Untitled (dirty abandoned lot) c. 1950

Curator: Lucian and Mary Brown’s photographic print, simply titled "Untitled (dirty abandoned lot)," stops me in my tracks every time. Editor: It has a bleakness to it, doesn't it? The tire in the foreground feels like a failed Ozymandias, a monument to something lost. Curator: Absolutely, and you see it in the contrast – the domesticity of the houses in the background against this wasteland. It feels like a memento mori for the industrial age, or perhaps, an indictment of our throw-away culture. Editor: The tire seems so deliberately placed too. Almost like the artists are pointing at it, a symbol of circularity gone wrong, of waste becoming monumental. There is something very enduring about the symbolism of abandoned tires. Curator: That interplay between the macro and micro, the personal and the political, is what makes this piece so compelling. Editor: I agree, that abandoned tire whispers volumes about what we leave behind.