Lots of reading to do for next weeks seminars. Just read a great paper by Joseph Masco called Desert Modernism, Masco considers the landscape of the american west. The contemporary desert landscape has conflicting myths within it of historic colonisation of land and displacement of people, Utopian consumerism of Vegas, Dystopian militarism and abject land pillaging through mining and drilling. Masco writes, "To negotiate these conflicting approaches to the epic west, both citizens and officials have come to rely on tactical amnesias, temporal sutures enabling a precarious - if addictive - cosmology of progress, fuelled by high-octane combinations of risk, silence, utopian expectation, and paranoid anxiety. It is this dual process of mythologizing through cognitive erasure that I call 'desert modernism'." (Msaco, J (2004) Desert Modernism Cabinet MagazineFutures:13)
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/masco.php
This Utopian/Dystopian conflict resonates with me as an articulation of ideas about contemporary culture that I am interested in channelling and exploring in my work. Pieces that I would link this too are my performance in collaboration with Sacha, my photo series with the red phone and my casting of the light switches. The following images are images of previous pieces of work -
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