Art Review: Point of Views @ Flat Iron Arts Building, 10/11/08

[Above: Zsófia Ötvös' "Which Hunt," in progress]

Artists and galleries at Wicker Park's Flat Iron Arts Building put their bodies, puppets and artwork on display for this past weekend's Point of Views exhibit. Friday and Saturday, slide projections and performances of occupied the windows of the Flat Iron, to the delight of art lovers and drunken bar hoppers alike. 

The performances and projections of Point of Views, one of 12 featured events during Chicago Artists Month, were inspired by Mahatma Ghandi's new seven deadly sins: Politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity and worship without sacrifice. This year's theme for Artists Month is “Artists and the Issues that Matter,” with Ghandi's seven deadly sins providing a compelling frame through which to deal with subject and problems facing artists and the art community.

The live performance-centered galleries at Flat Iron attracted the lion's share of attention from pedestrians below, not least because Bernard Colbert's third story gallery featured scantily clad go-go dancers in front of a largely ignored slideshow. Fellow artist Bill Eaton laughed bemusedly from the street while admiring the projections of others and his own.

“What those firefighters gawking at the dancers didn't know was that not all the dancers are female,” Eaton chuckled, illustration the impact a bit of knowledge can have on one's perspective. This, in fact, proved the exhibit's downfall: Many of the artwork slideshows displayed were too small to gather much detail from, and without knowing the theme of Ghandi's seven deadly sins, it would have been difficult to gather meaning from any of the works.

Zsófia Ötvös' display, for example, ambitiously spliced images of her artwork with a scene from upcoming film The First Breath of Tengan Rei (which centers on the brutal rape by U.S. soldiers of a young Japanese girl and the aftermath) to express its subtextual emotions. Her painting "Which Hunt," four years in the making, is rife with pop culture references (the witch on trial weighed against a duck, an homage to Monty Python and The Holy Grail). However, from street level, none of these intimate details or connections could be seen, let alone examined and appreciated.

The exhibit's themes were most simply conveyed in Eaton's gallery. His projections featured each of the deadly sins, followed by pictures of various sinners with their eyes blocked out for “privacy,” Dick Cheney for “politics without principle,” and Paris Hilton for “wealth without work.” The display asked the viewer, “Are you part of the problem?” Though it hit home the themes, it attracted much less attention than the go-go dancers and red-wigged divas admiring themselves in the mirror of JoJo Baby's Closet.

How well the exhibit provided thought-provoking takeaways to the pedestrians of Wicker Park is in question, but it caught everyone's attention-- a good first step towards affecting anyone's point of view.

Related links:
Chicago Artists Month tackles issues that matter
Review: Drag City dredges archives for celebration of art and music
Gallery 400 offers "A Visual Introduction to Drag City"