The Coat Check project, under Matthew Avignone’s curation, has performed the service of bringing forward the strongest young Chicago photographic artists. In its current show, we see a powerful still drama with stakes for both the photographer and the subject. What does it mean when a daughter takes crisp color photographic portraits of her mother, gussying her up so that she looks like a magazine celebrity model? What does it mean about the mother? And what does it mean about the daughter-mother relationship? Forget those questions, and look at Natalie Krick’s color images in which her mother dominates the photographer. The mother has embraced the conceit and knows how to make mugging a power tool that allows her to express everything from dyspeptic cynicism to in-your-face, though expertly cynical, bliss. It’s a duel that resembles nothing more than Eikoh Hosoe’s “Ordeal by Roses,” where Hosoe pitted the stellar poet Mishima against the piercing beauty of roses. In Hosoe’s classic series, the roses prevail; in Krick’s, the subject is victorious—look at the mother wincing at a kiss with an effaced man, with an image of her about to give a steamy kiss to another man overlaid on it, and you will see that Krick is the documentarian of a performance artist. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 14 at The Coat Check, David Weinberg Photography, 300 West Superior, suite 203
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