“The extremely narrow pursuit of one’s personal taste,” photography. Obsessed with putting her tastes on display, Shawnee Barton spent a day walking around Chicago visiting her favorite restaurants, taking nibbles and color Polaroid shots along the way, compiling a diary, collecting wrappers and counter checks, and drawing a map of her gustatory travels, all of which appear here, except for the comestibles. Decidedly a downscale diner, Barton is partial to storefront taquerias, bagel joints and assorted other independent small-time eateries. Her snapshots mirror her haunts and are often out of focus and deliberately uncomposed, and sometimes even blotched by white-outs from uncontrolled glare. Barton’s aesthetic is epitomized by an off-hand shot of a crumpled paper bag from Harold’s Chicken Shack that is smeared with greasy brown sauce. Self-indulgence is Barton’s trademark, and she is guaranteed to offend the fastidious and to make the rest of us laugh with her. (Michael Weinstein)
Through February 16 at Giftshop Project Space, 1039 W. Lake.
Cloud Atlas: A Review of Sonya Bogdanova at Ignition Project Space The ephemeral and intangible quality of cloud making is what binds together Bogdanova’s solo exhibition, “A Dream We Dream Together is Reality.” It’s a whimsical move, capturing, on a micro-level, the joy of seeing things in clouds, which is to say, the perceiving of meaning in the random.
An Artistic Project: Portable Gray at Ten (Issues) The journal was conceived as a way to share the work of the Gray Center’s fellows and the University of Chicago’s broader artistic and scholarly community with the rest of the city. This May the journal will launch its tenth issue on the subject of “Family.”
