Freeze frames
Petrides' paintings take viewers out to sea

Date: July 24, 1998
Author: Margaret Hawkins
Section: WEEKEND PLUS

‘Olivia Petrides: Cycles and Confrontations' and Vera Scekic Through Aug. 1
Artemisia Gallery, 700 N. Carpenter
(312) 226-7323

`Marcie Gill-Kinast: Minutiae' Through Aug. 1
A.R.C. Gallery, 1040 W. Huron
(312) 733-2787

. . . Also at Artemisia is a tight little show of graphite drawings by Vera Scekic. Scekic's work, while it also refers to the natural world, is as clean and smooth as Petrides' paintings are crude and bumpy. Basically abstract compositions based on natural substances, these drawings are rendered so smoothly and with such refinement they appear to be photographs at first. But photos of what?

One drawing, "Multi-Particle Event," shows arcs and lines against a blue ground. It could be a star map or the elegant remainders of an algebraic equation worked out on a blackboard with no erasures. Another, "Bitewing," shows the delicate image of teeth, dimly visible as they appear on a dental X-ray. These are elegant drawings, finely rendered yet without the grandiosity that sometimes accompanies virtuosity. They seem to refer to galaxies and at the same time to microscopic views of lifeforms and are presented with the cool impartiality of medical illustration . . .

Excerpted from Chicago Sun-Times Online (article is no longer available)