Pelican Reviews

Pelican - AustralasiaCD
Originally Posted on Panel-House: November 2003

With, “Australasia”, the Chicagoan instrumental quartet known as Pelican build upon the monolithic sound of their untitled debut. "Nightendday" opens the disc with an anthemic wall of low-tuned guitar chords and pounding percussion; a sound that evokes the image of some unnamed lethargic beast crossing a primitive landscape in the twilight of its genesis. This is quite a feat for a band that has chosen a stripped down arrangement of two guitars, a bass and a drum kit rather than taking part in the orchestral indulgences that have become a trademark of the cinematic/sound-scape rock clique. Whereas many of these problematically dubbed “post-rock” bands play at being the soundtrack to a civilization in decline, Pelican’s mixture of huge guitars, powerful rhythms, and subtle shifts in time and melody is both triumphant and mysterious; the theme for landmasses in development.

“Drought” begins with a low rumble of arcane feedback that is quickly flattened by the hypnotic weight of Pelican’s deliberate gait. The power is in the slow precise pacing, reminiscent of the song “Mammoth” from their debut cd (See review: "Pelican - Untitled CD EP" 4/29/03). However, “Drought” makes a deeper exploration of the sonic terrain moving between quicker rolling, metallic passages and slower double-bass driven breakdowns.

The vague doom of “Drought” then subsides for the hopeful and yearning tone of “Angel Tears”. This piece is melodic with a tinge of the melancholic but the delivery is marked with the same power and precision of the previous tracks. At 10:59 this is one of the longer pieces on the disc and through a manipulation of nuance that mimics the shifting of tectonic plates, Pelican slowly leads us back to darker waters.

The greatest surprise on the album is the the untitled fifth track. Layers of acoustic guitars plaintively pluck a progression that is somehow eery yet inviting. What sounds like a theremin laces a spacey melody over the top and an arrangement of chordal baritone brass (most likely trombones and tubas) is introduced, filling the lower registers with a dreamy warmth.

As a unified work this cd is a triumph and the logical progression from their debut. They explore some new ground while staying true to the blueprint of cinematic heaviness that fostered Pelican’s inception.

Pelican - Untitled CD EP
Originally Posted on Panel-House: April 2003

Recently signed to Hydrahead Industries, Chicago’s instrumental doomcore quartet, Pelican, are quickly gaining some well deserved attention. This four song demo cd has just been re-released on Hydrahead without any alterations. They weren’t necessary; a testament to the poise and proficiency with which Pelican executed the composing and performing of these four songs. Pelican’s sound is big, rich and lush. The guitars (tuned down to B) are thick and heavy but not wanting in clarity. The 5 string bass work is tasteful, tight, and never tries to assert itself over the vision of the music as a whole. The drumming is equally tight and as anyone who has seen Pelican live will tell you, is played on an enormous kit with two bass drums and a healthy array of cymbals. The double bass never gets out of hand and is used as an intensity heightening effect rather than a tool for gratuitous bombardment.
"Pulse", the opening track, invites the listener in with a triumphant cadence that gradually builds as the ornamental cymbal crashes build into a slow, deliberate, driving rhythm. The subtle dynamics and fanfare-like melody bring to mind Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s, "The Gathering Storm", but Pelican gets to the point much quicker. As soon as "Pulse" has lured the listener in, "Mammoth" encases them in a low-tuned avalanche of thunderous behemoth footsteps. They stick with a formula similar to the opening piece, manipulating the nuances of one or two repetitious themes, but this time with much more abrasion and lead thick palm muting from the two guitarists. Delayed harmonics from Trevor de Brauw add a touch of the ethereal but never too much, saving the piece from becoming spacey or adding too much air to Pelican’s intentionally dense sound.

We are then introduced with a short burst of sonorous feedback to "Forecast For Today", which continues much in the same vein of the drudging, "Mammoth", but with a slight increase in meter and dynamic intensity. The bass and drums guide the group through the song’s changes with metronome efficiency. After four and a half minutes of building, varying, and augmenting three distinct themes, the beat drops out and the guitarists introduce a more open and haunting melody. The drums and bass steadily build their way back in as the guitar parts continue searching for new levels of intensity. Pelican never let their crescendos get too manic and this one soon reaches its climax as the rhythm breaks down into a hard, crashing, moderate tempo.

