New Age photographic syncretism reaches its limits of intensity and profundity in Kate Ingold’s series of color digital photo-works in which indistinct subjects that are sometimes enhanced by gossamer threads of steel wire lie immersed in droplet-filled enveloping water. Inspired by her Buddhist sensibility and study of Mayan mythology, Ingold’s vision of globalized spirituality is far from tranquil; destruction is inevitable and technological hubris receives its well-deserved punishment in abject failure. Yet rebirth is always around the corner—we emerge from an aqueous multiverse only to drown in it when our time is up, and the cycle never ends. Although her emphasis is on the final term of the creation-preservation-destruction triad—and that is reinforced by the thangka poems that she has inscribed in her images—the final sense of Ingold’s hypnotic works, which both draw the eye in and force it back, is the transcendent peace of indifference. (Michael Weinstein)
Through August 7 at the Illinois State Museum, 100 W. Randolph
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