New York Times Book Review: Joe's Junk Yard
Joe’s Junk Yard was reviewed by Dana Jennings in his Paper Gallery column in the Books section of the New York Times
on Friday, October 18, 2012.
Jennings writes: “One of the most slighted schools of art is the School of Necessity. We can’t know from what unexpected fissures art will bubble up. No matter how improbable the artist, or seemingly unpromising the subject, the artistic drive won’t be denied. Such unlooked-for artists learn to make do with their situations, with the rough materials at hand. Rather than buck local gravitational pull, they just shrug and go with it. They aren’t shackled by theories or “isms.” They have the will and the lust to make art and find homely and practical ways through… The photographer Lisa Kereszi understood that her family’s junkyard was a crucial part of her creative DNA, while Robert Adams and Ron Church found the woods and seas that their imaginations craved right in their own neighborhoods… Ms. Kereszi had me from her first photograph of a sprawling squall of deceased tires. I burned lots of time in junkyards as a kid, and Ms. Kereszi’s junkscapes, shot at a Chester, Pa., yard that was in her family for over 50 years, ferried me to a genial place, where the oil-soaked soil glittered with galaxies of shattered glass. Ms. Kereszi is on the faculty of the Yale School of Art these days, but she realizes that stack upon stack of tortured Detroit steel is her legacy. A junkyard: what a perfect place for an artist to be born.”
Posted on 21 October 2012
