The Calvin BFA show is up at Khora, Calvin's space at 106 S. Division. Pretty nice little show. My favorite piece is Taylor Greenfield's Legend.
Greenfield presents an antique card catalog, empty Bell jars, labels, pencils, and these instructions:
Dear Participant, This collection is incomplete. Please take a jar and fill it with something mythical, magical, iconic, or otherwise legendary. Label your contribution and place it in the drawer of your choosing and arrange the jars as you see fit.
When the show opened the drawers already contained many filled jars. The contents ranged from the mundane: wax, stones, to the fantastic: ground unicorn horn, gold, to the visceral: hair, urine.
My contributions include a jar labeled "WRATH," in which I put the smashed pieces of one of the other jars, "Ash that floated a mile to get here," which contains burnt pieces of foam that floated here from that huge fire a few weeks ago, and "ALL THE RULES NEEDED TO PLAY DUNGEONS & DRAGONS," where the jar contains a Sony memory stick with text files containing all the basic rules of D&D (which, incidentally, is about 15 megabytes of information).
I like this project because it combines the conceptual tendencies of things like The Art and Language Group and relational aesthetics with ideas of fantasy and myth.
Art and Language Group at Documenta 1972
After all, what's art if it's not a prescribed method by which the mythical meets the mundane?
Well done, Taylor.
ps- The show is only open until this Friday, so hurry down if you missed it. Gallery hours are:
Wednesday 1-9
Thursday and Friday 1-6