Robin Dluzen Writing

Anthony Adcock, Grill, 2023, Oil and 23.5k gold on aluminum, 15 x 10 in.

How different are signs from paintings, anyway? One contains carefully composed, two-dimensional imagery rendered atop frontally-oriented substrates, installed so as to maximize the viewer’s access, encourage intellectual engagement, and even influence how one moves through the world thereafter. And so does the other. Dualities like this one --the fine and the everyday, the vernacular and the ivory tower-- have long fascinated painter and tradesman Anthony Adcock, and in “Gridlock,” the artist draws yet another intriguing and absurd conceptual thread through western art history and the nuances of the construction industry. Here, Adcock narrows his focus. A single five-sided shape, the genesis of his inquiry, bounds each painting in this exhibition, effectively aiding in his conflation of road work signs and the work of Italian Pre-Renaissance painter, Giotto. 

The works in “Gridlock” invite the viewer into Adcock’s peculiar headspace, where not only is he able to see art in the everyday (a phenomenon unique to, yet quite common among artists), he also allows himself down a rabbit hole of free associations, what-ifs, and buoyant musings. Works like Giotto’s Way and Wrong Way combine the notions of constructing a composition and the construction of infrastructure, with his trompe l’oeil rendering of crusty plywood and what look like preliminary sketches in “pencil.” He revels in the exquisite contrast that is a matte black on a reflective ground, making a sign a minimalist painting in Crossing. Alternately, the artist puts the imagery of a painting into the “sign” with Figure, wherein traditional figure studies populate the face in place of graphics. Forward and The Muck satisfy one’s impulse to see the painterly potential in the alluring illusion of viscous crud and splatter.

Further still does Adcock delve, with subject and narrative ricocheting between his two points of reference. Just as road work signs function to tell the public where and how to proceed, the imagery of Giotto’s masterpieces are (amongst other things) visual metaphors intended to impact the behavior of those who look upon them. As one of Adcock’s paintings illustrates, it’s a quick conceptual leap from the directional “This Way” to the aspirational “This is The Way.” Paintings like Adcock’s Nope and Descent serve as warnings that some things are off limits, and could have dire consequences. Interstate, immaculate in its saturated colors and iridescent gold leaf, combines this marker of one’s commute with the reassurance that one is indeed on the right path, the straight and narrow. Adcock’s Grill, though, leaves one with existential questions to ponder. Like an icon, this gilded silhouette sits centered in the sign or the altarpiece. Is it an allusion to that which all men (or, should we say, blue collar males) are supposed to revere? Does it represent the pinnacle of contentment, togetherness and leisure? Perhaps it is simply a graphic shorthand for the destination we all share, the ultimate reason for all this traffic: to get home for dinner.

-Robin Dluzen, 2024

Dennis Lee Mitchell, "Nebulae Series 41", 2024, smoke on paper, 23¾ x 23¾ in. (framed)

The funny thing about the smoke in Dennis Lee Mitchell's drawings is that it doesn’t seem hot. Instead, the sooty tones and marks are rather cool and calming. The undulating saturation of the gestures resembles the flow of water, the matter gathering at or dissipating from the fine edge of his forms, like the dried-up borders of a stain. In this light, his many radial compositions can feel like so many tiny waves rippling from a disturbance at the center. It seems almost absurd for a medium such as smoke to suggest the character of water, the two ideas so ensconced in our consciousnesses as inherently opposite. But, it's the completely novel character of Mitchell's drawings that allow for such varied interpretation of the viewing experience. This is a process that is relatively unusual, so unique to the artist that a viewer has very little to draw upon to place it within our typical understanding of works on paper.

Yet, there is an urge in a viewer to name or categorize Mitchell's forms. While the artist is able to anticipate how the gestures he makes with his torch might settle upon the papers’ fibers, the drawings are intuitive and abstract. It's our own pareidolia that strives for recognition, that locates imagery within pattern, like the derivation of meaning from an ink blot test. Mitchell is not drawing pictures of anything in particular, rather he's making space for the inherent properties of the medium to do what they do. In works like his “Portugal Series,” an astounding degree of illusionistic space is created through Mitchell's layering of smoke, the ebbs and flows of the soot resembling the highlights and shadows that light casts upon a form. 

Insomuch as Mitchell's works capture the remarkable aesthetic potential of smoke, so too are these drawings a testament to the poetry of its science. The drawings’ radial compositions are not truly symmetrical, but oftentimes seem close to it. And, Mitchell's affinity for this shape results in multiples, the repetition reinforcing the subtle differences among the pieces. The ghostly halos in the first of his “Nebula Series” are that much more fragile compared to the finite edges of the second, while the both of them are so airy and ephemeral in the presence of No. 4 --a spotlight in the darkness in comparison. Like snowflakes or fingerprints, these differences underscore the impossibility of true sameness in the natural world.

The significance of Mitchell's smoke drawings also derives from their indexical nature, in the physical presence of the matter that makes up the works’ meaning: the transformative power of fire. In several of Mitchell's newest works, the introduction of a wider range of color reinforces the phenomenal. Applying heating additives to the flame of his torch, the artist harnesses these chemical reactions into billowing, all-over abstractions. There's a kind of logical magic to these, with a heightened awareness of the process. Between the combustion of the fuel and the additives, and the finished product, lies that at which Mitchell bids us to wonder: that fleeting moment wherein soot is airborne, a sublime state rendered through an extraordinary footprint on paper.

Rhonda Gates, "Road Cut: On the Way", 2023, oil / graphite on panel, 16 x 16 in.

“It takes a while to figure it out,” Rhonda Gates told me, referring to her process-laden, multi-layered nature paintings. Gates favors abstraction over illustration, formalism over realism, method over romance, and each piece in “land(e)scapes” bears the evidence of the artist's problem-solving strategies: underpaintings blooming beneath opaque patterns and forms, and shimmering graphite linework suspended between. The construction of Gates’ paintings is the culmination of an array of tools and processes, material and conceptual, all serving to encapsulate the way that our encounters with nature shift and change as we attempt to understand and recollect what it was that we experienced.

