Get a glimpse of what Museum of Contemporary Photography curators Natasha Egan and Karen Irvine see as cutting-edge Midwestern photography today in this lavish juried show. Although there is a range of genres and techniques represented among the twenty-five artists selected by the jurors, social photography rules the roost. You will get the sense of Irvine’s and Egan’s aesthetic best when you see Peter Yankowsky’s black-and-white shot of a little boy poking an air rifle through a chain-link fence; spent canisters of water are strewn around him as he aims at something that we will never know. A sense of purposelessness and absence haunts the images. Next to Yankowsky’s shot is Mariah Karson’s muted color image of two RVs plopped down in North Dakota’s “oil boom” framing a vast expanse of desiccated prairie, signaling an absence that nothing present can fill. Is this what we are fated to feel now in the Heartland? Maybe that was always true. (Michael Weinstein)
Through July 14 at Lillstreet Art Center, 4401 North Ravenswood
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