For more than twenty years, Abelardo Morell has been experimenting with the camera obscura by darkening rooms and then letting light in from the outside through a small hole, producing inverted images of the world on the walls that he then photographs. Now Morell has ventured outside, setting up a tent made of white fabric in which he applies his method to depict landscapes in color that appear grainy and decomposed, and in which nature itself and any cultural objects in it are transformed into a total ruin. In Morell’s transfigured landscapes—take a woodland clearing reduced to cross-hatched filthy brown mounds presided over by a cyano sky smudged with clumps of dirt—what would have been conventionally majestic scenes under a straight photographer’s lens have been deconstructed in a decidedly brutal fashion. The effect that Morell conjures up comes from the interaction of the tent’s textured surface and the inverted projection, but when we look into the images, we forget about their technical construction and feel that we are witness to a version of the post-apocalyptic environmentalist nightmare, and we experience the aesthetic fascination of the abomination. (Michael Weinstein)
Through August 3 at Stephen Daiter Gallery, 230 West Superior
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
