Janet Russek

The Wheelbarrow Series

In the midst of climate change and an ongoing drought in the Southwest, I placed an old wheelbarrow under the canopy of a great Ponderosa pine, with the intent to photograph it and its contents through the four seasons and over a few years. Soon, the wheelbarrow began to gather signs and signifiers for each day’s unfolding moments, and for larger things wandering on the edge of the mind, the new normal of anxiousness about our whole world. As the series progressed, I realized the images began to reference chaos theory, which brought to mind my mentor, colleague, and friend, Eliot Porter. A random collection of fallen leaves; the growth of lichen and moss on rocks; the movement of water, weather, and the swirl of desert sands are all patterns that repeat themselves in nature. The work made daily and over the past years is a visual metaphor for the passing of time and gave me a spiritual centering that was very needed to maintain a life now so isolated. —Janet Russek

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Nature should be viewed without distinction…she makes no choice herself. Withering follows blooming, death follows growth, decay follows death, and life follows decay in a wonderful, complicated end- less web the surface beauties of which are manifest to a point of view unattached to vulgar, restricting concepts of what constitutes beauty in nature.

—Eliot Porter, Nature’s Chaos