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As a child growing up in London, Steve McQueen—not the deceased film star, but the contemporary film artist—says that seeing the 1981 Irish hunger strike on television was one of those “impressionable moments,” the kind that carries with you into adulthood. In 2008, seventeen years after that initial haunting, he released his first feature-length film “Hunger,” a hyperrealistic, oft-times completely gruesome look at the 1981 hunger strike inside the HM Prison Maze. McQueen captures the demise of Bobby Sands, a member of the British Parliament and volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who starved himself to death between the prison’s cinder walls. McQueen followed up on this breakout movie with his 2011 film “Shame,” about an attractive thirty-something New Yorker named Brandon through the tunnels of his sex addiction. But McQueen did not start out as a feature-length filmmaker; rather, this newfound vision came out of more than twenty years of shorter works in mediums such as 8mm film, 16mm, 35mm slides and color video, all of which are represented in this stunning survey of his work to date.
Read the full review on Newcity Newspaper: http://art.newcity.com/2012/10/30/review-steve-mcqueenart-institute-of-chicago/
