Gallery Glance, A Vue
Margaret Hawkins, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 15, 2004

'Love and work are the cornerstones of our human ness ." So said Sigmund Freud . and in a short video at Donald Young Gallery, Joshua Mosley manages to explore this balancing act in a fairly nuanced way , especially considering that he uses stopmotion puppets to enact a drama of love left behind in service to professional duty.

Like a short-story writer. Mosley suggests a whole life in a few scenes . George, a park ranger who lives an otherwise colorless existence. apparently spends his life maintaining a monumental statue or George Washington Carver. Then he meets Susan, who comes to town for a fancy job at a fiber optics company. They experience attraction and then, after a brief discussion of the importance of work in their lives, part when she is transferred . George then returns to his solitary post, wiping bird droppings off the statue.

The video is oddly moving. maybe because it is so stark. The puppets move in a wooden, inexpressive manner that captures the way people's emotions get buried in routines and roles, sometimes causing them to never really say wha t they reel. But the real star of the piece is the statue, which appears monumental in the video but proves to be only 24 inches tall in the sculpture installation in the adjoining gallery.

A statement posted by the gallery says Mosley uses the statue of Carver as the video’s centerpiece to symbolize relentless sell-sufficiency. What strikes the viewer is how something that looms so large in one man’s subjective world can seem small and insignificant out of that context.

This matter of scale suggests another reading of the work, that Mosley's hero is a servant to an unworthy ideal at the expense of his own personal life.

If this sounds all a bit contrived, the video is not. The simplicity of the shaky digital photography and ink wash drawings, along with a wistful score by Abby Schneider, give this short, sad work a surprising emotional resonance .

"A Vue," Joshua Mosley , Donald Young Gallery, 933 W. Washington ; (312) 455-0100. Through October .