Working Structures
Across the rural American West, certain buildings announce themselves from miles away. Grain elevators rise above the sage plain, water towers mark settlements that might otherwise be invisible, corrugated storage sheds line the rail corridors that determined where towns grew and where they didn't. These structures were the economic backbone of a region — the physical expression of how wheat moved from field to market, how fuel reached the farms, how a dispersed agricultural civilization organized itself across enormous distances. They were landmarks before there were roads worth the name, and they shaped patterns of settlement and migration that are still legible in the landscape today.
The work spans Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon, Arizona, and Washington — a geography defined less by state lines than by those same rail corridors and agricultural economies. And like the Rising to the Surface series made alongside it, this work is drawn to things caught in time, neither preserved nor quite gone, accumulating the evidence of their own history on their surfaces. The weathering is not picturesque. The deterioration is not mourned. What interests me is the present tense — what light does to a corrugated wall at a particular hour, how shadow bisects a facade and turns it into something a painter might have planned, the quiet authority of things built to work rather than to be looked at.
This is not elegy. These buildings earned their monumentality without asking for it. That, finally, is what draws me back to them.
