Michael Weinstein

Pursuing a variety of photographic genres, Scott Polach ruthlessly inscribes his own darkly quizzical and slightly surreal and absurdist signature on his subjects. Polach's aesthetic effect is achieved through his emphasis on shadow in color images, giving his subjects an appearance at once haunting and unfamiliar. Best when he surrenders to the siren song of surrealism abjectly, Polach's banner image is "Poe," a tabletop shot of a busy Chicago street recreated with cutouts from his photos and dominated by a slinky house cat with a deeply and thoughtfully intent look looming over the tiny vehicles and pedestrians, and the fork and plate that the artist has left in the frame to show us that none of this is conventionally real, as if we needed to be told. Ever the deconstructionist, Polach has even put a tiny cut in one of the figures to make it plain that realism does not mean faithfulness to the illusions of straight-photographic perception, but slices deeper to our doubts.

Scott Polach shows at Up Gallery, 1501 North Sedgwick, (312)397-0690, through May 19. (2005-05-03)

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