amy wheeler

ART REVIEWS
Friday, March 13, 1998
LOS ANGELES TIMES
BY DAVID PAGEL

Also on view at Post Gallery is "Paintings Interested in the Ideas of Architecture and Design," a snappy seven-artist exhibition organized by painter Adam Ross. Combining an intentionally imprecise title with a smart selection of works on canvas, panel and paper, this visually focused show surveys a style. of picture-making currently on the rise in Los Angeles.

Its 13 generally crisp images straddle the division between abstraction and representation. Based on recognizable objects found in homes, stores and catalogs, or derived from views of city streets and maps of property lines, all of its works are highly stylized. Their mundane subjects serve as sly armatures for exceptionally synthetic palettes-curiously fresh mixes that range from muted, designer blends to noxious, postindustrial tones.

As a whole, the exhibition is permissive in its definition of painting. Tom Baldwin's vibrantly artificial C-prints share space with Laura Owens' square painting whose playfully ham-fisted naturalism gives it a similar comic appeal.

Stephen Metts' quickly sketched bathrooms, kitchens and dens match wits with Steven Criqui's painting of a silhouetted still life and Kevin Appel's pair of canvases that depict casually idealized shelves. Together, these three artists, works show that style and substance are in no way opposed.

Pet Sourinthone's oddly shaped cartography echoes off of Amy Wheeler's highly-schematized renditions of highly fashionable outfits. Equally spare in their simplified stylishness, these abstract pictures, like the rest of the works in Ross' show, know that paintings must be as well-designed as buildings and dresses if they expect viewers to be interested in them.

opost Gallery, 1904 E. 7th Place (213) 622-8580, through March 28. Closed Sundays through Tuesdays.

ART/TEXT   58. 1997
Mari Eastman and Amy Wheeler
Chicago Project Room, Chicago
March 22 - April 13, 1997
By Michelle Grabner

When it was my mom’s turn to host the Saturday night bridge club, she would fanatically sterilize, aromatize and accessorize the house with elegant, never-used porcelain ashtrays, newly upholstered throw pillows, Brach's candies and Burt Bacharach music. I remember being jealous of her generosity and graciousness until I realized it was nothing more than a maneuver on the suburban social ladder, a self-serving charade couched in upper-middle-class good taste.

A gregarious project hosted by Mari Eastman and Amy Wheeler, "BYOB" is an attempt to encourage sociability and hipness in Chicago's art scene while fulfilling a blatant yet admirably ambitious, self-promotional subtext. The storefront gallery, informally installed with a couch, coffee table, some lamps, chairs and an audio-video unit to create a space conducive to hanging out, was also used as a stage for specialized social activities: a potluck dinner, an opening bring-your-own-beer party, a film noir video night and music performances. Apart from these scheduled events, Eastman and Wheeler chaperoned the space during the Saturday and Sunday gallery hours, spending the time decorating and redecorating the walls with their paintings and friends' works. When visitors stopped by the gallery, Eastman and Wheeler played docent/hostess/art dealer as they attributed the work on display, plugged upcoming performances and reminisced about the success of their well-attended opening party.

Coffee, ice cream and wafer cookies served by an apron-clad David Robbins to a host of art friends and acquaintances on a Sunday afternoon comprised "BYOB's" version of an ice-cream social. With the help of Baskin Robbin's speciality cakes and some customized icing by Robbins (the unofficial spokesperson of any product that shares his surname), this event-intended to behave like an all-ages social, replete with conversation and conviviality-was unsurprisingly reminiscent of a typical art opening, including networking and superficial art chat. Ironically, this petite soiree underscored the lack of genuine fellowship fielded by many artists and art professionals who use the social as a means for self-promotion as opposed to pleasurable discourse in its own right.

A painting that spanned the height and length of the gallery's east wall, Gaylen Gerber's enormous stretched canvas was the project's lone wallflower. Standing mostly unnoticed, coated in interference blue paint, this prop was one of the few elements in "BYOB" that didn't fall prey to Eastman and Wheeler's shifting caprice. Regardless of its subtlety, this backdrop abstraction begged certain formal and conceptual questions, legitimizing in the process this project's occupation of a gallery, rather than an American Legion post or church basement.

