Mitch Eckert
Louisville, KY
Summer 2026 * Photography
Artist Statement
Future Ruins begins with the material residue of a culture of convenience. Molded foam and other forms of protective packaging are designed to protect objects during transport. Their usefulness may end as soon as a product reaches its destination, yet the materials persist long after that brief encounter. I collect these discarded forms and use them to construct spaces that hover between industrial interiors, ritual chambers, monuments, tombs, and archaeological sites. Working between sculpture and photography, I cut, combine, alter, light, and stage packaging until its familiar function becomes uncertain. Photography completes the transformation. Scale collapses, shallow constructions appear inhabitable, and cavities once intended to cradle consumer goods become apertures, niches, corridors, and rooms.
These photographs do not document discovered ruins; they construct the conditions through which something disposable might be encountered as architecture, artifact, or cultural evidence. The constructed spaces resist belonging to a single historical moment. Shifts in light, scale, and surface allow them to appear alternately ancient, industrial, ceremonial, and speculative. I am interested not simply in manufacturing a convincing past, but in creating places where several kinds of time appear to coexist: the immediate time of consumption, the long material afterlife of plastic, and an imagined future in which its remnants are discovered and interpreted.
Portrait of the photographer
Works
Column Fragment, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 10" x 14"
Portal, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 12" x 12"
Passageway, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 10" x 14"
Aperture, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 10" x 14"
Cella, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 8" x 10"
Columbarium, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 10" x 14"
Columns Among Ruins, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 10" x 14"
Site 7, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 8" x 10"
Midden, 2026, Platinum Palladium Print, 8" x 10"
Sealed Aperture with Ingots, 2026, Platinum and Palladium Print
Riven Wall with Passages, 2026, Platinum and Palladium Print
Rotunda Altar, 2026, Platinum and Palladium Print
Column Fragment, 2026 © Mitch Eckert
About the Artist
Mitch Eckert is an award-winning artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has been included in a variety of publications from textbooks to journals. After receiving his B.F.A. in photography and sculpture from Indiana University he went on to earn an M.F.A. from Ohio University focusing on photography and printmaking. His technical knowledge of photography is well rooted in the mediums rich historic processes including his masterful works in kallitype. His work is held in the collections of 21c Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, and several corporate and private collections. Eckert lives and works in Louisville, Kentucky, where he is a professor of art at the University of Louisville’s Hite Institute of Art + Design, where he teaches all things photography.
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