Michael Weinstein

Susan Greenspan has a thing for 7-Eleven signs, which she shoots from above and below, frontally and at angles, and in their full glory and radically cropped or blurred into illegibility at night, all in the context of the Chicago streets that they grace. In Greenspan's soft miniature color cityscapes--taken with a cell-phone camera--the heralds of Big Gulps to come are obtrusive intruders on otherwise nondescript streets, dominating their environments brashly and monotonously. Seeing so many of the same signs--even when their presentation is studiously varied--deprives them of any seductive power that they might once have had, leaving the sense that they should fade into their surroundings, which we know that they never can do. The photographic miniature normally invites us into a world that our gaze can dominate; here the sign looks back at us and pokes us in the eye.

Susan Greenspan shows at NOVA, 840 West Washington, (847)903-5360. Through March 31.

(2007-03-06)

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