Landscape Artist
Soon more houses were built, and the airport began to grow, intruding on Kowalski’s idyllic neighborhood. Midway serviced armed-forces aircraft during World War II. “We had a runway parallel to our house. I’d stand in the prairie there and throw rocks at the planes. I don’t know what I was thinking. I remember a B-17 was coming in, and the nose gunner shook his finger at me when he saw me winding up. He scared the shit out of me.”
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Even as the fields turned into subdivisions, Kowalski noticed that nature could still elude human control and understanding. He says every summer a small pond was formed by a leaking fire hydrant near a gravel road. “I would fantasize about this little pond as some sort of evolving ecosystem, like it was almost possible that some fish or animal life would come out of there.”
Backbone consists of four three-by-five grids, each with nine floor tiles. In the center of each tile is a black-and-white photo of a Chicago street scene. Most of the people in the photos look ordinary, and, Kowalski says, this relates in part to the title: “These people are the backbone of the country–they’re doing their jobs, buying food, keeping things going. On the other hand, to put it bluntly, they’re also the people who fuck things up, because of their apathy.” The subjects didn’t know they were being photographed, making Kowalski a bit of a spy.
