PAUL D'AMATO

Join us at Stephen Daiter Gallery for an exhibition reception for Midway by Paul D'Amato, featuring remarks by the artist. 

Midway is a project that explores the twilight zones of urbanity that exist between neighborhoods that are geographically, ethnically, and socio-economically more distinct. At the heart of it is Midway Airport in Chicago, one of the few airports in the United States embedded within a residential area of a city. It is a rock thrown in the middle of a pond of humanity, with the economic and cultural ripples extending for miles in every direction. 

Though all working class, the Midway community is difficult to define and routinely ignored by everyone going to the airport to fly to places that are far more exotic. Just about every ethnic group in the city lives here against a backdrop of strip malls, fast food, light industry, shipping, and transportation. Everyone is midway between poverty and middle class, all striving to be somewhere else, although very few have flown on the jets that make their dishes rattle every ten minutes. There’s nowhere less romantic. The challenge is to weave all these incoherent pieces together in a body of work that could be from anywhere in the United States, because it is emphatically midway, and distinctly nowhere.