The disc closes with the nearly thirteen minute long epic, "The Woods". The piece opens with some lighter and creepier guitar interplay. Slight variations in kick drum placement enhance the rhythmically shifting guitars to create a disturbing setting. It doesn’t take long for crashing percussion and heavy guitars to take over and begin flirting with refinement and madness as stirring melodies and dramatic dynamics take turns intriguing the listener. After a series of rising and falling action, a final haunting theme is introduced. The beat stomps along in Pelican’s usual pounding yet paced manner, as a tasteful and melodically chilling guitar solo creeps in, takes over, and then disappears into the burgeoning net of distortion and noise. The guitar melodies are overcome by feedback and begin to drop out leaving the bass and drums to finish and fade. During the past few months Pelican have been closing most of their shows with "The Woods", which as hard as it may be to believe for those who have only heard the recording, is even more intense live.

Written by Jonathan Glover
NOTE: Found more music materials, Jonathan Glover was my roommate in 2003 and is now finishing his Masters at UCF Orlando. Jon is also the main musician behind Ars Phoenix.

Editorial: The Great Catamite

Editorial: The Great Catamite
Originally Posted on Panel-House: October 2004

I do not recall how the discussion that lead to the argument came up but somewhere in the middle of a visit to my father over a summer years ago the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe arose. I was fifteen at the time and vaguely familiar with art from frequenting Washington DC's free museums while my father was at work during my visits since my parent's separation. I had read that the funding for the NEA was going down and that all it had cost at that time in the early 1990s was .64 cents a year per person to fund and it was going down and I was concerned. My father felt that not only was it correct to lower the funding of the NEA but he felt he knew why and that reason was Mapplethorpe. At the time I was not familiar with any of Mapplethorpe's work nor the 1989 controversy so it was a new name to me.

My father verbally described the images to me and not only objected to their content but the fact the exhibition was funded by federal dollars. My father's verbal descriptions were not enough because I still weakly argued for their funding and right to exist regardless of content so we sped to a nearby Border's Bookstore. My father stormed to the photography section with me in tow and pulled a massive Mapplethorpe monograph off of the shelf and flipped it open saying "Just look at this".

He was pointing at a picture of a flower.

Not only was it a flower but it was a photograph that was so exquisite, so well done, that I thought maybe he was wrong with the name of the artist who took the image. But after being a bit flustered my father found the correct "offensive" image, of a man sticking a whip up his ass which I didn't find offensive. It also made arguing a blanket case for Mapplethorpe's obscenity tougher for him because that flower was amazing. At fifteen I had joined the photo club in high school and had some knowledge about developing and shooting but I was terrible at it, I quit the following year for the drama club which I was slightly better at, still I knew enough to know that was a phenomenal photograph technically.

I don't recall how the argument ended, it was diffused by this image of a flower and drifted to another discussion or arguement. That arguement and image were an important point for me. Though I gave up on photography it did start in me a more pointed interest in art and now that I think back to it in our current political time it illuminates other things for me.

There are things you don't know how to explain but you just know what you know about it. For however much Mapplethorpe has been engraved into the consiousness of art education and the post-1989 NEA situation; Corcoran Gallery shutting the show down, the protests, the ensuing problems in Cincinnati, etc. that image of those flowers somehow look fresh again to me. As an image that quelled an argument and an image I returned to recently because it reminds me of the brief drop in volume in right wing rhetoric my father experienced.

Some things do not change. When I was fifteen my close friends (including Jon Glover who does music reviews for panel-house) had a small zine called "Bullet" which we distributed amongst like-minded cohorts writing about music, poetry, and how much our high school infringed on our freedom of speech and expression. After my father and I argued I decided to write a page in "Bullet" about the NEA. Granted none of us on the staff could vote yet but all of us found it important to our concerns.

Given that we are in the mess of it this month I have kind of felt a bit paralyzed as far as what to say about art and finding some form of political relevance in shows and how to review it/discuss it/etc. That is not to say that the content of current shows is lacking, though of course there could be more, it is this aura of defeat or cynicism that sets in as you potentially face another four years of...well...this kind of logic that is debilitating.

In all honesty I do not know what that anecdote should mean to anyone, but it has made me realize the foundation for most of my art education through fine art, historical, and critical. It gets back to the work at hand, in this case an image that can cut through the jargon of Buchanan's culture war and allow for a pause, a check in my father's case - and for me a witness to the power of something so simple over searching for obsenity.

Written by Terence Hannum

NOTE: Sorry to return to that horrid time of almost hope before the past presidential election. Ugh, is it 2008 yet?

Rufus Wainwright Concert

Rufus Wainwright Concert
Originally Posted on panel-House: December 2003

There were never collected so many fourteen-year-olds, soccer mom chaperones and comfortable, middle-aged gay couples at what could have passed for a drag show as Rufus Wainwright’s 2002 performance at the Vic in Chicago, Illinois. Save for the performer wearing a shabby white undershirt with ratty jeans and sporting shoulder-length, unkempt hair rather than actually being dolled-up, all the motifs of the male transvestite saloon singer’s showcase were present: the piano; the cigarettes; the copious and copulatory pontifications meandering among the songs; the playfully hostile relationship to the audience; bawdy, blue and racially solidaristic humor; and desultory delusions of grandeur. It was libratory to see a niche form of performance, usually sequestered into small clubs for a pre-initiated subculture, writ rich and ribald onto a larger audience. The cumulative affect flew in the face of mass culture’s misplaced cooptation of drag as either the misogynist amusement of seeing a male movie icon in high heels or a pop-diva’s misanthropic sanitization of fringe raunchiness. In this performance, Wainwright located the real power of a lone representative of a disaffected minority guising as premier emissary of popular song. The fantasy of drag is that, via the adulation of a roomful of people, you just might belong. For a New York minute, the performer binds his adherents, through exposing hyperbolically fey tendencies and sappy sentimentality, in the space of a song wherein your body and soul’s most intimate desires need not be ostracized.

Importantly, Wainwright’s vamping was not wrapped up in the typical covers of the American songbook but his own potent songcraft. Unfortunately, the intimacy of his personal lyrics and deeply idiosyncratic music became too ensconced in the performer’s need for acceptance to truly provide a sustained uplift. As the show progressed, Wainwright snapped too much at his audience about, “How hard I am trying to be a pop star,” and referenced too often and too sycophantically his second album, “on sale in the lobby.” At most desperate, he incongruously removed his ill-fitting tee to flay his pale torso like a keyed-up rock-star to his own music, which though magical, lyrical and technically proficient, frankly, doesn’t exactly rock. Wainwright suggested that he, and by extension his audience, was too musically out-of-step, far too idiosyncratic and, ultimately, too gay to truly fit in anywhere. At it’s nadir, Wainwright proffered an ungenerous performer just haughty enough to know his talent but too insecure to surrender to song and share his genius.

Brief life rafts from this unfortunate undertow existed in the performance though. They were located in the moments where, in spite of himself, Wainwright unselfconsciously made his music. As he expertly yet passionately completed a long and complicated passage on the baby grand or hit a particularly soulful note, the audience was allowed fleeting rapture. Most memorable was a nearly a cappella cover Hallelujah. Standing with his arms barely away form his side, supine and hyper-extended, at center stage, Wainwright gently coaxed Leonard Cohen’s lament for redemption into a hypnotic crescendo, “Hall-el-lu-oo-oo-ah-oo-oo-ah-jah.”

In virtuoso moments of singing like this, what suppliants a celebrity’s brattiness is the artist’s potency. Wainwright is an Olympic singer. Much like the grandeur of opera is the sheer athleticism of a well-performed aria, Wainwright is capable of the type of Herculean sound that demands attention. Far from being just a prodigiously talented performer, however, Wainwright is also a masterful songwriter. His body becomes a resonator of his song. For a time, the song reverberates around his neurosis, needs, observations, organs and bones. Then the song is projected; the song becomes art. It flows out, shakes the room and magnetizes the atmosphere to confront the audience.

For some, the song will enter as though you were a vessel, touches your insides and wrings all moisture out through the eyes. For others, it will hover in your space, define your body’s boundaries and present itself as an object at which to wonder. In this moment, the theatrical fourth wall is permeable and this object and your self are mutually colluded, understood and redefined. The drama allows you to connect to something far greater than your lone body’s existence or that ditty’s sole duration. In this instant are parts of your make-up, the piece’s color, a glimpse of the artist’s meaning and the legitimacy of other viewers’ perceptions. The moment is fleeting, however, for at the same time, the sound waves have passed by you. Again your own entity, your body’s very existence has been validated during the exchange. You are both habitually present and infinitely just. Drag is a version of this power of performance as a conduit for a certain politic.

