Reviews from 2016

Aint Bad Magazine

The urban space is striking – its tall and mysterious buildings, crowds of anonymous people, the endless sea of concrete. City Space is an ongoing photographic exploration of the urban environment and my perception of it. I am interested in the physical space of the city and its emotional and psychological impact on the body. These photographs reconstruct mundane events in the city that I have personally experienced or witnessed in public. Stark light, deep shadow, and muted color are visual strategies I explore to describe the city. I use the city as a stage and transform the physical space into a psychological one. The images I create do not represent a commonality of experience but instead provide a personal interpretation of the urban landscape. Read More

Wired

Bonet started thinking about light pollution after moving from Florida to Chicago in 2009. Instead of seeing stars, she saw a lot of steel and concrete and glass. Still, it dazzled her, especially as she drove along Lake Shore Drive each night. “You look in and the city just kind of explodes,” she says. Bonet wanted to capture that sense of awe. Four years ago, she started taking walks downtown to photograph windows that caught her eye, but the images didn’t convey the impact of seeing hundreds of them at once. So in 2014, she started combining the images into square collages. Read More

Chicago Gallery News

While the show may be her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Bonet has been associated with the Catherine Edelman Gallery for almost four years. As a recent graduate from Columbia College in 2012, Bonet entered a show juried by gallery owner Catherine Edelman. Edelman then invited Bonet to be a part of The Chicago Project, an online gallery devoted to rising photographers in the Chicago area. The pair built a relationship from there, until Bonet became a represented artist in 2015. Read More

Strange Fire

I grew up in Florida and prior to moving to Chicago it was the only place I had ever lived. I was used to a warm, lush, tropical, car-cultured way of life, so you can imagine what a shock it was to suddenly be living in Chicago. It was simultaneously thrilling and intimidating. The landscape felt wholly foreign—the sheer expanse of the city, the anonymous individuals that I would never see again, and the large swaths of concrete that covered the surface of the city. It was challenging to deal with at first; I had never felt so insignificant. To understand this new landscape and my place within it, I started making images about it and my experience of it, which eventually turned into City Space. Read More

Musée Magazine

Psychogenic Fugue was made to benefit the David Lynch Foundation, which focuses on transcendental meditation as a healing source for at-risk populations. Psychogenic Fugue can be downloaded for a small donation to the David Lynch Foundation. It will be shown at Miami Basel in December before hitting the film fest circuit in 2017. A portfolio of 15 art prints will be available through the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago. Read More

Blouin Artinfo

This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Her ongoing body of work revolves around the individuality of city life. Bonet used her phone to photograph the interactions between people, architecture, and light. She would then revisit the places and recreate her first experience, by hiring models to play specific roles at the precise time of day when the light was perfect. The resulting photographs are carefully staged memories that appear to be snapshots of everyday city life. The artist’s second ongoing project, ‘Stray Light,’ looks at the anonymity of people in their homes at night. Bonet photographs once the sun sets, capturing the colorful glows from hotel and apartment windows. Back in her studio, she carefully constructs each image from multiple photographs, transforming the urban cityscape into a constellation, as the mind tries to organize the information presented. Read More

Chicagoist

Catherine Edelman Gallery - Chicago, IL: Chicago’s premier gallery focusing on contemporary photography hit it on the head yet again this year. From the whimsical and surreal landscapes of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison to the documentary work of Sandro Miller in his series of American bikers and Jan Kaesbach's chronicle of working folks in the People of the 21st Century series, this gallery once again had one of the most poignantly curated booths of Expo. Read More

The Torch

Clarissa Bonet believed that when she first came here for graduate studies at Columbia College, so she recorded that experience while she was here. At the opening of her exhibition at the Catherine Edelman Gallery, Bonet discussed how this art project came to be. Read More

Dodho Magazine

The urban space is striking. Its tall and mysterious buildings, crowds of anonymous people, the endless sea of concrete; these things constantly intrigue me. Read More

Chicago Magazine

“I’m not trying to document the city as it truly exists,” says Clarissa Bonet, “but to make an image about a feeling of a place and a moment in time.” The Chicago photographer, 30, wanders the sidewalks and public spaces of downtown, sometimes for hours on end, observing people’s comings and goings, the progression of shadows across the pavement, the play of reflected light on skyscraper façades. Read More

