In the rare case that your only exposure to Dutes Miller is through his sensitive and extremely human collaborations with Stan Shellabarger (who is also extremely human), prepare to have your understanding tilted, because this is something entirely different.

Like an Atlantis Cruise missile spunked from the bleached bowels of Fire Island, Dutes Miller’s The Ecstasyist will blow your mind with unstoppable waves of shattering, irradiated penises. Miller conjures up a wet-nightmarish post-homopocolypse where men have become cocks and cocks have gone mad, and in this swirling ballscape we are felched and greased and lost.

Dutes Miller, Collages and Plaster Condoms

You may know first hand the second layer of vision, built by years of internet browsing, which serves to guard against flashing jpegs of gaping assholes or otherwise undesirable content. This internal nictitating membrane, this sweet delayer of perception,  allows for an extra moment of observation to close the tab or look away without having to absorb the explicit imagery, and this natural defense is exactly why I initially found my eyes ping-ponging around the gallery searching for something to look at.

I was not alone in this.

Dutes Miller. Also Pictured: Deb Sokolow, who stared at the floor and blushed the whole time.

However if you are able to calm your eyes and examine the works for more than a heartbeat, you’ll be well rewarded. The Ecstasyist is far more fun than the content sign on the door might suggest, and the amount of humor present in these collages and mixed-media paintings makes the show the success it is. In one cluster of works we see professional wrestlers, some transformed at the hip into wagging dongs, battling and body slamming eachother into the canvas. Testicular sculpture hangs from hooks, stretching nearly to the floor in smiling scrotumous agony. There are gestural, cloudy asses.

But don’t let the humor fool you either: the show’s titular piece, a collage and mixed media book at the center of the gallery, presents a more intimate, slightly darker view, and is generally an excellent work of art.

Dutes Miller

I was a little put off by the disparity in craft within the show, as some pieces had the flimsy appearance sometimes achieved when collaging on paper, and when placed in the same space as the 36 framed and perfectly gridded collages on the east wall, looked sorta underfed. All that said, The Ecstacyist comes off as a fun and well executed and panoramic romp through sexuality and, despite the twenty seven thousand cocks and the content warning on the door, never lets its explicitness get in its own way. I give it a:

8.2

Dutes Miller’s The Ecstacyist runs June 12th, 2009 to August 1st, 2009 at Western Exhibitions.

Located above the Swim Cafe in Wicker Park, EbersB9 is the brand new, proof-of-dedication apartment gallery of Sara Ebers, SAIC grad, gallery assistant at Melanee Cooper, and all around friendly face in the active up and comers in the Chicago art scene, and Dominic Paul Moore, assistant director at Packer Schopf and a similarly active and up and coming face. The gallery’s first show featured Chicago/Alberta artist B.C. (Cameron) MacEachran‘s newest body of work, titled Shooting Stars.

B.C. MacEachran, You're Just a Shooting Star, Oil on Canvas

Instantly recognizable as complex and articulately painted patterns, each painting nontheless reveals its complexity in surprising bursts. Perception jolts and coasts on each new realization – an upset within a pattern, a rotational shift buried in a horizontal symetry, the color repetition being upset by the offset of minute gradations, a painterly directional stroke pattern only revealed when seen at a certain angle, etc. By layering these multiple and incredibly subtle geometric and painterly effects into each work, MacEachran demonstrates his ability as an artist, his mastery of quiet color, and a deep and real  fascination with his visual material.

B.C. MacEachran, Cotton Candy, Oil on Panel

Though the show is a small one, the work addresses many realms of pattern. I was reminded of national symbols, tile installation, arabesques, and my own college-ruled explorations of the endlessly recursive pentagon.

B.C. MacEachran, Before and Between Canada, Oil on Canvas

My only complaint would the venue’s inability to showcase the underlying patters which can only be seen at a distance (or, thankfully, in a reduced digital image, as seen below). This bit of content in MacEachran’s work is mainly unavailable due to the size of the space, but the show survives well without it. If you can, bring a pair of children’s eyeballs to swap in half-way.

B.C. MacEachran, Before and Between Canada, Oil on Canvas

I give it a :

7.4

B.C. MacEachran’s Shooting Stars runs from May 8th through June 6th, 2009 at Ebersb9, 1359 W Chicago Ave.

I should admit straight out that my impression of Zoe Crosher’s Selections from the Analog Collection opening at 65GRAND last May 1st was undoubtedly effected by the fact that I could not feel my legs. I’d become disconnected somewhere between the winding, uneven stairclimb up to the gallery and the two full days of no-where-else-to-go standing and wandering like an art fair zombie/pilgrim at the Merchandise Mart, so with floating hips and two smoking sockets I prepared for what I hoped would be the last art I would see that day.

I thought it was a fascinating show.

As the title suggests, Crosher is here working from her massive Michelle Du Bois project, a corpus of photographs and journals obtained from Du Bois herself that has the tragic, enslaving qualities of being both so vast as to confound curation and so compelling as to demand it. In its natural state, the project contains the scattered narrative of Du Bois’ travels abroad as shown through her own obsessive photographic documentation. While that alone would be enough to support a show like this, in Selections we see Crosher binding down the wild Found Magazine quality of the word in order to tell a different story — one that exists as much on the backs of the photographs as on their faces. 

Selections from the Analog Collection is not about the life story of Michelle Du Bois, nor is it about the life story of analog photography, though it is about both. The overlap is what concerns Crosher, and given the incredible presence of Du Bois and the relative silence of Kodak paper, turning focus to the intersection isn’t easy. The approach Crosher takes is algebraic and, given its complexity, surprisingly successful. 

Zoe Crosher, A Kodak Paper, no.1, 2009

By photographing the backs of aging analog photographs from her Du Bois collection (some with handwritten notes or tears or simply the Kodak logo), Crosher negates the purposed narrative to focus more on the sad tale of technological obsolescence. Alone, these photo paper images are too straightforward and not very memorable stuff — however their inclusion works like a rudder for the show, steering a reading of the more descriptive Du Bois images away from the plain entertainment of found photo voyeurism and into a much more satisfying consideration of a kind of personal obsolescence. To that end, they’re perfect foils.

The age of the forward-facing photographs and the age of Du Bois in those photographs allow us to make some guesses as to where Du Bois is today. The idea that the person we’re looking at is probably still alive, but in all likelihood finished with whatever fascinating and self-absorbed quest left us this collection, is slightly problematic. With her known and named and still around somewhere, the nostalgia in the old pictures reinforced by the neck-revealing, turned-away poses in the photographs, feels as premature and slightly awkward as mourning the decline (but not yet death) of analog photography.

Like analog photography she is both obsolete and still around, dissapearing but not dissapeared, and so (for now) jamming any pure archaeological reading of her photographs.

The point then, and what I walked (or lurched) away with, and really the remarkable achievement given just how strongly these images lend themselves to the aforementioned narrative voyeurism, is a portrait of that narrow slice of a story between the end and The End or, in Crosher’s own words: the “just-past.” While such an idea would be present in the photographs presented regularly and a-side only, such a small conceptual target needed the analog/Kodak foil to tease it out through intersection. It makes for a successful and oddly quiet use of the Du Bois project, and a memorable show too. 

Finally, while I enjoy Crosher’s ability to push this body of work into new conceptual realms, keep an eye out for Crosher’s thick artist book on display for all your straightforward delicious freak voyeurism needs. Du Bois does not disappoint.

Here’s an 7 point 3

Zoe Crosher’s Selections from the Analog Collection runs May 1st through June 13th, 2009 at 65GRAND, 1378 W Grand Ave.