Sub-Rural # 52, Ciurej & Lochman at Gallery 224

Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman have been collaborating on visual culture for more than 40 years from their studios in Chicago and Milwaukee. Recognized originally for their dauntless photographic critiques of the artworld’s male-centered authority, they have steadily expanded their reach to other radically experimental and deliberative subjects. Their extraordinary partnership explores the degree to which conversation and conservation as a multidisciplinary practice can uncover the meta-narratives of gender and nature. They substitute alternative formalisms – salient and uncanny, sometimes humorous, that ponder social and aesthetic crises. Their art, photographic and otherwise, adapts an aesthetic therapy that stitches a wounded cultural and political present. In their worldview we greet a consciousness that reforms the vision and space of the post-domestic.

Ciurej and Lochman take late modernism and our collective corporatist culture to task. As specialists, first in photography and later in collage, text works, curatorial projects, and design, they frame their subjects to abridge a viewer’s critical distance. Their generation was defined by reducing barriers between viewers and subject and smoothly transitioned by wearing multiple hats as writers, editors, curators, and designers. Their subjects pushed art content off the pedestal and the podium and fused it with labor, technology, and ecology. They conceived a hybrid visual language that applied theory to transient optics.

Their concerns often reveal how disconnected mainstream culture is from either ordinary experience or artists’ unorthodox subjectivity. Their collaborations are lucid, formally robust, meditations on the poetics of identity, originalism, localism, and environmental instability. Through their work, viewers/readers can be curiously suspended at the spatio-temporal borders of photography, technologies of propagation, a debate between craft and narrative, a cross generation of popular trends and academic theory, and ethical questions about representation and ownership.

Ciurej and Lochman are among 12 artists who participated in this year’s ARTservancy,  a 12-month residency program designed to promote “visionary research of both artists and conservationists” and includes Gallery 224 in Port Washington, Wisconsin, RestoringLands, River Revitalization Foundation, Milwaukee Area Land Conservancy, Tall Pines Conservancy, and Lake Michigan Bird Observatory. Ciurej and Lochman will exhibit the result of their work in Fellenz Woods, Ozaukee County, Wisconsin at Gallery 224 from September 4^th through November 1^st 2025

Two forms of documentation and representation were produced during the artists’ residency. One is an elaborate black and white accordion style book work titled “Still Moving, Moving Still” that traces and condenses a length of the Milwaukee River. The image is remarkable in the extent that it expresses an inherently variable, redeploying aquatic footprint. The reconstructed graphic depicts space-time symmetry that responds to a mid-century paint/pour architecture containing innumerable overlapping divisions and hesitant measures. Given the historic bearing of the woods and river the utilization of an antique camera coupled with  contemporary photo-equipment produces a temporal hybridity that subtly acknowledges the agriculture, paved roads, and airport on the perimeter of the site’s 160 acreage. The fact that the preserved site seems unspoiled in tandem with the developed perimeter attests to nature’s resiliency even when compromised.

Along with the accordion print, the artists produced several sophisticated geometric photo-compositions that spoke, formally to graphic Suprematist models. They also reflect the role of plotting in inland landscape architecture, as well as mapping extant in much of abstraction’s impromptu topographic compositions of both rural and urban studies.

The camera launched America’s turn of the Century industrial creation myths and its devotion measured by popular access grew to include a regularly updated photo technology. It paralleled a non-Euclidean visual space predominantly seen in hard edge abstraction and an alternative intellectual and artistic framework for rural landscape. Ciurej and Lochman’s radical expansion of that language is a discerning and sensitive investigation of the surrounding, but rarely foregrounded, features of nature held at arms-length by urbanism and popular media.