idea for works show:

flickring

Flickr, with millions of members, provides an amorphous borderless environment for social interaction. People in London or New York or Montana are the same, and a kind of specific aesthetic emerges. This aesthetic is tied into a sense of very specific place. A tension and kind of irony emerges. It provides an opportunity for very local and intimate discourses to emerge.

The French urbanist Debord used to make these maps of Paris, where he lived. The maps would be his personal depictions of where he went on his daily trips. They provided a personal history of the city. His history. We are all now making that map, and making that map explicitly public. What I want to do is track what that pattern means. The photographers here have an aching desire for specific aesthetics or narratives. The land comes up through pixels and electrons.

How the photographers negotiate the tension between an audience of millions, and a specific reality of one, is what I find fascinating. Sometimes it is of the quotidian documentation of work (The shots of Moos farm in Montana) or the effects of capital in working class neighborhoods (Lost in Van Nuys) or an interest in local histories both ancient (Simon K’s exhaustive documenting of English Parish Churches) and modern (The fading glories of rust belt America, as taken by Toledo’s Joey Harrison). The point is, that what was formerly a local, and personal act has become an interaction of global meeting points. Nothing and Everything is local. By presenting it in real life, as a tangible object, in a traditional gallery space, there is a hope to mark this new movement.


fotogs to ask:

moos
joey harrison
kogden
simon k
here in van nuys
gowanus