Gwen Gerard
Gwen Gerard, a French artist who’s lived in Chicago since 1991, makes sculptures out of building materials and junk–scrap wood, metal plates, window screens, paper bags, newspapers, shredded remnants of dirty plastic–that seem to have sprung straight from the city’s construction sites and garbage-strewn vacant lots. But some of her work also contains fragile, ephemeral things–baby teeth, locks of hair, disintegrating bits of old leaves–that speak of tenderness, of a romantic sensibility not usually associated with this gritty town.
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Consider Incandescence, a small, boxlike construction that, like many in the show, hangs at eye level, suspended from the ceiling on two long wires. Behind a square piece of glass framed by narrow strips of wood Gerard has sandwiched, from front to back, an X made of two crisscrossed cables, a piece of wrinkled gray plastic attached to a delicate wood scaffolding, a small curl of hair, and finally a translucent envelope mounted on a wire screen. Having traveled through these layers we pause at the photograph inside the envelope, which shows a rural hill with a single straggly tree on the horizon and what looks like a clump of broken weeds or an uprooted tree in the foreground. Blurred by the envelope’s milky paper, the black-and-white image seems a piece of the past, a keepsake from a distant time and place.
Gerard sometimes alters her found materials to create surprising effects; things are not always what they seem in her work. The pale insides of the holes drilled at the corners of Voyage’s frames suggest the material isn’t rusted metal after all but wood painted a rust color. And though from a distance Accumulations Poussierreuses, a five-foot-square construction suspended on cables, appears to be fabricated from Cor-Ten steel, from closer up you discover it’s made from bolted-together pieces of rough-textured wood. These support a central open cage filled with what look like stacks of nicked and bent sheets of scrap metal–until you notice the familiar font of the Reader’s classified ads and realize you’re looking at wrinkled newspapers painted a rusty red. Once again we’re confronted by the sense of time passing: what was once up-to-the-minute not only ages but nearly loses its identity altogether.
