Vicious tenebrous gods of Subjectivity! There’s no real reason, that I could find, for castigating Wyatt Grant’s “Dreamer Gets Another Dream,” a collection of collages and paintings and bantam sculptures; only that they fail both conceptually and aesthetically—”aesthetic” here not to be confused with “beautiful”—and therefore holistically. What is it saying, when the most attractive pieces are abstract works that embody the supposed theme of the show the least, wherein the colors and shapes and lines and spaces are arranged just so in a purified neo-plastic way? (This is how, by the way, a work of art succeeds aesthetically.) Meanwhile, the finest piece of quasi-representational work is one wherein the abstraction runs high and fast—a tartan face, a floating eye, a hulking hourglass form—and sits in a pile next to the gallery assistant, ready and willing to be taken home with you (not an indictment; personally, I love how my favorite piece can live with me, and me it).
Wyatt Grant. “Cantina,” 2015 mixed media on wood
There is something underdeveloped about most of Dreamer’s dreams; the street-dancing scene of “Heads or Tails,” with its chocolate-chip moon and hard, unyielding tree of angles—just sharp British Racing Green angles, just so, like a car accident, like someone impaled a julienned Mini up there—and dancing ghouls, all shark’s eyes and viperine slot-noses and silty slit mouths pasted to pallid skulls, rises up in the mind and eye like a brume; with a year’s development, when we are taken off the sidewalk and inside the “Cantina,” allowed to see Grant’s world in three-dimensions—the viper people are now joined by a leviathan champagne flute and a piano, obtuse ivory teeth and gravid belly splayed akimbo at the finger’s tips, sybaritic icons looming like doormen on the floor—some depth is added, and something comes close to happening here. Grant mentions “The Catcher in The Rye” as shaping his dreamer, perhaps without knowing that Holden Caulfield meant nothing, but he sure was pretty; even so, he’s here, locked in those anxious shapes and scoffing at the phonies and their drinks, their lives, their dreams. (B. David Zarley)
Through March 7 at Paris London Hong Kong, 845 West Washington.
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.
Looking Down: A Review of Bob Tanner at Perspective After the loss of his wife, Bob Tanner made two photography series, “At Ocean’s Edge” and “At Winter’s Edge,” that are shown in this meditative show filled with graceful visual poetry.
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.
