Martos Gallery
June 20 - August 2, 2013
Opening: Thursday, June 20
Transmitting a fantasy of the metropolis through seductions, appeals, and commands, the contemporary "consumer city" shapes and reshapes itself according to conflicting agendas, while producing images which belie the contradictions inherent in urban life. Promoting the needs of individuals disconnected from the material specificity of the built environment, the experience of the city is gradually shifting from one of cultural interaction and negotiation between the individual and the group, to the production of undifferentiated spaces which provide consumers the means to commune over shared lifestyle choices.
While the idea of a "neighborhood" is grounded in a definable geography, the images produced to advertise their place within a hierarchy of style celebrate aspiration as an end in itself, equalizing all locations as potential places for luxury living. Eschewing privacy in favor of publicizing a domesticity that inspires envy, the transparent glass facades employed by many new residential structures provide the passerby with life on display, a living billboard populated by a growing demographic that could someday include "you."
Peter Scott's exhibition No Place Like You emphasizes the underlying perceptual phenomenon of the ever-shifting urban condition, where the physical experience of the city is gradually transformed via the psychological "space" of identity culture. Combining paintings done on the reverse of canvas which gradually reveal faces one might "look up to" and find on billboards, with photographs of "high-end" residential building sites that collapse distinctions between image and structure, the work in No Place Like You conveys the disorienting nature of a mediated urban space, where connections between individuals and their immediate environment seem increasingly tenuous.
No Place Like You (continued)
Shoot The Lobster
Dan Graham
Servane Mary
Heidi Schlatter
Jaques Tati
Continuing the theme of the psychological underpinnings of today's urban condition, this group show includes work that spans several decades, emphasizing the experience of transparency, reflection and mediation within the contemporary city. Dan Graham's Performer, Audience, Mirror (1975) presents the relationship between the self and other as one of reflection and display, anticipating his quasi-architectural two-way mirror pavilion structures which produce reflective overlays of the individual and the group. Servane Mary's corner piece, Untitled (Jean Seberg and The Mirror) (2012), incorporates the reflections of the viewer and the surrounding space with a mirrored portrait of the actress in her iconic role in Godard's urban feature "Breathless." Heidi Schlatter's light box image of a New York City housing project, Residential Towers, Williamsburg, Brooklyn (2000) presents an ironic "reversal" of real estate advertisements, while Jaques Tati's 1967 film Playtime offers a satiric view of a city transformed by the cool rationalism of the International Style.
image: Peter Scott, 18th Street Rustic, 2013, Inkjet print 19" x 14",
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