Yet the sifting together of ever-changing art objects and seemingly unrelated social events in a gallery-turned-sitting room is not really new territory. The early days of Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York and Bliss in Pasadena, Manifesta's inaugural appearance in Rotterdam, Group Material's East Village origins and "Traffic" in Bordeaux all enacted the intersocial activities intrinsic to art making, while dissolving the traditional parameters of display. Clearly, Eastman and Wheeler's partygirl pad/art installation shares something with my mother's bridge parties. Mom's intentions may have been compromising, but I knew I could always count on leftover bridge mix the next morning. As for "BYOB's" leftovers? Perhaps, the empowerment of young artists to engage hybrids between art and life as viable models of artistic production.

Art Papers
BYOB/Mari Eastman and Amy Wheeler are at Chicago Project Room
Review
By Nicholas Frank
1997

This past spring's flurry over the White House coffee klatsches exposes a particularly problematic example of the ins and outs of any open system. At once participatory and exclusive on the basest of terms, we are left to locate ourselves either inside or outside of the system. On the level of small, private galleries, the art world is essentially a closed system that wears the face of an open system. What happens when art world participants pull themselves and their work firmly into the realm of social? More exactly, what then are the relationships between the artists and the art and the art and the viewer? Who's in, who's outside looking in, and what's left out? In the case of "BYOB/Mari Eastman and Amy Wheeler at Chicago Project Room," each element of the show negotiated its own space and weight within a balanced system.

"BYOB," described as an ongoing an open collaboration between artists Amy Wheeler, Mari Eastman and "Gaylen Gerber and other friends," echoes an open, participatory system. Presumably, anyone is welcome to become a full participant in the show simply by being there. In terms of actual artwork, only a select few of the artist's close colleagues are invited to put something in the show. Yet, if we shift the definition of an art show just slightly, as this show demands we do, we fall squarely into the realm of participatory art. It's not that we all become artists, it's that such definition become imperceptible at best, and mostly meaningless, at the very least.

The idea is basically to come in and sit down, hang out and see what happens. The artists themselves are to be there, or soon to return, having just stepped out to pick up some take-out. There are objects strewn about, to be sure; a knitted throw on the couch and a stuffed TV on top of an actual TV, both by Maria Troy, and some drawings and painting by Eastman and Wheeler, but the focus remains on what happens in the space during the time you are there. On a second visit, I had just missed one of the structured activities, an ice cream social hosted by David Robbins. Allan Kaprow would surely claim "BYOB" as a direct descendent of Happenings, but that genealogy doesn't account for the unfocused irresoluteness that makes "BYOB" so compelling. There is not only no point, but no ironic attempt at being pointless.

"BYOB"'s X-factor is Gaylen Gerber, certainly the most concise of the end-of-painting painters. Wheeler and Eastman invited him to contribute a beautifully invisible painting, Backdrop (1997), which functions as a literal backdrop to the tableau vivant of the show: constructed to the exact size of the easternmost wall installed over it, painted the same color, and then coated with a layer of interference blue, Gerber's project pushes painting at once back into the wall and out into the room, away from itself, blowing everything out of proportion, to becoming a salient observer rather than the locus of the discourse surrounding it. Rather than rendering painting impotent, however, Gerber's strategy implodes back in on itself to push through an implied back hole and into a new conception of the role of painting. Reducing Stella's maxim to "what you see is what," Gerber nevertheless restores a curious dignity to the painted surface. Wheeler even reversed the ploy at one point, leaning one of her low-key paintings up against Gerber's, sending both into a perpetual state of becoming.

What better environment could there be to play out such unselfish strategies? "BYOB" has generated plenty of ongoing, loosely formed activity around the painting. While Gerber has used this strategy before (I'm thinking of his collaboration with Joe Scanlan at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in 1992), the two results are distinct. Scanlan's objects were sculpture, but "BYOB" pushes mere presence into the realm of sculpture; viewers (better described as "visitors") become equivalent to art objects in the space, as do non-art objects (couch, TV, stereo, lamps, etc.) and activities, both planned and unplanned.

The strategy of blurring art and life has been mined successfully by such artists as Kaprow and Rirkrit Tiravanija, though they specifically set out to make art. Here, the blurring gets blurred and there is a warm couch waiting for you. Gerber's coy diversionary tactics buttress whatever happens in the space, pushing action near to becoming theater and inaction near to becoming sculpture, but without asking for a commitment from either. "BYOB"'s lack of resolution permeates its every aspect, including one's own relationship to the show. Sliding in and out of being a viewer, being an integral part of the show, or just being the show undercut the tactics of distance and importance used in most exhibitions. "BYOB"'s mutable focus redefines the language used to describe art, which is perhaps the true hallmark of innovation. What more could be asked of a small event that passes so quickly?