Last fall choreographer and multimedia artist Ann Carlson started sifting through thousands of archival images from the Chicago Historical Society and other sources for her new site-specific project, Night Light. Eventually, Carlson and two local researchers settled on nine photos “where the place can be identified,” she says. “Sometimes it’s ridiculously obvious, like the lions at the Art Institute.” The piece, in which dancers will re-create the series of photographs shot at various sites around downtown between 1890 and 1990, will be viewed in the context of a walking tour, with the dancers wearing period costumes–all in gray scale–and standing stock-still on the spots where the photographs were originally snapped.
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One “living photograph” will re-create a postcard sold at the Art Institute: a group of female students–all of whom are white–working on sculptures of a Native American man in full headdress. “There are embedded issues in the photographs that I want to leave to the viewer to deconstruct and be curious about,” Carlson says. A mid-70s photo booth snapshot of self-taught artist Lee Godie, which was stitched to one of the paintings Godie used to hawk outside the Art Institute, will be staged on State Street, complete with photo booth.
She admits she’s cheated on some of the photos: “We can’t verify where they were taken, so we restaged them at a place where they could have been staged because of the background.” They’ve also moved a couple of the locations closer to the others, so “people don’t have to walk so far to see them.”
–Cara Jepsen
