Opening Reception, August 3, 2019
@ 1100 Florence Gallery, Evanston IL

Selections from my "Lincoln Avenue Motels" and "Lake Street" series

Oblique – Streetscapes of Chicago
Photographs by Jordan Scott and Nelson W Armour

Photographers Jordan Scott and Nelson W Armour explore the urban landscape, searching out lesser-recognized streets, structures, and views. Chicago’s flat urban topography yields different perspectives, both close and far, both recognizable and unknown.
 
Scott’s black and white work emphasizes the history of specific Chicago streets with penetrating focus on unique structures and buildings. He captures transportation structures, cultural oddities, the vintage, the unusual, the seedy and the offbeat. Unfashionable motels with postmodern exterior facades and privacy barriers transport one from present-day to earlier styles and geographies. Now squalid and crime ridden rest stops, it’s just a matter of time before demolition occurs. Is Scott documenting these idiosyncratic and iconic structures? Is he capturing their melancholy, hinting at the unknown worlds living within?
 
Armour’s color work also searches for offbeat locations and idiosyncratic corners. Iconic structures are ever present within the frame. Normally, these familiar and famous buildings are viewed from beautiful angles and with a majestic sweep. Yet, Armour’s oblique take reveals less traveled neighborhoods, grittier blocks, and industrial settings. The famous skyline recedes in importance and the quirkier settings promote what is near; the iconic fades into the distance. What’s close conflicts with what’s distant. Most of these local settings have now succumbed to demolition and development. Will the distant continue to swallow up the close?
 
Scott and Armour’s work examine Chicago streetscapes at once recognizable and familiar but with unusual perspectives, tones, and feelings.