Corbett vs. Dempsey

Ed Flood

By Joanne Molina. December, 2009

Ed Flood's work offers a complex experience of danger and joy. A key player in Chicago's Imagist school of the 1960s and 70s (he died in 1985, at 41), he distanced himself from the New York art scene and its overt political expression. In September, Corbett vs. Dempsey boldly reasserted the relevance of Flood's belly laughs and wry grins in "Ed Flood: Constructions, Boxes & Works on Paper, 1967 - 1973," the first in the gallery's three-part series of exhibitions of the artist's works.

Freestanding and hanging boxes reminiscent of the elaborately constructed worlds of H.C. Westermann and Joseph Cornell were arranged among serigraphs and the superbly unsettling film Tappy Toes (1968), which Flood shot and fellow Imagist Red Grooms directed. In the catalogue's introduction, the critic Robert Storr emphasizes Flood's whimsy. Indeed, comics and advertisements for holiday resorts influenced serigraphs such as Lone Palm (1969). But the carefully edited exhibition revealed both faces of this artistic Janus. Seemingly innocent pieces were strategically placed among more overtly allusive ones, such as the box construction The Flaming Comet Zulu Dart Board (1968), a world of pinball games, palm trees, marbles, and toy soldiers clearly referring to Vietnam, the atom bomb, and the colonialism embedded in our visions of "tropical paradises." The boxes of Time Capsules (1966 - 70) are both adorned and obscured by their exuberant covering of opaque brown paint, which keeps their contents hidden from viewers' eyes. Through this display the curators demonstrated the profound thoughtfulness of even Flood's most playful work.