This country should be too young to have ruins, but as technological progress accelerates, plenty has been left behind from bygone days that weren’t so long ago.

Shuttered factories, rusting rail cars and heaping scrap piles from 20th-century manufacturing seem older than they are. Their premature obsolescence inspired artist Anna Audette, who saw loveliness in their decline and history in their survival.

An exhibition of her work at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme reflects her vision through large paintings and insightful words.

“Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette” takes us where artists seldom travel: forgotten buildings, demolition sites and automobile junkyards. There are stories in these desolate vistas, and her instinct was to seek them out and tell them with brushstrokes.

An art professor at Southern Connecticut State University who died in 2013, Audette was fascinated by disuse and ruin. Sometimes it was on a small scale, and she could be moved to paint a single piece of machinery, like a fuel pump from an old car.

More often, it was abandonment of greater expanse that fired her creative energy. She sought out modern ruins and depicted them, usually in oils on canvases of striking size. Where some might perceive ugliness in need of renewal, Audette saw “peculiar beauty created by massive neglect.”

“Demolition II,” for example, shows a building being torn down. Tangles of metal rebar hang from exposed pillars that hold up what’s left, even as other parts of the structure are reduced to rubble. They will stand until they meet the wrecking ball, as people live until the moment they die.

Similarly, in “Harper’s Ferry Abutment,” a stone pier heroically withstands time’s ravages. Part of it has collapsed, and vegetation worms its way through ancient masonry. But the structure is steadfast, as it was when it supported a West Virginia bridge that’s long gone.

Closer to home, we can look through vacant windows at Baltic Mills in Sprague, a year after a 1999 fire destroyed the former textile factory. Where once the view showed workers manufacturing cotton products, now there’s nothing to see but the blank opposite wall.

Audette wrote thoughtfully about such sites as she committed them to canvas.

“These are the remains of collapsed power,” she said of defunct New England factories. “They have a strength, grace, and sadness that is both eloquent and impenetrable.”

Sad indeed is a scene like “Sheds, Bethlehem Steel,” which evokes the quiet shrouding a once-great Pennsylvania shipbuilder in 2001, the year it declared bankruptcy and prepared to close. The buildings are ordinary, but they are where busy men once made things, and now not a soul is in sight.

In fact, there isn’t a human figure in the entire exhibition. It’s objects, not people, that Audette used to document the passing of an age.

Amy Kurtz Lansing, the museum’s curator, said the paintings nonetheless suggest a human presence, reflecting craftsmanship and decision-making through their physical results.

Audette spent the first 20 years of her career working in printmaking and casting about for a theme, said her husband, Louis Audette of New Haven. A turning point came around 1980 when, on vacation in Vermont, she visited a junkyard where old cars were decomposing.

“They were just allowed to be taken back by nature,” he said.

Stirred by the sight, she made some drawings and gradually began to work in oils rather than monochromatic prints, he said. Something clicked, and industrial abandonment became her hallmark.

Finding subject matter took some effort. Audette would scout locations and write to property owners to explain her interest, enclosing photos of her work, according to the exhibition’s catalogue.

She was usually welcome to take pictures, which she would recombine for better composition. Other times she and her husband would sneak into a site and occasionally found themselves being escorted off the property.

Photos and firsthand observation were her source material, and the goal was a precise though not necessarily complete representation. Creating a mood took priority.

Audette’s tour of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a cavernous former prison dating to 1829, led to a painting of a somber, vaulted hallway lit by the sun as plants grow wild from a balcony. But the scene isn’t quite what she saw.

She later explained that she “removed virtually all signs indicating the exact nature of the interiors because I wanted the images to communicate a more general sense of melancholy, decay, and abandonment.”

Decomposition, which offered Audette endless possibilities, brought new colors to objects and changed their shapes as they rusted or fell apart. Her portrayals of scrap metal piles are a multicolored jumble of small objects, each with its own past and purpose. Closeups of machinery offer a similar kaleidoscope of disorienting detail.

Sometimes she evoked a left-behind place with little more than the quality of the light, as with the shadows on a plain, terracotta-hued wall of an old building in New Haven.

Audette’s work in this vein owes a debt to the urban landscapes of Edward Hopper. Her factories are a postscript to Charles Sheeler’s earlier scenes of America’s industrial might. She admired both artists and was also influenced by Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi and French painter Hubert Robert, who both romanticized Greek and Roman ruins in the 18th century.

A recurring theme at the exhibition is motion-become-stillness as objects fall out of use. From a surplus yard near an Arizona Air Force base, she painted an obsolete fighter jet whose frozen landing gear is obscured by growing grass. In “Cars IX,” a confusion of rusted and dented autos look as if they were all in the same chain collision and left where they crashed.

Stillness without decay animates a work called “Scranton, PA,” in which four rail cars sit in close proximity at a museum, their doors open as if still ready to receive passengers. The curving blade of a snowplow dominates the foreground.

A curious outlier among her works is the result of a close call in which Audette was nearly struck by an 18-wheeler on the highway. “Night Truck” shows the cab of a tractor-trailer, its headlights glaring balefully as it bears down on the viewer at an angle. Unlike her typical subjects, it’s still in use and vividly in motion.

The exhibition grew out of an offer by Louis Audette to give the museum one of his wife’s paintings, according to Lansing.

“It just seemed so relevant to our current moment,” she said.

Lansing tried to highlight the artist’s ideas by grouping works in broad categories like landscape, machinery and transportation. Sometimes that led to surprising results, like classifying a painting of moored ships as a still life.

If it’s disquieting to contemplate a society so revved-up it can produce ruins within a human lifespan, consider a site where Audette found compelling views. The Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., had been open barely three decades when she visited in the early 1980s. New technologies were driving out the old at a breakneck pace, fueled by Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.

Rather than repurpose outmoded sites, NASA saved time creating new ones elsewhere. What remained was already rotting and forgotten by the time Audette encountered it.

Disused areas were marked with three words: “Abandon in Place.” That phrase not only gives this exhibition its name, it suggests we may be moving too fast for our own good.

“The triumphs of industry,” Audette wrote, “turn out to be just a moment away from obsolescence.”

j.ruddy@theday.com

<strong id="strong-d4731d0b378a7dbaf96d0cc62673447c">IF YOU GO</strong>

What: “Abandon in Place: The Worlds of Anna Audette”

Where: Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme

When: Through Jan. 28

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday

Admission: $12 adults, $11 seniors, $10 students with ID, free for 12 and under

Information: florencegriswoldmuseum.org