Week 016: one two & three

ONE*
Michael Wolf: The Transparent City
November 14, 2008 - January 31, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Photography


"While it has been common for photographers to glorify Chicago’s distinctive architecture and environmental context, Wolf depicts the city more abstractly, focusing less on individual well-known structures and more on the contradictions and conflicts between architectural styles when visually flattened together in a photograph. His pictures look through the multiple layers of glass to reveal the social constructs of living and working in an urban environment, focusing specifically on voyeurism and the contemporary urban landscape in flux. Wolf explores the complex, sometimes blurred distinctions between private and public life in a city made transparent by his intense observation."

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TWO**
WORK/PLACE
November 14, 2008 - January 31, 2009
Museum of Contemporary Photography


Work by:
Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom
Thomas Demand
Lars Tunbjörk
Karen Yama

"...Work / Place looks at the idiosyncratic personal routines that individuals perform inside their offices. The photographs and video in this exhibition use as their raw material the highly ordered but often banal and absurd activities of office life. "

"In each of the works on view, the artist strikes a balance between the personal attributes brought into an office and the homogeneity of office etiquette and behavior. As the popular television show The Office so cleverly depicts, the great challenge of the workplace is the implausibility of drastically distinctive personalities having to function toward the same goals—under the same roof."

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THREE***
Gabrielle Basilico: Intercity
January 7, 2009 - March 6, 2009
Cohen Amador Gallery


"Pooled from his most recent bodies of work, the exhibition articulates Basilico’s lifelong fascination with the city as a densely collaged environment."

"This character of spatial isolation and urban indifference persists throughout the work and speaks to the state of the post-industrial—post-modern—city. In their indifference, architecture and industry are shown to aggressively reject human access."

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