Mark Mann
dal 4/5/2005 al 30/6/2005
Segnalato da
4/5/2005
Mark Mann
Laurence Miller Gallery, New York
Four Easy Pieces. Four large-scale color photographs. A riff on his two previous bodies of work, 'Wish You Were Here' and 'Are We There Yet?'. The America of family vacations - those summer migrations that lead to theme parks and fast food and exhaustion in motels on the edge of town - is still the topic, but here four vignettes encapsulate a day in the life of a seriously vacationing American family.
Four Easy Pieces
From May 5 to June 30, 2005, Laurence Miller Gallery will present four large-scale color photographs by Mark Mann, an elegant riff on his two previous bodies of work, Wish You Were Here and Are We There Yet?. The America of family vacations--those summer migrations that lead to theme parks and fast food and exhaustion in motels on the edge of town-- is still the topic, but here four vignettes encapsulate a day in the life of a seriously vacationing American family.
Like the movie from which the title of Mann’s show is ironically derived, these four pieces are nuanced and complex, and layered with a sense of humor-noir: Rest-Rant invokes a tension that calls to mind the famous “toast†scene from Five Easy Pieces: a man sits inside a diner, his female traveling companion waits in the driver’s seat of the car outside. One senses that if something has not happened yet, it soon will. This uneasiness, about what has happened or will happen soon, permeates every photograph in the show. In Cement Pond an empty row of lounge chairs at the edge of a swimming pool conveys more a sense of danger than absence; Frontier Town, where two young tykes make ready for a showdown (at high noon?), harks back to a time when playing cowboys and Indians was innocent. In today’s politically correct climate this photograph takes on an element of horror that would otherwise never have existed. The fourth piece in the show, Red Room, in its quiet, may be the most mysterious of them all, and the most open to interpretation by individual experience. Based on our own childhood recollections of vacation moments gone sour, we revel in trying to answer questions that are raised by the simple depiction of a single child sitting alone in an empty motel room.
Mann belongs to the contemporary tradition of picture-making that includes Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti, photographers whose pictures as a group describe a journey, but individually form a chapter in said journey, a narrative unto themselves.
Image: Cement Pond, 2005. 22 x 40" Fujiflex print
20 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019
Laurence Miller Gallery