Current Shows

Mel Watkin: InsurgencyMel Watkin was one of the smartest of the bright, dedicated crowd that shaped influential exhibitions on next to no money in the good old days of the old Forum for Contemporary Art. She now directs the Public Policy Resource Center at UMSL, but she continues to make art on her own. This haunting exhibition of drawings is a deliberate subversion of the folding road maps that even in the Internet era find their ways into glove compartments. Some are worn to the texture of chamois by frequent handling; some after a hundred refoldings acquire the enigmatic qualities of palimpsest. Watkin draws on them, and what she draws corrupts the map's established function: Geography is erased, redefined, overgrown with the flora of the draftsman's compass and the artist's fecund imagination. The commercial road map -- so deliberately informative, so thoroughly artless and commonplace -- thus becomes anarchic. Watkin's work will challenge your notions of time and space through February 3, 2007, in the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery of the Sheldon, 3648 Washington Boulevard; 314-533-9900 (www.sheldonconcerthall.org). Hours: noon-8 p.m. Tue. and Thu., noon-5 p.m. Wed. and Fri., 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Sat.