The new novelty star on the photography scene is “Cooper: The Photographer Cat,” collared by his owners, filmmakers Michael and Deirdre Cross, with a micro digital camera programmed to snap a color shot every two minutes, wherever Cooper may roam around house and garden. This, of course, is not a cat’s eye view of the world—the camera doesn’t see what a cat does, what the camera captures is not necessarily what Cooper cares about or even notices, and the Crosses have so many images from which to choose that their selection of eighteen of them for this show has to reflect their own visual taste, which runs to striking views, enhanced by the blurs and streaks created by the animal’s movements, of brilliant abstractions of a nature that is dominating when seen from the ground—as when we are crawling in the grass. Of course, there is the odd domestic scene like an unflattering take on a pair of human legs. Cooper is the surrogate for the Crosses who did not want to or were not aware that they could go down on their all fours with cameras strapped around their necks and get the same results. (Michael Weinstein)
Through April 11 at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 2430 N. Cannon, (773)755-5100
Cross-Cultural Existence: A Return to Mona Hatoum at the MCA Twenty-five years ago, in 1997, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago gave Mona Hatoum her first solo show in the United States. The current "Mona Hatoum: Early Works" is an overview of her video and performance works made throughout the 1980s.
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