The edge is closer than we think, but illusion won’t free us from reality, even as the sustained narrative of tabloids becomes history and the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality. Globalization has moved forward unevenly and no-one can say where this "New Frontier" is leading us. As the natural world is liquidated and substituted with an artificial one, the social landscape becomes increasingly fractured and alienated. No longer in focus, all grand narratives dissipate in the space of post-history, as technological dependency diminishes the tangibility of our experiences. The medium has swallowed the message.
For 50 years, corporate power has been glorified, consumption championed and waste justified. Now we stand before a precarious future. The nature of the earnings that define late capitalism have incidentally raped us of nature itself. Our time is marked by mass extinction, diminishing resources, global pandemic and climate change. As the vices of the first world burden the third, the skeletons of old factories serve as caveats of growing inequality. The silent landscape a symptom of a world exploited beyond use and increasingly reduced to a bottom line. Political dissidence is drowned out by the white noise of the media, as it sedates the social psyche with empty promises it proposes for the future it truncates.
The two decade long war waged against “terrorism” has resulted in a mass refugee crises, the pollution produced from manufacturing our products overseas is the contributing factor behind to global climate change. You cannot dislocate the rising of sea level or reroute cataclysmic storms. Yet for decades the West has proven successful in keeping the repercussions of their actions out of sight, out of mind. But there is a limit to everything.
How is it that a mere material manifestation of a light refractory so painfully and intimately captures a fleeting glimpse of time lost? Our view of the world is unique and cannot be shared. Memories transcends the skeleton of the past like ghost. A photograph simulates the act of seeing, it is physical product of perception. Perhaps the absence of closure is the catalyst behind my need to return.
Combining images of destruction with portrayals of the virtues born from the American dream, Heydt confronts its disillusionment with the ecological nightmare it is responsible for.
The palimpsestic female body is a site where cultural phenomenology and social perversions have historically been inscribed. America's consumer society is fueled by a market that by nature must constantly develop new consumables and new consumers; as such, the body has increasingly become its terrain over the years, and larger and larger segments of women's and girl's bodies have become colonized, commodified, and reshaped by market forces.
The state of the spectacle empties and nullifies every real identity. In its place, the media offers ideologically infused avenues for identity construction. From the array of media text, gender roles are realized, social norms are cemented and beauty standards are established.
When culture becomes another fetish product. The Cartesian gap between desire, memory and reality reveals how act of archiving is a result of the societal impulse to preserve the past and cement a coherent collective memory. Photographs transform the pathological into a historical archive. Although a product of lived experiences, the hundredth-of-a-second captured has infinite readings — the poetry of the enclosure met with the prosaic phenomenon of the minds’ need to create meaning. The complexities of this dichotomy underpin the mediums precarious relationship with reality.
….invisible suburbs, skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting.
No certainty of truth, no truth to uncertainty. The world no longer in focus. Our collective consciousness has been reduced to a scattered daze that drifts from the new multiplex to old strip mall, from one meal to the next, twitter to text message, coffee to cigarette, rush hour traffic and the fast food drive thru.
As the myth of progress continues to perpetuate inequality, oppression and violence, the social landscape becomes increasingly fractured. We live in a time of deferred expectations and anxieties, of reality tv presidents, disaster movies, self-fulfilling religious prophecies, suicide bombers and drones. The collateral damage of these new forms of political dissidence is drowned out by the noise of the media.
Presence is defined by its absence. Interested in the transient space of motel rooms, this series solicits a recognition of the collective experience-looking at how objects wear time, details become mysterious and mundane moments go unregistered, yet internalized.
Left the window open to let outside in. The struggle is apathy, complacency, it never being enough, China, Iraq, the C.I.A. Somewhere in the numbing hours in front of the TV our life slips away between commercials, our attention still hijacked by the next new thing flickering on screen.
Future Ruins. Presence is defined by its absence. Interested in the transient spaces and finding beauty in banality, this series solicits a recognition of the collective experience-looking at how objects wear time, details become mysterious and mundane moments go unregistered, yet internalized.
A stop motion film following the trajectory of a road cutting across a number of continents and hemispheres, from Iceland to New Zealand, and then Australia and so on.
Our time is one of continually deferred expectations and anxieties where tabloids provide the sustained narrative which later become history. With the boundaries between life, art and tv becoming increasingly obscured, the poverty of experience at the hands of our hyper-accelerated society comes into question.
Life is an Artificial Stage. All transcendence has disappeared, the natural world has been liquidated and substituted for an artificial one.
You imitate the shade of my mother. Contemporary cultural narratives speak to our common aspirations, fears, and perplexities. Ritually retold, these stories reinforce a constructed history and sustained narrative that collectively we buy into. Infiltrating our collective imagination, the ideological contradiction at the heart of this myth is the delusion. The simulacrum does not hides the truth, but rather reveals its absence.