Lenscratch

There are not a lot of photographers who can create work that is at the same time complex and simple. The complexity of her compositions marry figure and space beautifully, yet still allow for breathing room and quiet contemplation of simple gestures. Those qualities take a special photographic artist who is willing to put in the time and observation it takes to find ordinary moments that become transcendent in their framing. Read More

Crain's Chicago Business

Hamilton, Schmamilton: Besides singing colonists, there’s plenty of cultural awesomeness happening throughout Chicago this fall, from an inaugural music festival with a strange name to world-premiere plays galore. We asked the city’s most tapped-in writers, curators, performers and artists to lead the way and tell us what to see and do. What follows are their recommendations. Read More

PDN

As Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago prepared for their summer group show, “Still Moving,” which featured video work by six artists, Edelman and the gallery staff spoke with each of the artists to figure out how they wanted to present and sell their pieces. Read More

Dodho Magazine

Catherine Edelman Gallery opened in 1987 quickly establishing itself as one of the leading galleries in the Midwest devoted exclusively to the art of photography. From its inception, the goal of the gallery was to exhibit prominent contemporary photographers alongside new & young talent, showcasing a broad range of subject matter and photographic techniques. Read More

Lens Culture

In celebration of the ongoing LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2016, we will be publishing a series of inspiring features on great contemporary street photography. Enjoy! Building facades melt into darkness, their architectural details vanish, leaving only glowing windows in a sea of pitch black, like stars in the night sky. Read More

Fast Co. Design

For the photographer Francesco Pergolesi, his hometown of Spoleto, Italy, is synonymous with the mom-and-pop shops that pepper its streets. When he returned home after studying in Rome, he noticed that some of the shops had started closing down because of big chain shopping centers that had opened in the suburbs. Saddened by the change, Pergolesi set out to capture the shops and their keepers, a project which turned into his series Heroes. Read More

American Photo

Daniel Beltrá's work in The Best of Fotofest. Read More

Slate

Francesco Pergolesi’s roams cities and towns in Italy looking for scenes that spark memories of his childhood and speak to a time when people were more intimately connected to their work and to one another. Read More

PDN Photo of the Day

For his 19th solo show at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago, which opens tonight and runs until September 2, Kenna finds arrangements of form and light that add up to a particular sense of soulful, minor key serenity. In this show, he combines recent images from Japan—many of which were published in his 2015 Prestel book Forms of Japan—with older work from Europe and elsewhere. Read More

Musée

The relationship between the photograph and the written word is a curious one. In photography, the artist’s voice is distilled from the image. Therefore, an unusual dynamic emerges when certain photographers choose to introduce words into their work. Some might even consider this presence gratuitous, an unsubtle distraction from the inherent message behind an image. However, this same disruption can birth a unique harmony between mediums, one that offers multiple layers of meaning and interpretation. The inclusion of words generates new and poignant questions regarding the significance of the photograph. Are the words included within the photograph? If they’re superimposed on the surface, where are they placed? Read More

Royal Photographic Society

After noting it listed in a recent edition of Black+White Photography, the exhibition “Heroes” by Francesco Pergolesi found its way on to a to-do list for my recent weekend in Chicago. The Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago is a great space, clearly successfully selling contemporary photographers' work to collectors. It's good to see that photographers (plus their teams and agents) can make a living - contrast that to my recent blog about crowd-funding being used to support war photography. Read More

My Modern Met

Artist Ysbel LeMay's collage composites draw the viewer into her ethereal kingdom. Created using hundreds of individual photographs merged into one, the Canadian-born artist constructs her images piece by piece until she is happy with the final fusions. The resulting hypnotic composites weave fragments of plants, animals, and elements into “panoramas of natural splendour” that take cues from the real world but are ultimately something much more mystical. Read More

Messy Nessy Chic

Francesco Pergolesi’s series “Heroes,” which opens at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago on May 6, is set at dusk, when the proprietors of the tiny Italian shops he depicts are working late—baking bread, making shoes or sharpening knives. Made as a sort of collaboration with storekeepers in Rome, Milan and in small towns. Read More

