For this small show at Russell Bowman, the unflappable William Wegman pastes aged postcard to panels and connects their landscapes with paint, filling in the gaps in between the narrative of each card. The artist’s familiar sense of humor is on display with works like “The Last Summer,” a mélange of sun-soaked beachgoers and Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” More than just wordplay, the cards switch between aerial views, interior shots and close-ups, allowing Wegman the pleasure of engaging in some complex spatial somersaults. The panels twist around and contort and zoom in and out of focus. For instance, in “Up Sugarcreek” (presumably without a paddle) the sky of one shoreline community becomes the ocean to a cluster of bleached seaside condos. Wegman also considers the postcard as a cultural form. In “Expo,” he poignantly places two postcards showing a pair of youthful friends walking by a lake next to each other. It is easy to become nostalgic from the card’s brand of Americana but the reoccurrence of one image reintroduces the reproducibility of the cards and their use as commercial promotional tools. They are tourist advertisements of leisure, hotel lodges, swimming pools, motel parking lots and shopping centers. The automobile allowed this generation to sample America and these postcards remain a vestige of that experience. Wegman’s astute vision is as much about the overpass, the tunnel and the bridge, the fleeting glances out the window and the windshield as it is about the postcard home. (Dan Gunn) Through November 8 at Russell Bowman Art Advisory, 311 W. Superior, (312) 751-9500
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