312-944-4340

Gary Justis: Reviews

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online review

Tip of the Week
Gary Justis

Steven Wirth

There is an awkward moment at the top of a roller coaster when, after the slow, panic-filled ascension towards the inevitable drop into the unknown, everything vanishes and your awareness of the structure is temporarily disabled as you are thrust out into the sky. And then it happens: you tip over the edge and the moment is lost forever. Such perhaps is the present work of artist Gary Justis. Building upon a visual language he has developed for well over two decades, the sculptures, drawings and multimedia work on display at Alfedena Gallery are very much about formalizing time and place into an alternative version of those realities that escapes the often fleeting nature of formlessness. The works featured in "Plush" offer a gentle, impressionistic interpretation of Justis' musings on childhood experiences, yet is far from sentimental due to a masterful balancing act between the decidedly quirky and the decidedly sincere. Thus having chiseled away at the inner workings of memory, "Plush" offers a stunning glimpse at what famed psychologist Julian Jaynes refers to as the "insubstantial country of the mind!"

Gary Justis shows at Alfedena Gallery, 434 West Ontario, (312)944-4340, through October 6.

(2007-09-18)

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online review

Plush! Chicago's Long Time Premier Sculptor Lights It Up Yet Again!

posted by The Shark on September 13, 2007 05:24 AM

The Plush works are extensions of drawn forms influenced to a great extent by cartoon imagery. The large sculptures are crafted from various flat forms of shaped and fitted wood understructures, the proto-objects start as large cut-outs, then come to life when fabric and underlying padding is applied, suggesting a hyper-synthetic taxidermy.

Lets not mince words. The Shark thinks Gary Justis has created the most important body of 3d work to be found here in Chicago over the course of the last two decades. What has happened, what is wrong with the Museum Of Contemporary Art -that rather than this brilliant, sustained, exploration of modernist formality, conflated with and colliding against the psychological, philosophical and sociological, in a context loaded with gravitas, creating a sensibility of almost socratic like questioning, an ideational sense of object, of approaching 'thinglyness', of weight, that might have given Plato himself pause, cause to question his idea/idealism concerning the nature of reality, of the origin of 'things', our perception of the ethical object-....why are we not celebrating these things here in Chicago at the MCA's 40th year Aquisition Celebration as opposed to say, the work of artists who made their reputations pandering to and 'shocking' the Wilmette crowd of art maven wannabes with cibachromes of themselves urinating on...themselves! or sucking on their toes...or having moronic canned tomato fights at Gallery 400 (where else?), or making really just awful, unskilled, generic, innocuous wallpaper like pattern painting..

Why? I happen to think its a pretty god-damned good question. One that everyone of us should be asking.

Community Machine Gun by Gary Justis, 2007, aluminum, fabric, wood superstructure, image projection unit, 51 H x 84 L x 68 W (inches)

 

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