Debra Riley Parr
Debra Riley Parr is Associate Professor of Art & Design History at Columbia College Chicago. She is currently writing a book on contemporary olfactory art.
This exhibition is about the unlikely friendship of two marvelous women, Frida Kahlo and Mary Reynolds, one now very famous and the other deserving more recognition. People attending Frida Kahlo’s Month in Paris: A Friendship with Mary Reynolds might be perturbed that there are only a few of Kahlo’s paintings on view, surrounded as they are with the art and ephemera of the avant garde who hung out at Mary Reynold’s place in Paris.
For this exhibition Kim Gordon created eight-minute-long bursts of sounds to accompany German-born artist Albert Oehlen’s three massive twelve-foot-tall metal constructions. Flat cutouts attached to the walls of the stark, over-lit, white gallery space, they are shaped like huge omega forms. Their curved elements are softened into organic almost phallic silhouettes, perfect for Gordon’s pas de deux of low grumbling and dissonant feedback.



