Edra Soto
The Chacon-Soto Show
UBS 12 x 12 New Artists/New Work series, at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
June 6th - June 28th
Before proceeding, take a moment to open a new browser window and run a YouTube search for Iris Chacon. Familiarize yourself with this name. Undoubtedly familiar to most Puerto Ricans, few Anglos have any recollection of the bygone bombshell's existence. Her Latin-flavored song-and-dance routines and elaborate stage shows, broadcast nationally in the 1970s and 80s on her weekly variety hour, El Show de Iris Chacon, never quite made its way to the United States, although later manifestations of her persona will forever be indebted to her over-sized gyrating backside (think Shakira, or Jennifer Lopez). Physical features aside, Chacon's proud display of Puerto Rican folk culture on her television program resonated deeply with populist sentiments across the island nation. Despite her exuberant sexuality and the constant innuendo between Chacon and her omnipresent stable of male back-up dancers, the program became nationally regarded as wholesome family entertainment, drawing in thousands of weekly viewers. Similar to other long-departed musical variety shows like The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, Soul Train and Top of the Pops during its heyday in the 1970s, El Show de Iris Chacon has become an emblematic and indelible source of nostalgia for a once-young generation of Puerto Ricans.
Naturally, Puerto Rican-born painter, Edra Soto grew up accustomed to Iris Chacon's televised presence in her parents' household, but has until recently given the former television-star little consideration. That changed two years ago when the painter, who now lives and works in Chicago, happened upon an outdated newspaper clipping picturing Chacon on hands and knees in a catlike pose surrounded by four male figures wearing gorilla costumes. The image resonated immediately with Soto, initiating an ongoing body of work anchored in bizarre, many times surreal, manifestations of Chacon's persona and her gorilla companions. Appropriately, her recent appearance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago's 12x12 showcase for young and emerging artists, begins with a framed copy of the clipping claiming an entire wall for itself.
Soto wastes no time in taking full advantage of the remaining space. She departs from painting almost entirely, using the foregrounding opportunity afforded by a museum show (albeit an arguably ghettoizing one in particular) to do something entirely different. She has constructed an alluring but simple stage, which allows museum visitors to enter and consequently inhabit the world she has until now only depicted in paint. From afar its brightly colored scenery looks like a highly minimized, highly stylized drawing of a fruit basket. It emits warm light from a row of bulbs along the bottom, and a sizzling mix of Chacon's greatest hits from a speaker atop. The similarities to Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1991 are obvious, and perhaps intentional, although where Gonzalez-Torres's smaller platform based piece poses a deliberate barrier to its audience, Soto's construction invites viewers to step up to the spotlight. While her previous paintings weave together multiple and many times opposing facets of womanhood, as embodied by Chacon's objectified body and simultaneously assertive persona, the stage reveals a similarly doubly-bound predicament, placing the viewer in the position of both performer (an inherently assertive, perhaps even ballsy position) and spectacle.
At the front of the stage's giant wood cutouts viewers find a colorful, well-cultivated veneer; at the back unfinished pine teases our often conflated notions of reality and theatricality, while doubling as comfortable seating from which museum visitors may restfully view the remaining work. On the rear wall of the gallery hangs a collection of fifty-five drawings by fifty-five Chicago artists, mainly friends and colleagues, including one by Soto herself. She asked the group to combine her features with those of a gorilla into a single portrait on paper. Although Soto's work is usually rather difficult to read without referring back to its nexus - the newspaper clipping - the current portraiture is particularly confusing. Whatever intention is embedded in this aspect of the exhibition does not easily connect with the altogether apparent logic of Soto's remaining cosmology. We have seen kindred bonds between animals and humans symbolically referenced in previous work by a steady cast of half-ape, half-human creatures. These portraits suggest the conflation of human and animal characteristics, but how exactly this theme connects within the two bodies of work on display remains unexplained without strip-mining the newspaper image of Chacon in search of missing subject matter. The portraits, like the stage surrounding them, attempt to include viewers in the world described in paint. In a conciliatory sense, both become a welcome extension of an already exciting endeavor.
