Larry Chait

I am a Chicago photo-based artist who has been actively working since 2002. I studied at the MCA and Columbia College. My work has been in the MoCP’s Midwest Photographers Project, The Chicago Project at Edelman Gallery and the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. I have exhibited widely throughout the country and internationally in 14 solo and more than 100 group exhibitions. I work largely intuitively; my ideas for images come to me when I least expect them, determined by where I happen to find myself, what my mood is, and what thoughts happen to be floating in and out of my head. Most of them I forget straight away. It usually takes me a long time to appreciate my own work and its meaning. But I'm beginning to believe that it all has something to do with imposing order onto a chaotic world.

Walls and Wires

For many years now I have traveled to San Miguel de Allende, a colorful colonial town in the central mountains of Mexico. There are two visual aspects of the town that have always attracted my attention. The first are the walls of the buildings. They come in a huge variety of colors, materials and textures. The second are the overhead wires (electric, cable, telephone) that form a spider’s web nearly everywhere you look. For each photo of this series I combined one image of a wall (or walls) with one image of overhead wires. I made the images black-and-white in order to emphasize the textures of the walls and the abstract, dream-like quality of the composite images. The images also have a somewhat bleak, sinister look to them, which correlates with my anxiety about the increasing level of cartel-related crime and violence that has come to the area in recent years as the town has grown and become increasingly popular as an international tourist destination. I see the walls as symbols of security and isolation and the wires as representing constraint and
entrapment.

www.larrychait.com/