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Little faith
Christine Tarkowski's new show emerges from her homegrown religion.
In 2006, Christine Tarkowski’s car broke down in Indiana, and she stayed at an Amish woman’s Elkhart County inn. “She tried to convert me,” recalls the 42-year-old atheist, who’s taught in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s (SAIC) fiber and material studies department since 2003. “I was trying to understand her commitment, how she could be so firm in her beliefs.”
Tarkowski, who had been contemplating her own “moral code,” became so interested in the idea of conversion that she returned to Indiana to visit her new friend. “I would go to her choir rehearsal and see if it would stick,” she says.
It didn’t. But the experience left Tarkowski so fascinated by systems of belief that she created her own religion—one with no dogma, deity or adherents. This imaginary faith is the focus of her solo exhibition “Last Things Will Be First and First Things Will Be Last,” which opens Friday 29 at the Chicago Cultural Center.
When we visit Tarkowski during the show’s installation, the harried artist doesn’t seem interested in proselytizing. She shows us her religion’s house of worship, however: a concrete geodesic dome incorporating energy-efficient light bulbs and cast glass, which she created for her 2006 UBS 12x12 show at the Museum of Contemporary Art. In “Last Things…,” the artist places this structure, lit from within, in a dark room filled with the sound of “punk/country/gospel” hymns she recorded with Chicago musician Jon Langford. Tarkowski tells us the dome references both “sacred geometries” and Buckminster Fuller. The 20th-century inventor interests her because his utopian ideas made him “a God-like figure” to many people.
Tarkowski was born in Connecticut, grew up in New Jersey and studied textile design at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons in New York before getting her M.F.A. from SAIC in 1992. After a stint designing wallpaper, she began investigating how her work could interact with the built environment. Our favorite Tarkowski piece, Warm Fuzzy Fun (2001), wraps the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center on the South Side in photographs of stuffed animals. The artist also began building structures herself, such as Working on the Failed Utopia (2005), a geodesic dome at Governors State University’s Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park.
“Last Things…” seems to be her most ambitious effort yet, a journey through three rooms, each an immersive environment that’s as awe-inspiring and hard to grasp as Dan Brown’s popularity. The myriad works include a vast curtain screenprinted with photos of Rome’s Pantheon and a neighborhood in Tijuana, a 25-foot-high sculpture representing the mast and sail of a whaling ship (pictured) and several small cast-iron models of parking structures. The latter’s double-helix ramps, Tarkowski explains, remind her of religious rituals based on circular motion, including Muslim pilgrims’ circumambulation of the Kaaba in Mecca. She represents this practice in a series of etchings that also depict racetracks and traffic roundabouts. We laugh at the incongruity, but the artist doesn’t smile. “Driving in circles is much more akin to my existence,” she says. “I don’t spin a prayer wheel.”
Moving in a circle without “spreading out” appeals to Tarkowski as an alternative to Manifest Destiny. The openly antiwar artist papers the walls around her concrete dome with 19th-century broadside-style posters bearing proclamations about oil and martyrs, suggesting American expansionists haven’t stopped looking to religion for legitimacy. She also wants to remind us that “globalization is not a new phenomenon,” and so “Last Things…” encompasses whaling and slavery, two industries that enmeshed the early U.S. economy in international commerce. Because of her interest in globalization, Tarkowski chose bamboo for her whaling ship fragment that traveled from China to Florida before reaching her studio. Such an orgy of fossil-fuel consumption strikes us as a sign of the environmental hell to come. Despite the symbols of belief on display, we think we’ve found a religion based on cynicism.
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