Blight is beautiful, if admittedly a bit eerie in Doug Fogelson’s color photographs, in which he has shot luxuriant landscapes on transparency film, effaced some of their details, and whited out parts of the images in order to make a comment on environmental depredation. Fogelson wants to set up a play between notions of nature as a paradise and the threat of impending ecological doom, but his pictures are so lush and seductive—even more so by virtue of their diminutions—that morality goes out the window and aesthetic charm takes over—something that seems to happen with every photographer who can’t give up his sense of beauty when he is bent on preaching or provoking. In an aqua field backgrounded by blue woods, an attenuated, ethereal, and translucent pink spaceship-like figure appears to have landed, evoking tantalizing wonder. It’s just too luscious to think about too deeply. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 23 at City Gallery, 806 North Michigan
Symbols of Life: A Review of Theaster Gates at the New Museum in New York City Gates unites his artistic beginnings as a ceramics sculptor with the impressive amount of objects that he has acquired as an archivist. Titled “Young Lords and Their Traces” it follows the lineage of his artistic and archival practice through multiple times and histories.
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