To London from Chicago, with great love
7th –23rd July, 2006
i-cabin, London, UK

The cramped cubicles known as i-cabin are host to this recent group show, which
includes the work of forty artists from Chicago. Situated in northeast London
in the Clarendon buildings, i-cabin is one of the few—if not the only—awkward,
site-specific gallery spaces in London. Appropriately, this show is the first
half of an arranged gallery exchange with Chicago-based artLedge, whose project
space consists of a ledge approximately five by ten feet in size, caught between
a railing, an angled wall, and a spiral staircase in a Chicago apartment.
i-cabin artists, including gallery organizers Juliette Blightman and Sebastian
Craig, will be installing a show in Chicago in August; for the London portion
of the exchange, artLedge organizers Brandon Alvendia and Caleb Lyons travelled
to London with most of the work for the show packaged into suitcases. A few of
the pieces were completed, per the instructions of the respective artists, upon
arrival in the UK. These were the only parameters artLedge set for the show—that
work be small, lightweight, and easily transported by luggage. Despite the
somewhat sentimental title of the show, it is a deliberately messy, careless
proliferation of work. "No work to be attached to the walls"—this was i-cabin's
rule for their first year of exhibitions. In response, the artLedge show (which
marks the eighteenth month of i-cabin's existence) gluts the walls with hanging
work, most of which is not framed. Amanda Ross-Ho's Irreconcilable
Indifferences, which consists of dozens of xeroxed images affixed with hot pink
tape to the walls throughout the gallery's two rooms, effectually destroys the
walls and directs the focus towards the more sculptural pieces. The single wall
that has escaped her xeroxes is covered instead by Ben Foch's plywood-patterned
contact paper, upon which he has written the words "I believe I can fly" in
silver ink, rising vertically with the pattern of the grain. The wall that the
paper covers is itself constructed out of plywood, but has been painted white.
Hanging over the papered wall are five works on paper by Nicholas Chaffin:
Norman Rockwell paintings ripped out of a magazine, whose characters Chaffin
has delicately and tenderly rendered nude with acrylic paint. This curatorial
decision—and in fact the entire show—seems to ask: Is it possible to reduce a
thing by adding to it? Can what is lost be recovered?
       The physicality of To London from Chicago—artwork, curation, and exhibition
space together—responds to the commodification of the art world and to the
slick, attractively hung exhibitions ubiquitous in contemporary galleries. The
excessive and haphazard curation of the show, as well as many of the individual
pieces, also critically address American culture, patriotism, and the way in
which Americans are viewed by other nations. The opening of the show fell on
July 7th: intentionally just three days from the date Americans celebrate their
independence from the British empire (and, unintentionally, the one-year
anniversary of the London public transport bombings). The overwhelming
temperature of the criticism is light-hearted, self-abasing, and ironic; though
Brad Farwell's wall-size inkjet print of an oversized water balloon descending
on downtown Chicago addresses the threat of terrorism, it does so in a
tongue-in-cheek way, in order to respond to the media-induced paranoia plaguing
the United States. For Enduring Independence (4th of July), Kevin Jennings
exploded an M-80 firecracker in clay, created a mold, and cast the "explosion"
in plaster; the casting sits on a suitcase-turned-pedestal and is flanked by
tacky mass-produced frames painted with the stars and stripes, containing
digital photographs of fireworks. Sze Lin Pang's The Barbarians Are Coming is a
set of two t-shirts (given to i-cabin organizers and worn the night of the
opening) emblazoned with the iron-on epithet "barbarian" in block letters. The
humour, the silliness, the intentionally amateurish and sloppy look of the show
create a palpable sense of vulnerability within the i-cabin space—a sense
redoubled when considering the control given up by the Chicago artists in
sending singular representations of their work to be seen by an anonymous
audience. The overwhelming effect is that of exposure, of revelation by way of
exaggeration: exposing humility beneath brashness, care beneath abandon,
sincerity beneath frivolity.