Late last summer I was walking by the lagoon in Lincoln Park, near Lake Michigan, and stopped on the bank across the water from a cluster of magnificent trees. They magnetized me, and as I shivered in the heat a generalized image of Edith Altman’s time/space drawings came to mind. I had not previously thought of these geometric configurations of white conte pencil on black Pellon as representations of nature, but their elegantly mystical energy, like that of the natural world, indicated a simultaneously suave and artless attunement with cosmic forces and principles of control and creation.

Altman

One usually thinks of “documentation” in terms of videotapes and photographs, but “PERF DOC: Documentation of Artists’ Performance,” included props, costumes, scripts, polemics, calendars—anything preservable that had to do with the planning, participation, and/or after-the-fact validation of various performances. And these nontraditional “documents,” made by the artist and often with the status of actually having been at, or been part of, the event, were in a way better proxies than third-party tapes and photos which are, after all, separate media with their own esthetic.

For example, the various

As Joanna Frueh has aptly pointed out, Chicago Imagism is not as wonderfully illogical and cleverly fey as it appears; it is actually born of “a chaotically self-destructive society—more specifically of Chicago’s checkered past and present.” This conditioning of the fanciful by an omnipresent restraining reality is essential to Estelle Kenney’s work.

This current work, for the first time, combines poetry and documentary note-taking with imagery, stripping the paintings of a claustrophobic color in favor of linear definition and conceptual focus. Words appear either directly on the aluminum, imaged