Gates’ paintings in “land(e)scapes” hinge upon the particular scenario of nature being a respite, an escape, an anticipated excursion --in short, a place that is decidedly not the here of our everyday urbanity or suburbia but a there to be visited and from which to return home. In this context, what one has encountered exists thereafter in one's awareness in a modified form, filtered and bounded. In works like Road Cut III, 1 & 2, great vistas have been cropped into modest squares; autocumulus clouds are rendered as uniform grids, the strata of the cliffs even and orderly, the effect flattening like an overexposed photo. Gates’ treatment of the landscape underscores the truth that, while the painted terrain retains its essence, something always changes in the capturing of it. No matter how well-told the story, how dutifully rendered the painting, how meticulously edited the Instagram post, the process of transcription has its limits.

And it's not just our conscious attempts at reproduction that are subject to these limitations. Even within our own memories, recalled and unexpressed, our encounters are made simpler, smaller, as our brains alternately focus and delete according to their biologically determined bias. So much of Gates’ practice deals with the push and pull of impression and intellect, and the paintings in “land(e)scapes” evidence such a grappling. In pieces like Reflected Cloud, the fine line of the horizon separates the waterscape. The symmetry of the ovoid “cloud,” above and below, and the orderliness of the parallel lines of the water's ripples, overlay the gestures of the underpainting, as if applying logic to sensation. 

Summer Prairie: Queen Anne's Lace too embodies these complications. Those who are familiar with the flowering wild carrot know of their umbels of so many tiny white flowers that give the appearance of gauzy, floating clouds from a distance. In the painting, Gates renders the umbels with her relentless symmetry: tiny circles grouped into radial disks, hovering among stylized blades of grass. Here, impression and intellect collide, with what things seem like and what we know them to be coalescing in abstraction. 

Yoonshin Park is a bookmaker, and it comes as no surprise that the blank page would hold a particular kind of significance for her. So when Park found herself in the midst of a paralyzing creative block, the page --that unmarred sheet, that metaphorical emptiness abounding with potential, that empty space waiting to absorb and record creative output as evidence of one's identity as an artist-- was an ever-present specter. Park's "Tied" series is a product of that period in her life. However anxious she might have felt then, this practice instead embodies the assuaging of that frustration, the uphill climb towards re-establishing a creative rhythm. Catalyzing this return to making was the simple folding of paper. For Park, the repetition, the accumulation of rote handiwork, is its own kind of antidote to the discontent surrounding her lack of production. Via this self-soothing practice, the basis of "Tied" was formed.

In the dozens of pieces that make up Park’s “Tied” series, handmade papers are sewn (or 'tied') to fabric substrates through their folds, the subsequent feathered fibrousness resembling the deckling of a book’s fore-edge. There is so much volume among these soft leaves that Park’s works call to mind the textures of a filled sketchbook, or a well-loved paperback novel, with their collective sheets swollen well beyond the thickness of their spines with inks and paints, and the oils and dirt from hands that repeatedly turn their pages. An early piece, Arborescent from 2016, remains one of the only works in “Tied” in which the artist’s papers run vertically, as though standing in a book shelf. As for all the others, their papers appear stacked, like so many volumes at hand, picked up, opened, read, written or drawn upon, and set back down in the course of use. In a more recent piece, Absent Whispers from 2021, sheafs of paper bloom out into space, hanging over the other horizontal bands like the protuberances of signatures from a fallen spine, or the triangular flag of a dog-eared corner. In the eyes of a bookish person, the tactility of Park's papers is proof of progress: the transformation of crisp, uniform pages to ones irregular and tattered through touch. 

Park’s palettes of browns, reds, and grays, too, recall the experience of having and holding books. The earthy suggestions of tea and coffee stains in Encounter; reddish hues, like corrective pencils, in Altered Arrangement; and graphite-colored smudges of Calibration, are actually made by saturating the handmade paper with various inks --an inversion of the impulse to fill up pages, doing so without even making a mark. Most prominent in “Tied,” however, are the blues. The various shades in Indigo, Notations, Morning, and Submerged evoke the marks and notes of a blue fountain pen and the notion of the revisited page: the sentence, the phrase, the idea to be highlighted and returned to. So too do these tones drive home the play on words by which the artist has named her series. The undulating blues are also clearly representative of the series moniker’s homophone, “tide.” The rising and receding of water, that rhythmic, unceasing return, has so much to do with Park’s creative impulses here so as to be practically aspirational. It is a testament to the artist’s thorough understanding of books and what books can do that she can pack each artwork with so much content by way of such nuanced gestures. Through Park’s work in “Tied,” it is possible to recognize that the book --or indeed, the art object-- need not be simply a vehicle onto which meaning is applied, but a thing that embodies meaning intrinsically.

Robin Dluzen, 2023

The narrator of Willa Cather’s classic novel, My Ántonia, describes the winter of the Midwestern landscape with both a disdain for its gloominess, and acknowledgment of its singular character: “…the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: ‘This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer…the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.’” With a dichotomy like this one --of verdant flora as a distraction, and bareness as revelatory-- one can appreciate the vast networks of dormant tree branches in Lora Fosberg’s landscapes as more than canopies of extraordinary linework. They also serve as a sobering, allegorical foil to Fosberg’s signature comedic existentialism.

The imagery in this exhibition, “HELP. I’M ALIVE,” is populated by towering, leafless forests and sheer rock formations wherein diminutive figures can be found approaching various precipices: a crevasse, the mouth of a cave, the bank of a river, the horizon. While Fosberg’s jocular titles (IT’S TRUE THAT I LOST THE LIGHTER AND I ALSO LOST THE MAP, for instance) delight in situational absurdity, it’s clear that, wherever her figures might be, they’re at the mercy of their surroundings. So too do Fosberg’s three-dimensional works combine an ironic humor with existential dread. Grinning, cartoonish ceramic skulls mingle with chunks of scorched or rough-hewn hardwood --a simple duality suggesting an inextricable link between the fates of humans and the natural landscape. If we are indeed to identify with the humans in Fosberg’s work, if we put ourselves in the shoes of her tiny hikers as they venture beneath the defoliated canopies, the precipice seems also like a place of reckoning, where a decision must be made about whether and how to continue on. 

