Irene Siegel at the Art Institute

A painter for most of her life, Irene Siegel is also an accomplished photographer. For "Field.wrk: Digital Ground," her recent show at the

Art Institute of Chicago, she exhibited 49 digital inkjet prints ranging from 9 inches to over 4 feet in height. Siegel manipulates her color photographs on a computer to create images that occupy a territory between painting and photography. Her imagery comes from an odd variety of sources--the landscape of Indiana, where she has a farm, as well as ancient architecture and strangely pruned trees that she photographed on her travels in Iran. Yet, basically, her work is about light and the painterly presentation of light that Photoshop makes possible.

The artist photographs the Indiana landscape at sunrise and sunset, when the light is dramatically slanted. Early morning sunlight, she says, "loses its potency after an hour," and "light turns yellow in the evening as it departs." Siegel digitizes these photographs, softens the focus and creates stagelike effects--glowing fringes of radiance on vegetation, bright pools of light on the ground and dreamlike colors. She has made multiple images from a single photograph, layering animals or figures into the scenes, which then become pastoral fantasies. She likens her process to weeding and pruning her garden, and claims a spiritual kinship with the Roman poet Virgil, whose Georgics, a four-book poem on farming, appeared in 29 B.C.

There's much less detail in Siegel's architectural pieces, allowing her to experiment freely with scale, color and luminosity. She blurs the image, drops out the horizon line and sometimes tilts structures or turns them on their sides, transforming them into semiabstract objects that she may fill with boiling light or darken almost to obscurity. Though we never forget that these are ancient buildings, we lose our sense of their scale and relationship to the site. The artist ventures into fantasy, but never cuts completely loose from the real world.

Siegel also showed patterned pieces, which are made from cutup plant or architectural photographs, transformed in color and scale, and printed to suggest a garden plan or long horizon lines with imagery seeming to burst above and beneath them. The exhibition would have gained intensity if a half dozen of the weakest prints had been edited out. Still, what we see shows an uncommon level of inventive daring. As her work attests, Siegel is a fully mature artist who challenges herself every day.

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