Seized with the purpose of revealing the archetypal and impossible longings exploited by television advertising, Anat Pollack photographs moments of commercials from the screen and processes them in the computer so that the original color images no longer bear traces of specific products and communicate only hazy hopes and phantasmic dreams. In one of Pollack’s most effective images, a car reduced to a blur of motion rounds a corner, radiating the sense of speed and control. Other studies are more bucolic and tranquilizing. If Pollack intends her series as a foray into cultural criticism, she fails, because her technique results in photo-works that are suffused with soft impressionism that renders the eye contemplative and absorbed in the aura of the ideal, rather than in questioning it. If Pollack aims at showing us that advertising manipulates deep-seated desires, she is stunning, but only after we have broken the spell that she casts and are aware of her program. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 25 at ARC Gallery, 832 West Superior #204
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