Featured Review: Tiny Content

Installation view of Tiny Content at Snowflake.

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• Dan Solberg
• Willem de Kooning
• Susan Sontag
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

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Featured Review: Tiny Content "Content is a glimpse of something, an encounter like a flash. It's very tiny — very tiny, content," said Willem de Kooning. Taking its title from the epigraph to Susan Sontag's pivotal essay "Against Interpretation," this small group show, sensitively curated by Bevin Early, explores art's capacity for earnestness and failure. And an essay it is, in the English sense of the word — a small exegesis on a subject — and the French, meaning "an attempt." Recent Washington University M.F.A. graduates John Early and Dan Solberg contribute works that mine the aesthetics of inconclusiveness. Early's Swivel Swing invites viewers to sit, take a pencil and draw a parenthetical arc around themselves on the gallery wall, describing their arms' reach. Solberg displays a series of failed faxes from a colleague, who was attempting to send him the text of a lecture by Michel Foucault. Half-eaten by digital noise, the pages are an apt analogue to the heading from beneath which they were extracted: poststructuralism. Peter Pranschke displays a suite of delicate sculptures wrought in used erasers, meticulously wadded dental floss, cut-up notebooks and the detritus of other "ordinary materials" used to correct or improve upon aspects of daily human well-being. The small pieces are meaningfully laid out on a shiny white tabletop that resembles the blank expanse of a dry-erase board, suggesting a quixotic diagram or an abstract solution to an abstract problem. Mike Schuh inhabits a small alcove of the gallery with pieces of linoleum tile torn out of his studio in Chicago; the rough-edged and worn-out squares reaffirm the artist's absence and the objects' displaced use. Taken as a whole, the collection of spare artworks seems to function as a mumbling chorus of stripped-down materials, most of them commonplace, estranged from their typical purpose and made elegant by their simplicity. Through December 5 at Snowflake, 3156 Cherokee Street or www.snowflakecitystock.com. Hours: noon-6 p.m. Wed.-Sat.