Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

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Published: Oct 9, 2007

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Any artist who can make a deer with blood-squirting hearts growing out of its antlers look cutesy is, well, some kind of trickster. Merrilee Challiss' enormous spider webs and half-goat, half-cloud creatures resemble intricate, multilayered doodles. The paintings, ink drawings and pencil drawings on wood manage to be both adorable and creepy.

Showing the complicated, generations-old story of whites and blacks interacting in the same space, Joel Katz's black-and-white photos of "colored" drug stores and decrepit church crosses in Mississippi are abhorrent and uncomfortable. In the haunting Ruleville, an old black woman sits in a rocking chair with "What I want is to be treated like a human being" neatly handwritten below her portrait.

Anyone else hate the concept of smiling for photos? Seven photographers let their subjects relax their facial muscles for once, and the result is both honest and melancholic. The portraits of various straight-faced people capture the experience of being by oneself — drinking whiskey at a bar alone, grabbing a bite to eat alone, wandering the city streets alone. The strongest piece is Jessica Roberts' Brian, which features a chubby, sullen adolescent boy sinking into his bare mattress.

 

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