Juror's Statement
For this exhibition, I spent days and days looking at photographs of devastation, considering our country and parts of the world in ruin, communities that were abandoned due to lack of industry or opportunity, homes that had fallen into disrepair as the land reclaimed itself, signs of life where the homeless were finding shelter, and remnants of things left behind. This was not a joyful experience, but it was a profound one. How do we find beauty in loss and decay? After I looked at thousands of images of abandoned houses and businesses, rust and rot, the broken and the bleak, to be honest, it made me worry about the future...
-Aline Smithson