courtesy of the artist

Chicago artist Josue Pellot deploys several mediums and styles in order to examine his Puerto Rican roots as transplanted into the quintessential American experience – that is, as mediated by pop culture and consumerism in his current exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Thus, he displays a photomontage of the iconic fortress El Morro in Puerto Rico in which it is conflated with a supermercado/laundromat/liquor store.  In fact, many architectural structures in the United States do mimic this famous castle, and his neon sculpture of conquistadors and the native population’s revenge, 1493, was originally installed in the windows of La Municipal, a supermarket in Humboldt Park, during the last Puerto Rican Day Parade.

In Temporary Allegiance, the artist has placed in the gallery a flag that is an amalgam of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags, more specifically the remains of what was originally used by the artist in a installation/performance in Puerto Rico, after damage sustained by local police interference.  Sitting limply in the gallery as sculpture, one can only guess at the resonance and tensions encapsulated in its history.

courtesy of the artist

Josue Pellot received a BFA from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 2003 and an MA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University in 2006.  His work has been presented in several exhibitions in the Chicago area and in San Juan, Puerto Rico including a performance at the Museo de Arte de San Juan.

Los Angeles-based photographer Melanie Schiff opened her New York solo debut with Horton & Liu gallery last week. The exhibition, titled Mirror and Mastodon, features 8 mid-sized photographs that investigate ideas of spirituality and collective experience through the intersection of man and nature. While the images don’t contain any figures, the influence of man on the landscape is evident. The photograph titled Mastodon features an open field with a mysterious tree and root system that has fallen — twisted, blackened and reclaimed by the land. The photograph Mirror depicts two images simultaneously,  containing both a raw hill or cliff with the image of a graffiti covered concrete embankment.

Melanie Schiff: Mastadon

Schiff was born in Chicago and is a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Mirror and Mastodon marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since her inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The artist has exhibited internationally with recent exhibitions at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Uschi Kolb in Karlsruhe in Germany. The artist has forthcoming exhibitions in 2010 at the Seattle Art Museum and P.S.1 MoMA in New York.