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 »

Carole Harmel

RECOMMENDED

The genre of photo-works, which was one of the developments of the artistic revolution of the 1960s, calls for embedding the photograph in the context of other media to convey a comment on the relation between art and life. In this exhibition of three artists who create ingenious and involved photo-works, Carole Harmel steals the show with her three-shot sequence of color images that are placed in metal frames, torn out to reveal the subjects, and that reflect on the sin of sloth: a sensuous nude woman lies on a bed of roses that progressively engulf her until only the flowers are left. 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 »

Ursula Sokolowska, "Currency Exchange, Union Street, Chicago," 2011

RECOMMENDED

In this carefully selected summer photo show of fourteen accomplished, intelligent and distinctive gallery artists from around the world, Ursula Sokolowska stands out for her unsparingly direct straight color shots of gritty commercial and warehousing neighborhoods right here in Chicago. Perhaps it seems perverse to single out Sokolowska from a field that includes such global luminaries as Lalla Essaydi, Magdalena Campos-Pons, Luis Gonzalez Palma and our own Patty Carroll—and they are all here to their best effect—but Sokolowska makes their ingenious and insightful turns seem contrived when placed up against the world we live in that she has revealed in ominously illuminated color archival pigment prints. Who needs scenarios, set-ups and poses if we let Sokolowska transport us to the back lot of a dingy brick currency exchange on Union Street on a winter day after a snow, under a smudged aqua sky, where a lone gleaming white Mercedes sits parked? Had there been thirteen realists and one devotee of the imaginary, it might have been different. (Michael Weinstein)

Through August 26 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior.

Cornelia Hediger, "01.16.07"

RECOMMENDED

In an effort to lay bare the conflicts that sear her subjectivity, Swiss photographer Cornelia Hediger takes multiple images of herself and combines them into segmented compositions in which her personae engage in dialogical confrontation with one another. Hediger’s several selves are dominated by a pair, one of which is passive, creative, and skeptical—verging often on victimhood—and the other of which is more assertive and, if not confident, then at least determined. Incipient violence, agony, severe judgment, imminent death and an undercurrent of terror shoot through Hediger’s scenarios, never consummated and always renewed and unresolved. In one of her most telling studies, Hediger’s passive and, in this case, childlike self sits hunched in a corner, having scrawled an unkempt tangle of chalk marks on the floor, as she looks up apprehensively at her would-be dominating double who stands before her holding an empty bird cage. For many feminist photographers, imprisonment is a condition to be borne or battled; for Hediger, it is an ever-present horror and threat, continually deferred. (Michael Weinstein)

Through June 25 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

RECOMMENDED

Positioning himself atop parking garages and behind the windows of office buildings and hotels that place him at mid-height, John Dowell satisfies his craving for dense urban skyscraper beauty by shooting clear and reposeful color cityscapes at dusk and in the dead of night, emphasizing the glittering windows that surround him and sometimes granting us a distant peek inside. Dowell confects his most tantalizing eye candy at the last fading glimmers of dusk, when the lights gleam against softly hued skies. Drawn to Atlanta and Chicago, Dowell’s takes of our very sweetest home (as it appears to be under his lens) reach their zenith in his image of the garishly illuminated Rock ‘n’ Roll McDonald’s fronting a phalanx of twinkling towers that stand behind it like corporate sentinels. Far from sending up the fast-food emporium, Dowell looks down on it as a treasure of our times that is there to amaze and delight, as might a wonder of the world. (Michael Weinstein)

Through April 23 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior.

Natan Dvir, "Ehab (Muslim, Be'ine)," 2009

RECOMMENDED

Lebanese Rania Matar and Israeli Natan Dvir have independently undertaken photographic projects to explore the lives of Lebanese and Palestinian adolescents (Matar) and Israeli Arabs (Dvir). As an insider, Matar’s color portraits of young women in the private recesses of their rooms dispel any illusion that these people are exempt from globalized youth culture; even when they are in headscarves, Matar’s subjects partake in the hip romanticism that goes along with growing up. Dvir, as an outsider, confronts a higher bar to leap; his subjects, mostly male, pose themselves predictably as tough and defiant, yet he comes up with the show’s banner shot, in which a young woman in a hijab is captured in a mirror applying eyeliner, as a younger girl in black jeans and an entrancing t-shirt vogues seductively. Every rising generation has to encounter cultural conflict; Matar and Dvir know this and make us appreciate that truth. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 30 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

Jian Yiming, "Pop Star," 2010

RECOMMENDED

Among the five emerging photographers that gallerist Martha Schneider has brought together in her never-ending quest for fresh talent, Chinese color portraitist Jiang Yiming takes the palm for his series depicting kindergarteners posing as who they want to be when they grow up. Shot against a traditional Chinese watercolor painting of a soft autumn landscape, Yiming’s subjects pop out in brightly sharp-edged graphic relief, each one of them in full professional dress and all of them evincing intense seriousness about their performances. A little sailor boy stands at stoical attention, cradling a toy rifle in his arms; a budding young artist holding a brush and a smeared palette, and decked out in a paint-spattered shirt and jeans stares at the camera earnestly; a prospective musician in tie and tails, with his eyes shut, has fallen into a pained trance as he strokes a violin; and a little girl in a shiny red jacket vogues with determined insouciance. Little do they know what lies ahead. (Michael Weinstein)

Through September 11 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

Jowhara AlSaud

RECOMMENDED

For its traditional summer genre show that features contemporary developments in time-honored photographic forms, the gallery has brought together four gifted portraitists, each of whom proceeds along a different path and projects a distinctive sensibility. Ursula Sokolowska’s color scenario studies of distressed people in decrepit environments exude an ominous sense of bitter oppression; Jess Dugan’s black-and-white environmental portraits—presented as triptychs—are warm and relaxed without being smarmy; and Jennifer Greenburg’s color images documenting the diehard devotees of the 1950s rockabilly lifestyle are consummated without a trace of ironic superiority or a hint of a sneer. The bold experimentalist in the show is Saudi Arabian photo-artist Jowhara AlSaud, who takes snapshots of friends and family and then etches out the negatives to create dynamic minimalist photo-cartoons that pack a powerful emotional punch just by virtue of their absence of detail. Having eliminated their facial features, but leaving their hair and the patterns on their blouses intact, AlSaud captures the vibrancy of three women pressed against each other in convivial friendship. (Michael Weinstein)

Through July 3 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

RECOMMENDED

Seamlessly merging single color images into panoramic “constructed landscapes,” Kevin Malella comes up with compelling scenes that could be taken as straight shots featuring brilliant juxtapositions. Sheer beauty is Malella’s strong suit, as when he offers up a study in which railroad tracks dusted with a fresh carpet of snow foreground a tract of suburban duplexes abutting the towers of Chicago rising in the distance on a soft partly sunny day. Guillermo Srodek-Hart moves inside and shoots cluttered old shops in rural Argentina, delivering rich and subtly lit color photos that combine complex composition with densely overflowing content, as in his study of shelving in a general store on which cases full of gaucho knives vie for attention with crates of vegetables, spools of twine, bags of dog food and fertilizer, and a stuffed wildcat and falcon, not to mention most of the rest of the stock. Evincing perfect complementarity, Malella and Srodek-Hart, each in their own ways, achieve rare marriages of form and fact. (Michael Weinstein)

Through May 8 at Schneider Gallery, 230 W. Superior