The five young photographers in the University’s annual student exhibition share a passion for soft focus, despite the wide variations in their projects and approaches. Jessica Saia goes the funky route with her indistinct color shot of a man sitting at a lamp-lit table in the middle of a residential street at night; Julie Elliott goes traditional when she offers up a misty black-and-white study of an isolated old store in the hinterlands of Oilfield, Illinois; Tom Callahan invites speculation with his deeply shadowed black-and-white abstraction of what seem to be water droplets under a dull moon; Amy Nohl also piques the imagination with her blurred black-and-white shot of a room that appears to be dominated by a convoluted apparatus; and Steph Wesolowski creates wonderment with her faded digital street scene in which a girl dressed in pink stands in front of two guys in black and white hanging out on the sidewalk. What are we to make of these enigmas and indeterminacies? Of youth seeing life through a hazy lens? Or does it reflect the sensibility of the show’s guest juror, Barbara Wiesen? A DePaul art professor hints that we are seeing the world through Wiesen’s eyes. (Michael Weinstein)
The Craft of Reparations: DePaul Art Museum Connects Local and International State Violence “Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo” at the DePaul Art Museum examines the question of reparations by tackling two cases: the well-documented tragedy of Chicago police torture and the ongoing international scandal of Guantánamo Bay.
