RECOMMENDED Chicago artist Stephanie Brooks revisits a compelling, decade-long project in which she disturbs the identity of familiar objects or forms, resulting in the re-imagination or exposure of our competing affective investments in the object or form under analysis. Take, for example, the series “Photos,” in which four 4” x 6” zinc plates are hung in a square. Each plate is etched with the short description of a mundane and ubiquitous photographic subject: “birthday cake and smiling teenager,” “mom,” “Atlantic seashore/on a clear day/in New England” and “three old friends.” In this case, Brooks has replicated the formal structure of a snapshot wall, and the etched titles are clearly meant to invoke the visualization of one’s own mother, friends and birthday cake. Abstracting a sentimental form such as the family snapshot to its physical conventions, while still leaving space for—in fact demanding—the specificity of the viewer’s own self-insertion, is characteristic of Brooks. “Photos” effectively complicates our attachments to both sentiment and memory with quiet sincerity. It is that sincerity, rather than irony, that makes it so difficult in front of Brooks’ work to feel either easy sentimentality (“My mother is beautiful,” “I love my mother”) or cynical distance. (Rachel Furnari) Through November 17 at GAHLBERG GALLERY COLLEGE OF DUPAGE.
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