My default response to the term “landscape” is a grimace, or a yawn, but I am always intrigued by images in said genre that elicite a contrasting reaction.

The vibrancy of Chait’s series Motion and Memory: Impressions of the Rural Landscape from the Passenger Seat of a Car Traveling 70 mph from Chicago to Iowa City and Back, April 16-17, 2005 recalls the work of Elke Morris, but thrust into furious lateral motion, viewed from a midwestern throughway. In Chait’s artist statement, he writes, “As far back as I can remember I’ve found it natural to observe the world in a detached, objective manner.” His landscapes bleed into abstraction, into the shapes and colors of wide stretches of land and sky. “They speak to endurance and erasure,” writes Kendra Greene, “the things that persist and the things that can’t keep pace.”

Larry Chait is part of the Catherine Edelman Gallery’s Chicago Project, an online gallery of emerging and established Chicago photographers that deserve recognition. Motion and Memory was also featured in the Museum of Contemporary Photographer’s The Midwest Photographers Project.

Some weeks ago I came across Elke Morris’s photographs of houses; for days straight I could not stop staring at the structure of Domicile I (below), glowing within my computer screen.

…they look like toys, like internally sunlit dioramas.

Homes are important to me, in all their holdings of memory, dense/closed/private narrative, their stiff boxiness. Morris’s homes are inaccessible and perfect as they shimmer just beyond the grasp of realistically perceived space.

And all of a sudden I’m realizing the relevance of toys to the larger picture of my aesthetic interests and obsessions — the vibrantly colorful plastic plaything, the thing for thing’s sake that is this manufactured model/replica/figure. They demand attention.

What does it mean to convert these houses and homes into a litter of people-less miniature trinket stages?

It is of little surprise that Morris’s photos resonate.

I discovered a great love for the work of Ken Fandell a few years ago. His goofy, longwinded, often descriptive and, well, accurate, titles (they certainly invoke a thoughtful introspection) hang onto and compound the meaning of simple, bright, beautiful photographic images (as well as the occasional text-based peices). The series title in particular that fills me with fervent, pensive glee is that of I Think Everything is Really Important. (Particularly when regarding objects assembled within the camera’s gaze, I cannot disagree.) Part of that series is the breezy The Sky Above My Girlfriend’s Head:

This second work here is by Spencer Finch, Sky Over the Ikarian Sea III. I bring up Fandell’s work because I suspect he must love (and was likely influenced by) the installations/photographs/drawings/paintings of Spencer Finch. (And isn’t it neat to see these two “sky-above” images placed next to each other?) I recently visited Mass MoCA and its splendid exhibition of Finch’s work, fourteen-years-worth, What Time is it on the Sun?

The peice Absendiary (above) is a good example of how Finch will illuminate what seems initially to be a just lovingly created abstract work (merry watercolor polka-dots hovering like a hailstorm of bouncy-balls) with a bluntly informative title (full of literary and scientific reference, a revelation of the varied coded ways we all experience the world): Abecedary (Nabokov’s Theory of a Colored Alphabet applied to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The gallery card continues: “Nabokov’s system of a colored alphabet to transliterate 9,251 characters from Heisenberg’s text.” Wow.

Finch is often engaged in the act of translating. In Sunlight in an Empty Room he translates the color and intensity of the light on a certain afternoon in Emily Dickinson’s garden. The light panel recreates the experience of a clear sky; the blue sphere of gels dims and colors the light to match that of the afternoon’s light when a cloud would pass.

This is all of course absurd, but lovely — both to stand up close to the tenderly clothespinned plastic ball of blue, and to envision Finch with his measuring devices and his regard for tone and hue, standing quietly in that Amherst garden on a summer’s day.

I was surprised to discover that Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison have introduced an understated set of color tones to their newest work — an unexpected shift from the methodically realized sepia otherworld they’d carefully constructed in photogravure for over a decade (as seen above in Suspension).

The color seems to sit tentatively on the surface, like hand-colored tinting in early photography. At first encounter this work is as disarming (and maybe even disappointing) as encountering a colorized It’s a Wonderful Life on late night cable — the blues and pinks are unexpected, eerie, and evoke an atmosphere in which something is unmistakeably, perhaps forbodingly, off.

What is this foreign pigment? Is it tainting, poisoning? The images become less narrative, and much more ambiguous, than the eternal doings of the “architect’s brother.”  A new era has arrived upon the ParkeHarrison landscape; no longer does there exist that opportunity to mold the world with one’s very own hands. No longer can a man tend to, and craft, the clouds.

This new work can be viewed at Chicago’s Catherine Edelman Gallery.