Steve Hudson: Heterology
at Peter Miller, through March 16 Pamela Murphy at Melanee Cooper, through March 23 Michael Dinges: Essential Artifacts, Re-Presenting Everyday Objects at Aron Packer, through March 16
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The viewer bounces between noticing details–the delicacy and near transparency of baby toes, for example–and the overall mix of solidity, luminosity, and chaos. There’s a disturbing tension between idealized forms and their apparent dissolution, as if lineaments borrowed from a classic Madonna and Child painting had undergone a dramatic and mysterious transformation. In Tic, a baby’s arm emerges from a woman’s side and scratches her back, drawing blood. Affection shows a mother holding a child, its flesh transparent while hers is more opaque. Though their conjunction suggests the process of giving birth, the baby’s deformed figure and the veins visible in both hint at disease and death.
Hudson, who’s 35 and lives in Urbana, told me that in high school he was impressed by Rembrandt, Turner, and Renaissance painting and that his current show is a “continuation” of his very first exhibit at Peter Miller in 1992: “Expulsion” referred to Renaissance depictions of God expelling Adam and Eve from the Garden. “The expulsion was an expulsion from reason, and you’re left in this void of understanding,” he says. The unresolved contradictions of the present work–its mix of delicacy and roughness, order and decay–eloquently evoke our present dilemma: it’s impossible to tell whether human civilization is improving or the world is falling apart.
Dinges, 43, was born in Chicago and, after attending art school in California, returned here to live. A commercial artist most of his life, he makes his gallery debut with this show, following a year in which he focused on his own work. Referring in his statement to “high technology” and “the phenomenon of rapid change we find ourselves going through,” he adds that he tries to “make note of those objects that have served us well.”