-Robin Dluzen, 2024

GNOSTIC ALLEGORY, 2020, OIL ON PANEL, 9" x 12"

At the entrance to Chis Cosnowski’s exhibition, “Morality Play,” a gleaming figure beckons the viewer to follow her lead. The image of a gilded majorette, frozen mid-step with her head held high, vibrates in high contrast to the saturated magenta of her painted background. This painting, like all of Cosnowski’s hyperreal still-lifes, appears thoroughly contemporary, though his works rely on the same impetus as his art historical precedents: allegory. The subjects of Cosnowski’s paintings are selected carefully, these man-made objects chosen not only for their aesthetic characteristics and the fineness of their surfaces, but for their symbolic potential. In Majorette Trophy (Follow The Leader), it is obvious that the artist delights in the rendering of light and shadow ricocheting off the subject’s limbs, in the delicate veins of the marble-patterned base below her. The rigor of Cosnowski’s practice underscores the symbolic importance of various qualities captured in the painting: the shining “gold,” the jewel tones, the power of the subject’s pose. And, at the same time, a viewer is fully aware that these very same characteristics are a pretense, that the nature of the actual object represented here is a poor imitation of the fineness it is portraying. We know that a trophy like this is plastic or inferior metal painted to look gold, that the marble base is a veneer, and that this majorette is not a true likeness of a leader, but a merely nameless, idea of a person. 

A vein of absurdity runs through Cosnowski’s practice, driving home the satire that complicates his moral messages. Like the majorette, the toys and tchotchkes depicted in the artist’s paintings lend their unique characters to the compositions. In Gnostic Allegory, two items are placed among a de Chirico-esque Roman arcade. On the left, a miniature approximation of the Infant Jesus of Prague is placed slightly back in the picture plane, while a toy seal balances a dodecahedron on its nose in the relative foreground. With the figures arranged as they are within these Lilliputian arches, Cosnowski encourages the viewer to put together the metaphysical allegory for themselves. Who or what does this trained seal represent, as it performs for the benedictions of an aristocratic savior? What does it mean for the baby-faced idol to be partially sheathed in shadow while the circus animal does his bidding in the bright light of day? The scene is rife with possible real life parallels about those who set the rules and those who follow them, those who proclaim moral authority and those who have come to rely on such precepts to function. However heavy this content seems, it is tempered by the camp and caricature of the objects themselves. How different, really, is the miniature icon from the toy animal? Sharing their scale, their soft edges and their primary colors, could they not both be mere playthings, afterall?

Cosnowski’s paintings of trophies and toys tackle rather vast, timeless themes. His soaps, however, hit a little closer to home. In Colonial Toilette and Spirit Pour Homme, pristine bars of bath soap are stacked upon one another, all monochromatic hues of creams and whites, and softly diffused light. Here, the soaps' branding, with their molded relief imprint painstakingly rendered, drives the meaning: White Castle, Spirit, Pure & Natural, Dove. And, especially with the presence of a colonial porcelain woman’s bust in Colonial Toilette, viewers can see Cosnowski’s soaps as loaded with concepts of class, whiteness and Euro-centric ideals. But it’s the more spiritual word associations that make the soaps feel especially topical. The cliché “cleanliness is next to godliness” comes to mind, and when else in recent history has our collective judgements about being clean been so piqued as during the COVID-19 pandemic? Cosnowski’s satire is often inferred in his paintings, but in Morality Soap, a three-dimensional pyramid of bar soaps handmade by the artist himself, his message is delightfully overt. The soaps’ boxes feature a pair of praying hands and the slogan, “it’s stronger than sin.” These works speak directly to the impulse to cleanse oneself, to restore or establish wellness and goodness, to secure oneself a place among the righteous. Taken as a whole, Cosnowski's "Morality Play," with all its opposing earnestness and absurdity, reinforces the fact that notions of good and bad are mutable, that they have evolved and will continue to do so as a direct reflection of our ambitions and our fears. 

-Robin Dluzen, 2023

Review by Robin Dluzen

Melina Ausikaitis, “Fall in the Leaves,” 2023, Video, 6:27, music by Melina Ausikaitis and Nate Kinsella, directed by Mike Gibisser

Melina Ausikaitis’ artworks in her show “Fall in the Leaves” feel like memories: soft, indistinct scenes punctuated by bits with weight and form. Wall-bound works are derived from the multidisciplinary artist’s own family photos — of which we see only one, reproduced in the exhibition statement. It corresponds to “Williams Wedding 1985,” wherein chunks of ceramic anchor a scene composed primarily of blocks of blue-tinged fabric sewn tightly together. The seams function as outlines, subtle delineations barely suggesting figures and objects. The ceramics — a red-and-white case of Coke, disembodied hairdos of a woman and a girl, a corner of a black milk crate — are the only true details, the only pieces that seem solid and tangible in the midst of their ethereal ground.

Between “Williams Wedding 1985” and Ausikaitis’ corresponding photograph, we are visually guided into and through the familiar sensation of accessing memories. There is a difference between deciphering what has truly been imprinted on the mind, however, and what, perhaps, only seems to be because a photograph of it exists.

Further situating memories as something apart from the actual, the display of Ausikaitis’ four fabric and ceramic pieces reinforces her scenes as constructs. In “The Crucible,” loose threads hang from the corners of a theater vignette, while in “Mark 1973,” the sewn “corner” of a room juts out at an angle from the picture plane. In all, the assembled fabric is tacked onto bare, stretched canvases peppered with tiny, hand-sewn x’s, the substrate serving as a reminder that this, the memory, is not the illusion of representation or actuality, but a picture that has been composed. All the evidence of the maker’s hand — the stitches, the hanging threads, the ceramic appliqués — establishes these works as comprising a subjective, indeed a profoundly personal pursuit.

The exhibition shares its title with both a video piece (directed by Mike Gibisser) and the song featured within it (co-authored by the artist and Nate Kinsella). In the video, Ausikaitis re-enacts her own experience with hypnosis from over a decade ago. Through the course of the episode, the artist seemingly plays dead, her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She laughs exuberantly, and also sobs. The film is composed of several long shots, with Ausikaitis’ face giving the only evidence of the suggestions being conjured behind her closed eyes. At one point, she mouths the words to the song playing over the scene, the lyrics referencing the myth of Artemis and Actaeon — invoking the idea that seeking and glimpsing might not lead towards anything but oblivion.

