Jan 31
c.1950s-60s
RECOMMENDED
Chicago’s premier photojournalist Art Shay captured a moment in place and time, here in the early 1950s, when the gritty old city still held on, with its bittersweet ironies and brutalities, its harshness, and its anticipations of technology-fueled urbanity. Shooting straight and on the fly in unremitting black and white, Shay could pull the heartstrings and captivate the eye, as in his shot of a man taken from behind on a dingy commercial street who holds a duffel bag in one hand and a tiny kitten peering at us in the other, cradled on his shoulder; next to him a sign propped against a brick wall reads, “Be Kind Now.” Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 31
RECOMMENDED
“In the Spirit of Walser” at Donald Young Gallery is a series of exhibitions by artists inspired by the poetic, rambling stories of Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956). The second exhibition in this series features new works by Moyra Davey, including “Subway Writers II,” a grid of twenty-five photographs, and “Les Goddesses,” a sixty-one minute film reflecting on the life of writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Davey’s artwork, similar to Walser’s writing, balances melancholic introspection against a fascination with daily life. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 17
RECOMMENDED
Images flash by in an instant, zooming in on the random minutiae of a life. A cat playing on a fence, the scenic backdrop of a mountain range, a happy couple in wedded matrimony. Laura Mackin’s video “Zoom (Dean 1962-2006)” from her solo exhibition, “120 Years,” splices, edits and reconfigures the personal home videos of a stranger named Dean. Mackin rearranges Dean’s films and edits in zoomed images, creating a disjunctive visual experience. However random or specific the scenes that Dean chooses to zoom in on, they are still oddly familiar. Moments from an anonymous life read like the images we keep in our own memory of blurred impressions, arbitrarily conjoined, resurfacing fleetingly. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 17
RECOMMENDED
From 2005 through the present, Viktoria Sorochinski has been photographing the relation between Anna and her daughter Eve, not as a documentary of the vicissitudes of their bond, but through Sorochinski’s imagination of the many forms it might take in her staged and directorial color scenario shots. What Sorochinski’s images lose in spontaneity and the suppleness of life, they make up for in their sharply delineated moods and meanings. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 17
Gao Yuan, "Untitled (Woman with construction scene)," 2010
RECOMMENDED
Contemporary Chinese photography continues to impress by its conceptual power, sophistication and aesthetic richness in this exhibit of four artists who combine postmodern complexity with subtle senses of beauty. Nobody puts it all together better than Gao Yuan in her “Tattoo” series, in which she placed her models bedecked in their body art in poses derived from Italian Renaissance paintings, and then added to her studies backgrounds from China today of which the early moderns could not have dreamed. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 17
Jeroen Nelemans
RECOMMENDED
Susan Giles’ site-specific sculpture of the unbuilt Calatrava tower, toppled over inside The Mission, is a model of something unrealized. Although it might refer to the economic crash that scuttled the plans for the building, Giles’ “Crumpled Spire,” deftly built of wood, rests gracefully in the space, echoing the shapes of the windows, lighting grids and setting off the tin ceiling. Downstairs in the basement project room is an alluring and incisive set of photographs by Jeroen Nelemans that look beautiful at first glance but quickly assert a complex critical project that eludes the more poetic sculpture, upstairs. Read the rest of this entry »
Jan 03
Heather Rasmussen, "Untitled (New Orleans, Louisiana, September 10, 2005)," 2010
RECOMMENDED
Fascinated by the colorful and ruthlessly rectangular shipping crates that festoon California ports, Heather Rasmussen took to making miniature paper replicas of them; arranged her constructions to simulate documented accidents in which piles of containers crashed into each other, collapsed, or scattered in a mess; and shot her scenarios in color, leaving out any trace of context. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 20
RECOMMENDED
Between 1990 and 2001, Chicago’s gifted and gutsy documentary photographer Lloyd DeGrane went on the adventure of his life, going inside the walls of Cook County Jail and Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, shooting the entire world of incarceration from beginning to end, from the captors to the captives, and from the grinding oppressive tedium to the specks of creativity and wisdom. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 20
Damon Shell
RECOMMENDED
Among the eighteen accomplished Chicago photographers displaying their “favorite images” here in a variety of straight genres, the most abstract pieces are the standouts, preparing us to take some comfort and even joy in the blustery days that loom ahead. Remember last February’s blizzard. Damon Shell lets us relive it blissfully with his color studies of cars thickly coated with fresh white snow from which a taillight, windshield wiper or the hint of a windshield sometimes peeks through to create an entrancing composition. Then turn to Alan Teller’s dense and involving color abstractions of shards of ice amid bare twigs, dead leaves, and brown grass at the Ryerson Conservation Area near Deerfield, and you will find some redemption for all of the slips and stumbles of outrageous winter. Read the rest of this entry »
Dec 13
Dennis Oppenheim, "Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.," 1970.
By Monica Westin
In my notes for the exhibition “Light Years,” I scrawled to myself that of the multitude of photographs and other lens-based work in the Art Institute’s ambitious show of photo-conceptualism, half a dozen or more involve scenes of beaches. Jan Dibbets’ careful formal studies of tides and waves in photography and film bookend the show. Beaches also appear in more playful work like John Baldessari’s “California Map Project” and Eleanor Antin’s “100 Boots.” And Dennis Oppenheim’s “Stage 1 and 2. Reading Position for 2nd Degree Burn Long Island. N.Y.” documents the artist self-inducing a sunburn with a book on his chest while lying in the sand, treating his body like a kind of raw photographic plate to be exposed by the sunlight. A consideration of these images alone suggests not only the scope of this show but also this reviewer’s psychological need to focus, at times, on a single motif so as to keep from feeling utterly overwhelmed by an exhibition this big, which makes a strong argument about a decisive watershed moment in art history. Read the rest of this entry »
