For several decades, photographers have been exploring the aesthetic values and virtues of scenes of environmental degradation; now some of them are doing the same with the contemporary battlefield, including Krista Wortendyke. In her brightly colored, graphic and digitally altered photo-collages of the killing fields, Wortendyke serves up great clouds of red, orange and yellow fire filled with shards of black metal, around which aircraft buzz and soar, and beneath which soldiers scurry in the midst of their doom machines. Neither glossy propaganda glorifying boys with their toys, heroism or bracing adventure; nor grim denunciations of willed destruction, Wortendyke’s photo-works are spectacles of grandeur to be contemplated with or without whatever moral judgments viewers happen to bring with them. By placing her scenes in backgrounds of elegantly interrelated rectangles of earth and sky tones, Wortendyke lets us know that she intends to sublimate warfare. (Michael Weinstein) Through August 15 at Packer Schopf Gallery, 942 W. Lake
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
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