Review by Robin Dluzen

Alex Chitty, “Like a Mule Through Honey,” 2022, porcelain bowls, spoons, cast concrete, plastic horse, brass, honey dripper, various woods, cotton furniture webbing, powder coated steel, 40 3/4 x 31 1/2 x 8 1/2”

Continuing through January 28, 2023

“She had her ceramics studio in the laundry room,” Chicago artist Alex Chitty said at her exhibition opening. Chitty explained that this show, titled “Figs break open of themselves,” is connected to a recent foray into her genealogy, and what she’s learned about the various creative practices of the women in her family. While maintaining a studio in the home is not at all uncommon, for female artists it can also be fraught, relegating one’s creative ambitions to the back room in favor of the domestic. But Chitty’s own works are not simply a feminist critique; they are a manifestation of and investigation into the duality of home life and art-making — an ever-looming conundrum that weighs disproportionately on women.

Tables and tabletops comprise Chitty’s exhibition, wall bound or flipped vertically to become a kind of picture plane for her three-dimensional vignettes. The artist’s grandmother’s kitchen table is spliced between the segments of the diptych, “In Other Words.” In “Lush Understory,” another worn wooden tabletop is layered in front of a hanging button-up shirt and beneath a black and white photograph of a woman painting with four arms, all captured at different moments in her brushstroke. In these assemblages, domestic objects, such as glass coasters and fake fruit, are recognizable, but oddly recontextualized, painted, altered or embedded into contiguous surfaces. These, along with details like tiny chess pieces and miniature figurines tucked into crevices or perched on outcroppings, invite the eye to peer more closely, so as to reassess what we might have assumed was taking place on these familiar planes.

Bibiana Suarez, "De: Lata(What Gives Us Away)," National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, Chicago, Illinois

Continuing through August 1, 2022 

by Robin Dluzen

Bibiana Suárez looks at branding with a critical eye, in particular the visual marketing of Hispanic/Latinx food products. Her current exhibition, “De: Lata (What Gives Us Away),” addresses the depictions of women on food packaging, their images often put in service of evoking “authenticity,” exotification, nostalgia, and tradition to mobilize a person to make a purchase. Suárez’s works here are Pop in their style, embracing the formal aspects of her subject matter, though her representational prowess is also evidenced in the individualized portraits of real women placed where their fictitious counterparts would have been.  The works in “De: Lata” contrast with the stereotype that a woman’s domain is limited to the kitchen, one that is still embraced within food brands’ marketing strategies. The sitters in Suárez’s pieces are depicted to highlight all manner of careers and life stories: Poet Juana Iris Goergen; artist María Martínez-Cañas; educator and researcher of Latinx LGBTQ+ communities, Lourdes Torres; Gladys Rosa-Mendoza, a designer and visual strategist; painter Cándida Alvarez; and a trio including Dolce Orocio, Antonia Marroquín, and the artist’s sister, Marinés Suárez, women whose unique personal histories are captured in the compositions of their portraits.

Bibiana Suárez, "La Fiera (Untamed)," 2021-2022,acrylic on canvas, 86 x 65." Photo: Tom Van Eynde The exhibition text by Olga U. Hererra, PhD. explains that Suárez’s sitters collaborate with the artist on their likenesses. With this agency, the resulting paintings feel free of the confines of the male gaze. In “La Fiera (Untamed),” distinguished professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, María de los Ángeles Torres, is not smiling, submissive or particularly welcoming, unlike the illustrated women from the food packaging. The professor seems to regard the viewer sideways, her mouth set firmly, her eyebrows arched skeptically. Her authoritative gaze is powerful, effectively nullifying the issue of objectification. Torres doesn’t invite you to look at her so much as she dares you to. And while this portrait, and the others, are indeed breaks from the stereotypical relationship between women and food, Suárez puts imagery of food to a different use: to symbolize aspects of her sitters’ histories or characteristics. Below Torres’ visage is a Seder plate topped with rice and beans, combining her Cuban heritage and the Judaism of her family.

Bibiana Suárez, "La Fajona (The Hard Worker)," 2021-2022, acrylic on canvas, 49 1/8 x 75 1/4." Photo: Tom Van Eynde There is a single piece in “De: Lata” that does not contain a representational female likeness, and it is Suárez’s own self-portrait. “La Suárez (Gandulera Rubia)” (2005-2011) is the earliest piece in the exhibition, an inkjet print on aluminum, making it the work that most closely resembles the kinds of graphics the artist scrutinizes. A photograph of pigeon peas (used in arroz con gandules, Puerto Rico’s national dish) is emblazoned with the artist’s surname, as well as her date of birth and her “net weight.” In the presence of Suárez’s recent portraits, this piece seems particularly wry and ironic, with Suárez “marketing” herself like something that is to be consumed. Simultaneously, “La Suárez (Gandulera Rubia)'' is imbued with declarative power, asserting her physical existence with the irrefutable facts that ground her as a flesh-and-blood woman, not some formulaic cliche.

No Body: New Work by Mike Rea and Casey Whittier by Robin Dluzen

Casey Whittier, “Proof: We,” 2022, cast glass, 8 x 8 x 8”. Photo Credit: T. Maxwell Wagner

Cleaner Gallery, Chicago, Illinois Continuing through February 19, 2022

In “No Body,” Kansas City artist Casey Whittier and Chicagoan Mike Rea realize an unlikely pairing of absurdity and serious craft. Here, woodworking (Rea’s) and ceramic and glass (Whittier’s) are the materials for objects and imagery of a very personal nature. While in the past both sculptors have created highly realistic facsimiles of vernacular objects, in “No Body” both Whittier and Rea have shrugged off hyper-realism. The intentionally unpolished finish of these pieces underscores the process of their fabrication, and the relationship between the artist’s hand and the intimate nature of that which is depicted.

Mike Rea, "Garter Harness/The Doors, Fan," 2021, wood, paper, ink, epoxy resin, spray paint, interior oil paint, 64 x 52"

Whittier’s pieces represent the kinds of things that are worn often, and close to the body. Baseball caps and eyeglasses are rendered in dense, cast glass, capturing the textural nuances of that which they index: tiny bolts at the hinges of the temples, the folds of mesh backs, the relief stitching of a John Deere logo. A t-shirt hangs from a steel post in the wall, the garment — with “All Vintage Guitars go to Heaven” emblazoned across the chest — is crafted from delicate, interlocking loops of clay. These objects feel fragile, as if the preciousness of someone’s well-worn items has been transferred into, and even accentuated by the fineness of the media into which they have been cast. Whittier’s shirt, glasses and hats seem uniquely specific to someone, although it’s her cast glass sets of teeth that have singular auras. In “Proof: We” and “I and You,” sets of top and bottom teeth are stacked upon each other, suggesting an orthodontic retainer or a mouthguard as a potential mold for the cast. In Whittier’s hands, what is essentially a dental record is also a profoundly poetic gesture of intimacy.

