Michael Weinstein

Always edgy and spooky, with dollops of dada thrown in, Jeff Walls' large-format, back-lit color photo-works—produced over the last thirty years—evoke anxious distance and an undercurrent of madness. Whether his subject is wreckage—a favorite theme—or zombie-like people, often performing janitorial duties, Wall is always prying open our eyes to remind us that we have blinded ourselves to the unease that he finds at the root of life. None of the forty-one images here epitomizes Walls' sensibility better than his visual reprise of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," sitting hunched over on a folding chair vacantly drying off a pot amidst an unholy mess of an apartment in which hundreds of unlit light bulbs hang from a pipe-crossed ceiling. The wall text tells us that the artist has desired to "rebuild the rebellious spirit of modernism," yet his work shows that the feat cannot be performed when we have lost our innocence, as he surely has.

Jeff Wall shows at The Art Institute of Chicago, Michigan and Adams, (312)443-3600. Through September 29.

(2007-07-10)

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