Whether it is wild spidery branches sprouting from trees in the forests, incredibly gnarled tree trunks, the criss-crossed steel supports of the State Farm building in Bloomington, Illinois, a snow-dusted rural road engraved with sinuous and undulating tire tracks, dilapidated ramshackle sheds or elegant spindly clumps of pine needles, Jon Balke is there with his camera to bring forth in black-and-white images the exquisite ragged geometries around us that defy the eye’s preference for symmetrical order. Balke’s vision hones in on the involvement of networks of lines that are usually anything but straight, revealing endless complications within conjunctures that serve as metaphors for the confused and disorderly lives that inexorably attend the human condition. Among the many stunning images here, Balke’s masterwork is a study from New Orleans of peeling paint that displays such a multi-textured dimensionality and mutual involvement of fissures that even the most gifted abstract-expressionist painter would be tempted to give up the brush for the lens. (Michael Weinstein)
Through March 21 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington
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