That agenda was not nearly so present at Wainwright’s return engagement to the Vic last night, but it had been replaced by an even more consummate artist capable of investing the evening with countless moments of transcendence cum presence. Now well-coifed and donned in a sharp button-up and multi-colored pants, Wainwright performed a rigid set list of songs almost entirely from his latest album with concentrated, heartfelt precision. He wore each song from his back catalogue with an easy familiarity of a well-loved garment. Not-yet-released tunes were eagerly shared with a parent’s delight. The rehearsed, between-song prattle undercut the subversive punch of his prior performance, but, paradoxically, Wainwright’s ability to act like a self-assured, professional pop star superceded the handicap of needing to be such a celebrity. As a fanatic shouted, “You’re a musical god!” from the audience, Wainwright, chagrinned and amused, replied with the brand of humility that co-arises with true confidence, “I’ll never live that one down.” What Wainwright became on stage was an artist completely in sync with his craft well poised to share it with his audience, not a cloying personality. His music’s performance allowed the songs enough authority to blossom without being uprooted by a performer’s ego or an audience’s rapaciousness.

The key visage of the event came, like the moment described above, about halfway through the show. Leaving the piano, Wainwright again comes to center stage and begins to sing Oh, What a World. Filled with histrionics, complex harmonics and the ludicrously flamboyant inclusion of the gaudy and repetitive theme form Ravel’s Bolero as it’s centerpiece, the song is perhaps Wainwright’s most indulgent. If there was any hesitation that his music was too ensconced in a passé euro-western classical training to be populist however, it was not in evidenced as he bounced, chuckled and gesticulated behind the microphone. Although the lyrics cant feeling unloved in a hectic world, they finally, boisterously boast, “but I think I’m doing fine.” The song, curious and queer to a spectrum of popular music that more readily embraces rhythmic traditions through hip-hop or rock-n-roll, willfully exists whether or not it is understood. I doubt, however, anyone in attendance didn’t get it. For that moment, we had art’s treasured simultaneity of being and belonging. As Wainwright lauds his arms aloft to sing, “Life is...,” we all knew, as he belts out the final triumphant note, we were, “...beau-ti-fuuulll!”

--

Written by Jeff M. Ward

NOTE: Occasionally the writers for Panel-House would come to me with excellent musings on things musical, I certainly miss Jeff's insights as he finishes his time in the CORE Program.

I Need Something for Over My Sofa | Monique Meloche Gallery

I need something for over my sofa | Monique Meloche Gallery
Originally Posted on Panel-House: December 2003

I once read that whatever art work that resides above one’s bed represents the summation of that person’s psyche. As such, that same image goes on to play a significant role in the dreams of the sleeper(s), a kind of subtler approach to Salvador Dali’s experiment in painting his bedroom in vivid oranges and pinks within which he drifted off with the lights on. This self-induced performance dream art, as a study of the unconscious, inevitably reveals a slighter, yet equally complex condition. How often do we actually pay attention to the art on the walls of our home, especially they are not the center of attention? And should we feel guilty about this? Or at least a wee bit sentimental?

Monique Meloche’s current foray into design and art, I need something for over my sofa., starts, and ends, with not art for the bedroom but art for that social hub of any respectable home - the living room. But here, as it was made quite clear, to sit is to eer. Displayed is artwork by seven artist reside above six seperate reclining apparatuses. Forcing the viewer to admire with physical and psychological obstacles, this foray into obviated curatorial decision making is so disturbing it actually works. The sunken gallery itself serves as a sort of abbreviated warehouse reminiscent of those exposes of Architectural Digest-type spreads of wealthy collectors homes regaled in stressed floral arraignments, ostentatious modern furniture and cramped contemporary art.

I could not help feel this overwhelming sense of yearn here, being a part of the reason this exhibition is worth visiting. Is this a desperate attempt to simply sell art by the gallery in a Merchandise Mart sort of way (with a nod to the gift buying season)? Or is this a antiquated postmodern slight of hand environment with subliminal underpinnings aimed at a narrative of aesthetic nihilism? Or neither? Regardless, standing and staring is the way to go here - believe you me.

Some of the works of art (the hanging kind that is) are really quite strong, but expectant. Laura Letinsky still-life photography, Robert Davis & Michael Langlois paintings and Carla Aracho’s blunt non-color field come to mind. But the point here is the combination of the two. Unfortunately, shoved together side by side with the inevitable peripheral obstructions, the experience becomes rather unnerving. In a perfect world each combination would exist unto it’s own, but alas, how many times has that thought been uttered?

The furniture, from a bright pink Philippe Starck piece that looked like it could have been pulled out of Target, to an old Victorian love seat that might have been featured on an episode of Antiques Roadshow - looked as uncomfortable to sit in as it did being there in the first place. All that was missing was a suspended gilded Italian chandelier (conveniently located one store east at Casati Furniture, an Italian importer of over priced home furnishings, that also provided one of the couches for the exhibition, and possibly one of the most fascinating “galleries” in the West Loop). A spied trixie and dudetrixie didn’t seem to mind too much though. It sounded like bells going off as they perused the price list and sipped their white wine. Ah, decisions.

