or lack thereof) between limbs implies that they are related at all. (Ben Broeren) Through December 4 at Contemporary Art Workshop, 542 West Grant
Other Forces: A Review of Maw at Apparatus Projects Ailes and Lopez’s installations, images and sculptures function as a cosmos of life—worlds where the viewer is placed in a disordered exercise of cognitive sense-making between rather than sense-making of.
Complicating the Narrative: A Review of Them at Roots & Culture Featuring a cohesive body of works by Flor, Manal Kara and Caleb Yono, the exhibition is a stunning display of the magic that can happen when fixed ideas about artmaking and identity are thrown out the window.
