Author Archives: Tamara Faulkner

You’d think by now all exegesis would have been squeezed out of Kewpie dolls, Jesus lamps, and geisha figurines. But Liliana Porter’s show, “Girl With Rubber Dog, and Other Situations,” suggests that tchotchkes still have a story to tell. Porter’s meticulous screen prints, wall-mounted sculptures, and photographs present resuscitated figures in vignettes that read like […]

The more I stared at Bernard Williams’s large assemblage Queequeg’s Monument at I Space, the less I understood it. At first the buckets, chairs, and bulging shelves looked like the view through the back door of a packed moving van. But the strangely cohesive and precarious composition drew me in with the rhythms of rich […]

If it weren’t for the slab of meat replacing the figure’s knee, Leslie Carlson’s Self-Portrait With Rib Steak would be a well-made nude to nod at and walk away from. But the choice cuts in this and a half dozen other slightly skeletal self-portraits at Gescheidle open the works up. Appropriating the dripped, muted earth […]

In Jenny Perlin’s Washing–a brief, silent 16-millimeter film the color of urine-stained newsprint–a view of the Brooklyn Bridge through a window is erratically obscured by a woman’s hand wiping the glass with a cloth. Her obsessive gesture never cleans the window, but as you focus on what’s beyond her hand you suddenly realize that you […]

The collaborative canvases of Elena and Michel Gran–they describe their process as “symbiotic”–manipulate not just space but time, melding the juxtapositions of objects in Picasso’s cubist collages and the airless solemnity of Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin’s 18th-century paintings. In The Port, an imaginary landscape on a desktop, a folded newspaper hat is set afloat on a sea […]

Along the corridor leading into the Rhona Hoffman Gallery is Tania Bruguera’s beautiful yet troubling installation Poetic Justice: used tea bags shingle both walls, broken occasionally by tiny LCD screens playing sepia film loops of marching figures or of black faces being touched by people outside the frame or being covered by an oxygen mask […]

Gustave Le Gray captured wet the way Monet caught light. In many of his mid-19th-century albumen prints in the basement galleries of the Art Institute, including The Great Wave, Sete, soft diagonals of beach anchor dark and light zigzagging bands of waves. Halfway up the frame the water–slapping hard in the foreground, glistening as it […]

Jeff Carter’s graceful Scaffold/Landscape is intended to evoke Indonesian rice fields. But the six particle-board terraces–edged in green carpet and supported by lengths of bamboo–are saved from being either campy or didactic by their size and placement. Rising from floor to ceiling in the corner of a room just off the main gallery at Vedanta, […]

The first time I saw one of Carl Andre’s huge arrangements of rocks laid across a gallery floor it seemed to be shouting at me in a foreign language, but the small work of his that’s on display in a parlor-sized gallery at the Art Institute elicits a quiet conversation. The museum’s stated purpose for […]

At a distance John Reth’s intriguingly ambivalent Excerpts From the Land of Plenty: Lunch Turds, part of a group show at Betty Rymer, looks like a pile of shiny black rocks about to tumble off a pedestal. A closer look reveals round forms wrapped in electrical tape, each with a PLU sticker indicating the type […]