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Review: Engaging with evil

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Jan. 24, 2011 - Webster University professor Robin Assner collaborates with Milwaukee-based artist Sarah Nitschke under the name Ro~Sa, and they make art that takes on nothing less than the nature of human experience.

They've examined such subjects as Desire, Wish, Luck and Control; now at Good Citizen Gallery, they've staged "Dismantling Evil," a meditation on the darker side of human drives. Assner and Nitschke focus on acts of torture, hatred and humiliation, but they come at the subjects laterally, so as to engage viewers intellectually rather than shock us into numbness.

A series of inkjet print posters combine text with violent images so pixelated they barely register as photos and read instead like beautiful mosaics or painted abstractions. It's a successful strategy, moving away from the too-particular and softening the details so that we may recognize the (sadly) universal tendency toward evil (this approach works particularly well in the artists' design of the gallery's public billboard, "We Called Them Cockroaches...").

"Knowing Better, Doing Worse" presents a dizzying encyclopedia of racist slurs; for "Living Conditions," Assner's parents decorated tissue holders and coasters with Abu Ghraib torture imagery rendered in needlepoint, of all things.

Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic. 

Ivy Cooper
Ivy Cooper is the Beacon visual arts reviewer and a professor of art at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.