JOHN PAROT, “Biological Exuberance,” multimedia. Parot’s most recent show is bold, the way a good heroin rock band is bold, like the Velvet Underground. His collages and installations are aggressive and angsty, but also gloomy, slightly mournful, even melancholic, as the tightly controlled palette of black, hot pink, red, blue and white (but really mostly black) suggests. There are no half-tones or pastels here, no delicate moments. The three installations, crafted from mirrors, whiskey bottles, mysterious colored blocks, VHS tapes and Polaroids, have a forward, angular relation to space. For its pure geometry, one could almost compare Parot’s work with Mondrian paintings. That is, if it weren’t for the hallucinatory effect of droves of faces staring out from his collages, each bearing the same head with different eyes and smiling lips, rearranged into changing configurations with the ease of detached toy heads floating in the bath; and maybe if it weren’t for the Tarot-cardesque titles of the works that make you feel like you’re at a séance in Neil Young’s green room: “Heirophant,” “The Web,” “The Cliff,” “The Cage,” “Dark Entries” and so on. And of course also if it weren’t for the feeling that you’ve just woken up after a long night of crappy gay porn and hard drinking and caught a view of yourself in a shattered mirror; or wait, was that the dream? If there’s anything missing from the experience, it’s that one might at times wish the dream were a touch more hallucinatory, a tad crazier, with a super big power cord playing in the background. (Michelle Tupko) Through December 15 at Western Exhibitions
Second Sets: A Review of John Sparagana at Soccer Club Club Sparagana subverts the static documentation of a time-based medium by imbuing the image with an infinite set of potentialities—his blurred images shimmer like specters of time and space ready to unfold.
For Us: A Review of "Something from Something" at Engage Projects Kushala Vora and Adia Sykes’ collaboration "Something from Something" tells us as viewers that knowledge, art, creation, inspiration, love—really anything you can think of—has a place of origin.
Women Behind the Lens: A Review of "From Her to Eternity" Courtney Love curates on the street. Just west of Wabash on the corner of Eighth Street, there is a wall of stellar rock star images that includes a special collection made by women photographers over the years.
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.
