2005-09-14

Beautiful Dreamer -- Romanticism is alive and well in the contemporary art featured in this huge exhibition. Filled with the sensual, mysterious, and playful -- along with plenty of artsy mumbo-jumbo -- Beautiful Dreamer demonstrates that intellectual trends haven't quashed imagination and emotion. Jonathan Feldschuh may be the biggest daydreamer of the bunch. His immense photographs of planets ("Red Spot"), altered with shiny acrylic, reveal a childlike curiosity about the tactile qualities of gaseous bodies forever in stormy motion. Ruth Waldman's inner child, meanwhile, is interested in the tension between opposite forces that holds society together like an atom. She illustrates this concept in exquisitely detailed colored-pencil drawings of fanciful, Seussian creatures dangling in complex networks, entwined by their loose limbs. Katherine Daniels, in "21 Wall Blossoms," adapts disposable American media to a Persian art form, weaving cheap plastic beads into a fabulously ornate web. More serious is Dean Monogenis' acrylic titled "Eight Fifty a Square Foot," in which jarringly different architectural forms -- a clunky modern building and a collapsed Roman aqueduct -- collide to almost painful effect; history, it seems to say, is being destroyed before our eyes. Most touching is Raven Schlossberg's "Sunrise and Blacklight." A sprawling, elaborate collage of old magazine pictures, the piece traces a woman's life and psychological development from innocent childhood through sexual blossoming, rebellion, and motherhood. The romantic part? Its powerful sentimental narrative. Through October 23 at Spaces, 2220 Superior Viaduct, 216-621-2314, www.spacesgallery.org.

-- Zachary Lewis

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