Newspaper is often the first ephemera we come to understand.
It’s an impermanent medium that we try to make permanent over and over again, whether it’s a yellowing comic strip on someone’s fridge or a historical front page tucked away in the closet.
In that sense, newspaper is also typically our first lesson in the power of print and how our stories become tangled up and tactile through ink and paper.
The University of Illinois Springfield Visual Arts Gallery digs into this dynamic with “of strange shadows,” its current show from Texas-based collaborators Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban.
Pulling at the threads among color, print and collective memory, Mutchler and Urban pair hues of low saturation with images of protest and violence that examine the 1960s and ’70s — moments of political unrest “too familiar and yet distant” to our own time.
This story appeared in The Chicago Tribune on October 30, 2017.
Read the entire article online.
