Anne Wilson

“Man can never expect to start from scratch,” Marcel Duchamp told Chicago gallerist Katharine Kuh in 1962. “He must start from ready-made things like even his own mother and father.” Anne Wilson’s twenty-six Dispersions, in which she employs common craft materials to visceral and socially suggestive ends, echo this axiom. Each of these works consists of a piece of used white cloth, such as a handkerchief or a fragment of damask tablecloth, pulled taut and punctured by a perfectly circular hole circumscribed with embroidery sewn in irregular formations. These are stitched not only with colored

print February 2011

Josiah McElheny

“Crystalline Modernity” opened with two color drawings that McElheny had made on silver-gelatin photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s 1922 plans for a Glass Skyscraper. Not to be confused with Mies’s visionary Friedrichstraße project, these plans were part of a series of experiments made the following year, in the wake of Friedrichstraße’s failed construction. Such source imagery provided an apt introduction to an exhibition that reimagined the legacy of modernism by reframing its historical forms. The show’s centerpiece, Crystalline Landscape After Hablik and Luckhardt (all works 2010), a diorama