Vera Scekic’s Bilateral Symmetry
by Fred Camper
September 1, 2006
Vera Scekic
Through 11/4
Cook County Administration Building, 69 W. Washington
773-324-5520
AN INSTALLATION BY Evanstonian Vera Scekic in the Cook County Administration Building’s rear lobby, an outpost of the Hyde Park Art Center, offers a cheerfully disruptive contrast to one of Chicago’s deadest interiors. Bilateral Symmetry consists of two huge paintings on facing walls, each filled with a grid of 13 by 15 circles in almost cartoonish colors--a sharp contrast to a place otherwise oppressed by various shades of brown. The circles are cut out of pools of poured paint; they’re often thick, and none is perfectly round--all have bumps and indentations and little cusps, which enhance their visual interest. Her “symmetric grids are trying to impose order,” she writes, “while the gravity-molded circles push back against this Cartesian space.” The lobby is also a giant collection of grids--in the floor, the ceiling, the nearby elevator bank, and in the panes of glass above and alongside the paintings. By providing another, highly imperfect grid, Scekic both echoes and defies the surrounding space, letting in a whiff of the organic.
From Chicago Reader Online
