Michael Weinstein

Straight and altered portraits in a dizzying variety of forms vie for the viewer's attention in this show of eight contemporary photo-artists curated with verve by Michelle Kendrick. Seeking to show how photographic portraiture is sensitive to the artist's approach, Kendrick forces us to look at the construction of the images rather than through them to their subjects. Even the straightest shooter in the show, Donna Rickles, ruthlessly imposes a hip look on her youthful subjects that they surely would not display if we saw them on the street. The banner works in the exhibit--Simen Johan's digitally manipulated and seamlessly collaged scenarios of self-absorbed children--are completely dominated by the artist's imagination; a little girl in a garishly illuminated red room descends into fierce psychosis as she sits in a chair, rigid with tight-lipped anger, facing a wall on which appears a hideously tangled scrawl.

"The Portrait" shows at Schneider Gallery, 230 West Superior, (312)988-4033, through September 3.

(2005-07-26)

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