Episode 20: Jay Wolke and Eli Giclas

This episode features Jay Wolke and Eli Giclas in conversation with MoCP Curator of Academic Programs and Collections, Kristin Taylor. Jay and Eli discuss their photographic approaches to depict the built environment as a reflection of patterns of human consumption and an imbalanced relationship with nature. They also discuss their appreciation of works by Stan Douglas and Dawn Kim in the MoCP permanent collection.

Jay Wolke is an artist and educator based in Chicago, who is known for his decades-long practice of photographing people and architectural spaces. His work often explores the disparities between human ambition and its manifestation in the built environment. Through images made along highways, high rises, underpasses, over passes, rock quarries, casinos, parks, and more, he shows, in his words “perpetual re-imaginings, capricious assemblies, ominous entanglements, and repeatedly regrettable consequences of human industry and hubris.”

He has several monographs, including Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway, 2004; and Same Dream Another Time, 2017. His works have been exhibited internationally and are in the permanent print collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York MOMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and San Francisco MOMA, the MoCP, among others. He is currently a Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where he was Chair of the Art and Design Department from 2000-2005 and again from 2008-2013.

Eli Giclas is a Chicago-based photographer and designer whose projects in rich blacks, whites, and greys speak to an in-between-ness of action for the climate, and the consequences from broken relationships to nature. In his project Counting After Lightning (2021-2024), he makes large-scale images of industrial sites in the Midwest, representing patterns of consumption driven by extractive industries that we use for power. In contrast, another series, On Wing, 2022-2023, he shows volunteers and locations within an urban bird sanctuary, offering one story as a symbol of larger collective acts in healing. He states: “I consider our relationship to our planet and what must change to make a better, more thoughtful future possible…underscoring their collective reverence and the significance of their efforts.” Eli recently completed his MFA in Photography at Columbia College Chicago, under the instruction of Jay Wolke, and he also completed his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Arizona in 2018.