Mickey Gallery:

Five Years of Experimentation

Mickey, Chicago, July 14–September 10, 2023

 

by Michel Ségard

This gallery is new to this writer but has intrigued me since I heard of it. It is a gallery for emerging artists of a certain style. Its architecture has a Manhattan ambiance that I found a little odd for Chicago—extremely minimalist with small works widely spaced and unlabeled on stark white walls. The Gallery is housed in a renovated, modest sized, one-story commercial building in an (as yet) undeveloped commercial street.

Mickey shows mostly young artists who are still developing their style. This show, “A Summer Group Exhibition,” features artists that have shown at Mickey in the past five years as well as invited artists. It includes works by Marcel Alcalá, Rachel Bos, Michael Garland Clifford, Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire, Michelle Grabner, Paul Heyer, Leonardo Kaplan, Michael Madrigali, Vanessa Maltese, Zach Meisner, Ryan Nault, Emma Pryde, Emma Robbins, Nick Schutzenhofer, Chloe Seibert, Joe W. Speier, Amy Stober, Neal Vandenbergh, and Kevin Weil.

Some of the work appears to be conceptually and/or technically unresolved. Closer inspection suggests that the “unfinished” character is often part of its style—a self-conscious nod to outsider art and a repudiation of the highly polished output of many high-priced art superstars. This strategy doesn’t always succeed—some of the work just looks slap-dash or sloppy and, therefore, insincere to the eyes of a more mature or uninitiated viewer. But, a younger, hip audience might be attracted to the seeming rebelliousness of that approach and might be unaware that it could be a marketing ploy.

That is not to say that the work at Mickey is necessarily sub-par. Marcel Alcalá’s Club Q is a crudely painted homage to the Colorado Springs LGBTQ nightclub where five patrons were killed in a hate crime mass shooting in 2022. Alcalá approximates the club’s logo as depicted in its road sign. The hurried and “casual” manner in which the piece is painted suggests an emotional turmoil going on in the artist’s mind over the event—something he could not endure for the time it would have taken to do a more precise rendering. The concept was set down; grieving done; don’t dwell on what you can’t change.

Across the room is a small painting by the late Michael Garland Clifford titled OJ Goes to Disney from 2015, the year before his death. The piece, all in blacks, grays, and beiges, depicts a four-fingered glove, very crudely rendered with a top and bottom border that is a not-quite Greek key motif. This motif appears in many of his paintings—all done in a casual, child-like style, and most having some allusion to death. Sadly, OJ Goes to Disney is not his best work. It would have been more dramatic to include his piece Michael Was Present, done the same year. That piece indirectly foretells his untimely death at the age of 27 and, as such, is in the company of works like Larry Stanton’s 1984 drawing Untitled (Hospital Drawing) [I’m Going to Make It] that was included in the ARTAIDSAMERICA Chicago show held in March of 2017. (See “ArtAIDS American Chicago: The Anguish of Remembering,” New Art Examiner, Volume 31, Number 5, May/June 2017, pages 26.)

History rears its head again in the piece by Paul Heyer from 2022 titled 01203. At first glance, it recalls the early paintings of Christopher Wool with its silver metallic-looking background and an image rendered mostly with black paint. A closer look reveals that Heyer’s work is nothing like Wool’s. First, the background is not metal but a glittery silver lamé fabric. The “image,” the paths of a pair of butterflies collaged onto the painting, suggests the persistence of nature in an urban environment. Ultimately, the butterflies bring color and life into an environment that is uniformly gray.

 

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(Left) Paul Heyer, 01203, 2022. Oil and acrylic on silver lamé.(Right) Neal Vandenbergh, Mickey, 2023. Graphite, pastel, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper on aluminum panel. Photos: Mickey Gallery.

 

Neal Vandenbergh gives us an entirely different view of nature. His portrait, Mickey, includes a cobra’s head inserted over the forehead of the subject (presumably the gallery owner). The cobra head—representing the goddess Wadje—adorned the headdresses of Egyptian pharaohs. Rendered in graphite, pastel, colored pencil, and acrylic on paper, the piece has a very soft focus. Mostly muted greens and blues with some beige, the eyes of the cobra and the subject are depicted with warmer tones of orange and red so that they stand out. Is Vandenbergh commenting about the role of a gallery dealer in the lives of artists?