Neither entity here, the furniture or the art, could have worked in this exhibition successfully without the other. A sad state of affairs perhaps, but alas, a telling trope on increasingly homogenous fine art/fine fashion amalgamations indelibly evident in today’s art world. One existing within the others confines, becoming ultimately nothing more than just a nail-hanger for the other, might sum up this disposition in short. Sort out the details yourself.

Is this an opportunity to display show pieces for the accommodating home, the occasional visitor who might object if the television gets turned on during the cocktails or the lambasted unconscious? Perhaps the next exhibition in the series, curated by Douglas Levine from January 9th to 24th, will substitute the settees with exotic televisions - and turn them on. At any rate, the soul of the painting above my own couch, er futon, has gained a more significant role in my household. The art above my bed, umm, other futon, has duly been removed and replaced by nothing.


Written by Britton Bertran

Found a small ad

Here is an ad Eric Lebofsky made for Panel-House for a space in regulator

Raid in Chicago | The Pond, Standard & 1/Quarterly

Raid in Chicago |
The Pond Project, Standard, and 1/Quarterly
Featuring: Robert Mellor, Phillippe Hurteau, Nicole Farrand, Alison Smith, Jane Callister, Eric Beltz, Dimitri Kozyrev, Roland Reiss, Brian Ruppel, Liat Yossifer, Habib Kheradyar, Sherin Guirguis, Susan Cooper, Stephen Heer, Mela M., & Max Prisneill
Originally posted on panel-House: November 2003

Raid Projects is a loosely framed collective out of Los Angeles centered on Max Presneill. Presneill has been importing and exporting shows and artists in and out of LA, some of the artists featured in this Wicker Park dispersion are from France and other countries who had stayed in Raid’s residency program and now has arranged a Chicago exchange. The trade between galleries begins here with LA in Chicago at three galleries spread out across a few blocks in Wicker Park and will shift in January with Chicago artists in LA curated through Standard, The Pond, and 1/Quarterly. Importing and Exporting are an important concept between these spaces because it centers on the unique experience of this show in Chicago. When Standard, The Pond, and 1/Quarterly bring work to LA it will be contained in the large Brewery Complex but the spread-out experience of separate galleries is one endemic to the Chicago art experience. “Raid in Chicago” in fact raises the awareness of the experience.

Travelling through the few blocks between spaces has become a commonality but when the spaces come together for more than their individual exhibitions it makes the experience more intentional to try and visit all three. The trip becomes, itself, part of the exhibition. Sure Raid has compiled an interesting catalogue of artists that will be discussed below but one cannot ignore the intentionally episodic exhibitions based around this import.

At The Pond, Susan Logoreci’s “Untitled” colored pencil rendition of an aerial view of a strip mall parking lot where the buildings become squared off loosing their shape, perhaps becoming pixilated, yet you can recognize the building flattening itself out in the negative space of the paper. Dimitri Kozyrev, on the other hand, renders the dynamism of travel from an “8 Hour Drive” in more drastic attempt at combining speed and horizon. Kozyrev, using oil and acrylic plus (I’m assuming) some tape (which definitely has a pronounced presence from many of these artists), for the delicate straight lines in this painting creating multiple planes for the space to unfold where semi-recognizable forms emerge. This emergence in Kozyrev’s painting is comparable to a drive where the outside is witnessed only in segments of small glances but the road that is focussed on forms the geometry of the space. Obscuring form and planar recognition appears to be the goal of Habib Kheradyar’s “Untitled (Black & Blue) where the parallel armatures reverse direction from each other. One segment of the armature making a ‘V’ shape by being higher on the left and right ends of the line and converging at a low point in the center of the top edge of the panel and the other making more of an ‘A’ shape with their peaks in the center of the panel and their ends lower along the bottom edge of the panel. Kheradyar stretches a fabric over this armature, one side blue and the other black, in a diptych like relationship.

Working northward from The Pond Project in the middle of the trip at Standard, it is easy to forget that there are only five paintings in the gallery. Roland Reiss has a small tactile acrylic on canvas painting titled “Remax/Coto De Caza” and the small gray, white and orange house-like structure buried beneath mounds of pea soup paint swathed around it in orderly segments reminiscent of Tom Scheibitz. In “Long island, CA” Susan Logoreci again delivers another aerial view of commercial space, this time in gouache of a shipyard holding to the cubed/pixel-like technique which here comes to her aid with all those shipment containers for big rigs. Nicole Ferrand’s “Proximity” is a large blend of smooth alligator skin texture and clever circling with a green close to the color of the ground in this oil painting. Ferrand’s piece takes some time to gather together the elements inside of it with its subtle color variations.

