Lynne Cohen, "Untitled" Office with fish on wall, 1978

RECOMMENDED

Travel back to the 1970s hip scene—think Talking Heads. There you will find Lynne Cohen who gained fame and acclaim from the photographic cognoscenti for her deadpan, straight-on black-and-white images of depopulated institutional interiors that come at you as starkly delineated stage sets for the absurd rituals of modern life, after the illusions of the sixties have been dispelled. Read the rest of this entry »

Susan Sensemann as Ino

RECOMMENDED

One of Chicago’s premier conceptual photographers, Carole Harmel’s latest ingenious series had her taking color portraits of twenty-six of the city’s artists and then having her subjects paint, draw, apply textiles or otherwise grace the prints with their media, with the aim of fitting themselves into Homer’s Odyssey. Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas Impressionist figure painting is about how people look, Expressionism is about how they feel, and usually, like Edvard Munch’s screamer, they have felt pretty bad, and didn’t get any better as recognizable features were left behind by the Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. But picking up where Ab-Ex left off, Chicago painter Julia Katz has introduced action figures into the foreground and they seem to be expressing the joy of movement. She began, a few years ago, with kids running and splashing around, and now is inspired by the “rhythmic movement of breath, as well as the idea of yin and yang energies” concurrent with her practice of Yoga and Qi Gong. But are recognizable human figures necessary, or even useful for this inward-turning project? Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Parents often show love by giving us too many things, so even after we’ve grown older, nothing can be quite so comforting as the clutter of useless junk. And unlike everything that’s always changing, clutter can be permanent and reliable. Which may explain Mary Lou Zelazny’s pictorial world, where, as the “Cake Lady” herself, she offers up an armful of comfort food. We all know that the manufactured pastry, whose garish advertising images she has cut and pasted, is not very healthy, so one might conclude that she is also offering up a pointed critique of modern American life. But if eating chocolate cake makes you feel good about yourself, why stop? And feeling good about yourself seems to be this artist’s mission, especially in this exhibit of recent paintings that focus so often on the female face and body, not so much how it looks on the outside, but how it feels from within. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Veteran photojournalist Alex Webb has spent his life getting into the recesses of the non-Western world, learning, as rock icons Rush said, to “catch the heat of the third-world man.” Webb is an unreconstructed street photographer, looking for the moment at which drama—intended or not—reaches a peak that he can capture to make it seem that the humdrum life that everyone leads, whoever they are anywhere, achieves an epiphany of shock and awe. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Born in Cuba, Maria Martinez-Canas was taken by her parents as an infant to Puerto Rico and is now a Cuban-American photo-artist who has spent her sentimental and artistic life attempting to recreate in images the native home she never had. Having been preoccupied with cultural displacement and now middle-aged, Martinez-Canas is confronting her family history and finds that she cannot easily disentangle fantasy from reality. Rather than resolving her doubts, Martinez-Canas has depicted them in complex and elegantly produced photo-works, in which she lays a base of photographs (reality) and then overlays them with tracings of other photographs, segmenting the composition and presenting it in faded, misty, dreamy black and white. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Love is a many-splendored thing, but only in photography can love attain the zenith of self-referential purity and perfection, albeit in a series of images that could never be tokens of real life. Through the magic of the computer, Kelli Connell shoots the same female model, in the twilight of youth, playing the roles of two friends/lovers; mixes up the images digitally; and composes them in seamless color scenarios depicting moments of intimacy and distance in the subjects’ relationship—the quintessence of narcissism. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

Sexual desire is visual, at least as Scheherazade explains it in the classic “1001 Arabian Nights,” where love is always love at first sight. Wealth, power, intelligence and character may be attractive, but desire, like light, enters through the eye, just as it does in French Impressionism, which coincided with French imperialism in the Arab world.

So it is quite appropriate that as Iraqi art emerges from the ashes of civil strife, Impressionism is one of the paths it is taking, and it’s been taken quite well by Ali Hasmut who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of Baghdad in 1997 and came to the United States in 2000.

Unfortunately, Impressionism has been abandoned by the high-end American art world for nearly a century, and with a few notable exceptions, is mired in the saccharine, nostalgic, flaccid world of shopping-center galleries. Nothing could be more retardataire than Hasmut’s statement that, “My vision is to capture the most magnificent moments in life. Through texture, color and light, I want to show the moving souls of my subjects.” Read the rest of this entry »

Frederick Sommer, "Coyotes," 1945

RECOMMENDED

In this lavish show of black-and-white and a few color images taken in the last half of the twentieth century, from the collection of the late Jonathan Williams, who was a noted photo critic and whose non-profit Jargon Society press published poetry paired with American modernist photography, we look back on a sensibility that pressed against the confines of realism but still remained anchored to the world. Having bagged some big game, like Harry Callahan (about whom he published critical essays), Aaron Siskind and Ralph Eugene Meatyard (a book of whose late photographs he published), Williams also caught many minor masters like Wynn Bullock and Frederick Sommer, the latter of whom encapsulates the critic-collector’s proclivity for a gothic sense of life. In one of the most grisly yet somehow fascinating and even grimly amusing death scenes, Sommer captured a plot of stony, scraggly ground on which are strewn the carcasses of four coyotes sporting hideous snaggly teeth. Williams also collected some feel-good images, but his heart was in the darkness. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 30 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior.

"Rubber Boy," 1998

RECOMMENDED

Now that he has devoted his talents for upwards of four decades to taking absurdly humorous color photos of his Weimaraner dogs in various and sundry settings, you would think that William Wegman would have run that shtick into the pound. Think again. In his latest shaggy-dog romp, Wegman borrowed a passel of vintage sideshow posters from gallerist Carl Hammer, placed the pooches in front of them in appropriate dress, and posed them as—yes—the cutest sad-sack freaks this side of P.T. Barnum. Just imagine the bliss that the long-gone scaly-skinned Alligator Girl would have felt had she actually had one of those winsome Weimaraners, complete with an alligator snout, as her faithful consort. Wegman does that for her image posthumously. One can never accuse Wegman of being a one-trick puppy. He went to the dogs when postmodern photography seduced him and he never came back. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 26 at Carl Hammer Gallery, 740 North Wells