Delaware Center
for the Contemporary Arts
Solo Show
Wilmington, Delaware
August 17, 2007 - January 6, 2008
Eastern Illinois University
Solo Show
Charleston, Illinois
January 12 - February 24, 2008
Chicago Cultural Center
Group Show
HereThereEverywhere
Curated by Gregory Knight,
January 19 - April 6, 2008
The Los Angeles Art Show
Barker Hangar, Santa Monica
January 23 - 27, 2008
The Alfedena Gallery
Group Show
Chicago, IL
February 8 - March 8, 2008
by John Vettese
Aug 15, 2007
Runs Aug. 17-Jan. 6, 2008, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, 200 S. Madison St., Wilmington, Del., 302-656-6466, www.thedcca.org
The ever-changing makeup of landscapes makes them difficult to capture visually. Artists must find themselves in the right place at the right time, accept a dull image, or kill an entire day in search of expansive clouds, delicate beams of sunlight and the perfect alignment of land and sky. Chicago painter Ben Whitehouse uses the latter approach—sort of.
The mixed-media exhibit “Revolution” takes the long-form, high-definition digital videos he shot in order to study how a swatch of scenery changes from dawn to dusk, and matches them with his paintings of selected stills. If you’re into relaxing to the sights and sounds of nature captured in the videos, pay attention for the morphing of nimbus clouds behind a row of windblown trees, the red glow of vehicle taillights driving through nocturnal Central Park, and the hours when Michigan’s North Bar Lake is so still, it casts a glassy reflection of the horizon line above.
However, Whitehouse’s videos are 24 hours long, a full revolution of Earth—hence the exhibit’s name. Factor in a gallery that doesn’t open before 10 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m., and we’ve got a conundrum where visitors may miss out on the color pageantry of morning skies, or the silhouetted clouds of the sunset. Thankfully, a capable watercolorist is highlighting those moments when we couldn’t be there.