Drag City dredges archives for celebration of art and music

[Above: Detail of Emily Price's original embroidery for the cover of Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender.]

Launched in 1989 and now home to time-honored, rock-solid acts including the Silver Jews, The Red Krayola, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and comic freak Neil Hamburger, Chicago's Drag City is a label with a distinct personality: Playful, colorful and amorphous, but weary of the pains and struggles of the world that cheery pop music can't mask.

In that same vein of duality, Drag City isn't just about music, but also the visual art with which it runs hand in hand: Album covers, show posters, even the occasional bit of embroidery. Under the supervision of Anthony Elms, assistant director at Gallery 400, “Chances are the Comets in Our Future: A Visual Introduction to Drag City,” an exhibit celebrating that overlap, opened last week at UIC's College of Architecture & the Arts.

The majority of the exhibit consists of album covers grouped by artist throughout the showroom. Some are noteworthy (Savage Pencil's graphic designs on Flying Saucer Attack's 2000 album Mirror is a psychedelic wonder) but others less so. The poster and album on display for 2008's Neil Hamburger Sings Country Winners, featuring photography by Simone Turkington, is less than striking and seems to be included for Hamburger's own sake, rather than for the visual artistry of his work.

It might be a disappointment to die-hard Drag City fans that half of the exhibit can be found in their personal record collection, but the original art on display is interesting and dynamic. One highlight is Emily Prince's original embroidery for the cover of Joanna Newsom's 2004 album The Milk-Eyed Mender. The detail and effort put into this embroidery is lost in the small scale of a CD cover, but in person the craftsmanship is impressive and the texture is easier to admire.

Overall, the exhibit succeeds because of its archival elements and ties to beloved music, less so than its artistic merits. Most of the artwork isn't framed, some of it hung by paper clips or thumb tacks; some works are torn at the corners. Occasionally the work seems thrown together, as if Drag City rooted through an old back storage room to see what wasn't too wrinkled or didn't smell.  

Some works are from such early stages of production that the artists' pencil and eraser marks can still be seen, like Michale O'Bannon drawings for the cover of Gastr del Sol's 1993 album Serpentine Similar. Of two drawings by Ian Svenonius for the cover of Scene Creamer's 2003 album AK-47, one is done on graph paper and went unused (in comparison to the final version, it's easy to see why). As with many other works on display, it's a reminder that Svenonius' primary calling is that of musician, not visual artist.

The hardest-hitting works come from the more established musician/artists. Lo-fi experimental artist Bill Callahan-- also known as (Smog), with and without the parentheses-- has published sketchbooks of his work through Drag City, and has two color pencil sketches from 1999's The Death's Head Drawings on display here. His poster for 1994's (Smog) release Burning Kingdom 1994 includes notes of changes to be made on the final version. Jennifer Herrema's three paintings for the inner sleeve of RTX's Transmaniacon also display some of the exhibit's most notable artistic talent in the raw energy and wild brush strokes of her large, colorful portraits of Native Americans. 

Drag City fans new and old will find something of interest in "Chances are Comets," which runs til October 4-- just prepare yourself for a lot of album covers and collages in between.

Related links:
Gallery 400 offers "A Visual Introduction" to Drag City
Joanna Newsom tugs at the harp strings
Bill Callahan - Woke on a Whaleheart