Michael Weinstein

Among the many series in this retrospective show of Barbara Crane's path-breaking photographic grids, "Wrightville Beach," her set of photo-works, created in 1971, are the most arresting and significant. Although her bent is concentrated abstraction, Crane's most impactful work combines complex patterns ordered in sharply disciplined geometrical forms with penetrating images of human emotion or lack thereof. Imprinted with the fifties rebellion against the antiseptic suburban void, Crane can be as existential as Norman Mailer or Robert Frank. In a striking study of middle-class numbness, Crane joins stark deadpan black-and-white real-estate-style shots of isolated beach houses in the right two columns of her grid with devastatingly passionless impressions of a prostrate sunbather, a young woman lying passively in a hammock and a sleek sedan parked on an ocean shore in the left column. The emptiness of consumer society was never so clear.

Barbara Crane shows at Flatfile Galleries, 217 North Carpenter, (312)491-1190, through June 17.

(2005-05-31)

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