On a quest to discover whether Chicago’s green spaces can “yield the same meaning, as say, Walden Pond did for Henry David Thoreau,” Bill Guy took off with his camera around the city shooting color photos of parks, beaches and swathes of grass alongside railroad tracks. To his credit, Guy did not abstract snippets of “nature” from the surroundings of “civilization,” but placed the former ruthlessly within their context of concrete and metal, producing images that might be scenes from Thoreau’s worst nightmares–snowboarders cavorting or sprawled on slushy hills, waders disporting themselves in the lake and amblers pressing their noses through chain-link fences to take in slices of unkempt vegetation squeezed by skyscrapers. Guy is guided by Thoreau’s dictum that “in wilderness is the salvation of the world.” It is up to the viewer to decide if Guy leaves any wilderness in the picture, and if the sights that we see every day beckon us toward salvation. (Michael Weinstein)
All Too Real: A Review of “Not All Realisms” at The Smart Museum In the compelling exhibition currently on display at the Smart Museum, photographs tell the story of the sixties in Africa. It was a decade of change, resistance, revolution and hard-won independence in many African countries.
The Friction of History: A Review of Sky Hopinka at the Block Museum Merging metaphor and direct accounts of Fort Marion, Hopinka’s “Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer” offers perspectives on the long and complex reality of American colonialism told through this site of annihilation.
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