EDGE Chicago

Chicago artist Jacob Meehan takes the kind of personal photographs in which your average middle-class, Oprah-adoring mother appears odd, while a self-described "sex pig" seems, simply, quite well-dressed.

I can think of no better candidate to open a much-needed and decidedly contemporary apartment gallery, Golden, in the heart of Boystown. Meehan and partner Henry Chang opened Golden on September 12, and it is no wonder they would invite local Chicago artist Jill Frank to be the first to exhibit.

Meehan is a young photographer from southern Illinois, recently graduated from Loyola University with a degree in Visual Communication. His subject matter may be familiar to those of us friendly with the various Queer spaces and communities about town, but possibly startling to that of our own version of ’outsiders’ for its blatantly sexual imagery.

It is the tension between the normal or abnormal, heroic or bizarre, and clandestine or candid (and to whom?) that drives his slim but impressive body of work. The photographs consist of uncomplicated portraits of ’models’ met via the Men Seeking Men cruiser section of Craigslist, curiously empty interiors of sex-clubs and bathhouses, and appropriated stills from the aforementioned queen of talk’s show. Meehan makes his work as he "goes through the rounds of identifying, or not, with these people and places."

It is personal subject matter for Meehan, who at 25 has only been out for a few years, and his images, often featuring men boldly nude and nakedly kinky in the clearest of photographs, suggest a kind of admiration for their unashamed, fully displayed sexuality.

Needless to say, intimacy is on full view.

While Meehan has no plans currently to exhibit his own work at Golden, the choice of Jill Frank makes perfect sense. Frank’s artwork, as well, delves deeply into the personal.

Currently on view is Frank’s provocative photo project "Psychodrama," for which she has invited various individuals to recreate traumatic, embarrassing or otherwise unpleasant personal scenarios for the camera. Captured on film are memories that would have, one might think, rather been forgotten.

"I like this work because it makes record of something in the past, where a record did not previously exist,’ says Meehan, who curated the show with Frank to contain images of trauma both startlingly obvious (as in Water, 2004) and mysteriously particular to the pictured individual (as in Backseat, 2003).

While the concept is certainly compelling, the photographs speak for themselves, are well-staged and gorgeously printed in large sizes proportional to the heavy gravity of the scenes depicted. She, like Meehan, somehow produces an aesthetic some intriguing place between gratuitous and gracious.

It is an exciting, crowd-pleasing first exhibition for Golden, with Frank’s artwork benefiting from the cozy, familiar apartment quarters the first-time gallerists have transformed into exhibition space.

Successfully treading the line between commercial gallery and alternative, artist-run center, Golden will surely serve as a refined launching pad for young artists, both local and international, to be introduced to area collectors.

Be sure to visit, they may possibly be just down the block from you - and you wouldn’t want to be rude, would you?

GOLDEN is located at 816 W. Newport (Apt. #1), between Halstead and Clark. Galleries are open Friday-Sunday, Noon-6pm, featuring Jill Frank’s exhibition Psychodrama now through November 1st. For more information visit their website: www.golden-gallery.org

Frank’s work is also currently on view at Contemporary Art Workshop in Lincoln Park