3-­‐3-­‐15  Review:  Creeping  Toward  The  Light/Julius  Caesar  

Installation  view  of  Creeping  Toward  The  Light  at  Julius  Caesar  

RECOMMENDED  

Described  as  a  “collaboration”  between  organizer  and  artist,  rather  than  a  straightforward  comparison,  “Creeping  Toward  The  Light”  at  Julius  Caesar  features  artist  Stevie  Hanley  

alongside  one  of  JC’s  directorial  personalities,  Roland  Miller.  The  small  exhibition  space,  dominated  by  Hanley’s  large,  banner-­‐like  assemblies,  has  the  effect  of  a  curious,  colorful  maze.  

The  floor  is  chrome  throughout,  treated  with  a  foil  wrapping.  Miller  has  installed  several  slightly  larger-­‐than-­‐life-­‐sized  prints  of  women  cut  out  and  affixed  directly  to  the  wall.  Their  color  and  visual  texture  is  glitched,  implying  inversions,  blow-­‐outs  and  missing  data.  Brilliance  and  lurid  aesthetic  moments  become  occlusions—obnoxious,  pink  rhinestones  are  glued  to  the  picture  glass  floated  just  a  hair  above  a  collage  by  Miller,  covering  a  serial  repetition  of  sexual  penetrations.  Glints  that  blind,  rather  than  illuminate.  That  these  explicit  moments  are  not  totally  concealed  gives  way  to  that  naughty  impulse  to  peak  around  the  glittery  censor.  

Detail  view  of  Roland  Miller’s  wall  installation  at  Julius  Caesar  

Hanley’s  banners  are  collaged  sculptures,  constituted  by  snipped  and  layered  works  on  paper,  hair  clips  and  sundry  baubles.  Careful,  brightly  colored  pencil  drawings  of  spiders  and  Fabergé  eggs  (among  other  motifs)  recall  tidier  works  on  paper  that  Hanley  exhibited  last  spring.  They  are  pitched  between  updated  iterations  of  ithyphallic  stake-­‐forms.  The  bases  of  these  “flagpoles,”  apparently  cast  from  Bundt  cake  pans  of  various  dimensions  and  embellishment,  are  at  once  innocuous  supports  and  evocative,  puckered  starbursts  interrupted  by  the  insertion  of  suggestive  rods.  However  subdued  and  pastel,  Hanley’s  is  a  no  less  seductive  brand  of  anality.  

Hanley’s  structures  work  to  do  a  lot  at  once:  planes  of  soft  pink  washes,  marbled  tableaus  and  brilliant  orange  and  turquoise  stains  vibrate  between  notepads  and  textiles—patterned  decoratively  or  dotted  with  texts.  Both  sides  of  a  given  banner  are  titled  individually,  which  places  special  attention  on  the  decorated  frame  and  support  structure.  

“Creeping  Toward  The  Light”  is  pervaded  by  a  shared  sense  of  sensuous  breaks—a  play  at  layering  and  lapsing.  As  a  collaboration  that  challenges  the  traditional  precepts  of  the  group  show,  Miller  and  Hanley  have  found  an  erotic  incongruity,  locating  moments  of  exciting  overlap  in  sexual  difference.  (Collin  Pressler)  

Through  March  8  at  Julius  Caesar,  3311  West  Carroll