This is an image from a project I am currently working on that is tentatively titled "foreclosure." This project like much of my other work deals with liminality and it's presence in the everyday. I am interested in the nature of things that are in between. Specifically with these images, the ability of objects to exist in an extended state of liminality, and a state of liminality in which the aggregation may exist in the form of complete failure.

For this project in particular I have been photographing the weathered and often defaced advertisements for high-end condo buildings that have been foreclosed. When these building become foreclosed the signs and ads are often left behind. These are spaces that often have only existed in the idealization and planning of them. I became interested in these posters as a way to think about failure and what happens to an idealization when it suddenly becomes deferred. Because of the recent economic slump many of these spaces exist in Chicago. They exist in various states; some partially constructed some just fenced off land. But all of these spaces represent idealized city life, or at least what these spaces appear to be. The advertisements and billboards that surround these building often show images that could be found on postcards for Chicago. They sell not only a condo but also a lifestyle.

I have been researching these spaces and photographing what is left behind of these buildings that never were. Each image in the series focuses on what could have been but also attempts to jolt the viewer out of the image by natural decay of this perfection. They are meant to confuse the abstraction and ask the viewer to unpack the abstraction to understand the interplay of idealization and failure within the situation.

To me these images also address the object hood of a photograph. They are photographs of images that have transformed in the 3D forms through their extended presence in a landscape. Yet the process of photographing them again flattens them. These images examine the objectness of a photograph in time.

I am not sure if I intend for these images to comment on the economic state the world we live in but they do seem to tie into the reality. In my mind they are more intended to examine a physical manifestation of a “dream deferred” as described by Langston Huges in poem of the same name. Huges describes a dream deferred as a rotting explosive object and these images also consider that. They explore the semi permanence of idealization or dreams and what happens when these idealization are pushed aside, they begin to rot in a way. In the case of these images they begin to rip and tear and collect detritus and the illusion of what they show becomes complicated. They begin to show what happens when idealization is materialized and they deserted.