The Riverside Arts Center is excited to present Building Place: Big Boat Little Pond, a solo exhibition of Jay Wolke’s photography in both the Freeark Gallery and FlexSpace, curated by Paul D’Amato and Laura Husar Garcia. Please join us for an opening reception for the artist on Sunday, December 8th from 3-6pm, followed by a private cocktail hour at the Quincy Street Distillery. The exhibition will be on view Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1-5pm through February 22, 2025.

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If all we had were Jay Wolke’s photographs in “Building Place: Big Boat Little Pond” as evidence of life on earth, one could be forgiven for thinking what a strange and unknowable species these humans were. Given the evidence of Wolke’s pictures, the viewer is invited to wonder: who were these people capable of such impressive, functionless and mysterious structures all running into one another in a cacophony of design? Were they one people or many who never agreed to a hierarchy of purpose and meaning? Is then what remains the architectural consequence of the Tower of Babel?

I use the past tense because in almost all of Wolke’s’ pictures, there are no people in and around the many structures that were built for so many. Their absence is deafening. What happened and where did they go? Again, without anything else to go on, all we have are the pictures. But one offers a clue, “Zip Line, Niagara Falls, Canada 2023”. It shows four figures flying on guide wires up and out of the frame. On the right side of the frame is a line of people, perhaps waiting their turn to leave, with the last one, Jay Wolke – the man with the camera – recording how they all left.

Garry Winogrand once said “there is nothing so mysterious as a fact well described”. In the end, that’s the pleasure that underlies all of Wolke’s pictures. These humans may be odd, but Wolke loves what he sees and makes images that savor every detail. His images run the gamut from playful, disquieting, weird to serenely beautiful. All full of wonder and hard to believe were it not for the irrefutable evidence of the photograph.

He may photograph from the point of view of the last person to leave – or the first to return from a long absence – but everywhere he goes and everything he sees is an opportunity for a tour de force of composition, light and color. I’m sure if Wolke had been in charge of things all along, then the built environment might have the aesthetic coherence of his pictures. The world might be a better place but then, what would Wolke photograph?
–Paul D’Amato, co-curator

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Jay Wolke is an artist and educator living in Chicago Illinois. His photographic monographs include All Around the House: Photographs of American-Jewish Communal Life, 1998; Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway, 2004; Architecture of Resignation: Photographs from the Mezzogiorno, 2011 and Same Dream Another Time, 2017. His works have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent print collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York MOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco MOMA, among others. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times Magazine, Guardian Magazine, Financial Times Magazine, Geo France, Exposure, Newsweek, Fortune, and the Village Voice. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he was Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000-2005 and again from 2008-2013.

Jay Wolke
Building Place: Big Boat Little Pond
Exhibition Dates: December 6, 2024 – February 22, 2025
Opening Reception: Sunday, December 8, 2024, 3:00 – 6:00 PM
Join us afterwards for a private cocktail hour at the Quincy Street Distillery
Exhibition on view: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 – 5:00 PM
Artist Talk: TBD

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Tags: Jay Wolke, Jay Wolke: Building Place: Big Boat Little Pond, Laura Husar Garcia, Paul D’Amato, Riverside, Riverside Arts Center