Category: Conceptual

Disposessed

I Don’t Have Another Land, 2022, Nathan Coley at the Towner, Eastbourne

“I Don’t Have Another Land is a contemporary text sculpture by the internationally renowned and Turner Prize-shortlisted artist Nathan Coley. Coley creates these monumental sculptures using existing phrases that come from overheard conversations, song lyrics, news report, books or any found text. I Don’t Have Another Land was a piece of graffiti found on a wall in Jerusalem in the early 2000s. The phrases used in Coley’s artwork take on new meaning in each place they’re exhibited.”
– from the Towner website

A Dark Story

Grayson Perry at the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery

This ceramic appears to show children happily playing, but look closely and you see the darkness of the background (note, for instance, the house inscribed with swastikas). For more, take a look at Cuddly Toys Caught on Barbed Wire, here.

Modern Surprise?

New York

Well, at least the lamp is straight in this one, but I look like a deer caught in the headlights and that shirt just has to go! The one below has a yellowish color cast to it and we’re the wrong size compared to the one above. Nothing yet ready to add to Modern Romance.

Utopia

East Street, Farnham

I’m planning to enter a contest themed around the concept of “utopia,” Thomas More’s famous place-name from the Greek “no place” (but punning on “good place”). I have chosen to work on liminal spaces, those that are on the threshold between one place and another, spaces that are not places. Here, I present some recent candidates from my perambulations around Farnham. Click any of the images below (in the browser, not email) to see them larger.

Inequality

Flux.1

I’ve been having some trouble figuring out how to photograph the scenes I had in mind for my Inequality project. When I learned about the Flux.1 image AI the other day, I decided to give it a whirl. I made several attempts at contrasting Jeff Bezos’ wealth, estimated at $200 billion in 2022, with that of the median Black family in America that year ($45,000). The above is the best one (I added the amount labels in Photoshop, as image-generating AIs are notoriously bad at text. Of course, this doesn’t really begin to show the actual scale of the gap. Below, a number of earlier attempts.

Next, I’ve photographed some bills on m own and will attempt to duplicate them in Photoshop more precisely to scale. We’ll see if that works…

Neither give nor throw away

Cryptoportiques, Arles, France

Sophie Calle’s well known project, The Blind, was spoiled by flooding and subsequent mold. At Arles, she gave it all a final resting place, together with some other items of hers that she no longer wanted but wasn’t prepared to throw away. Read all about it here and see more below (click to enlarge).