In a fanciful postmodern project filled with ridiculous pathos, Philip Hartigan appropriated photos of Lucerne, Switzerland, to which he has never been; enlarged them so as to decompose their details; drew over them with softly colored squiggly lines recalling aerosol art, graffiti and tags; printed them at postcard size; joined them to each other so that they fold out like an accordion; and accompanied the resulting work with his diary of a fictitious visit there. Do not expect a travelogue; the dark brown and charcoal-black images with which Hartigan has ended up are washed out, roughed up, gritty, etiolated and barely legible depictions of hollowed-out human figures and shells of buildings that give no sense of place and make us feel that we are in a smudged land of the shades, brightened by some puckish color, where all is alien. As for the diary, it records the failed adventures of a hapless quintessential Gen-X loser; the entry “She Took Me to Her Place,” recounts the story of our anti-hero beating a hasty retreat when his pick-up starts to undress and he wimps out. Hartigan surely saved himself trouble by confining his tourism to a virtual trip. (Michael Weinstein)
Through October 30 at Finestra Art Space, 410 South Michigan.
Cloud Atlas: A Review of Sonya Bogdanova at Ignition Project Space The ephemeral and intangible quality of cloud making is what binds together Bogdanova’s solo exhibition, “A Dream We Dream Together is Reality.” It’s a whimsical move, capturing, on a micro-level, the joy of seeing things in clouds, which is to say, the perceiving of meaning in the random.
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