The New Mission has hung a first exhibition by one of the Art Institute’s master program students. The paintings are of a naive surrealist-symbolist sort in raw colors without felicity of technique. The work is ambitious: Mr. Stiegelmeyer has tried to encompass crucifixions, orgiastic rituals, apocalyptic terror, dream demonology, somnambulist disaffiliation, etc, etc., all in each painting. In most of the pictures there is no room left, no negative space, no possibility of examining any one symbolism for whatever significance it might have; the paintings are also so numerous and so close together that the viewer is likely to feel suffocated. Each painting is accompanied by a long poem by Daniel Moore which serves to further obscure the message in fathoms of metaphor and even more crowded symbolisms.

––Knute Stiles