“Isolated Building Studies is the visual confluence of my interests in urban dynamism, socioeconomic inequality, and photography. By uniformly composing these images of Chicago buildings with no neighboring structures, I hope to suggest new ways of seeing the common impact of divergent investment processes on urban communities.
In Chicago, as in many places being remade by the transition to a post-industrial economy and the geographic segregation of marginalized groups, the social terrain is uneven. While density is the norm in the disproportionately whiter and wealthier parts of the city, many of the neighborhoods called home by people of color and those with lower incomes have been hollowed out by white flight, successive financial crises, and policies designed to extract rather than support.
Isolated buildings are particularly useful for exploring these structural changes because they are immediately recognized as unusual. As urban buildings, their form illustrates their connection with adjacent structures; theirs is a vertical, boxy architecture confined by palpably limited parcels. When their neighboring buildings are missing, the urban form clashes with what appears to be a suburban, even rural, setting. The tension is amplified by viewing the building in context, prompting the seemingly simple question "Why is this building isolated?" It is from this fundamental friction that Isolated Building Studies launches....
When viewed as a series, all too human patterns are clarified; buildings are recontextualized from their given environments into an abstracted neighborhood of isolation. In so doing, new construction and old, homes and businesses, rich neighborhoods and poor neighborhoods are placed side by side. The resulting continuities and juxtapositions call us to investigate relationships, to delve into common histories and reveal the political and economic forces leading to spatial — and social — isolation. This new method of seeing alters not only how we interpret what we perceive, but also which questions are raised. Instead of seeing one peculiar building, we see the legacy and immediacy of urban transformation. Beyond asking "Why is this building isolated?" we begin to wonder "What is causing this phenomenon?"”
A series of photographs, reproduced in full-colour, showing buildings in Chicago that look like they were meant to have neighbours yet stand in isolation, with a preface by the artist and an afterword by Karen Irvine.
Clothbound hardcover with a photo label, 19,5 x 28 cm, 84 not numbered pages, Chicago 2026
ISBN: 978-1-7367436-6-9