Whittier’s sentimentality is counterbalanced by Rea’s sublime absurdity. Several large-scale works on paper are rendered using a mosaic-like method, with tiny squares of wood scrap adhered to gessoed paper. In “Coda Chrome Away” and other works the wooden pieces are colored in with squares of ink. Up close, these works have an earthy, timeless quality, the rough, gessoed paper contrasting the geometry of the wooden tiles and their velvety smooth surfaces. They feel like studies in material and abstraction, enough to lose yourself in their seriousness before realizing what it is you’re looking at. These are not abstractions, after all, but images of strappy leather gear binding up invisible bodies of negative space. “Garter Harness / The Doors, Fan,” and “Back View / Venus of Somewhere in Germany” feel campy and playful. They are triple-framed in wood of various tones, as if to “triple down” on the seriousness of Rea’s craftsmanship.

“No Body” is a lot of fun, with its unexpected dualities of high and low, the vernacular and the refined, earnestness and absurdity. However, there is a palpable melancholy surrounding it all. The leather in Rea’s images is wrapped around empty space; the hats and glasses of Whittier’s castings reverberate with the energy of the body that had, at one time, worn them. The fact that there are no bodies here, consistent with the exhibition’s title, makes one wonder whether, in non-pandemic times, this absence would feel so acute as it does right now.

Review by Robin Dluzen

Continuing through January 31, 2022

In terms of his notoriety, Tony Fitzpatrick’s creative output and his personality go hand-in-hand. And so, when this iconic Chicago artist announces that this exhibition, “Jesus of Western Avenue,” is his final solo museum show, those of us who know the man believe that he means it. Fitzpatrick’s is a wide-reaching creative life, with visual art, books, poetry, articles, plays, album covers and television characters under his belt. So his decision to take himself out of this particular portion of the art world game is meaningful precisely because he is at the top of his game. Fitzpatrick, by his own account, is removing himself from the equation to make room for historically and systematically underrepresented artists. Over the years, the artist’s generosity has often taken the form of access — to fine art for the public and to meaningful opportunities for emerging artists; and Fitzpatrick’s affinity for access makes its way into his visual artwork, as well. His practice features a specific sort of Midwestern Americana, blending the aesthetics of comics, vintage advertising, matchbooks, prayer cards, snippets of sheet music and Chicago-specific iconography. It’s a vernacular that allows so many different kinds of viewers an entree into the work.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “The Scavenger Searching for Jesus of Western Avenue,” 2020, mixed media

The works in “Jesus of Western Avenue,” mainly produced during the past decade, vary in subject matter but are remarkably consistent in style. Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic is hard-edged and gritty, with a Pop sensibility that is decidedly more blue collar and Imagist than slick and Warholian. An aura of the past permeates these works on paper (most are part drawing, part collage), though Fitzpatrick wields it in a way that stops short of nostalgia. There’s no longing or sentimentality here, and Fitzpatrick is pandering to no one. It is a past that feels quite alive.

In “Western Avenue (Street of Crocodiles)” (2021), caped superheroes, pinup girls and Dick Tracy-type characters with cigarettes dangling from their lips commingle with contemporary fast food and gas station signs atop a drawn grid resembling the layout of Chicago’s streets. Throngs of tiny, cut-out comic book characters in “Humboldt Park Winter Juncos” (2021) fill the background behind the carefully rendered birds of the piece’s title. In these works, like most others in the exhibition, a patchwork of everyday emblems of the past ground Fitzpatrick’s subjects, much like the way in which we lead contemporary lives in and around the historical remnants that shape Chicago.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “Humboldt Park Winter Juncos (I, Apostle of this Radiant Place, Cast my Bread on your Water),” 2021, mixed media

As much as Fitzpatrick focuses on the familiar, his works are never obvious. Even the smallest details in these works (some of the cut-out, collaged figures are less than an inch high), are curiosities. In “Humboldt Park Tern (Longing for the Sea)” (2021), tiny cherubs sport kitten heads on their shoulders, while grinning skulls replace faces of the saints in their ovoid portraits. A spindly tree in the background of “Monster Bird Deep in the Brick Heart of Chicago” (2015) has miniscule raw steaks speared upon its branches, dripping the blood that dots the negative space of the entire piece.

  The revelations here are not all dark, though. While Fitzpatrick has incorporated animals of all kinds as the primary subjects and symbols of many pieces from this decade, his pandemic collages are indicative of a newly acquired habit: birding. Flora and fauna are not usually what comes to mind when thinking about the dense, man-made grid that is the city of Chicago, but here Fitzpatrick catalogs the avian life of Chicago’s green spaces like an urban Audubon. Humboldt Park, the 200-acre park in the vicinity of the artist’s stomping grounds, figures largely, its name emblazoned across the pieces. Terns, herons, juncos and woodpeckers are among the species immortalized, their unique likenesses rendered carefully and with haloes about their heads, both at-home in and in contrast to the density of the drawn city grid in the background and its crowded occupants.

Tony Fitzpatrick, “Humboldt Park Winter Heron (Among the Opera of Demons),” 2021, drawing, collage, watercolor, ink, gouache, colored pencil and assorted ephemera on paper.

Continuing through August 14, 2021

The “Shoretime Spaceline” series, cited in the titles of Karen Reimer’s three large fabric pieces in “Sea Change,” references the artist’s 2016 exhibition at Hyde Park Art Center. There, Reimer had installed an enormous fabric construction that resembled undulating clouds from a vantage point on the ground, and rolling waves from the balcony above. The works in her current exhibition are repurposed from that giant piece — itself a composite of so many repurposed fabrics, all indigo dyed in various tones and hues of blue. Scaled down from that original spectacle, the patchwork material is something completely different here, formally and conceptually.