These are not alternative facts: racism, sexism, bigotry and hatred have no place in our country. Banning Muslims, tearing apart immigrant families, gutting regulation, questioning the integrity of the press, the validity of climate change, denying millions the right to health care - this isn’t draining the swamp any more than corporate tax breaks are leveling the playing field.
Visuals of Rajasthan, India. The revival of landscape photography in the contemporary art world begs the question of how such subject matter remains timelessly alluring yet inextricably socially harmful. Understandably, the vast and mysterious representations of nature trigger awe. The aesthetic tradition traces back to the seventeenth century wherein the act of painting the natural world became a practice adapted by the aristocratic elite.
Mad and raving through the desert of Rajasthan at dawn. illusion won’t free us from this reality, even with geographic displacement. Harm there, is harm here. There is no escape, but still the sun rises.
As the technical age cannibalizes the medium, contemporary photography oscillates from being an “archival medium” to a self-aware one. There are endless representations of a single moment which complicate the veracity of a single photograph. The relation of the spectator to spectacle is an intricately gendered system: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. Women come to define themselves according to how they feel they are perceived. A dialectic between the voyeur and the subjective- a photograph often unveils more about the photographer than the subject. This body of work speaks to the pluralities of experience, the complexities of shifting subjectivities and the absence of authorship- it is about misguided gazes, sex, loss and acceptance.
To know how much he suffered would be dear. As desertification and extreme weather patterns delimitates habitable and uninhabitable zones, it is clear that the earth can’t eternally withstand the strain of the industrialized world. Central to this work is the question of human survival in relation to nature and a global environment increasingly defined by unpredictability.
We outgrew love. Memories of the past are dictated by the present. Although no object is counted on more for it mnemonic technology, a photograph is not inhabited by memory, but rather produces it. A fugitive testimony to a moment lost, the image painted by light counterfeits an instance. The mutability of our understanding of history unveils the role imagination and photographs plays in remembering. Identity is constructed just as much on the memories you’ve chosen to forget, like the photos of yourself you frame or tear apart - versions of yourself that are acceptable or unacceptable. This series aims to deteriorate the positivist discourse of photography’s relationship with truth and shed light on the interconnections between memory, imagery and identity by focusing on universals.
Globalization and technology go directly from obscurity to meaninglessness. We live in a time of deferred expectations and anxieties, of Hollywood disaster movies and self-fulfilling religious prophecies, suicide bombers and drones. Any form of political dissidence is drowned out by the noise of the media. How will history judge us? Can we rebuild with what's salvaged from society?
SAM HEYDT 1986 in New York geboren. Studium an der Parsons School of Design, Cooper Union Universidad de Buenos Aires, Amsterdam und La Sorbonne Paris. Artist Residencies in Island, Australien und Neuseeland. Altruistic, non-profit work u.a. in Rajasthan, Indien. Ausstellungen in Newport Art Museum, State Hermitage Museum, St.Petersburg, Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, Krasnoyarsk Museum, Museum of Novosibirsk, LACDA, Los Angeles. Sie lebt und arbeitet in Miami und Paris.
The Oceans are Dying.
Plastic pollution can now be found on every beach in the world, from busy tourist beaches to uninhabited, tropical islands nowhere is safe. Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic pollution find their way into our oceans. There may now be around 5.25 trillion macro and microplastic pieces floating in the open ocean. Weighing up to 269,000 tonnes. Plastics consistently make up 60 to 90% of all marine debris studied. Recent studies have revealed marine plastic pollution in 100% of marine turtles, 59% of whales, 36% of seals and 40% of seabird species examined. 100,000 marine mammals and turtles and 1 million seabirds are killed by marine plastic pollution annually.
Balance & amend the schematics that are of the non-coherent semantics, syntactical relationships, gas lighting abuse, numbers, debts, credit balances due, ceding abuse, denial, mis-illiterate verb-sense, frauds, dyscalculia, liability assets, negligence, negative cognitions, tax perjury, tax slander &/ or ellipsis now that are to be of a positive is a positive now, too per se.
Ukiyo-e, or ukiyo-ye (浮世絵, Japanese: [u.ki.jo.e] : pictures of the floating world. Post-colonialism speaks to the cultural consequences of external economic control and exploitation of native people and their lands and analyses the politics of control through the distribution of knowledge. The discourse examines the functional relations of social and political power that sustain post-colonial identity through the imperial regime's depictions (social, political, cultural) of the colonizer and of the colonized.
Music: Lisa E Harris | Alibi & Rita El Jebari ft. Sappheiros | You Ain´t No Hero - Embrace
I couldn't do much but enjoy the peaceful easy feelings that were calm & quiet then.
I wasn't aware of my lifespace was of so much money that wasn't even ready to obtain then.
Balance & amend the title in reference to when I used to deflate my hot-air balloon at the end of each flight then.
I was aloft for forty plus hours then.
I moored my balloon for twenty plus hours then.
The propane gas odor was worth lots of money at the end of each flight then.
Eternally digitally caged
