Rhea McLean likes to sneak through abandoned buildings after dark, preferably industrial ruins in rough Chicago neighborhoods. She brings with her a camera, a tripod, a bag of supplies, and a sturdy human companion. Once inside, she moves by flashlight across dusty floors streaked with the thick shadows thrown by outside streetlights, carefully considering the instability that time and rot may have brought to stairways and surfaces.
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Holding the shutter open for 10 to 15 minutes, using slow-speed film, McLean moves about in the camera’s view and paints the picture with light. She employs the glow of color-filtered flashlights and flashbulbs, Coleman lanterns, matches, sparklers, Roman candles, smoke bombs, and flammable pastes. While she twirls and draws the light is captured on the film, but her dark moving body escapes the camera’s gaze.
The lavalike light has a life of its own that invades the buildings like a ghost. It suggests spirits of a building’s bygone occupants, or the soul of the building itself. It brings color and beauty to drab, brutal spaces, life to tombs.
She moved to Chicago about a year ago seeking artistic community. Today she lives alone in a postindustrial loft west of the Loop. For a while she lived in Pilsen, where she frequently drove past an abandoned factory on Cermak near the river. She grew more and more curious about the building until one day she summoned the nerve to take a closer look. The factory was empty and free of plywood barriers, so with a friend she ventured inside, where over time she produced many of the pictures in her current show.
