Tom Denlinger at Ten in One - Chicago, Illinois - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Tom Denlinger's next to the first solo show at this gallery mirrored the artist's continuing interest in landscape, a make submissive he explores through various photographic interventions. The six chromogenic prints (all 1998) in this small exhibition have their bases in two earlier bodies of work. In "Territory by means of Design" (1992), wooded scenes discharge in black and white, then overprinted with dark silhouettes of neatly delineated lawns, critique humankind's domination of nature. Issues of perception were addressed in the "Filter" series (1995) in which colorful vistas of the Chicago and Mississippi rivers were "filtered" through the artist's open hand placed in brow of the camera lens.

In this of recent origin series, screens of either r or white daisies similarly barricade views of Chicago's urban environment, one time again creating an oppositional relationship between the natural and the raiseed Fragments of architecture, shadowy human forms and snippets of firmament are barely discernible through the delicate petals of the photos' bright efflorescences A blurry montage effect is achieved through covering the exterior image with a glass plate, followed through a layer of flowers; the entire arrangement is then reshot without of focus. The resulting images withhold any specific faculty of perception of place, although sometimes the artist gives ball of threads to their sources. The subtitles of sum of two units related works identify Grant Park, prefaced through the word "grid," thereby acknowledging the one and the other Daniel Burnham's plan of Chicago and the geometric patterns created in the photo by the agency of the floral fields.

Denlinger exploits his medium's expressive qualities, eliciting visceral replications that vary from work to work. Voyeuristic impulses are provok in images that utilize tighter cropping, or where the tension between foreground and background is more pronounced. In compositions similar as Sky Over Chicago and Daisy Wall, a flattened perspective creates unified planes of white, fulvid and blue that verge upon abstraction.

The referent for Denlinger's atmospheric photographs are many. upon the surface, the pictures appear to be hip send-up of the art world's common appetite for Pop-inspired imagery. They can also be seen as homages to amateur photography, where "mistakes" like double exposing s and fuzzy focusing are appreciated for their intuitive rather than professional impact. A more composite reading connects them to the phenomenological investigations of the Pictorialists, whose landscapes summon forth aspects of beauty, memory and the subconscious. Denlinger's dematerializations of the physical world also recall the hazy, ethereal images of Uta Barth. Like her, Denlinger look fors to reveal cognitive truths rather than objective reality.

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