Mike Nudelman: Seeing Things

Thomas Robertello Gallery - Chicago

By Jeriah Hildwine

Chicago-based artists are regularly stereotyped as the modern-day embodiments of the city’s blue collar, working class history. It is an association eagerly seized upon by the self-described “city that works,” although one would be hard pressed to come up with any conclusive evidence that one city’s artists log more hours in their studios than another’s, or that the labor performed therein is any more grueling.  Nevertheless, Chicago is home to at least a few artists whose practices are particularly laborious, and Chicago-based artist Mike Nudelman’s process is labor-intensive in the extreme.

“Seeing Things” is Mike Nudelman’s second solo exhibition at Thomas Robertello Gallery. The works in this show range from 8 x 10 inches to much, much larger, and are painstakingly rendered in ballpoint pen on paper. Each image is built up by a gradual accumulation of tiny, innumerable, hair-like strokes, drawn diagonally with ballpoint pens of various colors. The results range from pale, misty atmospheres of pastel colors, to the rich black voids of space.

Mike Nudelman, Lookin' Out My Back Door, 2012, ballpoint pen on paper, 42” x 57”

The subjects of Nudelman’s work are predominantly atmospheric effects and outer space landscapes. Four Rainbows Over Niagara (What Does This Mean?) delivers as advertised a quartet of rainbows surmounting the titular waterfall, the parenthetical subtitle presumably referring to the “Double Rainbow” Internet video. Detached Observers is a stereoscopic drawing of the moon. Stereoscopic effects are normally achieved by spacing a pair of cameras about the same distance apart as a person’s eyes, and can be used to create three-dimensional illusions of subjects out to about 300 meters. An actual stereograph of the moon would require a pair of cameras spaced about 100,000 kilometers apart. However, the moon’s elliptical orbit causes an apparent rocking back and forth, which can be used to create a stereoscopic image in which the moon appears in miniature, like an orange floating in space before the viewer.

The flagship piece of “Seeing Things” is the 42″ x 57″ drawing, Lookin’ Out My Back Door. Its scale required innumerable hours of Nudelman’s labor over the better part of a year. In this drawing, a distant ship in the lower right corner of the image is dwarfed by a massive waterfall looming up above and ahead of it. A dazzling spray of light across the top of the landscape includes a wormlike meander reminiscent of the aurora borealis.

Bizarrely, the atmospheric light seems to emerge from behind an enormous rounded form, like a domed monolith or an impossibly gargantuan Buddhist stupa. Dwarfed by this bulbous form, but still towering over the smaller mountains in the foreground, is the geometrically perfect peak of a distant pyramid. This surreal combination of architecture and landscape evokes the surreal imagery of a lost city in an undiscovered country, much like H.P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, of which this passage is typical: “On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage-the first I had ever seen-in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.”

(November 9 - December 22, 2012)

Filed Under: Reviews