“Barbara Kasten: Constructs 1981–1982”

Chicago artist Barbara Kasten was a pioneer of the genre known as set-up photography, in which models or other contrivances staged in the studio served as subjects for the camera. Though long commonplace in commercial photography, studio set-ups became a means for artists to question photography and its supposed objectivity as a representational medium. In this series of enlarged Polaroids from the early 1980s, Kasten uses mirrors and other reflective surfaces to build geometric compositions that are at once abstract and trompe l’oeil, owing to the fact that much of color seen in the images are actually bounced into the frame from off-camera. Combining the formal and the metaphysical, Kasten’s “Constructs” seem like an unlikely combination of El Lissitzky and Giorgio de Chirico.