ART FEATURE: 17 CHICAGO PHOTOGRAPHS IN 10 HOURS BY NIKOLA OLIC
MUSIC: STARGAZER FROM CHICORY ROOT BY NICHOLAS KROLAK
1) 8:01am – 899 W Harrison St / UIC School of Architecture
The early morning gray was opportunely countered by the colorful public display across the street from the UIC School of Architecture, offering a seemingly conflicted visual space of a colorful public display and a gray colorless city behind it.
2) 8:21am – 50 Ida B. Wells Dr / Roosevelt University
Another way to improve the weather — at least temporarily — is to replace the gray background with a blue one, even if it belongs to a modern building and its glass facade.
3) 9:02am – Prudential Plaza + Buckingham Fountain
This photographs represents 3 rather than just one location. It was taken from Shedd Aquarium, and it depicts the water fountain of the Buckingham Fountain, decorating the uniform facade of the Prudential Plaza a few blocks behind.
4) 9:41am – Jay Pritzker Pavilion
The pavilion has ample opportunities for photography, with such a diversity of Chicago architectural options and styles offered around it. In this case, the overhead structures that help bring sound and lights closer to the audience also help frame a building near by.
5) 10:00am – Shedd Aquarium
Back to the Aquarium for more photographs, in this case lightly quoting famed Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri and his vertical dividing beams, used to frame distant water activity.
6) 10:32am – Prudential Plaza
The public space in front of the building offers a performance space and a Colosseum-like structure that can also be used to help frame and isolate interesting architectural details nearby.
7) 11:16am – 432 W Lake St / Fulton River District
From a particularly extended spot in the walking area in front one of the buildings facing the river, surrounding buildings come together in an unexpected visual space that combines and breaks and bends visual lines in dimensionless and disorienting ways.
8) 11:33am – 432 W Lake St
A small convenience store offers a unique and different view of the famed Marina City buildings, instantly recognizable to Chicago residents, even when reflected in a window which almost morphs the buildings into something else.
9) 12:14am – Waterview Tower
Another unique view of the famed Marina City buildings, this time reflected in an even less recognizable fashion, of the facade of the Waterview Tower.
10) 1:47pm – The Bean / Cloud Gate
One of the most recognizable visuals in Chicago, the Cloud Gate sculpture in Millennium Park (aka The Bean) helps a bird rest, while also providing cover for a building behind it.
11) 2:52pm – Sofitel Hotel
The striking building of the Sofitel hotel provides a sharp angle that can be used as a central figure in a photograph that balances the hotel and its facade with the empty Chicago sky, offering a quick break from the saturated architectural visual space of this fascinating city.
12) 3:06pm – John Hancock Center
The world-famous John Hancock Center has an interesting addition on its west side: a garage with a spiral driveway visible from the outside.
13) 3:21pm – 840 N Michigan Ave
The non-descript building near John Hancock center offers another view of the famous building, contrasting Hancock’s cross beams with this building’s horizontal facade sections.
14) 4:11pm – 120e E Walton St
Different sections of the building offer a unique opening towards the sky, and a unique light-shaped space that breaks the shadow in the early afternoon hours.
15) 5:00pm – 1100ish N State St
I had to “-ish” the address because I cant find it on Google Maps; Not the first time this happened with the dynamic city such as Chicago. The building offers a Picasso-like cubist reflection of — and reflection on — the famed Hancock tower a few blocks east from here.
16) 5:21pm – 505 N St Clair St
Eating pizza nearby, the similarly colored buildings a few blocks behind combine their similar facades and their sun reflections and reflections of each other, to provide an entertaining visual space.
17) 6:11pm – 899 W Harrison St / UIC School of Architecture
Back to the place where the walk started 10 hours ago, the improved light conditions provided new opportunities with the colorful public display, now worthy of its dedicated own photographic space.
About the artist:
Bassist Nicholas Krolak is a young veteran of the Philadelphia jazz scene. He has spent the last decade working as a side-man, experiencing new styles, and learning from the masters. Now, he has taken all he has learned and is applying it to his own group. Tracing the lineage of bebop into the contemporary, his compositions celebrate the city and honor nature.
Art: 17 Chicago Photographs in 10 Hours by Nikola Olic
In the artist’s words:
These 17 photographs were taken a few weeks ago during 10 fast-paced, fulfilling and weather-challenged daylight hours in Chicago, and represent a modern, abstract and playful view of places and buildings that can be both familiar and new to Chicago locals, and inviting and surprising to visitors, such as myself. My award-winning photography has appeared in galleries, art events, museums, magazines, newspapers, spaces and websites around the world, including Wired.com, The Guardian, CNN Style, Yahoo.com, ArchDaily, Digg, Curbed, Seattle Post Intelligencer, and SkyScrapers.com, as well as the Dallas Museum Of Art, Dallas’ MADI Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art and many others. This Chicago visit was a part of the ‘Cities’ project (http://bit.ly/2LsL49G), a collection of published photography projects that represent quick and unpredictable explorations over a few hours or days. This year I had visited Las Vegas, Denver, Fort Wayne, Galveston and now Chicago. All photographs had been published in interesting local magazines, newspapers or online, and my hope is for that to continue with these Chicago photographs as well. A few words about me — I am an independent Nikon World Photographer, originally from Serbia but living and working in Dallas, Texas, focusing on architectural photography and abstract structural quotes that reimagine their subjects in playful, dimensionless and disorienting ways. Each published photograph is accompanied with a short description and the location where it was taken, offering a direct connection between the unexpected visual space of the photograph, and the real world of cars, buildings, people and noise in which it exists. These are intended as demystifying tools essential to abstract photography, reminding that these subjects — beautiful or otherwise — are on every corner, in places we visit and places we live in.