Finished around the edges and fully backed, the three largest pieces in “Sea Change” are quilts. Whereas quilts, as an art form, often embody notions of comfort and security, Reimer infuses hers with a stark contrast, embroidering terrifying truths upon their surfaces. Rendered in glossy floss, small illustrations are stitched among the patches, outlining the Great Lakes Basin, the widely fluctuating lake levels of the region, and a graph of sea levels pitching sharply upwards. This combination of homey, worn tablecloths, satin-striped bed sheets, lightweight denim and chambray, and the cold hard facts of climate change, merges the personal and the global, the human experience and the environment. Additionally, the quilts carry the sublime irony in imagining covering or wrapping oneself up in the evidence of our own mistakes and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles that have developed as a result.

Karen Reimer, “Great Lakes and Basin,” from the “Shortime Spaceline” series, 2021, embroidery on fabric, 102 1/2 x 70 x 3” Alongside the quilts are smaller swaths of fabric in which Reimer uses a different tactic in her subversion of the familiar and the domestic in favor of her environmental messaging. Here, the artist takes cues from the formal details of her chosen fabrics, seamlessly integrating them into her embroidered illustrations. Bits of a peaceful, watercolor-like forest scene printed on cotton become the green toxic algae blooms in a blue-threaded map of Lake Erie. Thin red lines punctuating a green plaid swath intersect lower-mid Michigan like a crosshair in “Average Maximum Temp.” Two tones of blue dyed scraps come together to delineate the water line that is also spanned by embroidered icebergs. The image illustrates the enormous increase in surface melt after 2005, a fact incorporated into the work’s title. Not only does this piece speak explicitly to the crisis of the melting icebergs, but it also makes the metaphor of the iceberg especially potent: there’s often so much more going on than what initially appears to be.

What makes Reimer’s work so ingenious is not so much the message she delivers, but the way she delivers it. The cool, calming blue hues, the soft fabrics, and the nostalgic prints are what we see first. When one leans in for a closer look, to read the tiny, stitched letters, numbers and graphs, that’s when one’s viewing experience and understanding of the work changes entirely. Reimer plays upon a collective comfort zone, beckoning us with the comfortable and familiar, before yanking us right out of it by delivering the kinds of urgent information that should be making us all profoundly uncomfortable.

In “Summer Bounce,” Lorraine Peltz gives us flora at their most verdant, at the glorious peak of their most anticipated season. Floral imagery is not new to Peltz’s practice, though in this latest series, flowers are rendered in a style far more realistic than she has used in recent years. Peonies, daisies, violets and lotuses are centered in her canvases, articulated carefully yet painterly, harkening to the still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. But, unlike the subjects of still-lifes, Peltz’s bouquets are not situated in a naturalistic environment or illusionistic space; her blooms sit atop geometric patterned fields. Defined in pictorial space in this way, Peltz’s flowers are not just images of flowers -- they are symbols.

by Robin Dluzen

Joanne Aono, "Harvesting Ethnic Roots,” 2021, graphite, colored pencil, marker, crop cover cloth, wood, paint, cord, 8 x 17 x 19 feet Hyde Park Art Center, and boundary, Chicago, Illinois Continuing through June 5, 2021

Affixed to stretcher bars, or hanging from rods and pins, the silk substrates of Maggie Crowley’s gouache paintings and constructions set the tone for her solo exhibition, “Playmate.” Crowley’s silk is crushed, folded and creased, exaggerating the way gallery lighting bounces off the surface, asserting the works’ presence and physicality. More so does the silk underscore the narrative content of her works: it reflects light in a way very similar to that of the hi-vis reflective piping that is a staple of safety workwear. In “Playmate,” Crowley highlights the labor that is often judged as being “invisible,” not just by pointing out the essentialness and dignity of the work, but by capturing the nuances of the lives associated with it. Workwear and PPE feature prominently as Crowley’s subject matter. In works like “Metra Worker on Easter,” “Streets and Sanitation Employee,” and “Receptive, Cooperative, Dependable,” the artist paints portraits of workers, their yellow and orange safety vests rendered so as to draw focus to the motions of their wearers. One vest ripples as a worker lunges to the side, hand outstretched; another creases as a wearer cranes their neck while ascending a ladder; yet another twists around to the side as someone pauses to rest a gloved hand on a hip. As much as these portraits make visible the laborers and the labors they perform, it’s not simply the depictions of what happens on the job site that make “Playmate” so affecting. Amongst Crowley’s portraits, and other imagery of work jackets, trucks and scrubs, are other still-lifes and vignettes that have little-to-nothing to do with the labor, but might have very much to do with the individual performing the labor, and those around them. In particular, imagery like a fishing tackle box, the bouquet in “Anniversary,” and “Paper Snowflake” speak to leisure, occasions and loved ones. 

In her artist statement, Crowley explains that she is the daughter of a hairdresser and an ironworker, and perhaps it is exactly that proximity that makes her vantage point so dimensional. “Playmate” is a holistic picture of a life sustained and enriched by the fruits of manual skilled labor. Crowley’s exhibition is humanizing and personalizing, and is on display at an ideal moment amidst the pandemic —right when we all need to be reminded of and refocused on such things. 

Maggie Crowley, "Streets and Sanitation Employee,"2020, gouache on silk, 14 x 11." Photo by Robin Dluzen The blue-collar work that keeps a city functioning is only one example of the labors that have been taken for granted while the rest of the population is safe in quarantine. Joanne Aono’s exhibition, “Harvesting Ethnic Roots,” highlights another: agriculture. Where Crowley focuses on individuals, presenting laborers as visible and whole, Aono mines the histories of communities, shedding light on those who have shaped what we grow and what we consume. 

Maggie Crowley, "Equipment of the Earth (for a bartender)," 2021, gouache on silk construction, 92 x 78." Photo by Robin Dluzen

Maggie Crowley, "Invisible Glove," 2020, silkblend construction, 9 x 9." Photo by Robin Dluzen “Harvesting Ethnic Roots” is an installation of large-scale drawings on garden fabric, hung from the ceiling in three rows, encouraging us to walk among the pieces. Aono’s exhibition is on display at boundary — one of a handful of Chicago’s backyard gallery spaces that serve as a crucial site for artistic experimentation, and as an informal and accessible venue in which to see contemporary art. Aono’s research into the ethnic makeup of Morgan Park (the far south side neighborhood where the gallery is located) determined the imagery of her drawings and the order in which they are layered in space. In the back of the room, life-size renderings of strawberries, corn and wild rice represent the foodstuffs of Native American cultures; in the middle are those which were introduced with the European settlers, like cabbage and wheat; in the front are the sweet potatoes, okra and collard greens cultivated by Black Americans. Depending on where a viewer stands, one can see the hanging garden rows separately and distinct from one another, or as a single unit of blended layers.

