By Adam Langer
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Culver inhabits a small, dingy studio in the Ravenswood area that’s spare and messy at the same time. Beautiful black-and-white photographs of cathedrals and cloisters are piled on a long wooden table. On a nearby card table are stacks of sketches of ships and sailors that he drew for a film based on Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” he hopes to make someday. All around is beautiful junk that he’s collected from thrift shops and alleys–old children’s encyclopedias, bits of cloth, ancient record albums. He wanders the city, camera in hand, hoping to stumble upon some discarded object, lost family photograph, or neglected building that will inspire him to create a work of art he could never have foreseen when he woke up that morning. “It’s like a magnetic compass. You gravitate toward objects, and they suggest themselves to you.”
Most of his works have been photographs, beautifully composed black-and-white images of whatever he’s been able to capture in his meandering pilgrimages through Chicago, Brooklyn, and Turkey. A couple of years ago he forayed into model making, fashioning three-dimensional, almost photographic facsimiles of loading docks and other architectural structures out of cardboard. But lately he’s been staking out new territory, using the objects he finds to assemble boxes and collages that are essentially cunning and sophisticated dioramas, rather similar structurally to the ones everyone made in grade school.
“As I walk around the city to photograph objects I see that everything here has a creative consciousness behind it. It was a thought or an idea or a feeling before it was a physical thing. And when I photograph it I’m completing a process–I am bringing back the inner sense whoever created it must have had, I am bringing out a thought, a feeling, maybe an inner motivation.
