Interview with Curator Phaedra Siebert
Ben Whitehouse talks about his painting and
the evolution of The Revolution Series
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
March 15 - April 25
Revolution Still Lifes
ArtChicago
April 30 - May 3
Perimeter Gallery, Booth TBA
Grand Rapids Art Museum
June 4 - August 22
GRAM and Ox-Bow
Perimeter Gallery, Chicago September 10 - October 9
Alan Artner, Tribune art critic
Published June 1, 2007
Ben Whitehouse is a painter of the open air who attempts to fix fugitive conditions of light.
His seeming departure at the Alfedena Gallery actually extends what he does in painting to high-definition video landscapes that show light continually transforming three different places.
New York’s Central Park, plus a body of water and group of treetops in Illinois, have been observed from a fixed point for 24 hours. The time of day shown is coordinated to the time of viewing, so one sees a locale apart from one’s own within one's own geographical and seasonal environment.
The changes in the New York piece are especially beautiful, as the park’s entire South-to-North expanse is dappled by light that breaks through clouds as ambient sound wafts up from streets. Since the changes are experienced in actual time, the pieces are as much as anything else studies in patience that have achieved heightened intensity from having had the “real” world given a sharper focus by the frame Whitehouse put around them.
The artist also shows a group of recent multipanel paintings that likewise fix light conditions in particular landscapes. The most successful is “March,” which approaches the same stretch of Lake Michigan at the same time every day of the month. It has a hard, direct poetry not shared by other pieces that present qualities of light as if on swatches unusually arranged, sometimes like numbers on the face of a clock.
At 434 W. Ontario St., 312-944-4340.