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
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.