Ed Flood, Art Green, & Jordan Davies 

North Gallery 

In the penultimate North Gallery rotating exhibition, Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Ed Flood/Art Green/Jordan Davies. 

While the prevailing wisdom has long been that Chicago is a city of figuration, it has also been a laboratory for many varieties of abstraction, even those associated with the Imagist tradition. Early in its existence, in 2006, CvsD assembled the show Abstract Imagist, surveying a previously unnamed strain of artworks with stylistic or personal affiliations to Imagism but otherwise connected to abstraction. In this concise historical North Gallery presentation, a single monumental Jordan Davies painting encapsulates the concept – bolts of ribbony strata cross a pink field, all painted with the kind of fetish finish one associates with Christina Ramberg or Jim Nutt, but without the specific bodily point of reference. Around the same time as Davies' painting, in the early 1970s, Ed Flood, who showed with the Imagist group the Nonplussed Some, began making works that engaged with their space in extraordinary ways, including a series of glass works with painted amoeba-esque shapes that cast shadows onto the wall. Art Green's paintings, while always involving images, use a kind of hypercomplex ilusionism, the recognizable representations fractured, fragmented, and reconstituted into a new, highly abstracted whole.

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Image: Jordan Davies, Untitled, 1972-73, acrylic on canvas, 72 x 144 inches.