Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Work/Place
Runs through January 31 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
As the recession deepens and we continue to reassess the value of work, business and just about everything, Work/Place could scarcely be more timely. Its images are familiar, even mind-numbingly so, but these reconsidered approaches to mundane office aesthetics unearth those sad to inspiring truths too many of us take for granted between 9 and 5. Karen Yama enlivens the snapshots, credentials and other desktop souvenirs of her anonymous workers. Lars Tunbjörk pushes back (pictured), deliberately subverting the last traces of his subjects' humanity in washed tones and stilted formality, putting the drone back in office drones. Thomas Demand executes artifice with precision, documenting his deceptive three-dimensional paper models which appropriately reference corporate fraud. Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom's short film isolates one firm's baffling rhetoric to a single foyer, cross-cutting their way through an amusing cacophony of legal BS.

Pedro Meyer: Heresies
Runs through February 1 at the National Museum of Mexican Art
Where many digital artists have found fame Photoshopping frivolous fantasies, Pedro Meyer's retouched works reconcile conflicting realities, often provocatively. Meyer captures telling moments in the complex lives and dispositions of his countrymen and his compadres across various borders and continents, largely resisting melodrama or heavy-handed manipulation. Witness a realistically ironic juxtaposition of a billboard ad for a luxury hotel looming over a field of migrant workers. Some of his most simple and direct work, specifically his ersatz family portrait stitching six decades into one print, need little elaboration. Referencing Meyer's bold statement that all his work, manipulated or not, is equally true and untrue, "Heresies" celebrates the Mexican master and his craft at more than 60 museums worldwide.