ART: PREVIEW
Images extract visions from the commonplace
By Alan G. Artner
Tribune art critic
Published October 21, 2005

Leora Laor's photographs at the Stephen Daiter Gallery are among the few digitally manipulated pictures I have seen that add to conventional photography and transform reality in an exciting and powerful way.

The artist has shot scenes with a long lens in a public park in Jerusalem with a video camera. She then used a computer to extract still images and work on their textures and colors. This has caused a superficial resemblance to the work of fellow-Israeli photographer Michal Rovner, though Laor's art is less conceptual and more than able to stand on its own visually.

Her pictures extract from common postures, gestures and deployments in landscape an atmosphere of apocalypse. Look at the work long enough and the images collapse again into the everyday. But they never quite lose all of their visionary aura, and as a result we see how the extraordinary is consistently based in the ordinary.

Some of the images are merely theatrical, when we feel the artist straining toward the mythic. But more often Laor succeeds in taking the posture or gesture beyond its immediate circumstances--so that the specific seems to aspire naturally toward the universal.

The artist exhibited frequently in the 1980s. After an absence, she resumed photographing only in the last five years. This is her first solo show in Chicago , and it's a strong introduction to a gifted artist in her 50s.

It will be fascinating to see where the work goes from here.

At 311 W. Superior St. , 312-787-3350.

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