Corbett vs. Dempsey

Margot Bergman: "Wonderland and Other Reveries"

By Josh Tyson. Time Out Chicago / Issue 62 : May 4-10, 2006

Most of us know the feeling of buying something secondhand, be it a T-shirt, a recliner or a coffee mug, and basking in that item's ethereal history-it was intimate to someone else and has stories to tell which will never be delivered.

In her series "Other Reveries," Chicago-born artist Margot Bergman makes strides toward communicating with found objects by altering paintings that she "rescued" from flea markets. Over the past decade, Bergman has engaged unknown artists in a sort of trans-actual collaboration, using her own brush to flush out hidden faces she noticed in the works as they adorned her studio walls.

In Blossom, it's easy to see where she made entry: A painting of two Indians on horseback taking down a buffalo that has gored a fellow hunter's horse becomes also the tight-lipped face of a lady. The buffalo's head is her nose, and the upright warriors' heads, her eyes. The lush bouquet in Pearl has a distinct pair of eyes, but everywhere else it's nearly impossible to tell where Bergman began and her unnamed partner ended.

The "Wonderland" series is Bergman alone, though there are links to "Other Reveries" in these large and playfully violent abstracts. The multicolored dots looming like portals in Walking on Water seem more like bullet holes in Landscape, a diptych of separate portraits of bucks and deer.

Altering discarded works by amateur artists could provide fertile ground for sarcasm or slaughter. By contrast, Bergman's work is both childlike and studied; she seems to hold a reverence for worlds that can't be adequately defined and beg to be explored.