Siobhan McBride



Joachim Koester

















Occupied plots, Abandoned Futures, by Joachim Koester

The voids are a fundamental part of any city. Though rarely recognized as such empty spaces make up a psychic space within the urban reality. They form a network of holes and latent possibilities, which for a period challenge stasis and control.


In 1970 Ed Ruscha documented a number of such spaces under the title: Real Estate Opportunities. Ruscha photographed empty lots for sale in Los Angeles. A topographic mapping of the vacated plots overgrown by weeds that make up a city’s unconscious.


With the project Occupied Plots, Abandoned Futures I have revisited some of these exact places. Spaces that by now have been sold, brought and dramatically changed. My project is probably less optimistic than Rucha’s. In fact, to re-photograph these ‘opportunities’ is to engage in an archeology of abandoned futures.


Joachim Koester, 2007

Margaret Grimes



“In art school,” Grimes says, “we were told to look at nature as if we were seeing it for the first time. Now we look at it as if we were seeing it for the last time; hence the need to meticulously observe. My desire is to find the abstract in the natural and by close observation of the intensity of individual moments approach the transcendent.”


“While woodlands and thickets, frequent subjects of her large canvases, enable Grimes to more or less adhere to the two dimensions of the modernist picture plane as the ostensible arena for her vigorous brushwork and succulent surfaces, they simultaneously suggest infinite depth and inner mystery as well. Such is the complexity that Grimes courts, which is thoroughly in keeping with the epic ambition of the physical scale of some of her paintings suggests.” (Ed McCormack, Gallery and Studio)