September 2007

Foundryman's Room; Grinder's Room; Chipper's Room; One Civilized Landscape; Burner's Room;The Labours of Alexander are Magritte's Jokes; Equinox; Cinder Snapper's Room; New Chapel; Cooperate; Squeeze Molder's Room; Standard Set #2; White Cat; Custom Custom

These recent paintings are from a twenty-piece series, almost completed. Each painting presents an imaginary room in a Midwestern steel town in the late 1970s, soon after the town's mills have shut down for good. The series emerged out of my ongoing research in two actual Midwestern towns shaped by widespread mill closures. In their objectives and responsibilities, however, the research project and the painting project are fundamentally discrete.

While these interiors aim for the feel of the recent past (the late 70s), I make their furnishings out of much 'older' material--imagery taken from the 1902 Sears Roebuck catalog. This catalog details thousands of household commodities available from the large Chicago warehouse at the turn of the century. By using tight collage--building any objects in these rooms from several smaller pieces of other 'things'-- I can concretely conflate two different moments when there was a outpour of decorative goods and gadgets marketed to working class homes.

Isolating and elaborating these decorative elements and the space around them, I am interested in what a particularly American domestic interior is and what it could be. In paintings like The Past and the Present, mid-century Midwestern realist Gertrude Abercrombie provides one answer, making me see whole layers of objective history through a room containing only a couch and a bowl or some other decorative nothing. I've just begun to figure out how else one might go about a project like this in the present.

Research for this series was supported by a grant from the University of Chicago Arts Planning Council.