A piece that has overt religious symbolism is Emma Pryde’s Morning Star. This acrylic and pencil drawing on paper at first seems derivative of Marc Chagall’s paintings with floating bodies and pastel shades and, because of the wavy form of the figure, of Munch’s The Scream. But this is actually a crucifix—a crucifix of an androgynous “Christ” with cross-shaped stigmata. There are two locks and keys floating in the swirling universe that is the background. One lock is suspended from a beaded “chain” (a rosary?) while the other, winged and heart-shaped, seems to pair with a heart-shaped key hovering above it. Clearly, this image is meant to provoke reflection on the meaning and social effect of Christianity. I wish it had been executed more carefully. To my eye, the casual style diminishes the seriousness of its intellectual content.

 

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(Left) Emma Pryde, Morning Star, 2023. Acrylic and pencil on paper. (Right) Chloe Seibert, Lovers, 2023. Gouache on board. Photos: Mickey Gallery.

 

Next to Morning Star is a piece by Chloe Seilbert ­titled Lovers. It consists of two images, one above the other, of two creatures engaged in a passionate embrace. In the lower image, the figures, reading female, are depicted as grotesque with long, hairy, pierced ears, pointed teeth, and cat-like faces. In the upper image, a pair of hands are digging into the buttocks of the other being. It is a grim piece that made me think about the base and carnal nature of sex. Next to this on the adjacent wall is a much calmer Untitled image by Nick Schutzenhofer. Schutzenhofer depicts a serene female figure in green (with wings?) cradling the disembodied head of another sleeping female figure. While the narrative of the imagery is difficult to interpret, as his organic style hovers between the abstract and the surreal, it is a carefully executed work that has an undefined, compelling maternal quality about it.

Two wall sculptures offer dimensionality. Girl Gaze by Amy Stober is a cast basket whose handles are splayed out against the wall and whose bottom is covered with cloyingly cute images of girls, cats, and flowers. It offers a 1950s Reader’s Digest version of femininity. What is it saying about today? The other sculptural work is easier on the mind. Zach Meisner’s Untitled, a small-scale wall piece in muted olive tones, has elegant organic curves. A projection on the upper left has a perforation filled with a textured yet transparent substance. A random patina enlivens its surface. Overall, it soothes—easy on the eyes with no combative or provocative undertones. Only about eight inches tall, it looks diminutive by itself on the wall of the gallery. I would have liked to have seen it twice its size.

Two video works play with expectations. The one in the main room by Bailey Connolly and Isabelle Frances ­McGuire is titled Dresses Without Women Archive 2021: Video Two. It documents what was going on during the installation of the show in the other smaller room. While I was there the first time, the television was on the floor and nothing was happening on the screen; I thought the work was not operational. On my second visit, the screen showed the momentary reflection of a worker in the ­gallery. Boring. The second video—located in the smaller room of the gallery—depicts a microwave oven with a timer set for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. The video starts when the timer starts and stops when the timer reaches 0. Cute, if not very serious.

 

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(Left) Bailey Connolly & Isabelle Frances McGuire, Dresses Without Women Archive 2021: Video 2, 2023. Digital video. (Right) Kevin Weil, Site Gag, 2023. 4k video, sound. Photos: Mickey Gallery.

 

Owing to its content, one piece stood out from the rest. Most of the works in this show have a social message as the driving force behind the work. Ryan Nault’s Some Cups is about painting. It is a painting that “asks” how few strokes it takes to create an image of a glass and its transparency. This is the opposite of the Dutch still-lifes of the 16th and 17th centuries or the more contemporary work of Richard Estes, the hyperrealist. Nault’s work is about human perception and the technique of painting—a surprising position in this show that is otherwise mostly about social politics.

 

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Ryan Nault, Some Cups, 2022. Gouache and pencil on cardboard mounted to
 panel in artist's frame. Photo: Mickey Gallery.

 

Mickey reminds me of Feature, the gallery run by Hudson in Chicago from 1984 to 1988 when he moved to New York. At Feature, artists could test their aesthetic on a discerning crowd of young artists and collectors. This is what Mickey does. Many of the artists’ works are conceptually or technically incomplete or unresolved, but that is what makes the work interesting overall—the experimentation, the process of discovery, the unconventional viewpoints. There are far too few galleries like this that show works by emerging artists—works that are not necessarily safe. When you go to Mickey, you will not like everything you see, but you will be enlightened.

 

Michel Ségard is the Editor in Chief of the New Art Examiner and a former adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is also the author of numerous exhibition catalog essays.