Pablo Soria, “Una cama y el entramado de posibles sueños,” 2012

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Photography lends itself to surrealism more than any other visual medium does, by virtue of its manifold possibilities for representing a scene. Argentinian photographer Pablo Soria does the trick of defamiliarizing the ordinary by shooting large-format, sharp, starkly illuminated nighttime color images taken under long exposure times, producing brilliant dreamlike studies of his native San Miguel de Tucuman. Sometimes Soria moves into the frame as the film remains exposed, so that he appears as a ghostly presence; but he is most successful and fixates our attention when he envelopes us in intimate woodland sites in which he places an empty bed or chair, disturbing sparkling pristine nature with some uncertain human artifact and purpose. A rude wooden bench sits on the rough brown ground at the very bottom of the frame as stalks of semi-tropical plants, some of them sere, tower above it into the impenetrable darkness. This is a place for nocturnal dwarves; no doubt, one of them—in his own mind—is the artist. Read the rest of this entry »

Mel Keiser

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Back in the heyday of feminist photography, a quarter century ago, its practitioners often effaced, blurred, cut or otherwise mangled their ubiquitous self-portraits in an orgy of agonized self-rebirth and transformation, and then it stopped. Now Mel Keiser has picked up the neglected practices, taking color images of herself and hacking out substantial parts of them producing swirls, tangles and shards that cover her body and its surroundings in an expressionistic storm. Keiser’s intent is revealed in the title of her series, “ecorches”—flaying the flesh for the purposes of torture, science or both. Yet although the agony is unmistakable in the photo-works, they are too vibrant, dynamic and densely lush to suppress an ecstatic participation in them, whatever the psychic consequences might be. Covered in sharp-edged shards of glass, her face and torso horrifically scarred and pocked, in the colors of dried blood, it still seems as though Keiser is breaking out of a prison and preparing to rule the world. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chicago’s premier celebrity photographer, Marc Hauser, excels at set-ups that amp-up the distinctive attitudes of his subjects, often embedding them in striking backgrounds. In his latest series of large-format color images, the context has invaded the skin in the form of elaborate tattoos that cover the subjects’ bodies. This presents a problem: Do we lose ourselves in the labyrinthine tattoos, or are we drawn to their bearers, whom Hauser has posed and presented so that they are as attractive as can be? It is impossible to have both visual experiences at once, so the only solution is to adopt each approach in turn, and then repeat the process, getting two pictures for the viewing of one. Read the rest of this entry »

Luis González Palma, “Virginal,” 2011

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Throughout his career as a world-class photo artist, Luis Gonzalez Palma has always done what it turns out he had to do—register in tellingly emotional photo-works the state of his soul or, if we prefer to be naturalistic, his psyche. He went through Central American nationalism (Guatemala is his base), critical Catholicism, troubled masculinity, and existential agony and absence, to name just a few of his transformations, and now he has reached the point where the subjects of his sepia-toned tableaux express a uniform attitude of tight-lipped, harsh defiance—whether his model is male or female, strong or weak. It seems that Gonzalez Palma is saying that even though he knows that death faces us all, he will not be broken. In a repetitive triptych, a man sits at a school desk, with impenetrable mathematical formulas on a blackboard next to him, looking straight ahead, unwilling to submit to the enigma that existence has always been to him. This is not the last chapter. As long as Gonzalez Palma stays alive, he will surely continue to search for the light that has never yet come.

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Jess Dugan, “Erica and Kritsa 2012″

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As a precipitate of the relation between the photographer and the subject, the portrait inscribes a balance of power, in which one of the two dominates the subject’s representation. In Jess Dugan’s color portraits of people in the LGBT community (she herself is in the process of changing from female to male), Dugan takes the lead. All of her subjects radiate an unremitting intensity—never relaxed, betraying a smile in only a few cases, and yet never painted and certainly never stoical, dispassionate or nonchalant. They communicate a burning defiance, a sense that “I will not be moved,” that is diversified by each one’s particular temperament and physical bearing—Dugan does not homogenize her subjects; she simply gives each of them a signature attitude, one that every person takes at some moments in life. Dugan’s most striking work is a double-portrait diptych in which two women interrupt each other’s personal space. Their gestures suggest both a slap and a caress, yet neither subject is erotic or aggressive, only deeply intent. Their interaction breaches the frame’s divide to unite the double portrait. (Michael Weinstein)

Through October 27 at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior

Lydia Panas

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In this group show of conceptual color photographers, Lydia Panas stands out with her portraits of young men, women and children sharply etched against deep black backgrounds as they hold food in their hands. In all cases, the subjects are as doleful as can be, exuding discomfort and displeasure, and, in consequence, subverting the references to life and its bounty that would ordinarily awaken affirmation. Read the rest of this entry »

Xavier Nuez

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Positioning himself squarely inside the popular genre of contemporary ruins photography, Xavier Nuez rockets beyond the familiar conceit of redeeming derelict spaces and trash, and embraces them in an orgy of riotous glitz. Shooting at night in color in garishly illuminated spaces, Nuez’s images are phantasmagoria of graffiti-covered abandoned surfaces cheek to jowl with sparkling and scintillating skylines bathed in ink-blue darkness. Ruins photography tends to be meditative and to reveal beauty in decay that defies design; by introducing a play between decay and hyper-sleek urbanity, and stepping up illumination to a neon level, Nuez gets the eye excited and the mind energized. Juxtaposition invigorates. Read the rest of this entry »

Gao Yuan, "Untitled (Woman with construction scene)," 2010

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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

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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 »

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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 »