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Beachoids, 2015 Chad Gerth

Chad Gerth & Lydia Jenkins Musco - Essay

A Prairie as Flat as a Skyscraper

Many people would call themselves city people; many would no doubt say they are country people. What this generally means is that people feel a connection to specific places and feel more comfortable when they are there.

Places, whether they are urban or rural, are associated with meanings, memories and emotions. Even photographs of these places, or objects from them, stir something in us. Whether we have been there or not, these act as references to and relics of places. Though an image or an object may be ambiguous it can make us connect with a place and even one we have never been to before.

In the case of Chad Gerthʼs photographs and Lydia Jenkins Muscoʼs sculptures we find references to places and the relics that refer to them. What is so unique about these two artists and their work is that they seem to fit comfortably in both an urban jungle and a remote, rural landscape.

Gerthʼs Empty Lots series of photographs depict large empty lots in the city of Chicago seen straight on from 40 to 80 feet above. These lots, often referred to as urban prairies, become documents of what has been there before. Cracked concrete is divided into floor plans for homes and buildings that have long since been torn down. Instead of carpets and floorboards, weeds and grass grow and make their way through heaps of concrete rubble. These works are a part of the same dialogue as Thomas Coleʼs 1836 painting, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, commonly referred to as The Oxbow. In Coleʼs painting man is, for better or worse, the controller of nature. In Gerthʼs photographs, nature begins to reassert itself. However, while Thomas Coleʼs work is grandiose and in a sense force feeds us a political discussion, Gerthʼs work is more reserved and contemplative. We think more about the differences and similarities between urban spaces and rural ones than we do about arguing the validities and strengths of either.

In Lydia Jenkins Muscoʼs sculptures we see a stacking of concrete. The overall form of the works undulates, curves and bends while the individual layers multiply and grow up and up. Musco notes in her statement that she is the daughter of a woodworking father and she learned to feel space by studying dance and building houses. Based on this alone we might say her work is very urban and her works are clearly stand-ins for the tallest skyscrapers. In a sense they are exactly as Louis Sullivan noted when he wrote The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered in 1896, “It must be tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line.” This singular read is solely based on context. While Muscoʼs work clearly references soaring urban architecture it is equally at home in the wooded landscapes she explored as a child. The same layers of concrete that were floors in an office building are now the strata seen on the side of an ancient mountain or cliff. They are built the same way: one with the urgency of urban progress and one with the slow accumulation of time.

Chad Gerth and Lydia Jenkins Muscoʼs work points toward a third option, a more contemporary one. People are no longer solely confined to their surroundings or environments. Home and place are more a state of mind than a physical reality. People adapt more regularly to shifts in environment as they move from place to place. It is still appropriately, the references and relics that we bring with us each time we move that remind us of where we came from, where we are and, where we are going.

-Matthew Sepielli is a painter and member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid.