Sex, Death And God
By Laura M. Browning in Arts & Entertainment on Dec 17, 2010 7:00PM
The Tony Wight Gallery is a small, second-story space in, oddly, the same building as Checker Taxi. It’s as an appropriate venue as any for Ken Fandell’s Sex, Death and God, a photography exhibit with a sense of humor.
It’s not really strictly photography, though. Ken takes hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of pictures and then uses Photoshop to stitch them together. The results are huge, hyper-realistic photocollages like Bougainvillea Down the Block. Ken individually stitched the bougainvillea leaves together - go look at this in person, it will boggle your mind - resulting in layers of pink petals in various stages of decay, from freshly fallen to nearly soured. (The number of hours that likely went into this makes our head hurt a little bit). The Edge of the World is a milky universe, a cosmological splatter of an unknown substance against a black night. He works with more mundane subjects, too, like bananas, street signs, and even hair, but transforms them into something strange and otherworldly.
This is a small exhibit with only about eight works, but the small setting belies the enormity and complexity of Ken's works, which are so detailed that you could still lose part of an afternoon here. Ken is a teacher at the School of the Art Institute, and his work has been shown in places like Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art, so this is a great opportunity to see a solo show by a local artist. We suggest you take advantage of the intimate setting and check it out before it closes at the end of this month.
Sex, Death and God is on exhibit at the Tony Wight Gallery, 845 W. Washington Blvd, until December 31.