Memory and Meaning: William Dolan and Karen Perl in “Chicago Streets and Ways”
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“Chicago Streets and Ways,” on view at Hofheimer Gallery through April 25, forms an eerie visual premonition of the current Coronavirus pandemic. The streets and alleys we expect to see bustling with urban busyness are still. Buildings are dormant, windows opaque, as if waiting for the vital spark of human life to restart the city’s hum of interconnected pathways.
William Dolan’s ink drawings of Chicago alleys and side streets have the stillness of the morning of a national holiday — or a cataclysmic event. “Alley with Safe Zone,” betrays some recent activity; shallow puddles intimate that it has rained and a car or two has passed this way. A mattress, still white, is propped up against the ubiquitous blue and black bins that line Chicago’s alleys, and a smattering of golden leaves litter the foreground below a bullet ridden “Safety Zone” sign. Dolan has an affection for the distinct and incongruous details of his native Chicago surroundings. The particular cobalt blue bins of the maligned Chicago recycling program, a down-at-the-heels apartment building with its enclosed porch abutments (always an indefatigable lite margarine yellow), the warm gray lean of weathered phone poles, and the chaotic jumble of wires above are all depicted with the familiarity of a childhood friend.
In “Alley with Former Loading Dock,” long-limbed shadows stretch across cracked pavement, around cars, and up the sides of buildings as if testing the limits of their dominion. If eyes are the windows to the soul, then windows (and reflections) represent an internal world in art. The lack of lights and scant reflections in the windows of Dolan’s buildings do not reveal the life within. Windows, half-lidded with gray shades or colored in with a sketchy black scribble, seem agitated by their vacancy.
Dolan’s few El track drawings offer a different viewpoint. “Alley from Across the Isle,” contains the viewer in an abstract, compressed space rather than letting us roam the streets at will. Here, surrounded by cold but jaunty cerulean and cobalt blues, we are afforded a view of the city through a porthole-like window. Sedate earth tones and blank windows stare back at us, as if the city has grown up around our single car. We had expected a momentary delay— instead we are entombed inside an incandescent box.
In contrast to Dolan’s ink drawings, Karen Perl’s moody, desaturated oil paintings depict the less densely constructed Roger’s Park and Bronzeville neighborhoods. Wide, empty streets yawn between buildings, their expanse marked by an occasional car or ghost-like figure or animal. Where Dolan’s line drawings form an indelible imprint of a particular space in time, the quiet in Perl’s paintings have a dream-like sensibility. Perl seems to concentrate on the feeling of light and space between things. Her paintings are sparse in subject and material — areas of paint are scraped off and simplified. She provides just enough information to convey light and space. The muted palette is nostalgic, intimate, meditative. Street signs and businesses are left unnamed, as if their specificity is no longer required by the ghost-like figures who drift through them. In “Touhy, Ridge, and Rogers,” two cars come from opposite directions. The street appears wet and a red stop signal glows, bouncing light across the pavement. Although the streets are quiet and the buildings boarded up, a chance meeting between these vehicles seems possible. The “decisive moment” has yet to occur.
“Gone (Randolph & Peoria),”seems to have been painted en plein air and the heavier application of paint gives it a sense of being built up and alive. The industrial corridors and factory buildings at the heart of Chicago, rooted in work, find a sympathetic pursuit through the artist as laborer. Both manufacturers and artists share a similarly uncertain fate as development and economics make these spaces untenable. The sweep of clouds across a blue sky, and an impasto passage of pale pinkish tones over a sea of grey-green asphalt is a benediction, the sublime moment of unlikely beauty painted into existence.
“Landlocked (Clark and Rogers),” goes to the opposite extreme. Painted in crisp contrasts, sun-warmed brick emerges against a cold, cloudless sky. Signs and windows are bereft of words or interior details, they need only temperature and tone. The stillness of the scene is subtly activated by morning light nudging the shadow of a neighboring building awake. A budded branch peaks at it’s coral framed reflection and a seagull coasts past a faded no parking sign, photo-bombing the day.
Perl’s control in paring down elements to their essential shape and color, and the removal of paint as a technique, adds meaning to the figures that don’t quite fit within the rules of this restraint. A shy dog gazes at the viewer in “Lost,” as an American flag waves in the distance. “Sight Hound,” shows another dog at a crossroads, looking into the distance as the sun sets, a round moon overhead. As representatives of nature, these animals become totems for an unseen. A spiritual element that beckons us toward the inherent responsibilities of man as caretaker and archivist.
It’s the simple things that each artist chooses to reflect upon in their portraits of Chicago’s urban landscape. “Chicago Streets and Ways,” offers a slowed-down, un-peopley opportunity to revisit what makes and keeps us human. Our connections to place and community are critical. Our responsibility to care for each other (humans and animals), and to see beauty in the everyday, resonate through the artists’ rendering of familiar Chicago vistas. We are the connectors, if we are willing to be engaged.
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Chicago Streets & Ways
William Dolan & Karen Perl
Opening Reception: Friday, March 6, 5 to 8pm
Exhibition Continues Through April 25
Hofheimer Gallery (by appointment only through April)
847.274.7550
info@hofheimergallery.com
4823 N. Damen, Chicago, IL 60625