by Nate Lee
Before proceeding, take a moment to open a new browser window and run a YouTube search for Iris Chacon. Familiarize yourself with this name. Undoubtedly familiar to most Puerto Ricans, few Anglos have any recollection of the bygone bombshell's existence. Her Latin-flavored song-and-dance routines and elaborate stage shows, broadcast nationally in the 1970s and 80s on her weekly variety hour, El Show de Iris Chacon, never quite made its way to the United States, although later manifestations of her persona will forever be indebted to her over-sized gyrating backside (think Shakira, or Jennifer Lopez). Physical features aside, Chacon's proud display of Puerto Rican folk culture on her television program resonated deeply with populist sentiments across the island nation. Despite her exuberant sexuality and the constant innuendo between Chacon and her omnipresent stable of male back-up dancers, the program became nationally regarded as wholesome family entertainment, drawing in thousands of weekly viewers. Similar to other long-departed musical variety shows like The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, Soul Train and Top of the Pops during its heyday in the 1970s, El Show de Iris Chacon has become an emblematic and indelible source of nostalgia for a once-young generation of Puerto Ricans.
Naturally, Puerto Rican-born painter, Edra Soto grew up accustomed to Iris Chacon's televised presence in her parents' household, but has until recently given the former television-star little consideration. That changed two years ago when the painter, who now lives and works in Chicago, happened upon an outdated newspaper clipping picturing Chacon on hands and knees in a catlike pose surrounded by four male figures wearing gorilla costumes. The image resonated immediately with Soto, initiating an ongoing body of work anchored in bizarre, many times surreal, manifestations of Chacon's persona and her gorilla companions. Appropriately, her recent appearance at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago's 12x12 showcase for young and emerging artists, begins with a framed copy of the clipping claiming an entire wall for itself.
Soto wastes no time in taking full advantage of the remaining space. She departs from painting almost entirely, using the foregrounding opportunity afforded by a museum show (albeit an arguably ghettoizing one in particular) to do something entirely different. She has constructed an alluring but simple stage, which allows museum visitors to enter and consequently inhabit the world she has until now only depicted in paint. From afar its brightly colored scenery looks like a highly minimized, highly stylized drawing of a fruit basket. It emits warm light from a row of bulbs along the bottom, and a sizzling mix of Chacon's greatest hits from a speaker atop. The similarities to Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) from 1991 are obvious, and perhaps intentional, although where Gonzalez-Torres's smaller platform based piece poses a deliberate barrier to its audience, Soto's construction invites viewers to step up to the spotlight. While her previous paintings weave together multiple and many times opposing facets of womanhood, as embodied by Chacon's objectified body and simultaneously assertive persona, the stage reveals a similarly doubly-bound predicament, placing the viewer in the position of both performer (an inherently assertive, perhaps even ballsy position) and spectacle.
At the front of the stage's giant wood cutouts viewers find a colorful, well-cultivated veneer; at the back unfinished pine teases our often conflated notions of reality and theatricality, while doubling as comfortable seating from which museum visitors may restfully view the remaining work. On the rear wall of the gallery hangs a collection of fifty-five drawings by fifty-five Chicago artists, mainly friends and colleagues, including one by Soto herself. She asked the group to combine her features with those of a gorilla into a single portrait on paper. Although Soto's work is usually rather difficult to read without referring back to its nexus - the newspaper clipping - the current portraiture is particularly confusing. Whatever intention is embedded in this aspect of the exhibition does not easily connect with the altogether apparent logic of Soto's remaining cosmology. We have seen kindred bonds between animals and humans symbolically referenced in previous work by a steady cast of half-ape, half-human creatures. These portraits suggest the conflation of human and animal characteristics, but how exactly this theme connects within the two bodies of work on display remains unexplained without strip-mining the newspaper image of Chacon in search of missing subject matter. The portraits, like the stage surrounding them, attempt to include viewers in the world described in paint. In a conciliatory sense, both become a welcome extension of an already exciting endeavor.
by Nate Lee