Joanne Aono, "Harvesting Ethnic Roots” (detail)

by Robin Dluzen

Diane Christensen and Jeanne Dunning with Steve Dawson, “Birth Death Breath,”2016, inflatable opera. Installation view, Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Illinois "The Long Dream"  Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, continuing through May 2, 2021

Wrapping the corner walls of the entrance to “The Long Dream” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago are the names of the more than 70 local artists exhibiting work in the exhibition. Some of these names belong to my friends and colleagues, and there are others I don’t personally know but greatly admire. Rather than feeling vicariously buoyed by reading these names, and appreciating the institutional recognition of a segment of Chicago’s arts community, I instinctively flinched. It should be noted that I did not come to the MCA on this day in possession of the optimistic curiosity with which I typically approach an exhibition. The MCA and “The Long Dream” are at the center of a labor crisis, as extensively reported by Kerry Cardoza in The Chicago Reader (March 3, 2021). With my facemask and timed-entry ticket, I came to find out what happens to a show, stockpiled with excellent and timely work, when site-specific ethical turmoil takes over as context. My flinch at the threshold of the exhibition was the result of knowing that the artists whose names are on the wall must feel involuntarily complicit in the controversy. The curatorial statement of “The Long Dream” explains that the show, which borrows its title from the Richard Wright novel, highlights artists whose work “offers us ways to imagine a more equitable and interconnected world” — an institutional attempt to acknowledge the revolutionary zeitgeist. That would be all well and good were it not for the fact that MCA staff (organized under the moniker MCAccountable) has been calling on the museum to address its own racism, ableism and poor labor practices, especially in the midst of operating during COVID, only to face layoffs twice — the latest round in January, coinciding with a sickly hypocritical article by MCA Director Madeleine Grynsztein in Art in America (January 22, 2021) bragging about diversity practices at the MCA and how “[w]hen most institutions were furloughing their front-facing employees, we went in the opposite direction.” Cardoza pointed out, however, that “[t]he day prior, the MCA laid off 41 employees.” MCAccountable’s open letters from July 16 and August 21, and one from the artists in “The Long Dream” presented to the Director on March 11 outline the museum’s offenses, and the demands made by the artists and staff. 

Some of the artists slated to exhibit in “The Long Dream” — Maria Gaspar, Aram Han Sifuentes, Folayemi Wilson and the For the People Artists Collective — withdrew in protest before the show even opened. Initially, I worried for the artists in “The Long Dream”: that the show’s context had been proven a sham, and subsequently, that powerful work about racial justice, disability activism and LGBTQ+ equity would be grievously undermined. Indeed, the pretense that the museum was in solidarity with these causes was shattered, and an atmosphere of irony, sadness and outrage over the current situation envelops the show. But the convictions within the works reverberate. 

Artworks that hinge upon elements of vulnerability thrive in the exhibition’s shifted context. “Birth, Death, Breath,” an installation by Diane Christiansen and Jeanne Dunning with Steve Dawson, features a collection of seasonal, inflatable lawn ornaments: snowmen, ducks dressed in hunting gear, and parts of various animals frankenstein-ed together. All rise and fall as their air supply fluctuates in cadence with original songs. The artists take advantage of how these colorful, smiling forms bob, almost lifelike when filled with air; and the ominous way that they collapse when their supply is cut. Lyrics like “I will not survive / Where am I going / Where will I be” underscore threads of fear and uncertainty — feelings that have become all too familiar, especially during the pandemic when crucial lifelines and livelihoods suddenly became tenuous. While Christiansen and Dunning keep us at a conceptual arms length as we watch a narrative play out, Derrick Woods-Morrow closes the distance between the audience and the work. In “How much does this moment weigh for you?”, the mangled mass of a compressed police car is suspended from a steel frame by chains. The rusted heap no longer bears any resemblance to a Crown Victoria, but the police spotlight, aimed head-height, is unmistakable. In the darkened room, the sudden, blinding light stuns and disarms. Stepping away from the spotlight, it’s easier to focus on the disembodied voices in the room: two men tentatively discussing race, queerness, law enforcement and their shared memories of childhood. Woods-Morrow doesn’t simply tell a story here, he puts us right in the middle of it, both physically and emotionally. The sensation of being in someone else’s shoes takes us one step beyond mere awareness, and closer to understanding. 

Amanda Williams, “What black is this you say?—‘You thought getting Obama elected meant you could take a break from blackness’—black (study for 08.09.20),” 2020, watercolor on paper, 7 x 10”

But the piece in “The Long Dream” that resonates the most, in light of the collapse of the exhibition’s original intention, is Amanda Williams’ “What black is this you say?” series of watercolors on paper. Her series began in response to “Blackout Tuesday,” the social media event of June 2, 2020, in which Instagram feeds were flooded with blank, black squares by individuals, institutions and corporations alike, in what everyone thought was solidarity with Black Lives Matter. Quickly, it was realized that these posts stifled the crucial communication that was taking place online with the #blm hashtag, and people everywhere seethed at the superficiality of the gesture. Williams, known for her mastery of color in form and concept, began her own Instagram project that day, coupling abstractions of varying tones and palettes of black with captions that added humanity and individuality to a trend that was otherwise populated with flatness and sameness. The artist translated her posts into the small, intimate paintings seen here. And, with the addition of handwritten inscriptions, such as “I cain’t go swimming today, I just got my hair done black”; “Obama break from blackness black,” they capture the best aspect of social media — the window into someone else’s everyday — while infusing it with the slow-paced contemplation of abstract painting.

When I first met Jeff Chelf, he talked about woodworking like it was a past life. The Wisconsin-based artist has a more recent portfolio full of performative, conceptual projects --seemingly the artistic opposite of his erstwhile craftsmanship. We spoke about labor, handicraft and our shared Midwestern roots, remarking on the drastic divergence from his more traditional practice as a maker. Chelf’s practice today is not easy to label. His medium, performance, is not so much the conundrum as is his meaning. In his practice, Chelf is constantly traversing a thematic spectrum about work, value and objects, but he never lands anywhere one would expect with his message. Chelf’s body of work is full of earnest yet futile laboriousness, lengthy investigations into the inconsequential, and elaborate processes that don’t yield anything tangible in the end. 

