CHICAGO, IL.- Bert Green Fine Art presents their second show by Chicago printmaker Rebecca Gray Smith, and a debut exhibition by Chicago’s own Robin Dluzen, artist, writer, critic, and woman about town.

Rebecca Gray Smith‘s The Alphabet is a complete series of etchings, letters A-Z, and numbers 0-9 plus a title plate and two repeated letters for a total of 39 images. The series was begun in fits and starts over a 25 year period, originally intended as a response to the AIDS crisis. The letters were completed in 2014, and the numbers in 2016, all at Anchor Graphics in Chicago. Now the combined alphabet and numbers series are being exhibited together for the first time.

These works explore the presence of death in all human endeavors, using traditional signifiers of mortality such as the skeleton as a primary actor and subject. Each plate corresponds to a specific fatal activity or malady, highlighting the act of existence as a high-risk activity fraught with peril.

Robin Dluzen has created a full-scale replica of one of the henhouses on her parents' property in Michigan. Covered in charcoal drawings, made of impermanent materials, and divorced from its productive use, this work speaks to the artist's remove from an aspect of the culture in which she was raised. Installed in the gallery project room, this piece takes on an imposing scale by forcing an unavoidable intimate relationship with the object in a diminutive space.

Rather than nostalgically celebrating the animal world, Dluzen introduces a critical look at the interaction of humans with the sources of their food; chickens as instinctively motivated, useful creatures for which there is no need for sentimentality. The relationship between the chicken and the henhouse is a cooly, efficient economic relationship.