17/09/2023
Exhibition starts this Thursday. Thank you for the opportunity to share my work and for the amazing write up!!!
Repost from :
Titled "Fake Culture", the black and white image was taken by New York City-based photographer, Christine Mace, in Minneapolis, Minnesota during a 2020 visit home. The image is buzzing with activity. We see people and what looks like a summer sky meeting a brick building that appears to stretch a city block. The left-most building has an articulated facade featuring the words "Chicago Avenue Fine Arts Center", while its connected structures are sprinkled with graffiti—most visibly, the letters 'BLM'— and depict a partially obstructed mural of a man, who in June 2020, the world had just come to know as George Floyd. Just in front, we see people milling about—some moving, others looking at a fixed point which is obscured from view by a white transit structure overtaken by graffiti, mainly by the phrase 'FAKE CULTURE', which we see in deeply saturated black letters. This is the most prominent part of the image. In the foreground, we see empty chairs facing a plush couch where a person is reclining with their legs up, facing the scene in front of the Arts Center. We see this singular figure separate from the others, in a state of relaxed comfortability usually reserved for private settings—it feels immediately in contrast with the lively public atmosphere behind it. The two scenes appear to be separated only by the white transit structure with the words 'FAKE CULTURE'.
What makes this work special, beyond its striking and articulate composition, is Mace’s ability to capture this scene, just days after the police killing of George Floyd, without exploiting or imposing narration upon the figures she has photographed. No voyeuristic intrusion is made. In fact, people are not the subjects here, rather, the scene itself is. We see the artist as documentarian. Capturing the meaningful, the benign, and the destructive from the view in which they came to it. By
Christine Mace, "Fake Culture", June 2020, Digital photograph printed on Fine Art Baryta paper, 18 × 27 inches