The art felt as if it was trying to find the language to merge emotion with content, to harness the energies of the search within the courage of experimentation.
More than ever, mixed-media work and hybrid processes seem to reflect our age of tension, disparity, and despair while slickly produced objects feel reminiscent of a time when the fraying world did not inflect our daily lives.
From April 11 to 14, the 11th edition of Expo Chicago, the midwest’s largest art fair (recently acquired by the London conglomerate Frieze), presented 170 galleries from 29 countries and 75 cities at Navy Pier. Two other art fairs took place simultaneously: the artist-driven Other Art Fair and the Barely Fair, run by Chicago collective Julius Caesar, featuring 20-by-20-inch miniature booths.
It was the messy, the disparate, the hybrid, the inchoate that called most urgently in Expo. Perhaps this work felt as if it was trying harder to find the language to merge emotion with content, to harness the energies of the search within the courage of experimentation.
