Our current exhibition, The Chicago Project IV, ends next week, so get in here and see the show! In the meantime, enjoy two images by Chicago Project artist, Jeremy Bolen, along with his artist statement. If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit the show page and click on the film clapper next to his images.

Three years ago I began a long-term examination of the loss of American ideals and cultural deterioration as a whole by photographing abandoned resorts primarily in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. From the 1970s on the Borscht Belt region was left behind for cheap flights, central air conditioning, and the all-inclusive resort experience. This project, leftover and leaving, focuses on the cultural perversity and economic ramifications of leaving a once thriving destination, in ruins.  It conveys the emotions felt, the desires never met, the desperate search for idealism those environments represented, and the seemingly animate nature of these spaces and people left behind as they slowly begin to mirror their surroundings.

—Jeremy Bolen