Solo Show
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago
Feb 10 – March 10, 2012
Revolution – special installation
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA
Oct 2012
Essay by J. Susan Isaacs, Ph.D.
Curator, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts
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| ISSUE 118: | MAY 31–JUNE 6, 2007 | |
Ben Whitehouse
“Revolution,” Alfedena Gallery, through Sat 2.
-3 stars-
By Lauren Weinberg
Ben Whitehouse has found an outlet for his shameful addiction to representational landscapes.
Since 2004, the English-born Chicago artist has channeled his forbidden love of plein air into abstract oil paintings and digital videos that emphasize the cyclical rhythms of nature, with appealing—albeit repetitious—results. The transition in Whitehouse’s work begins with March. Every morning during March 2004, the artist completed one painting of Lake Michigan from the same vantage point at Leone Park Beach, yielding 31 small panels that he arranged like a page from a calendar. Each individual painting is a gorgeous yet conventional depiction of sky and water; seen as an ensemble, they reveal the slow changes in our environment that most of us never notice. Lake Michigan is also the subject of 2006 Horizons—two discrete colored panels that seem suspended in the air: The top panel represents the light above the lake and the bottom panel represents that light reflected in the water. Despite their innovative construction, their sameness ultimately undermines their charm. Whitehouse’s abstract paintings have intriguing underlying concepts—such as Watch Over Time, which records the shifting colors in the sky over a 24-hour period—but his videos are the most compelling works in the show. Revolution North Bar Lake allows the viewer to contemplate the Michigan lake for 24 hours while providing a soothing soundtrack of birds, insects and waves. The beauty of nature may not be an original subject, but it evokes an intense response.