SILOS

2022 - 2023

Heading west on Highway 7 toward the Front Range, the Lafayette grain silos and elevator seem strangely out of place. They hover on the horizon like a fragment of a memory too distant to recall. The inanimate machine-buildings recently became the subject of a local controversy over whether to preserve or erase one of the last remaining traces of Lafayette's past.

These sculptural landmarks serve as visual reminders of the mutability of memory, and the nostalgia they evoke questions why we long for a simpler time that never was. Photos, like memories, often lie and never tell the whole truth.

Today a conservation easement protects the both beloved and abandoned site from development. The empty vessels are tagged with markings and painted-over graffiti that resemble mid-century American paintings, while plant life is slowly reclaiming the steel structures. What We Thought We Knew is a visual unfolding of the entanglement of nature and man-made landscape.