Galleries & Museums

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Gabriel Villa’s “Xicago Memoriam: 18th Street and Robert Taylor Homes”

Jason Creps

Going On

Exquisite City and Exquisite Windows

By Deanna Isaacs

November 6, 2008

The urban block of artist Vivienne Edmister’s dreams is a deco delight where a diner facade swoops around a corner and bumps up against a Buck Rogers-inspired movie palace. Edmister’s exquisitely detailed model, “The Place I Want to Live,” is part of The Exquisite City and Exquisite Windows, the sprawling double show Kathleen Judge curated for the Viaduct Theater’s First Annual Art Exhibit. More than 70 artists (mostly locals, including a group from Lakeview High School) contributed pieces for the show, which will occupy the Viaduct’s main theater space for the next five weeks. It consists of about 30 blocks of an imaginary cardboard city installed on a grid and, separately, 32 dioramas, each like a view through the window of a high-rise.

The artists were instructed to create a 40-by-48-inch city block—using Chicago as their springboard—and set loose. The result combines the nostalgic, low-tech charm of a department store holiday window display with eye-popping diversity and invention. Each block is a world unto itself, from the vertical shaft of the “Important Hamburger Corporate Office,” by Amy Cargill, Derek Erdman, and Sally Timms, which sprouts from its own little blacktop parking lot, to Gabriel Villa’s “Xicago Memoriam: 18th Street and Robert Taylor Homes,” a graceful pyramid constructed out of tortilla boxes topped by a forbidding tower. Execution ranges from raw to Edmister’s precise detail, which includes a wrought-iron fence surrounding a row of billowing trees decked out in shredded-paper fall foliage.

There’s also a swooping highway interchange, penguins in an imaginary zoo, an empty lot complete with glittering litter, a gaggle of Chicago’s iconic rooftop water towers on stilts, and a miniature version of the Hideout music club. When I saw the installation, two days before the opening, sound effects (the real thing from Chicago streets) by Favorite Chicago Sounds and streetlights were yet to be installed.

The art is for sale; most prices run from $50 to $3,000 (Edmister’s piece is $250, the hamburger office is $300, and “Xicago” is $1,000). Tonight’s opening bash (November 7 from 6 PM to midnight) features walking tours of the cardboard city by Hideout owner Tim Tuten after 8 PM, music by the Black Bear Combo at 10, and a cash bar. On November 16, from 8 to 10 PM, there’ll be a sound performance by Chicago Phonographers. There’s more information at exquisitecity.com.   

The Exquisite City and Exquisite Windows
11/7-12/12, Wed-Fri 5-9 PM, Sat 1-9 PM, Sun 1-8 PM, Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western, 773-296-6024 or viaducttheatre.com.

Exquisite City (top: Jay Ryan; middle: Catherine Irwin)

Jason Creps

Critic's Choice
Harold Mendez

Detail from To Leave, to Escape, Is to Trace a Line by Harold Mendez

The art world lost a formalist saint when Agnes Martin died in 2004 -- her subtly ruled drawings and paintings convey a quiet beatitude connected to her acceptance of the impermanence of life. A similarly somber poetry comes through in the work of Harold Mendez, who creates gray grids directly on the wall with packing and duct tape. But Mendez's pieces are less about metaphysics than menace: larger-scale than Martin's, they surround the viewer with a mesh of barriers representing the invisible traces of the institutions that structure our lives. In his MCA installation, Things That Cannot Be Buried or Forgotten or Walked Away From, the barriers are linked to borders defining land and ancestry. An accompanying four-channel sound piece, So Long as We Can Say This Is the Worst, This Is Not the Worst, features manipulated desert sounds that conjure desperate attempts to enter the U.S. from Mexico as well as biblical flights into the desert and the snares and hazards of living under surveillance. Through 11/30: Tue 10 AM-8 PM (free), Wed-Sun 10-5 ($6-$10), Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago, 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org. —Bert Stabler

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