Mehretu's paintings seem to be in transition. Normally her idiosyncratic drawings -- a cross between chalkboard football diagrams, blueprints, topographies and migration patterns -- are set on layers of vellumlike polymer over backgrounds organized into architectural spaces (such as the inside of a room). Here, she takes the dichotomy between a map and an interior one step further: Ringsite appears to be exploded architectural space, with floating staircases, doorways and bridges taking the place of her small armies of symbols against a spaceship-control-room-like backdrop, and Ringside, which is more like her earlier work, looks like the area where the spaceship landed. Still, Ringsite and Ringside seem to hover somewhere below resolve. Although they look just as refined as ever, I am eager to see Mehretu move in a totally new direction.
The final artist in "Core 1999," Paul Whiting, has made an interesting choice for a group show: He has created work that deliberately eludes attention. I think, in fact, that he means for us not to look at it at all. Not that it's small: Whiting drew with chalk, marker and primer on nine-feet-tall and 29-feet-wide backdrop paper. But it is intended as a backdrop, a setting, and as such it draws on other "backdrops" in our world, things we see through a car window but aren't really meant to notice, such as strip malls, camper vans and rocks.
This work transitions seamlessly from Whiting's earlier sculptures -- objects built from Sheetrock and other rough materials that camouflaged themselves as discount-store display shelves, airport security gates or other objects whose primary mission is not an aesthetic one. His work is quiet, perhaps because stealth is the only way to ambush and capture the visual qualities of things that don't have visual qualities. In the drawing in the show's catalog (each of which, extraordinarily, also contains an original drawing of a circle by Braun), Whiting combines elements from industrial trash cans, cabinets, car doors and stereo consoles into a long, uninterrupted sort of kitchen counter.
Other artists have been preoccupied with capturing the unnoticed; Uta Barth, for example, sets up a portrait, then takes the subject out of the picture before snapping the camera shutter. But Whiting seems interested, also, in how his organization of space affects the viewer, which is why he plays with scale. On one end of his untitled drawing, the viewer seems to be standing a few feet away from a truck with a searchlight, and on the other end to be viewing the silhouette of a storescape from a great distance, yet both truck and storescape are presented as if they are in the same flat plane; there are no perspectival clues other than size to indicate one is farther away than the other.
It's always difficult to write about a group show like the annual Core Fellows exhibit. There's no theme, no organizing concept, no curator. But this year there is a unifying attitude, which is perhaps most extremely expressed by Whiting's utterly unassuming work. It's a calm and purposeful generosity, one that doesn't so much set the stage for the viewer as create a space.
"Core 1999" will be on view through April 25 at the Glassell School of Art, 5101 Montrose, (713)639-7500.
