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 »
untitled, 2007
RECOMMENDED
If you’re in the mood for a full-strength shot of grotesquerie, glom on to Gary Briechle’s black-and-white Collodion portraits of Maine rednecks (they’ll beat the southern gents and belles any time for their unstudied naivete and unadulterated rawness). Ralph Meatyard’s backwoods surrealism and Diane Arbus’ freakish individualism fuse in Briechle’s studies of people who let their emotions hang out because they don’t know how to front, even if they’ve been posed. 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
If you’re a film buff or a fan with a fancy for box sets filled with background, you’ll be a sucker for Steve Schapiro’s shots of star power radiating from the sets of two of the most iconic films of the late-twentieth century: Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972) and Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976). Hired by the directors as the “special photographer” tasked with recording the productions, Schapiro fulfilled his mission mainly by shooting the famous scenes in takes that were snapped while the movies were being filmed or in practice sessions. Don’t expect to see any lapses, unguarded moments, unfamiliar perspectives, or signs of the apparatus that encases the “orchid” of the film, as Walter Benjamin called it; this is not a documentary, but a still accompaniment or iteration. Marlon Brando is Don Corleone, Robert De Niro is Travis Bickle, and Jodie Foster is Iris—always in character. (Michael Weinstein)
Through April 30 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 West Superior
RECOMMENDED
I first saw Lori Nix’s photographs online—scenes of post-apocalyptic interior environments abandoned and in the slow process of being reclaimed by nature—and I was amazed. After learning that Nix photographed miniature dioramas that she builds by hand, mostly from scratch, there followed a moment of disbelief. Each scene is so lavishly detailed down to wood grain and stained walls that I thought she simply set-dressed existing locations rather than create the world exactly as she wished it to be. After disbelief came relief; I was glad these locations didn’t exist, that they weren’t actually the result of some current natural or manmade disaster. This relief is a gift often administered by great art. Read the rest of this entry »
Lilli Carré: Untitled, 2010, screen print, 8 x 8 inches. Photo by Angee Leonnard.
Top 5 People and Places We’ll Miss
Kathryn Hixson
David Weinberg Gallery
Rowley Kennerk Gallery
Green Lantern Gallery
James Garrett Faulkner
—Jason Foumberg
Top 5 Solo Exhibitions
Edra Soto/Ebersmoore Gallery
Philip Hanson/Corbett vs. Dempsey
Lilli Carré/Spudnik Press
Gladys Nilsson/Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
Ian Weaver/Packer Schopf Gallery
—Jason Foumberg
Top 5 Public Art Projects
Ray Noland’s “Run Blago Run”
Pop-Up galleries in the Loop
Nomadic Studio/DePaul University Art Museum
Hui-min Tsen’s tours of the Chicago Pedway
Marwen
—Jason Foumberg Read the rest of this entry »
"Study of Nest," 1994/2010, RC print with acrylic paint and UV varnish
RECOMMENDED
In a celebration of the surrealist imagination centered on the relations between human beings and the denuded natural landscape, the indomitable photographic team of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison sets up scenarios and confects collages that feature improbable constructions and collections that are the frames of bizarre performances enacted by Robert. After they have shot their handiwork, the ParkeHarrisons proceed to apply paint and varnish subtly to their prints, endowing the resulting photo-works with a faded surface that renders their subjects slightly indistinct, as though they come from days gone by that we know never were, and are inaccessible to us. Although the ParkeHarrisons intend to make an ecological point, they end up delivering bittersweet shaggy-dog stories, as when we see Robert, with his back to us, sitting inertly in a large bird’s nest after he has taken off his shoes, which have been neatly placed on barren ground nearby. It’s environmental dada. (Michael Weinstein)
Through October 30 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 West Superior
Howard Schatz, "You are... four years old; first time at the circus," 2007
RECOMMENDED
In one of the most illuminating and intriguing educational exhibitions to be mounted in Chicago in recent memory, Catherine Edelman has brought together twenty-eight photographers and, for each of them, has paired a full-size image with the contact sheet from which it was selected. Call it conceptual curating at its finest; no wall text is required—and none provided—for viewers to test their judgment against the photographer’s and to try to understand the choices that were made and then second guess them. Read the rest of this entry »
RECOMMENDED
Catherine Edelman can say with justice that her space is “the gallery that Michael Kenna built.” Since 1988, Edelman has delivered her walls over to Kenna’s atmospheric black-and-white environmental photographs, shot throughout the globe, all in the same soft and finely delineated style, seventeen times. Featuring recent images from Europe, Asia and the Middle East, among other far-flung places, Kenna’s present installment highlights the consistency of his position as the solitary shooter who hews to the modernist path of producing distinctively photographic beauty through contrasts of tonality and chiaroscuro. The effect is usually dreamlike reverie, but Kenna is also capable of evoking more tempestuous moods, as in two studies of the Huangshan mountains in China, in which the peaks rise up from roiling fog that resembles steam from an unseen furiously boiling cauldron. The secret of Kenna’s appeal to collectors is his ability to draw the eye into scenes that border on the sublime, yet are small enough and sufficiently domesticated to infuse awe with comfortable repose. (Michael Weinstein)
Through July 10 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior
RECOMMENDED
Keith Carter is best known for his mildly surreal and mildly eerie black-and-white photos that create a neo-gothic warm-hearted visual myth of the rural American South, tied together by sensibility rather than narrative. Those images are abundant here, but the highlights of the show are the works from Carter’s recent “Natural Histories” series, in which he has converted from laid-back “bad” bluesman to bitter war denouncer. In large-format sepia prints, Carter has combined in the computer his photos of gutted and blasted American warplanes, taken at an airplane graveyard, with background shots of people disporting themselves in muddy fields in the deep south. The sepia tone, illuminated by glares of light, creates an unsparing vision of devastation, in which the revelers are transformed into despondent survivors in the glowing aftermath of an enveloping nuclear attack. There is no beauty here—maybe some sublimity, but much more the horror of what we manage to do to each other. Welcome to Hell; war is Hell. (Michael Weinstein)
Through May 1 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior
