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Chinatown Elevator Bridge #6 |
April 4, 2003 – June 14, 2003 The photographer of architecture can document a structure as “still life” or see that structure as inspiration for its graphic possibilities. The city seen by Madeleine Isom is fractured into its most elemental structural parts, expressing the essence of architecture in the details of a building. She finds beauty in the surface of “I” beams of Mies’ skyscrapers and the layering of windows at opposing angles from distant blocks. Like any obsessed architect, Madeleine sees the world through a 3-D grid of possible geometries in a myriad of combinations. She builds her images from the surprises found in looking at a city with a sense of irony and the background of a historian. Her first solo exhibition, “Architecture Abstracted,” opened at The Chicago Cultural Center in late 2000 where she described her work as follows: “They are landscapes without reference, no horizon, no sky, only layers of buildings and time.“
Madeleine’s major influence has been the New Bauhaus of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, where modernism was taught as a purely formalist language that she has further refined into a kind of “haiku“ about architecture. On Friday, April 4th, ArchiTech begins an exploration of contemporary architectural art with its first one-person exhibition by a living artist. As a historically oriented gallery specializing in the works of Wright, Sullivan, Burnham, and other masters of architecture, ArchiTech has chosen the work of Madeleine Isom to be in that select company. |
