Metra Abstacts
I am always pleased to discover unexpected abstractions in the city, especially in places designed purely for function rather than beauty. This series focuses on steel plates beneath the Metra viaducts in Evanston, Illinois, where decades of weather, use, paint, corrosion, and repair have transformed ordinary structural surfaces into something strikingly painterly.
Working slowly over two days with a tripod and long exposures, I photographed these plates at close range, isolating their rivets, rust, peeling paint, stains, and layers of accumulated wear. Removed from their larger architectural setting, the surfaces begin to lose their industrial identity. They become fields of color, texture, pattern, and form.
What interests me most is that none of this was intentionally created. I could spend a lifetime in the studio with paint, pigments, and other materials and never reproduce what decades of exposure and use have created here. The surfaces are the result of countless small events accumulating over a long time.
I also wanted to document them while they still existed in this condition, knowing that maintenance, repainting, and restoration could eventually erase all that had developed so slowly. What might ordinarily be considered deterioration and unsightliness became, for me, the beautiful subject itself.
Time is often the ultimate abstract artist.
