RECOMMENDED

Harking back to the voguish spiritualism of a century ago and deploying its rich photographic techniques—the light blue cyanotype, the faded pink kallitype, the attenuated etched tintype and the luminous dreamy gum-platinum print—John Metoyer serves up seductive surreal images with more than a dash of the gothic and some side orders of grim wit. Thoroughly postmodern, Metoyer simultaneously pays homage to the old-school experimentalists and subverts them; in “Phantom Limb,” we are treated to the vision of a prosthetic leg levitating above a draped table, as though it had been summoned at a séance, perhaps to the horror of a bereaved lover seeking rapport with a soul who had passed to the far side. Seeking to vindicate the “alternative process photography” of a long-lost era by celebrating its imagination, craft, beauty and “poetry;” to disturb our complacency in everyday life and to have some fun in and with the process, Metoyer is sublimely successful on all counts. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 5 at Harold Washington College, 30 E. Lake, Room 1105.