Matthew Mederer was painting a mural of a dancer on Milwaukee Avenue earlier this year when a Logan Square resident walked by and asked if Mederer would paint his garage.
Kevin Kobets, who bought his family’s Medill Avenue home in 2017, wasn’t joking.
“It’s a big, old, Chicago brick industrial garage. It’s hard to miss. Fifty feet wide, 30 feet deep,” Kobets says. “Once we purchased the land and garage with it, we always felt like it was an opportunity for somebody to do something with one or both of the walls.”
Mederer, whose studio is in Logan Square, and fellow Chicago muralists Megan Kind and James Sturnfield each took part of the garage. The result is a philosophical compilation that wraps around the structure in the alleys between West Fullerton, West Medill and North Sacramento avenues in Logan Square.
Kind’s mural does a take on time. An hourglass stretches from the top to the bottom of her segment of the garage. The top holds a curled-up baby. It appears to seep down to the bottom of the hourglass, where the baby transforms into the wrinkled face of an old man.
“Time comes for everybody and you seep into it a little bit,” Kind says.
Mederer’s mural shows two dark-haired men looking up from the feet of a blonde woman. She and one of the men are holding dice.
“I really want to talk about chance and probability,” says Mederer, who studied actuarial science in college.
“It’s really interesting as a science but also as a life philosophy,” he says. “It’s really a cheat code for life. The more times you try, the more times you’re going to get a favorable outcome.”
The third image, by Sturnfield, shows three landscapes turned on their sides. An eye gazes out over an arm holding a flaming Molotov cocktail over a prairie fire. Another arm seems to burst through the blue sky and reach to the Molotov cocktail, unsure whether to take it.
The scene is “a representation of someone deciding whether to take in violence,” Sturnfield says. “The hand isn’t fully accepting (the Molotov cocktail). It’s flinching and getting burned.”
“It’s a strong message of thinking about what your actions may cause and what your choices may do to you and the people around you,” he says.
Kobets says the three panels together are exactly what he wanted.
“We just love the story behind it,” he says. “It’s a common theme between them all.”