Today is the first full day of EXPO CHICAGO! Thank you to everyone who attended opening night, it was great to see so many familiar faces. We had a wonderful start to the week.

CEG is excited to be featuring eleven artists at EXPO this year. Photographs by Daniel Beltrá, Liat Elbling, Laurent Millet, and Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison make it hard to walk by booth 257 without noticing their vivid color.

Daniel Beltrá
Born in Madrid, Spain, Daniel Beltrá is a photographer based in Seattle, Washington. His passion for conservation is evident in images of our environment that are evocatively poignant. His striking, large-scale photographs are all shot from the air. This perspective gives the viewer a wider context to the beauty and destruction he witnesses, as well as revealing a delicate sense of scale.

Amazon scarlet ibis (#222), 2017 © by Daniel Beltrá

Over the past two decades, Beltrá’s work has taken him to all seven continents, including several expeditions to the Brazilian Amazon, the Arctic, the Southern Oceans and the Patagonian ice fields. In 2009, Beltrá received the prestigious Prince’s Rainforest Project award granted by Prince Charles. Other highlights include the BBVA Foundation award in 2013 and the inaugural “Global Vision Award” from the Pictures of the Year International in 2008. In 2007 and 2006 he received awards for his work in the Amazon from World Press Photo. Daniel’s work has been published by the most prominent international publications including The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, Le Monde, and El Pais, amongst many others.

Liat Elbling
Like many still-life photographers, Liat Elbling cuts, tapes and assembles objects on a table, condensing or expanding the physical space through meticulous lighting. Her current solo show at CEG, Proposals for Disorder, presents 23 photographs that examine how the construction of a space can affect ones mood. A gray room can be both soothing and non-descript; red is the color of passion and danger; merlot the color of a soothing wine. In each of these scenarios, Elbling uses color to create an atmosphere that invites the viewer into a world that is as comforting as it is suspenseful. As she states, it is her desire to “return to art’s basic characteristics: perspective, light and shade, examining the relationship between two and three dimensionality, and the blending of materials, colors and textures.”

Laurent Millet
For more than twenty years, Laurent Millet has channeled his innate curiosity to create photographs that question the way objects appear within space and time. Citing R. Buckminster Fuller and Denis Diderot among his influences, Millet creates an artistic vocabulary through metal wire, vineyard posts and barrel hoops – objects prevalent in the coastal town of France in which he resides. Photographs from his series La Méthode, La Chasse, and La Cabanes are on view at booth 257.

As he stated in a 2014 interview in L’Oeil de la Photographie: “I felt like I had to take refuge in something that was comforting and reassuring… This idea brought me back to what I did as a child in the countryside when I would play with wood and stones. I rediscovered that pleasure as an adult… Starting with the first things I built, fishing machines, I felt like a world was opening up in which I could really exist. These objects are powered by my personal fictions, my dream of another life. The photograph is proof of that, a record of the moment, a reward.”

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison
Much has been written about Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison, the husband and wife duo who met as students in New Mexico. She was studying dance and metalsmithing, while he was focused on photography. Within a few years of graduating, they gained instant recognition for their collaborative works that presented constructed and choreographed scenarios about mans effect on the landscape.

More than twenty years later, the artists are still dedicated to the environment, showing us the power of nature, and the effect our actions have on it. By creating environments specifically to photograph, the artists address issues about the earth and our responsibility to heal the damage we’ve created, while investigating the human condition. This ideology has remained a constant, and is why they are so greatly admired.

You can see all the photographs on view at Booth #257 on our website here.

EXPO CHICAGO
Festival Hall, Navy Pier
600 E Grand Ave Chicago, IL 60611

Thursday, September 14 through Saturday, September 16
11:00 – 7:00 pm

Sunday, September 17
11:00 pm – 6:00 pm

For tickets and more information about the fair, visit expochicago.com.
Follow along with us this week on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and here on Cyclopsblog!