Trib does Tim Tate

I am not familiar with the Chicago Tribune's art critic Alan Artner, but apparently much like his counterparts in DC and Philly, he rarely does galleries. But last week he did in writing about Narratives at Marx-Saunders Gallery

The easy seductiveness of glass as an artistic medium has in 20 years given rise to a virtual industry in sculpture in which prettiness is all. But what is there beyond technique? One answer comes in the four-artist exhibition at the Marx-Saunders Gallery: Narratives.

Each of the artists — Carmen Lozar, Catharine Newell, Minako Shirakura, Tim Tate — is to some degree a storyteller. So glass is less important in and of itself than in how it conveys the artists' tales, either alone or in combination with other materials. This shifts the works' emphasis from physical appeal to presumably something more inward.

The pieces incorporating video by Shirakura and Tate accomplish this best, still without convincing us that glass was essential to the enterprise. Could their glass components have expressed as much if they had been executed in another medium? Yes. And in Newell's pieces the new material could have been as simple as paper, as chief interest is in her representational drawing. Even so, only Lozar's cartoonlike tableaux disappoint with an equal coyness in execution and idea. If not there yet, Shirakura and Tate are clearly onto something to deepen the discourse. Here narrative is interesting enough to be periodically revisited.

Read the entire column of reviews here.