THE NEW ART EXAMINER / MAY 1980

CHICAGO Jane Wenger, untitled photograph, 1980. Photo courtesy of Landfall Press Gallery. JANE WENGER Landfall Press Gallery 215 W. Superior, 951-6130 Closed Carol Ehlers, director of the photographic gallery attached to Allan Frumkin, has mounted another fine show of Chicago photographs. Lacking exhibition space on North Michigan Avenue, Ehlers placed this striking series of prints by Jane Wenger at the Landfall Press Gallery, an old building in the process of being converted to gallery space.

Wenger, whose series of bald heads against the sky has remained in the minds of everyone who saw her last show two years ago at the Hyde Park Art Center, has grown even more forceful. Unlike the formal intensity of the bald heads, this work has an almost shocking content. It is composed of exaggerated close-ups of the human face. Her very closeness to the subject is indecent: it violates respect for the privacy of another’s body. In fact, her camera is closer than we even wish to come to our own bodies, since at that distance, pores and hairs have a Brobdingnagian horror.

At such close scrutiny, the human face becomes a bizarre landscape reminiscent of the grotesque enlargements of tongues, blood cells, and nerve ganglia photographed by the Swedish scientist Nilsson. The human becomes object. As other, our very faces are capable of betraying us. What seems innocent enough as our skin, upon closer examination, becomes a lunar surface of craters and rocky protrusions. We must wonder what kind of souls live inside such monstrous bodies. Can there be such a thing as beauty among such creatures?

CANDIDA FINKEL