RECOMMENDED Chicago’s great unrecognized street photographer, Jim Lukas is the genius of the aesthetic of brutality. Having wandered the mean ‘hoods for decades shooting the grisly juxtapositions that appear on urban walls, Lukas now turns his attention to the ruins around us with devastating effect. His color shots of Sarajevo’s bombed-out city hall and of a crumbling apartment house in East St. Louis exude a magnificence—the sublime and fascinating mystery that Medieval philosophers discovered at the root of existence. Lukas achieves his piercing effect in nearly all of his photographs because he is the rare person who has drunk from the most poisoned wells of life and has digested the toxins and transmuted them into elixirs, which differentiates him from photographers who shoot ruins to redeem them. Look to Lukas whenever his work is on view for a jolt into the chaos surrounding our constructed order; he will make you want to stay there. (Michael Weinstein) Through November 24 at Gallery 203, 1579 North Milwaukee
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