Michael Weinstein

In a tour de force, Joan Truckenbrod has created a photo and video installation that combines a meditation on life and death with searing social criticism. When you enter the gallery's project room, you encounter a pulsating video of a salmon run projected on a pristine white doll's house without walls through which you dimly glimpse a grid of color photographs. Walk behind the house and you are confronted by uncompromising head shots of sullen old people pressed up against barred windows. The message is clear and painfully provoking; the salmon are struggling upstream, yet they are free; the people may still have the will to persist, but they are imprisoned and, perhaps, broken. Truckenbrod's grim commentary on civilization is heightened by the fact that when you stand in front of the video, the people vanish into utter darkness.

Joan Truckenbrod's installation is at the Flatfile Photography Gallery, 118 North Peoria, (312)491-1190, through November 16.

(2002-10-30)

Also by Michael Weinstein

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Sally Mann has always been a dreamer. The provocative photographs of her children that made her famous were self-declared fantasies, rather than windows on their world, as many people perversely believed.
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In one of the most unabashedly beautiful series of contemporary photographs, Joel Sternfeld takes us to New York City's Highline, an abandoned elevated railroad track where he has found a dense wilderness of untamed vegetation that mutates kaleidoscopically through the seasons.
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Political and culturally critical art makes a comeback in this sharp-edged show.
(2002-08-14)

TIP OF THE WEEK
With this final show, Chicago loses one of its most important venues for young photographers.
(2002-08-07)

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