
Julie Blackmon, "Girl Across the Street," 2008. Courtesy of Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago.
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Far from a desperate housewife, Julie Blackmon—surrounded by her extended family in Springfield, Missouri—practices photographic sublimation by shooting her husband and children, and assorted more distant kinfolk, and then tweaking her color images in the computer to create fantasy scenarios that are loose, high and fancy free, yet betray an undercurrent of detachment that subverts all the play and makes us think of our fundamental isolation. Take “Girl Across the Street” in which we see a little tyke from behind looking out of a living room window at a lawn on which a little girl in her undies stands provocatively with hands on hips; only he is immune to her charms and stares past her, seemingly at nothing—we can only hope that changes in a decade or so. Blackmon calls her genial series “Domestic Vacations,” and her images provide us with sprightly relief from the teapot tempests of the everyday. (Michael Weinstein)
Through January 3 at Catherine Edelman Gallery, 300 W. Superior