Carolyn Swiszcz

Carolyn Swiszcz, "Hi-Fi Video", 2005.

Carolyn Swiszcz's series on the ever-expanding urban landscape incorporates historical memory and imagination to make the urban jungle look almost like Pleasantville. Each piece offers a bit of nostalgia mixed with the banal. We have seen these places before—as children while on a road trip with our parents or in the neighborhoods of our youth. Or maybe we pass these places every day, on our way to work or dropping off the kids.

Midwestern Rest Area, a large acrylic painting with ink reliefs from rubber stamps, is a place we may have run into to use the restroom or buy chips and soda—we've seen this kind of place thousands of times traveling on highways. The muted colors make the seasons fade into one another, suggesting that it could be anywhere or any time of the year—the rest area of our past or one of the future.

Food and Liquor, a smaller canvas, offers a satirical homage to the "one stop" shopping that characterizes urban sprawl: "convenient" corner stores that boast food, beer, ATMs and lottery machines—the staples of urban life that litter our neighborhoods. In News # 4, trash, barren trees and empty newspaper stands adorn a forgotten city street, and vestiges of the past come alive in Hi-Fi Video.

All in all, Swiszcz skillfully depicts cityscapes and other landscapes we know somewhere between the way we remember them, the way we would like them to be, and the way they really are.—Patricia Williams Lessane