My Modern Met

Francesco Pergolesi’s charming photos shine the spotlight on the overlooked champions of the corner shop. The stars of his project Heroes sweep their front stoops, cut their cloth, and bake their bread, working hard as the sun dips into dusk. Pergolesi highlights the efforts of these local vendors who put their heart and soul into their tiny Italian shops, emphasizing these emotions by offering his images from the perspective of a passerby at twilight. Read More

Art & Antiques

Chicago’s rich art scene offers prehistoric art, contemporary works, and everything in between. CEG’s next show is the American debut of Italian photographer Francesco Pergolesi. Titled “Heroes,” Pergolesi’s exhibition is a series of photographic tableaux that pays homage to his memories of growing up in Spoleto, Italy. Read More

PDN Photo of the Day

Francesco Pergolesi’s series “Heroes,” which opens at Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago on May 6, is set at dusk, when the proprietors of the tiny Italian shops he depicts are working late—baking bread, making shoes or sharpening knives. Read More

Chicago Magazine

The best things to do in Chicago this month, selected by our culture critics. Read More

National Geographic

Visually illustrating climate change and global environmental shifts is no easy task. But for photographer Daniel Beltrá, documenting humanity’s effect on our planet has been a lifelong passion. To date he’s photographed the polar regions, the Amazon, Iceland, Greenland, and even the BP oil spill. Read More

Crave

Precipice. On the edge. The fall is there, laid bare before your eyes. You can see it coming and it cannot be ignored. This is what drives us to the end; sometimes do or die is the only way. It’s a curious quality of the human condition, that which drives us to such extremes, becoming a metaphor for the human condition itself. Our drive towards progress at any cost is creating an entirely world, a world brilliantly evoked in a new exhibition of photographs: Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison: Precipice, at Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, now through April 30, 2016. Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/969691-exhibit-robert-shana-parkeharrison-precipice#EDOWEBPiR2oLJL7T.99 Read More

TrendLand

Renowned aerial and conservation photographer Daniel Beltrá has seen his share of the effects of global warming. For more than two decades, Beltrá’s work has taken him to all seven continents, including several expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon, the Arctic, the Southern Oceans and the Patagonian ice fields. His work on the Gulf oil spill in 2010 garnered him much attention, including the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award from the London Natural History Museum and the International Photographer of the Year Award from the Lucie Foundation. Read More

Visual News

There’s an inherent problem with humanity’s love for the world, and that it is sometimes too loved. Whether for resources or landscapes, mankind and womankind have devoured what has been offered; a problematic cause certainly. And that’s why it’s good we have artists who can illustrate complex problems in engaging, hopefully inspiring, ways, such as the ParkeHarrisons. Read More

Create

Ysabel LeMay’s digital compositions are brilliantly wild depictions of places that seem almost real. However, she painstakingly constructs them piece-by-piece from photographs she takes around the world. Read More

Create

In the photo-based art of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, a magical world sends warnings about the future. For more than two decades, the ParkeHarrisons’ work has been informed by their desire to motivate viewers to move against the environmental disaster we are barreling toward. Read More

Colossal

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison have been a collaborative duo for the last 20 years, mixing Shana’s interest in dance with Robert’s background in photography to produce environments specifically for their combined practice. A constant theme throughout the couple’s two decade long work has been man’s effect on the landscape—showcasing how we are constantly influencing, and more often than not damaging, the Earth. Read More

Culture and Life

Much has been written about Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, the husband and wife duo who met as students in New Mexico. She was studying dance and metalsmithing, while he was focused on photography. Within a few years of graduating, they gained instant recognition for their collaborative works that presented constructed and choreographed scenarios about mans effect on the landscape. Read More

Art Diversions

Daniel Beltrá’s exhibition, “Ice/Green Lands,” at Catherine Edelman Gallery is delightful. Upon entering the gallery, I swiftly transitioned from urban life in Chicago to the stunning, far-off worlds of Greenland and Iceland. The fifteen exhibited works consist of aerial photographs of Greenland and Iceland. They exemplify the natural beauty the world offers, which is why the show grips us. It is also why, as I walked around gawking, I realized the exhibition is particularly relevant today. Read More