This is the last week for The Chicago Project IV exhibition [it ends on Friday, September 2], so get in here and see the show! In the meantime, enjoy two images by Chicago Project artist, Lenny Gilmore, 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.

“Believed Imaginings” is a photographic collage project, where each image is made by cutting up and then combining hundreds of photographs while simultaneously doing the same to memories, dreams, and experiences.

I think these new combinations of personal memories with common history shed the burden they would carry if they were too specific to one memory or historical event. Yet, I believe they still retain visual cues that hint at their source(s).

I tend to imagine my protagonist as experiencing a sort of coming of age. An internal pull between a wonder and cynicism, childhood and adulthood. I try to externalize this internal conflict in my images through depicting moments of confrontation. Fragile moments that are caught between possibilities of something almost surreal and implications of things that are quite possibly tragic.

—Lenny Gilmore