REVIEW: Leslie Baum, Diane Christiansen, and Selina Trepp, An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman at the Chicago Cultural Center
Exhibition view of An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman, 2022. Photo by Clare Britt.
REVIEW
Leslie Baum, Diane Christiansen, and Selina Trepp
An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman
February 26 – September 4, 2022
Michigan Avenue Galleries
Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington St.
Chicago, IL 60602
By Annette LePique
Adrienne Rich’s poem “Planetarium” is dedicated to astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750—1848). Herschel, a pioneer in the field, is best known for her discoveries of comets. Rich’s poem reads,
I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.
The exhibition “An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman” currently on view at the Chicago Cultural Center’s Michigan Avenue Galleries, features the work of Leslie Baum, Diane Christiansen, and Selina Trepp. Organized by Annie Morse, the show positions each artists’ immersive explorations of abstraction, the mutability of form, within the lens of gender. Morse’s curatorial gesture is explicitly political (i.e., the allusion to Rich unavoidably brings to mind her role in second-wave feminism, with its adherence to elements of some sexual and gendered binaries). However, Morse’s curatorial engagement is multi-faceted and mutable, the surface is not what it seems. Presenting the artists’ work through the overarching images of Herschel’s comets, the ephemerality of form, and the transformative nature of abstraction offers space to subvert viewer expectation. It’s a reminder that the center never holds steady, gender is a shifting architecture, and one hundred lifetimes can be lived in the span of a second. Even Hilary Holladay’s 2020 biography of Rich, the first definitive biography of the writer, is built upon that claim that Rich herself felt she never possessed a “definitive identity.” Surprise always abounds.
Exhibition view of An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman, 2022. Photo by Clare Britt.
The idea of fractured selves, of Herschel’s ambivalent pulsations, of the desire to navigate the currents of our interiors, are generative grounds from which to consider each artist’s work. Centering the importance of friction, of quirk, of oddity, is of critical importance for this trio as their work appears to share a sense of aesthetic exchange. Baum, Christiansen, and Trepp are all Chicago artists who are deeply immersed in the city’s arts ecosystem. The three possess relational, discursive approaches to making and exhibiting their work. All are invested in abstraction as an element of form but it is this very abstraction, this ambiguous terrain, and the surprising turns of artist’s methods which provides their practices the space meet, repel, and spark in innovative ways.
Selina Trepp engages with notions of exchange and reciprocity, specifically framing her work through the lens of economy. Trepp’s zine included in the show details her decision to no longer bring new materials in to her studio, an illustration stating in all capital type, “I WORK WITH WHAT I HAVE” alongside a flow chart detailing the material and artistic benefits of the imposed constraint. The zine continues on to detail Trepp’s aesthetic interests in the moving image, the three dimensional frame, as a mode which encourages a similar cycle of exchange and relational making of meaning. In Trepp’s animated work, there is a certain degree of improvisation. With each gesture and movement there contains the potential for new forms, new colors, new dialogues and experiences between viewer and work. The same dialogue is extended and expanded to also include the schematics of the piece’s viewing space as Trepp intentionally built seating for those viewing the work.
Christansen too built seating for her stop motion work, the seating itself made from folded and repurposed sketches. From there viewers can sit and watch her dripping, darkly humorous stop motion animated pieces. In each piece amorphous figures and shining fragments touch and retract; shapes form worlds anew and from the stomach of a starry-eyed toad there emerges cavalcades of color and light. We’re seeing birth, death, boundaries transgress and merge. There’s a porousness to Christansen’s work, the multi-hyphenate nature of her practice internal and external in turns. There’s a system here that both generates and remakes: Christansen’s painting, drawing, animation, sound, and music collaborations all feed and inform one another. The work holds a shared language, it reaches out together. In an email exchange with the artist, Christiansen likened their practice to connection born of the studio’s solitude.
Exhibition view of An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman, 2022. Photo by Clare Britt.
Leslie Baum began the “Plein Air Project” in 2017, in which she invited friends, colleagues, strangers, any one to come paint with her out of doors in various states of nature. The results of these encounters are watercolor paintings which Baum photocopied and collaged for a large scale series of abstracted reflections and interpretations of her painting partners, specific places, and sensations. Thirteen of these pieces are up in Instrument, with the original paintings included below their collaged counterparts in a case that wraps around the gallery walls. Connection loops and disintegrates in a hermeneutics of abundance, it is a source of pleasure to locate and identify the project’s elements; assembling and reassembling to create memory, language, and feeling in dialogue. That notion of exchange.
People in your life possess the ability to transform you. The work, again a piece of you, is transformed. Comets change when the shoot across the skies, they change even more when their remnants fall to Earth. Change is a lesson here; to be in this world means the ability to be touched, to be penetrated, to be forever altered by another. You’re never the same once you fall to earth.
An Instrument in the Shape of a Woman is up till September 4th, 2022 at the Chicago Cultural Center, Michigan Avenue Galleries, 1st Floor North. The Center is open daily from 10AM-5PM.
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