My default response to the term “landscape” is a grimace, or a yawn, but I am always intrigued by images in said genre that elicite a contrasting reaction.
The vibrancy of Chait’s series Motion and Memory: Impressions of the Rural Landscape from the Passenger Seat of a Car Traveling 70 mph from Chicago to Iowa City and Back, April 16-17, 2005 recalls the work of Elke Morris, but thrust into furious lateral motion, viewed from a midwestern throughway. In Chait’s artist statement, he writes, “As far back as I can remember I’ve found it natural to observe the world in a detached, objective manner.” His landscapes bleed into abstraction, into the shapes and colors of wide stretches of land and sky. “They speak to endurance and erasure,” writes Kendra Greene, “the things that persist and the things that can’t keep pace.”
Larry Chait is part of the Catherine Edelman Gallery’s Chicago Project, an online gallery of emerging and established Chicago photographers that deserve recognition. Motion and Memory was also featured in the Museum of Contemporary Photographer’s The Midwest Photographers Project.