Chicago Tribune
March 17, 2006
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Lisa Klapstock's "Threshold" images at the I Space
through April 1.
311 W. Superior St., 312-751-9500.
Lisa Klapstock's "Threshold" images at the I Space gallery
testify to the continuing power of straight photography. Each
presents its own atomized world of light and color, again
proving that the everyday still contains scenes as mysterious
and exciting as just about any a photographer could imagine.
All the pieces are squares about 17 inches across, which makes
them almost miniatures in our day of photographic gigantism.
From a distance--and, sometimes, close up as well--each print
mounted on Masonite looks like an abstract painting in which
a single flat color predominates, giving way usually once,
occasionally twice, to an aperture or slice that allows the
eye access to deep space.
As it turns out, the colors are of fences that separate backyards
from alleys. Klapstock came upon them in her home city of
Toronto. The apertures and slivers are holes in the fences
or spaces between slats.
Peeking through them reveals territory normally private and,
in a sense, forbidden. At a time when the government of the
United States spies on its citizens, Klapstock's little invasions
look innocent and scarcely register as visual eavesdropping.
The thrill of them is not, in fact, the one that can come
from doing something we know is illicit, but the pictorial
wonder of contrasts and harmonies that already exist, just
waiting to be found.
In some pieces, the backyard arrangements shown are all-important
and more intense for being revealed only in small part. But
in other works, the forms function mainly as abstract splashes
or constructs, crisp and sharp within a smoky (or softly striated)
field of color. Still others flip from abstraction to representation
and back again, seducing the eye with sophisticated "found"
scenes almost too good to be true.
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