March / Apri 2016 - art ltd 33Tread on Me” flag, as well as yellow placards
that read “Stop the Invasion.” Eventually
three men from the group plant Old Glory
among a pile of boulders. These shots are
intermixed with clips of anti-immigrant plac-
ards, ants seen scurrying across a desert
floor littered with spent shell casings, and
shots of Hispanic youths facing a wall while
chanting a modified version of “The Marine’s
Hymn.” The emotional and visual core of the
piece, however, ends up being the shots of
a white pickup doing donuts around an island
of sagebrush and cactus, shown both from
the outside, where the truck spins round and
round beneath a clear blue sky, and from in-
side, where a man of AARP age punctuates
the soundtrack of his roaring engine with
random pistol shots and an occasional “Yee-
haw!” In one of the final clips, the driver is
shown again, this time wielding an assault
rifle as he spins the wheel and strings to-
gether phrases like “You mess with us and
you’re going to mess with fire,” and “We
love you, we welcome you, any race,
creed, color, doesn’t matter... but do it
the right way.”
Distanced from the original news story,
Okón’s video piece may have lost its immedi-
ate political poignancy, but he’s managed to
capture a slice of Americana that resonates
beyond a single issue or news cycle. If
members of the AZ Border Defenders are
not among the people who occupied the
Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern
Oregon, they are certainly cultural and
ideological cousins.
—SHAWN ROSSITER
CHICAGO
Nicholas Frank: “Post-Self”
at Western Exhibitions
Everyone’s tired of hearing about “selfies,”
the early front-runner in 21st century
narcissism (though they even make me
sympathetic to politicians, who daily are
subjected to a close clinch with a series
of idiots holding a cellphone at arms length).
Nicholas Frank takes us back to a long-forgot-
ten simpler and sylvan time—you know, a
decade ago—when having your picture taken
in front of some thing or place required the
participation of another human being who
would hold the camera or cellphone and do
the deed. Frank gets around, and on trips
this last decade to Great Britain, Russia, and
China he engaged in the surreptitious act of
taking pictures of people taking pictures of
people. They look like a bit like a one-person
firing squad, someone stands perfectly still in
front of something, and the other stands or
squats 10 or 15 feet away, also perfectly still,
takes aim and shoots. Frank’s project here is
a wry slice of the human comedy, looking at
a practically universal situation as a simulta-
neously intriguing and pathetic act, proving
that old adage that wherever you go, there
you are.Frank is a witty and intelligent artist whose
work falls between the ruminative and the
quirkily revelatory. He enlivens this project by
framing the inkjet prints of photographs in in-
dividual largish frames that are—I looked it
up—isosceles trapezoids, meaning that two
of the four unequal sides (here, always the
left and right) are parallel while the other two
are not. While the images are always plumb
horizontal they don’t appear so at first,
seeming askew or foreshortened by their
capriciously asymmetrical framing. This proj-
ect had me humming “Picture Book” by the
Kinks (go ahead, YouTube it) for weeks after-
ward. A second project by Frank, Greatest
Skips(2015), had him amass all of those that
were on his LP record collection and create
another LP that for some 30 minutes (both
sides) played his skips one at a time over
and over. Hearing dozens of 3-4 second
skips individually repeated 30 or 40 times in
a row turns each one into a kind of chant,
fragments of music sometimes vestigially
recognizable. It’s a bit of a retro Cage match,
a refusal to overlook the accidents that seem
like imperfections but actually invite a fresh
rethinking of the medium. Nicely done!
—JAMES YOODCHICAGO
Erin Washington: “Useful Knowledge”
at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery
Chicago-based artist Erin Washington’s chalk-
board-like works have a very strong material
allure, though viewing them immediately
directs one’s thoughts far beyond the pieces’physical presence. On the edges of each
panel, globs of dried paint reveal the thin
layers of tones that were built beneath the
matte black grounds, and the surface bears
the dusty smudges from marks made and
erased as the compositions progressed.
Modestly sized, these works on panel are
filled with contents that feel grim, deep and
encompassing. While there’s no doubt that
Washington’s concerns are weighty and
poignant, she counters that conceptual heavi-
ness with material lightness: a wallpaper
installation of wispy, reflective emergency
blankets, and images on panels that are
rendered delicately through drawn lines
of white chalk.Washington’s Search for Meaning(2015)
features a drawing of Viktor Frankl’s
renowned 1946 psychology text, “Man’s
Search for Meaning.” In Ruin and cosmic
dust(2015), the precisely drawn head of
a classical-looking sculpture is missing its
nose. Three drawings of the artist’s own right
hand after the removal of sutures years ago
recall the history of medicine and anatomy.
Such subject matter depicted with Washing-
ton’s chalkboard technique reminds one the
stuffy lecture halls of universities—places
with one foot in the past and the other in
the present. They suggest places where the
facts and histories of the heavier sciences
are discoursed in only one direction: from the
teacher to the pupil. Yet Washington’s works
are the furthest thing from didacticism. While
the chalkboard works in “Useful Knowledge”
do nod to the finite nature of knowledge,
they are far more emphatic upon that which
is nebulous. The chalkboard is also the
epitome of ephemerality: a surface that is
intended for practice, false starts, or brain-
storming, the space for the lengthy means
to an end, as a problem or equation is
worked through to its conclusion. The marks
upon a chalkboard are the stuff that are not
meant to stay, but to be inevitably wiped
clean. That Washington’s work depend on
preserving these chalk marks emphasizes
the methods and practices that take us
from uncertainty to certainty.
—ROBIN DLUZEN“Ruin and cosmic dust,” 2015
Erin Washington
Chalk, acrylic, and gouache on panel
341 ⁄ 2 " x 30"
Photo: courtesy Zolla/Lieberman Gallery“Summer Palace 3 (Sky Blue)”
2007/2015, Nicholas Frank
Inkjet print on Epson Ultra Premium Luster
Archival 260gsm Paper mounted in
Rising Museum Board
Custom-designed and cut maple frame, painted
by the artist, glazed with UV Framing
Quality Plexiglas, 21^1 ⁄ 2 " x 24^1 ⁄ 2 "
Photo: courtesy Western Exhibitions