Wandering alone at night with a camera in depopulated places is a popular pastime for photographers with existential proclivities. Chris Eichenseer lets the world cry him a river in color photographic prints featuring garish illumination and surprisingly subtle colors that give angst a good name. If you have to suffer, why not do it standing at a distance from the rows of rigs in a truck-stop parking lot after a heavy rain, in a world bathed in every eerie shade of yellowish brown? You are guaranteed to get the hit that Albert Camus’ Stranger sought from the blazing sun; he should have tried artificial glare. Only rarely does Eichenseer venture into post-industrial Chicago; his haunts are the ‘hoods where he finds old frame houses surrounded by weeds in the shadows of the Skyway. Eichenseer is as Chicago as Nelson Algren; give him his Simone de Beauvoir. (Michael Weinstein)
Through May 20 at Threadless, 3011 N. Broadway.
Related Stories
Historic Perspectives: A Review of Chris Kleihege and Eric Holubow at Gallery 1871 Holubow celebrates the beauty of buildings falling into disrepair and eventual demise while Kleihege chose monuments—fitting, as many monuments are being questioned. Kleihege unwittingly erased or partially obliterated the monuments by using burned film.
For Us: A Review of "Something from Something" at Engage Projects Kushala Vora and Adia Sykes’ collaboration "Something from Something" tells us as viewers that knowledge, art, creation, inspiration, love—really anything you can think of—has a place of origin.
Women Behind the Lens: A Review of "From Her to Eternity" Courtney Love curates on the street. Just west of Wabash on the corner of Eighth Street, there is a wall of stellar rock star images that includes a special collection made by women photographers over the years.
Other Forces: A Review of Maw at Apparatus Projects Ailes and Lopez’s installations, images and sculptures function as a cosmos of life—worlds where the viewer is placed in a disordered exercise of cognitive sense-making between rather than sense-making of.
