Shopping is our national religion. Our malls are grander than our cathedrals, and retail design turns the act of shopping into a grand ritual with the shopper as star. BRIAN ULRICH in his ten color photographs at Peter Miller articulates this with a frightening precision.
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Ulrich’s images show how stores feed shoppers’ narcissism, placing them at the center of a constructed universe. In one of two images titled Smithhaven, NY, 2003, a teenager sits talking on her cell phone on a high-backed plastic bench like a cross between a diner booth and a throne. Draped in a sheer curtain, this showy settee places the girl center stage, surrounded by merchandise. At the Disney Store in Cleveland, OH, 2003 shelves overflowing with stuffed animals frame a large picture of the Magic Kingdom while a little girl stands just off center looking toward the camera almost lost amid the toys.
The nearly 100 artists in “ART AT WAR” at Aldo Castillo deal with war more explicitly. This is a riotously diverse show of paintings, sculptures, photographs, and mixed-media works from some two dozen countries. If Ulrich’s particular notions about shopping are part of what makes his work successful, some of the artists here flounder amid vague and unformed ideas–given the history of modern art, for example, fragmenting the human body doesn’t necessarily convey violence or produce revulsion. But other pieces do conceptualize war–often as a physical attack on its victims–with a precision similar to Ulrich’s. Gretchen Minnhaar’s wide painting Fences shows figures seemingly imprisoned in a forest of vertical bands; her note questions whether we build fences for “security or isolation?” Lorna Marsh’s untitled diptych riven down the center shows an abstracted version of a ruined landscape–there’s a band of bomb or bullet shapes, another that’s a chaotic mix of shapes, and a third of babies in fetal curls.
118 N. Peoria
Aldo Castillo
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Fred Camper.
