dayton is not in ohio

Matthew Fisher recently blogged on Chicago artist Jeni Spota (#2 of 52 artists in 2008), which brought her to my attention for the first time. She received her MFA in painting from the Art Institute last spring, but I don’t think our paths ever crossed, though we have a number of mutual friends. I saw her 12 x 12 show at the MCA this Saturday.

Her work is amazing, and there’s just no good way for words to make up for what’s lost in a photograph. The paintings are lush, voluminous, relief sculptures in oil paint. Spota’s generosity with paint is lavish, and the viewer is the benefactor of her philanthropy. They’re delicious (culinary metaphors just keep coming to mind)… I don’t often get excited about paintings.

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), 2007, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 14 inches]

[Giotto’s Dream (Pisa Pane verison), detail]

The thing that seals the deal for me is the subject matter. Crucifixions abound. Madonnas, haloed saints, angels, and throngs of onlookers fill the canvases. Most surprising of all is the absence of any easy sign of cynicism, bitterness, or even casual dismissiveness that often accompanies Christian imagery in contemporary art. The paintings are quite straight-forward, even tenderly painted, and the absence of any obvious antagonism is what makes the work so ambiguously palatable. It leaves me wondering what the catch is. It must be there somewhere. Right? It is in the MCA, afterall… It’s unclear, and that’s what makes the work powerful and unique.

The main exhibition at the MCA right now is Gordon Matta-Clark. I just love the guy. The show is a really broad look at his work which was great to see. I saw his piece Bingo/Ninths (video here, sandwiched between two other works) in 2004 at David Zwirner gallery in New York, and was really impacted by it. The piece is a video of Matta-Clark (and crew) cutting nine rectangular sections from the side of a house in Niagara Falls an hour before it was demolished. The video is accompanied by the actual wall sections cut from the house. This type of work was all new to me at the time, but I’ve come to really love his works of architectural intervention.

[Gordon Matta-Clark, Wall sections from Bingo/Ninths]

There was something strange about seeing these particular objects again, in a completely different setting. It made me want to see the crates that these dissected wall sections travel in.

To wind it up, there’s also a show of Alexander Calder models for his mobiles, including a model for Ghost, which hangs in the Great Hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This brought to mind Tylenol heir and Philadelphia collector Hank McNeil. He named his daughter Calder, and she has a small Calder mobile (a real one, not the museum gift shop variety) hanging in her bedroom.

There’s also Mapping the Self, a show of artist “maps.” It draws on both blue chip artists and Chicago locals, including a couple of folks I know, making for an interesting show.