
Carol Stewart, "All My Stuff," oil on paper on board
RECOMMENDED
Gallery KH’s show groups together three women artists whose oil paintings toe the line between new ways of seeing still life and warmed-over homages to Impressionism. Carol Stewart’s work is the most absorbing, where surfaces are so saturated with color and texture that they seem to be decomposing themselves as much as the wilted flowers they depict (in contrast to sturdy glassware and Diet Coke cans that prop them up). This corporeality is balanced by kaleidoscopic plays of light through the glass containers that bring to her work a strange and paradoxical sense of heavy flotation. Mingonette Yin Cheng’s geometric paintings are studies in flatness, where dull origami swans compare themselves to ordered, shadowless flowers against swathes of triangles and sweeps of thick striped paints. More often than not, Cheng’s paintings seem to be unfinished, blocked-out layers of future still lifes. Honore Lee’s studies of blue bowls are the least compelling of the group, with the kind of antiqued texture work on both bowls and backgrounds that immediately calls to mind the patina-effect murals that a Starbucks would present as a sign of mass-made authenticity. (Monica Westin)
Through July 10 at Gallery KH, 311 W. Superior.