Argentine emigree photo-artist Luciana Abait has surrendered herself to compensatory fantasy in her latest series of digitally altered and painted color images of lush, verdant thickets of leaves in which tiny human swimmers dart about within the dense foliage like insects feeding on their microcosmic ecological niche. In a world in which our species has attempted to stand above and control its environment, Abait’s idyll is a refreshing look at an impossible condition in which we are enclosed by a vegetative nature to which we are perfectly adapted and in which we are free of the will to dominate, because the effort to exercise it would be futile. Above all, Abait’s photo-works are celebrations of what the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called the “sportive sense of life,” which he believed was the required corrective to our ruthless determination to bend everything to our whims. (Michael Weinstein)
At Jean Albano Gallery, 215 W. Superior, (312)440-0770, through August 23.
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