In Spring 2010 I wrote this for my friend Matt Woodward. It was pieced together from earlier statements and proposals, new thoughts and notes from Matt, new research and thoughts of my own, and mostly-accurate intuition regarding how he thinks about his work. He'll be showing new work at the Chicago Cultural Center Michigan Avenue Galleries in April-May 2012.
"The city is made, forgotten, and made again, / trucks hauling it away haul it back" -Carl Sandburg, The Windy City
"Over the last year I have been building a body of work around the moldings and wrought iron details of the American Renaissance and Beaux-Arts movements of the turn of the twentieth century, an era which employed the conventions of European classicism to glorify the advent of a new Golden Age of progress through industrialism while constantly and necessarily shedding the accoutrements of the past in order to advance and perpetuate its own motion. The White City of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago represented a crowning achievement of American Beaux-Arts at the same time it stood in stark contrast to...
an already-emerging new American architecture born out of drastically changing modern function and methods. Louis Sullivan's Wainwright Building, for example, sometimes considered the first true American skyscraper, was completed in 1891, just a year before the Exposition was erected; Sullivan and Adler's Transportation Building, part of the Fair itself, broke dramatically from the strict classicism of the Fair's other structures. Over the next several decades as buildings grew ever taller and function's effect on form became more and more profound, Beaux-Arts and the emerging new aesthetics in architecture constantly engaged, re-casting and re-contextualizing one another as they jockeyed for space in the American cityscape; beautiful, palatial structures such as the old Cook County Hospital and the first Chicago Public Library, now the Chicago Cultural Center (having narrowly escaped demolition in the 1970s, unlike so many early twentieth century buildings), remain firmly rooted in the classical tradition while Chicago School structures such as the Santa Fe Building herald the first steps towards the drastically new aesthetic of decades to come, making revolutionary new use of classical ornamentation. These elements have grown up around, on top of, and into each other, requiring earlier structures to yield in order to find room to stand, and themselves eventually yielding to the ever-taller, ever-sleeker, ever-more-functional structures of subsequent eras.
Carl Sandburg in his 1922 poem The Windy City celebrates this cycle of growth, demolition, crumble and revival that is very much a part of Chicago's identity: "put the city up; tear the city down; / put it up again; let us find a city." My work searches for this city. The use of reductive drawing in these pieces consciously mirrors the constant push and pull of deconstruction and reconstruction that shapes the ever-changing face of the city as we come to know it. Rather than beginning with blank paper or canvas, the work is begun by creating a dark surface ground, in this case using graphite, and applying the light of an object to the surface by removing the ground using an eraser or sandpaper. The surfaces are worked, erased, and re-worked again and again; as with many surviving historic structures, old space is harnessed for new use in an intensely physical process that is both expressionistic in gesture as well as precise in measurement. The marks that remain, when taken individually, may seem arbitrary; but their physicality and expressionism serve to systematically document that objects travel through time; that in the heart of the American city, something new cannot be found or erected except in the place of something else; and that in order to exist, new structure must carve out new space in space already occupied . . . at least, until it is erased and re-worked into something new itself. My intent, through the subjects, process, and large scale of my work, is to celebrate and preserve the places where tearing down and building up meet, for a moment or a century. At these intersections of the monumental and the ephemeral, where trucks that haul away pass trucks that haul back, we may find our city.
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