Jason Lazarus

Jason Lazarus, Spencer Elden in His Last Year of High School, 2008.

Jason Lazarus’s efforts to foreground photography as the ultimate medium of memory and voyeurism give his solo show the feel of Found magazine, with its array of odd private flotsam. Lazarus’s “NIRVANA” series collects individuals’ snapshots of the people responsible for introducing them to the grunge icons. This canny choice of subject suits the current direction of retro fashion…and leads to an enjoyable lineup of scruffy white boys sitting on basement sofas in black T-shirts or posing with their beat-up Camaros. But the implied air quotes in the series “Living with a Portrait”—Lazarus’s hung, framed portraits of other people’s hung, framed portraits—make this show less affecting, and his “still-lifes” of plants in personal spaces as markers of departed love are downright maudlin.

The strongest pieces include Lazarus’s photographs of handwriting. Looking at the Back of an Ad Reinhardt, from a cute series of works spoofing modern art, (supposedly) shows us the back of Ultimate Painting No. 19—a near-blank canvas by Reinhardt, an austere color-field painter—covered with notes in black marker. The exceptional Cabrini Green housing project (before razing) doesn’t just capture a departing tenant’s scribbled ode to the 30 years she spent there; it memorializes a pivotal moment in Chicago history. At its best, Lazarus’s eye for what should be frozen in time amplifies the ghostly pathos of adolescence or statements written on a doomed wall.