Touching a bit on all three of these aspects is one of Chelf’s recent projects, Dutch Masters (2020) with Ali Deane. The introduction of the small printed book that documents Dutch Masters explains that Chelf and Deane selected a scrap of printed paper board from the trash they had cleaned up from along a Madison, WI highway. The scrap, which turned out to be packaging from Dutch Masters brand cigars, is not terribly interesting to look at, and is reproduced in the book; nevertheless, the artist duo embarked on a month-long digital research binge that ended in them both smoking the mass-market cigars and then (presumably) sending the scrap back from whence it came: the garbage. The research Chelf and Deane turned up is of a mildly notable variety --some anecdotes from the brand's century-old origins, its contemporary popularity as a blunt wrapper. If the object itself nor the sum of the research are the focal point of the artistic exercise, then what is? As one pages through the Dutch Masters booklet, one finds oneself dwelling more on the absurdity of this venture in general than the information printed on the pages. Dutch Masters is just one of many instances in Chelf’s body of work wherein a viewer spends their time not thinking about what the piece’s intended message is, but why the artist has chosen to do it at all and why he expended so much effort in doing it. 

In his own words, Chelf’s relationship to labor is “strained.” It’s no small thing for a Midwesterner to flip the script on the notion that production --of material, of consumer goods-- is the genesis of value, as such production in the region has shaped the landscape, the population, our families, and even our own psyches.(1.) And while the artist is no longer driven by an engagement in the labor (and subsequent commerce) of making, industriousness, in the abstract, remains an important vehicle for Chelf. In To Cut a Lake in Half (2020), Chelf again exerts himself in a tremendous undertaking; along with collaborator Derek Kiesling, Chelf literally cuts a line through the ice of a frozen lake with nothing but hand saws. This gesture speaks to the character of such Midwestern waterways, their simultaneous fragility and resilience, and their inextricable link to the region’s industrial history. Like in Dutch Masters, there is an absurdity to the piece, an aspect of futility in laboring over something so ephemeral. If, as a woodworker, Chelf had previously been channeling his labor into the craft object in an attempt to imbue it with value, as a performance artist, he’s now resituating the labor as the subject of a conceptual art piece. He’s assigning meaning to his labor without creating a consumable product for a market. 

However, when it comes to the value of an artwork, a viewer cannot just take Chelf’s word for it. At least in To Cut a Lake in Half, there was a beginning and end to the project: the artists began cutting at different ends of the lake, and completed when they met in the middle. To Bring Water to Land (2020) has no such satisfying conclusion, no sense of accomplishment a viewer can appreciate vicariously. To Bring Water to Land is one of the most futile pieces in his oeuvre. Here, Chelf and Kiesling, outfitted with a pair of galvanized buckets, scoop water from a lake and deposit it on the shore. The photos that document this performance show the collaborators dressed for the autumn weather, soaked to the knee as they trudge back and forth from the water to the rocky bank. As one would expect, the water poured onto the beach flowed back down to the lake, and the artists’ efforts made no perceptible impact on the water level. It’s also likely that, after a few hours, the ground would have dried and it would appear as though Chelf and Kiesling were never even there. If in Dutch Masters and To Cut a Lake in Half, meaning shifts around between objects and actions, meaning is essentially questionable in To Bring Water to Land. In the latter piece, a viewer has to wonder: is this really something, or is it nothing at all? 

1. For example, in the textbooks issued to us for Michigan History class in fifth grade, the opening line is a quote from Henry Ford: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black.”

-Robin Dluzen Artist & Critic, 2020 

CJ Pyle, Goldie #6, 2019, Pencil, ink, colored pencil, On verso of LP cover, 12 x 12 inches

“Crawling From The Wreckage,” like most of CJ Pyle’s exhibitions, is like a snapshot of the current state of his making process. Pyle’s solo exhibitions don’t necessarily contain a certain body of work, or act as bookends to a particular set of ideas or conceptual stimuli. The artist explains that his intuition guides the progression from piece to piece, as it does his compositions, his mark-making, his choice of colors. In a way, his entire oeuvre is a career-long continuation of a single practice: his laborious style of “knotted” mark-making with ballpoint pen upon found paper material.

Pyle’s adoption of ballpoint pen in his drawing began decades ago, when he was a touring musician and free pens were the medium readily at hand. Over the years, Pyle has studied, researched and mastered the practice of drawing with a ballpoint pen, the intricacies of which are made so compelling throughout the works in “Crawling From The Wreckage.” In a single work like Goldie #6, Pyle uses a pen to render vastly differing textures, from smooth “ropes” to soft “wool” to the simple lines of the subject’s stubbly collarbone. Wah-Wah too features this array of mark-making; and, with the addition of a field of matte India ink in the background, the viewer can suddenly decipher a range of purpley-blue hues within the sheen of the “black” ballpoint ink.

The LP sleeves, the backs of which are so often the surface Pyle draws upon, are another holdover from his music career. Compared to the glossy print of the album covers, the versos are a kind of blank canvas, though in Pyle’s hands, even this plain paper board incites his aesthetic decisions. For the artist, the matte, lightly sealed surface is ideal for retaining the strokes of the pen; the square format and the head and shoulders of his subjects are in perfect harmony. In The Nice, Pyle makes use of an album cover entirely unfolded, its center crease a crucial component of the picture --a formal hinge separating the figure’s head from her body like an exquisite corpse. So too do the creases, tears and stains lend a patina that evidences the LP cover’s former life --a detail that conceptually parallels Pyle’s use of autobiographical titles that hint at his personal history. 

Though his own life makes it into the drawings in subtle ways, Pyle’s work is resolutely imaginative. For artists who work so intuitively, putting into words one’s decision making process is something next to impossible. Pyle borrows Picasso’s adage regarding the kind of “shock” or “jolt” an artist experiences with a certain combination of aesthetic elements, though, with Pyle’s labor-intensive, tremendously precise drawings, it’s hard to imagine any decisions taking place within a mere moment. Indeed, the nature of the artist’s craft is such that each of these impulses arrives in the midst of slow, tedious handiwork. He has so much time to contemplate such intuitions, to distill the impulses of his imagination and formal expertise, as his hands continue with their motions, rote and tremendously proficient.

-Robin Dluzen, 2020