Roofs face the elements without shingles and collapsing, store fronts stand shuttered and windows boarded over, and gingerbread crumbles off formerly elegant facades. In Doug Rickard’s “A New American Picture” on view at Stephen Wirtz Gallery, the sense of desertion pervading the images remains strangely untempered by the spotty presence of people. They amble past decrepit houses and drive on cracked, untended roads. It’s hard to imagine the buses they wait for will arrive. They seem more like trespassers on long-abandoned property than residents of Detroit, Memphis, Fresno and Houston.
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