Closing just before Valentine’s day is this well stocked group exhibition featuring faculty* from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).  Having just returned from a semester long sabbatical, they are exhibiting recent work in the gallery at the entrance of The School of the Art Institute’s eastern most building, at the corner of Columbus and Jackson Drives.

One of the stand-out groupings of work is by Jim Trainor, a staff member of Film, Video & New Media at SAIC, who is represented by a suite of twenty-six drawings and photocopies on 8.5” x 11” pages of paper. Organized in two long rows of ten, these pieces expose Trainor’s marginalia, which consists of notes on the numbers of frames or locations of the drawings subject across the page, which he later uses to aid him in the animation process.

Jim Trainor, The Presentation Theme, 2008. Animation still.

The still’s themselves depict humanoid and animal figures, reminiscent of South American Moche illustration because of the distinct, black, linear patterning they bear. These creatures enact the mysterious, sometimes barbaric, and frequently erotic narratives of nature and the natural world, occupying a universe ruled by instinct, where emotions are elided.

Rebecca Shore, part of the faculty in Painting and Drawing, has a staggering fifteen gouaches, casein or egg tempera on paper or panel works on display. They spread forth from the entrance into the gallery in either direction, and despite their rather small format, the buzzing complimentary colors, such as a grayish green on brick red or grayish violet on butter yellow, catch the eye.

All works share the name Untitled and then bear the date of their completion, but they are bifurcated into two types; linear abstractions of triangular rows and columns and silhouettes of what may be plant illustrations, prettily embellished with all the endearing flourishes of Jugendstil design, including plump curlicues, undulating, tasseled stamens and pregnant loop-de-loops.

The solidity of Shore’s opaque water color media laid solidly over opaque water color backgrounds (with the exception of one piece, Untitled 2007, of which several are named) lend the work an illustrative, at times wall-papery feel. They are at their most charged and mesmerizing when the patterning’s asymmetry and bio-morphism sways across the page on the same sort of vibrations as her color scheme are tuned to.

Diana Guerrero- Maciá, part of the staff for Fiber and Material studies, is perhaps most familiar from various exhibitions she’s had at Tony Wright and, it’s earlier incarnation Bodybuilder & Sportsman, galleries as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art. Two of her iconic, textile banners (top image) on display are strategically located, like large magnets, on a wide wall flush to a protruding wall in the gallery, drawing in passer-bys as they walk past the gallery’s open door.

The multi-color thread exposes neat, hand stitches that anchor various felt and vinyl cut outs. The forms bright colors overlap across the layered surfaces of her banners, which are hung by a row of golden grommets to the gallery wall, reminiscent of circus or advertising banners.

Guerrero- Maciá also uses letters, which cascade across her compositions, and seem employed more for the shape of their font or capitalization, as opposed to their ability to be yoked together in any discernable word arrangement.

--Thea Liberty Nichols

*Pamela R. Barrie, Deborah Boardman, Douglas Ewart, Diana Guerrero-Maciá, Carl Ray Miller, Helen B. O'Rourke, Peter Power, Rebecca Shore, Jim Trainor, and Constance White.