Artist Glenn Wexler says he can’t look at anything without imagining a screen print on it. He’s silk-screened pictures on cast cement, brushed steel, marble slabs, enlarged photos of old paintings, a variety of found objects, and on canvas too. He’s even cropped and printed images from Renaissance art on cutaway sections of tree trunks.
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The el clatters outside the windows of Wexler’s Wicker Park studio, which is full of commonplace items–a picnic basket, a gasoline can–that haven’t escaped the screen treatment either. He points to a concrete block covered with renditions of familiar Italian statuary. “Years ago people would’ve chiseled away at it. But then I thought, why not put an image directly on it? Just because I’m not sweating over it doesn’t mean it’s going to fall short of being an interesting piece.”
A native of Austin and Oak Park, Wexler was recently featured in an exhibit of work by young artists influenced by Chicago Imagist Ed Paschke. “He has a certain energy and excitement that has inspired me,” Wexler says. Yet his latest work is less jarring, more meditative, moving away from what he calls “the standards of pop culture.” Many of the works contrast religious and military icons. Sinister images–radiation warnings, jet fighters, atomic submarines–are printed on Formica in wallpaperlike grids, and end up looking more benign through repetition. He says the finished pieces appear “as if they’d been manufactured, that they were made that way on this type of material. I thought there was a strength in that idea.”
