Shifting Grounds: Block 21 and Chicago's MCA is a sequel to Hidden Truths: The Chicago City Cemetery and Lincoln Park. Both projects explore the physical transitions of a Chicago lakefront site and are connected through their mutual history of the development of Lincoln Park and the Chicago Park District.


Through a web-based presentation of archival material and historic newspaper accounts, the projects unravel layers of history embedded within two sites.


Both Shifting Grounds and Hidden Truths have site-specific components integral to the projects. In Lincoln Park, traditional historical plaques mark locations within Chicago's first municipal cemetery and direct park visitors to the Hidden Truths website. Shifting Grounds, presents an installation on the site of Block 21 within the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, as part of the exhibition, The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology. Both projects' websites include audio conversations with scholars and individuals who have interacted with the sites.



See a wider portfolio of my work here.

In December 1986 I went up to the John Hancock Observatory with my new Hasselblad medium-format camera and photographed downward from multiple viewpoints. I came across the negatives while researching for Shifting Grounds and found that I had captured a view that shows the east end of the armory, along with the Chicago Park District's Lake Shore Park. I returned in August 2013 to view and photograph from the same perspective.