CHARLES WIESEN
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Seasoned salegoers always check maps and addresses before they leave home–who wants to arrive late and miss the good stuff? Tough Gallery is located on a dead-end stretch of Sangamon Street, in a nether zone between Greektown, River North, and Fulton Market where it’s easy to lose your bearings. Trucks and trains rumble through the area on dilapidated roads and railways whose poor condition is evidence of Chicago’s waning industrial might. Located in a high-ceilinged basement, Tough’s starkly elegant gallery space is almost chilly–an unlikely setting for Wiesen’s warm and humorous human-scale treasures.
One piece, an old hand mirror hanging with its back to the viewer, hides the word “onto,” which is painted on the wall behind. As we handle the mirror and watch the light play on its beveled glass, we’re left to wonder if the painted word is the artwork or if its mirror image is–or whether the joke is on us. Recollect is a particle-board bench with a space for “storage” that’s taken up by a plastic garment case full of torn bits of Wie- sen’s old drawings. Sifting through them feels like secretly rummaging through someone else’s closet–these scraps of the artist’s past invite us to investigate, yet the pile can’t satisfy our hunger to know what the pictures were about.
Might “shopping” be dangerous? MINE is a series of small lead disks placed around the gallery floor, each etched with the message “mine.” Viewers are left to wonder if they’re stepping on someone else’s precious property or being warned of some subterranean danger. Both notions have some metaphoric truth: Wiesen claims a kind of artistic ownership of the whole exhibit with these little lead devices, and also reminds us that our interactions with all of his objects are potentially explosive–our hands and interpretations can greatly alter this art. “Look and touch,” he offers. “But do so with care.”
