As consumers our lives are full of stuff. Some of it is tied to the necessities of feeding and clothing ourselves, but most of it is part of a system based on desire and gratification. There is an advertising mechanism in place that tells us what to buy and how to feel about it, but underneath this world of Dyson vacuums and iPods there is a sub-class of products whose very nature is a grotesque distortion of our overpriced life style. These are objects of such poor quality and small intrinsic worth that they lack any material value, not because they are physically lacking in desirable qualities but because they are ignored by the cultural machine that would assign them worth. These are small things that do not impose much on our lives so we do not expect them to function well or excite our senses. They are easier to replace than to store so we now consume them in a cyclical fashion like food, but rarely do we enjoy them that way.
You can find these things in megastores like Wal-Mart and dollar stores where they, by their placement and lack of advertising, appear to be shelf filler. They are cheap products simply for the sake of being cheap; they are a testament to manufacturing efficiency; they are the dozen tube socks you can get for a dollar. The goal of my work is to acquire these cultural ephemera and show off their true uniqueness, to treat them like the Dyson vacuum or the gadget of the week.
I use a variety of photographic means to make images but none has been more impactful to me than the flatbed scanner. Having not been designed to render three dimensional forms the flatbed scanner brings to the image a host of small glares, distortions and fall off of light, yet it is the ultimate tool in descriptive ability. It brings out the unseen detail and tonal variety that often defies the appearance of these objects as cheap and indiscriminately homogeneous.
---Toy Cars---
Dollar store die-cast toy cars come eight for a dollar. They have minimal packing, no name recognition or brand and very little relationship to real cars. They would undoubtedly have no more staying power with a child than a single potato chip. They have a limited number of shared decorations, whose placement is always off, their paint is uneven and gloppy around the edges and their parts never seem fit. The poor construction of these objects seems almost willful as though it was planned in some way to drive the price down. The cars are so ridden with flaws that each one takes on a distinct individuality and beauty; no two cars could ever have the same errors making these special in way that a better toy car or even a real car could never be.
---Bottles---
Small plastic bottles are the ultimate in planned obsolescence. They usually hold three or four ounces of liquid making them safe for airline travel and incredibly cheap. These bottles would no doubt be used once then thrown away where they could survive indefinitely in landfills. They represent the act of buying empty packing, but they are also examples of very fine production and design with soft forms and pleasing shapes worthy of appreciation.
---Silly Putty and the News Paper---
As information has become increasingly a commodity of excess in our society it has pushed to the periphery certain types of traditional media. To this end I examine black and white news paper images which appear to have no great value to the story they illustrate except as filler. They become like my bottles and cars in that they belong to a venerated system of representation, but now relate to that only incidentally; as such, I attempt to give these images a new tradition lifting the pictures with silly putty and creating a new and singular visual experience.
In all my pictures I attempt to flesh out the character of objects which go totally overlooked by most people, using the objects’ inherent formal qualities I make photographic images which are grand and mysterious in all the ways these objects are not.
