"PhotoDimensional"

The MoCP has spent the past several years investigating photography in the context of other media, i.e. performance art, painting and video. Now it’s sculpture’s turn.

Most of “PhotoDimensional”?’s artists make photos about sculpture—often with curious twists on one of photography’s traditional roles, the documentation of sculpture. Others literally make sculptures out of photos. Katalin Deér’s Tabletop (2008), a photo of a sculptural object, which the artist has cemented onto a concrete table, assumes iconic status in bringing both of the show’s threads together. (Some of these pieces would be inaccessible without the wall text, which is clear and helpful but not pedantic or juvenile.)

Curator Karen Irvine’s particular interest in the limits of spatial representation yields two of the cleverest works on display. Taking disaster photos from the news as her source material, Chicago artist Heather Mekkelson re-creates the images’ debris in the gallery. Her sculptures confront visitors with the gravity of those situations in ways the flat images can’t. Bettina Hoffmann freezes people in domestic scenes and twirls a video camera around them—capturing angles in her video La Ronde (pictured) that elude the monovision of still photographs.

Pello Irazu retouches his photos of chairs and boxes so that viewers can’t reconcile the space these objects seem to occupy with reality. True, Irazu engages a theme that’s been around since the early 20th century, but his well-executed work has plenty of aesthetic appeal. While the show doesn’t break any new art-historical ground, it doesn’t make any grand claims, either: It’s simply a comprehensive, carefully assembled look at its subject.

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