The Exquisite City
When: Nov. 7-Dec. 12 2008
The urban block of artist Vivienne Edmister’s dreams is a deco delight where a diner facade swoops around a corner and bumps up against a Buck Rogers-inspired movie palace. Edmister’s exquisitely detailed model, "The Place I Want to Live," is part of The Exquisite City and Exquisite Windows, the sprawling double show Kathleen Judge curated for the Viaduct Theater’s First Annual Art Exhibit. More than 70 artists (mostly locals, including musicians Catherine Irwin, Sally Timms, John Rauhouse, Marvin Tate, and Chris Salveter, and a group from Lakeview High School) contributed pieces for the show, which occupies the Viaduct’s main theater space. It consists of about 30 blocks of an imaginary cardboard city installed on a grid and, separately, 32 dioramas, each like a view through the window of a high-rise. The artists were instructed to create a 40-by-48-inch city block—using Chicago as their springboard—and set loose. The result combines the nostalgic, low-tech charm of a department store holiday window display with eye-popping diversity and invention. Each block is a world unto itself, from the vertical shaft of the "Important Hamburger Corporate Office," by Amy Cargill, Derek Erdman, and Sally Timms, which sprouts from its own little blacktop parking lot, to Gabriel Villa’s "Xicago Memoriam: 18th Street and Robert Taylor Homes," a graceful pyramid constructed out of tortilla boxes topped by a forbidding tower. Execution ranges from raw to Edmister’s precise detail, which includes a wrought-iron fence surrounding a row of billowing trees decked out in shredded-paper fall foliage. There’s also a swooping highway interchange, penguins in an imaginary zoo, an empty lot complete with glittering litter, and a gaggle of Chicago’s iconic rooftop water towers on stilts. When I saw the installation, two days before the opening, sound effects (the real thing from Chicago streets) by Favorite Chicago Sounds and street lights were yet to be installed. The art is for sale; most prices run from $50 to $3,000 (Edmister’s piece is $250, the hamburger office is $300, and "Xicago" is $1,000). On November 16 from 8 to 10 PM, there’ll be a sound performance by Chicago Phonographers. --Deanna Isaacs
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