| | APPROACHING NOWHERE, Jeff Brouws’ seventh solo exhibition at Craig Krull Gallery, surveys the evolving cultural landscapes of rural, urban and suburban America, from secondary highways to strip malls. Combining a minimal, bleak beauty with understated social commentary, the photographs seek a deeper meaning behind the cycle of construction, decline and renewal—a process endemic to economist Joseph Schumpeter’s well-known premise of capitalism’s need for “Creative Destruction.” Starting from this theoretical position, Brouws’ photographs go beyond mere description, and gather layered meaning, often functioning as antipodal metaphors or as images posing sociological questions. Deserted streets and freeways connote an emotional restlessness and isolation, solace or anticipation, while simultaneously asking us to intellectually consider roads as “places” of consequence: nodes of vital infrastructure, central to a consumer society’s dependency on the transportation of goods and services.
Ever fearful of the loss of place, and of an America becoming a country where “there is no there there,” Brouws bears witness to new Superstore construction that eradicates valuable farmland in the Midwest. Other photographs examine embattled landscapes of once vibrant, but now abandoned central business districts in rust-belt inner cities like Buffalo, New York or Gary, Indiana. As commercial ruins shuttered and victimized by suburbanization, white flight, and chronic poverty, these places represent a nowhere—
a discarded zone—in the consciousness of most Americans. On Chicago’s south side, high-rise towers of segregation based on Le Corbusier’s Radiant City concepts stand in silent testimony to the failure of public housing erected during the Great Society era of the 1960s. Driving east, we encounter the logos of multinational corporations crowding the skyways off I-90, infiltrating our view sheds indiscriminately, helping to create a ubiquitous conformity of placelessness—a nowhereville.
The photographs in APPROACHING NOWHERE act as witness and warning—quietly asking us to re-examine the linkages between economics, consumerism, place, race, social-class, housing, and urban planning. By subtle implication they suggest an under-lying disparity throughout a country that purports economic equality and social justice for all.
A reception for the artist will be held at the gallery on Saturday, January 21st from 10am-noon. Later in the afternoon, at 2pm, Mr. Brouws will be a guest speaker at this year’s PHOTO L.A. For lecture reservations visit: www.artfairsinc.com.
|
