Michael Weinstein

Taking the recent photographic fascination with rubble to its limits, Danielle Paz wanders through Chicago in search of dumps where she shoots mounds of stone, slag, dirt and trash in color, framing her images so that their subjects appear as monumental formations existing at a distant remove from dense and bustling city life. Lacking any hint of environmentalist proclivities, Paz's studies accentuate a grandeur that is intensified by the rough and jagged textures of our local manmade mountains, which can be found on such familiar arteries as North, Grand, Halsted and Western. Admirably fulfilling the aim of straight photography to open the visual world to us in fresh ways, Paz makes us eager to visit the sites that she has come to love, so that we can see them as she does—outside their everyday context—and redeem the ruin definitively.

Danielle Paz shows at Contemporary Art Workshop, 524 West Grant, (773)472-4004. Through June 22. (2007-05-29)

Also by Michael Weinstein

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Rough, raw and infinitely complex disturbing beauty is what Brian Andrews is after when he records and imagines nature in dense and teeming color close-ups of flora and fauna
(2007-05-22)

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Huffman is most himself and at his best in his series of studies of the gray scale--the aesthetic core of mis-labeled black-and-white photography
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Sensibility and atmosphere trump all other photographic values in Melanie Schiff's large-format, softly glowing yet clear-color images of interior spaces
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In this lavish exhibit impeccably curated by Leigh Moran, we get a chance to appreciate the mastery of Art Shay, the most important Chicago street, celebrity and performance photographer of the twentieth century
(2007-04-24)

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(2007-03-20)

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(2007-03-13)

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(2007-03-06)

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(2007-02-27)

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(2007-02-13)

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(2007-02-06)

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(2007-01-23)

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