RECOMMENDED Achieving her aim of “honing perception to the sensuous reality of a constantly changing and dynamic world,” Jin Lee’s exquisite color photographs of dense brush on the Illinois prairie throughout the four seasons evince such precise detail that they reach the boundaries of psychedelic perception. Lee’s strategy is to get inside a thicket and introduce us to its myriad forms and tones at the closest range, so that we are enveloped by the vegetation and even seem to feel its textures and smell its scents. Her images of milkweed pods sprouting from their stalks as the leaves around them turn orange and wither on a cloudy fall afternoon incite our desire to see Lee’s scenes with our own eyes, which can be done by walking outside the museum to its grounds dotted with patches of restored prairie, where—with Lee’s vision planted in us—we will experience acute pleasure. (Michael Weinstein)
Jin Lee shows at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 North Cannon, (773)755-5148, through September 24.
The Friction of History: A Review of Sky Hopinka at the Block Museum Merging metaphor and direct accounts of Fort Marion, Hopinka’s “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer” offers perspectives on the long and complex reality of American colonialism told through this site of annihilation.
