Captive Audience
MORE Gallery talk with Marc Fischer and artists Lucky Pierre Sat 1/27, 2 PM. Public discussion Sat 2/3, 2 PM.
INFO 773-344-1940
INFO 773-235-0936
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Captive Audience, an extraordinary exhibit about incarceration curated by Marc Fischer, approaches its compelling subject from many angles, using the gallery as a place to savor, examine, and blend experiences. You can try on prisoner clothing, restraints, and hoods, for example, as well as see the catalogs that sell these products to public and private institutions. You can even take home your own plastic-wrapped prison-issue toothbrush. And a clever board game–Incarceration, created by a group of British prisoners known as Risk-Takers Ltd.–allows you to explore daily life on lockdown a bit more deeply.
The postcards and virtual notices for Edra Soto’s installation at Polvo, Familiar Portraits, feature a manipulated photo of the artist lying beside her sleek black cat, Tito–who’s blown up to the mammoth proportions of a full-grown tiger. But photo experiments barely appear in the piece itself, which was fine with me. Whimsical trompe l’oeil effects often seem like overdetermined attempts to undermine visual “reality,” and Soto’s closet-sized installation is far more snuggly than your average epistemology seminar.
