Museum of Contemporary Photography Review

"PhotoDimensional", Columbia College Chicago's latest exhibition at their magnificent Museum of Contemporary Photography, offers the public a chance to observe art that investigates the relationship between sculpture and photography, between two and three dimensions, and explore the issues inherent to those relationships. The pieces in this exhibition challenge the notion that a two dimensional photograph cannot be examined in more than a two-dimensional light. The works in this exhibition, which are of mixed media, highlight and acknowledge the multiple layers within a two-dimensional landscape, often leaving the observer feeling a sense of chaos and intricacy, yet subtlety when looking at the "big picture".

One of the most widely discussed pieces, and one of my favorites in the collection, La Ronde by artist Bettina Hoffmann, is a three-piece video installation that uses a slowly panning video camera to present multiple points of view on subjects who are absolutely still, (think The Matrix when Trinity freezes in midair and the camera pans around her in midair.) It felt as if I was traveling through a two-dimensional photograph; therefore, the humans became sculptures to stare at, to examine, to judge. The installation felt extremely voyeuristic and, in some ways, made me feel uncomfortable to be examining these subjects so closely by every angle.

Out of the three sections in La Ronde, my favorite was a scene with two male human subjects, seemingly getting ready to confront a beautiful woman sitting down who is staring at some object in the distance. The camera panned around the three subjects as if we, the audience, were on a carousel, with deeply personal and haunting ambient, repetitive music effortlessly playing in the background and moving along with us. The section displayed the art of a moment, the dynamics of human interaction, and the open-endedness and ordinary setting of the scene made it even more personal and relateable.

In the three sections of La Ronde, the camera kept going around and around in one big circle as if we were in the world or in the bubble with these characters, yet each subject still seemed stuck in their own bubble, in their own world, deep within themselves. In another section, we are once again examining various subjects--this time, we are at the lunch table with a family. There is a sleeping child, the child's grandmother staring at a bowlful of berries, the child's grandfather asking his daughter a question, his son staring at his face, the son's sister not paying attention, her husband staring at the sleeping child. Alright, that was confusing, but so is La Ronde; we don't know for certain if these subjects have any relation, but we can't help but find the time to examine the dynamics of these characters and try to decipher the emotional details that run so prevalent within these three pieces.

Melinda McDaniel's "Seven Days" is a piece that contains many large photo prints. As shown in the artistic statement, McDaniel's placed strips of color photographic paper outside to achieve varying degrees of exposure and imprints of weather, revealing the subtle color gradients inherent in the paper's chemistry. Each strip was exposed from one to seven days and are shown chronologically left to right, with the the shortest exposured photograph on the left and the longest exposed on the right. Because the paper has not been processed, the "photographs" will continue to expose throughout the exhibition, negating the typical notion that a photograph is a still moment in time. McDaniel's photographs lead the audience to wonder if one would be able to analyze and interpret the language of the photographs, even though there was no subject or any sort of story that one would be able to work with.

Another one of my favorite pieces in the "PhotoDimensional" collection is a piece by Florian Slotawa from the series Hotelarbeiten. Sotawa took photographs of hotel furniture that he arranged into fortress-like sculptures in various European hotel rooms. The subject of hotels and the thousand of stories that must have occured in one hotel room always fascinates me, and Slotawa's photographs brought a sense of life, of playfulness and security, to these otherwise stale, impersonal spaces.

"PhotoDimensional" contains work by John Coplans, Katalin Deer, Leslie Hewitt, Bettina Hoffmann, Pello Irazu, David Ireland, Heather Mekkelson, Melinda McDaniel, Laurent Millet, Vik Muniz, Susana Reisman, Lorna Simpson, and Florian Slotawa.

The exhibition is running from February 13th - April 19th, 2009 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago, 600 S. Michigan Ave. The exhibition is free and open to the general public. Hours: Mon-Sat, 10am-5pm; Thursday, 10am-8pm; Sunday, 12pm-5pm.