2/25/2010 - West Side Leader
By Roger Durbin
A look at Akron Art Museum’s newest exhibit
DOWNTOWN AKRON — The Akron Art Museum’s Looking for the American Dream: Andrew Borowiec’s Ohio Photographs gives museum-goers plenty of food for thought about living in Ohio through 32 photographic images that span his 26-year artistic fascination with the region.
Having grown up in France, Algeria, Tunisia and Switzerland, Borowiec, a University of Akron distinguished professor, knew little about the Midwest when he moved to Akron in 1984. He decided to photograph the Ohio River Valley and encountered what was, to him, an alien environment, according to museum officials.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Borowiec captured images of the advent of the “rust belt” designation for the area. In stark black-and-white gelatin silver photographs, he focused on houses, other structures and neighborhoods that not only have seen better days, but were both bound up with and overwhelmed by the industrial society around them. Often, as he did in a 1993 photograph called “Stratton” (for the village along the Ohio River south of Akron), Borowiec caught on film an image of a house dwarfed by high-powered electric lines; others show images of crunched together and congested neighborhoods that are tidy and apparently lovingly cared for, but that are abutted to a huge smokestack that represents the industry that helped to make any of it possible.
Interestingly, from the vantage point of time, we come to understand the aspirations of the people who were building their lives in such a place. The houses sometimes seem the sole emblems of beauty. There are no vistas, on the face of it, so that the reward of labor is ultimately contained within the development of the very small plot of ground and the house that stands on it.
Borowiec’s are grim images of failing industries and the resulting loss of affluence and growth. But, seen against the newest of his images — the highly colorful photographs taken from 2003 (or the early 21st century in this area) on — they can be seen more favorably to represent less a wasteland than the culmination of the aspiration for the “American Dream.”
In the past eight years or so, Borowiec has shifted his iconic aim and looked at the loss of traditional Ohio farmland. Borowiec observed that “the rolling farmlands and idyllic small towns that used to define our heartland are rapidly giving way to vast developments of mini-mansions and shopping ‘villages’ designed to evoke an imagined era of luxurious consumerism.” In refocusing his intention, Borowiec moved to the use of full color and large-scale images of 3- by 4-foot photographs.
As contrast to his earlier grittier images, the brightly colored new ones (all seemingly shot on the sunniest of days with the clearest of skies), depict grand structures that — instead of looking built and rooted to the environment — seem to be managed and assembled for the primary purpose of display. Rather than aspiration, they seem more like validations and confirmations that the dream has indeed already arrived.
From details like lawn service flags, through images of rolls of newly purchased and flawlessly manicured sod for lawns to be placed about the newly fabricated building, to the man-made creation of rolling hills on which to fashion just the right look for the new structure, the “American Dream” has moved away from the life of the city to the idea of a deliberate transformation into a new rural, but luxuriously landed gentry.
Borowiec’s images catch subtler nuances of the distance between dream and reality than the starker ones from his earlier works. The new look-alike manor houses and regentrified townhouses aren’t the product of farming the land or growing an urban industry. They seem to more emphatically show that one has, in fact, built a better life somewhere else, and here’s proof. The structures may not look as though they are lived in, as the early images certainly do, but that doesn’t seem to be the point.
The exhibit is on view through May 30. Borowiec will give a free lecture in the museum’s Charles and Jane Lehner Auditorium March 7 at 2 p.m.
For more details on museum hours and admission costs, visit www.AkronArtMuseum.org or call (330) 376-9185.
Roger Durbin is professor emeritus of bibliography at The University of Akron and an avid art enthusiast. To contact him, e-mail r.durbin@sbcglobal.net.
