“All of my work is very heavily grounded in research,” Victor Burgin has said, “but I do not put the research on the wall.” For the digital projection work Prairie, Burgin created a quiet meditation on two iconic buildings: The Mecca, an apartment building constructed in 1892 on Chicago’s South Side and razed sixty years later, and Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Design, which was subsequently erected on the same site. Through alternating passages of word and image, the work explores lost cultural histories that remain inscribed in the built environment. Publicly presented for the first time at the Neubauer Collegium, Prairie was produced with support from a Gray Center Mellon Collaborative Fellowship at the University of Chicago and included as part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial.

Curated by Jacob Proctor