Everywhere Dead End

Everywhere Dead End is a project to find traces of traces in the desert of the American Dream, and beyond, in the dead zones of global modernity, where oddities of accumulation and patterns of waste are generated by cycles of consumption, on sites found only afterwards, in the epiphenomenal borderlands of a civilization puttering carelessly toward ruin. An anthropology sans the appearance of a single human subject, these photographs ask why and by whom has this world been left behind?

Installation Proposal

These works have been configured as a photographic installation—one that performs the cycle of consumption, waste, and re-circulation of the commodity world that inspired them. Using this series of photo prints, hung on the wall as tear aways in a stack or on a roll, each photo is individually exhibited for a day before being pulled off, crumpled into a ball, and discarded on the floor where they become a growing mass of detritus among the other objects in the installation.Through the ritual act of consumption I hope to challenge the privileged value of photographic art by conflating its meaning with the casual consumption and careless circulation of the photographic image; moreover, investigating the relationship of both with the particular kind of ecologically-conscious photography which attempts to ‘show’ our endangered world to us while also demonstrating our role in endangering it.

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The images in the series are printed in stacks mounted to the wall, ritualistically discarded, and occasionally repurposed or recycled. Over the course of the exhibition the discarded images would gradually fill the gallery floor and walls, intensifying the chaos and disorder of the space.
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Detail: ‘recycled image’

Various works in this series:

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