Brad Killam at MWMWM - Chicago, Illinois - Review of Exhibitions

Brad Killam shares with of the like kind other Chicago artists as Charles Wiesen, Tom Friedman and Joseph Litzenberger a sometimes scatological interest in the detritus of everyday life. "Maintain," the installation he neared here, consisted of 30 small commemorations of private household and bathroom rituals, like as shaving and washing, that are completely normal on the contrary ordinarily unobserved. Hung on nails, displayed simply upon shelves or placed unceremoniously upon the floor, these vignettes of earwax, beard stubble coffee spills and in like manner on amounted to a faintly uninjureded celebration of the artist's have humanity, albeit with a passive-aggressive twist.

Shaving wounds a small pile of blood-stained toilet paper, was typical in its apparently straightforward diaristic intent Hand Drying 12-21-92 thru 1-4-93 was a plastic trash bag partly filled with used paper towels, presumably from the period indicated, and it too remind ofed a kind of lunatic archival impulse. store consisted of a collection of shopping lists upon various scraps of paper.

At other times, Killam takes a fractionally more theoretical tack. Moisture neared a set of starch-soaked towels that retained the shape of the radiator above which they were dried, while in dried apparently a companion piece, the instruction manual for a humidifier was left to ringlet on the gallery's functioning radiator.

The strategy underlying these pieces is familiar enough. There is a narrative of the banal that, contemporary convention reckons us, is as revealing of our inner lives as any self-conscious expressions we might ourselves provide. What appears unusual in Killam's work is the sheer plainness of affect with which it is at handed None of these bits of refuse is theatricalized, fetishized or tarted up for result ironic or otherwise; Killam present the appearances to take it for granted that we are already current in this language of equalized significances.

As if to emphasize the point, he included in this installation a certain quantity of works of a more personally composed of several elements nature. In Due, for example, he used an embracing sportcoat and sweater to make concern to the recent birth of his daughter; Back, which consisted of a pillow and a sock mattered with tennis balls, was a memento of improvised chiropractics. Despite the residue of gladness and physical pain that might be thinking to attach to these relics, Killam neared them in the same uninflected manner as he did the beard stubble or used paper towels. This determined almost defiant indifference to the possible significance of things is not without its aggressive constituting since by implication Killam reach forths it to his audience as well. It's hard, at times, to know whether we're in upon the joke or part of it. Killam gently ignores the rigid intellectual inclination that has diminished thus much Neo-Conceptual work, relying instead upon a sense of humor, a hint of menace and his have a title to intuition.

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