Some things can’t be told. The consequences would be unbearable, or so it seems to the one who would have to do the telling.
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The photographs, rendered by Sistler in the paintings and incorporated digitally in the prints, are mostly stiletto-and-garter-belt fantasies from the first half of the 20th century. He drops them into cartoonish but sinister interiors, viewed from a perspective so close to the ground it could belong to a fallen adult, but is more likely that of a child. There’s a range of content, including the dreamy eroticism of Reverie, which juxtaposes images of two aroused but isolated adults, but the most common theme is bondage: the occasional man, but mostly women, trussed and subjugated.
Sistler says his work wasn’t always like this. The School of the Art Institute graduate and former performance artist, who now works out of his home and studio in Bucktown, was happily engrossed in something completely different a decade ago, when his art suddenly took a “drastic turn.” He’d just completed an abecedarium—an alphabet series of three-inch-square gouache paintings illustrating aspects of art, from aperture to Zoetrope. Witty and whimsical, the series was so child-friendly the Illinois Art Education Association made a poster of it. But in the last stages of this sunny and safe work, Sistler says, he’d begun to get a different set of marching orders. While he was painting bunnies and dinosaurs, he recalls his muses whispering, ever more urgently, “you must work with pornography.”
Through May 19 at Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen. A selection of Anchor Graphics prints are included in “Pulled, Pressed and Printed” at Expo 72, 72 E. Randolph, through April 30.
And four works from Sistler’s “ABRACADABRA” series can be seen in “Write Now: Artists and Letterforms,” at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington, through April 29.