Finishing this northbound trip through the Jewel-Osco parking lot up Milwaukee to the 1/Quarterly Space on the third floor looking over the street. Having the largest space, 1/Quarterly has been able to have the most work, eight artists and 11 pieces to be exact, compared to Standard’s five and The Pond’s eight pieces. Roland Reiss again shows up with his piece “Remax” and next to it is Jane Callister who has had one small psychedelic drippy acrylic painting in each space. The “Untitled” oil painting by Liat Yossifor is one in a series of fifteen depicting Israeli female soldiers painted completely in thick white brush strokes. It’s texture gives the Yossifor’s painting a dimensionality requiring a panoramic walk around to catch the way the light hits it. The monumentality of Yossifor’s fifteen painting project sounds overwhelming, imposing in fact, if they are all blenched of color and contain this much physical involvement.

This cluster of galleries within a few blocks, easily accessed by foot, banded together to import RAID from LA, set up this trek and will, in a few months, send a blend of Chicago art westward curated by each gallery.

Written by Terence Hannum

NOTE: The Pond and Standard closed their doors a year or so afer this exhibition. 1/Quarterly kept their open a bit longer thoug now, according to their website they are a virtual exhibition space.

And Then They Were Upon Him | Robyn O'Neill | Bodybuilder and Sportsman

Robyn O’Neill | “And Then They Were Upon Him” | Bodybuilder and Sportsman
Originally Posted on Panel-House: April 2004

Robyn O'Neil's drawings are sparse mid-winter forests occupied by middle-aged men in sweat-suits. Most of them are less than a square foot, but range up to nearly 6'x5'. The mountains, cliffs, and valleys are carved out from the snow by their shadows; evoking the bleak and threatening side of harsh climates and remote areas. Within this environment is the main character of O'Neil's series: the overweight white male in a black sweat-suit, completely unfit for the outdoors.

He operates in three ways. He is often found contemplating, such as in “A Prairie Falcon and a Snowy Plover”, where he staring at two dead birds lying in the snow in an open field. Or he is doing a form of calisthenics, as in “He Ends a Struggle with Difficulties”, where he has both hand outstretched holding a branch as if it where an exercise weight. Lastly, he is a group member participating in the ancient ritual of stoning, as in the title piece, “And Then They Were Upon Him”. Yet, there are group of drawings without the man; simply of a bison, caribou, or even a dead bird ceremoniously surrounded by nearly dead trees, as in “Seldom Seen, Solitary, and Fallen”.

O'Neil's work is dependent upon narrative. She provides a scene where something has or will take place, and gives it a title that encourages the viewer to imagine a greater story in which the subjects are characters. It is this narrative technique that allows these men to inhabit these treacherous environments with a sense of credibility. These images are anything but absurd, these men belong here, as they might belong anywhere else.

It's oversimplifying to interpret these images as another lampoon on the fat, white man who is finally getting what he deserves for destroying our environment. O'Neil's drawings are more focused on notions of humankind's relationship with nature, rituals, and evolution. She is plainly showing how strange it is to see a human in a natural environment. Humans have always sheltered themselves from nature in order to survive. Our culture is on course, as survival has become a given, towards the goals of comfort and convenience. It is through this evolutionary process that humans have shed ancient instincts, rituals, and ceremonies that arguably come from nature, as “Seldom Seen, Solitary, and Fallen” implies. It is within these rituals and ceremonies that wisdom resides, the very basic understanding of who we are as humans and how we understand our relationship to reality. Here, our main character is encountering what reality he has always lived in, and yet isolated himself from. The evolutionary cycle, while it should have made him better suited for this environment, has left him completely inept for survival. We live in a volatile environment (naturally, politically, spiritually, etc.) that we have lost the ability to relate to. This is what the man is realizing, as his calisthenics seem more like attempts at recovering rituals he's long forgotten. These drawings stand not as a critique or attack, but a mournful tribute to what we've lost. And this is why the drawings of only animals in their landscape, as in “Portrait of a Bison”, are so strikingly dignified.

Written by Rowley Kennerk who at the time had just moved to Chicago to attend SAIC for an MA in Art History.