Elliott
Linwood
Lessons in Survival
Whether things are looking up or not, depends on your perspective, or where
you stand at any given moment. Assembling the snippets toward a cohesive
outlook becomes the trick.
For example, in Sequel, snapshots taken of a Times Square billboard are arranged
as images of twin towers, then multiplied again to reflect how popular culture
codifies and deploys spectacles of yearning and fear. In glancing skyward
at a steaming ad for “Cup O’ Soup,” it’s hard to avoid
the long shadow that the events of September 11th cast upon our shared visual
culture. Although it’s a catchy image of a recognizably cheap
unit of sustenance, on the one hand, our fascination with how the wisps of steam
unfurl betrays other fascination with transubstantiation, or the magic whenever
one substance perceptually becomes another.
A similar strategy of replacement is reworked in Cupboard, a series of pictures
taken in San Francisco. Unlike hermetically sealed Warhol multiples of commodities,
the serialization of a cup of coffee here reveals some of the dangers involved
in grafting images onto the social environment. Tethered to the scaffold
and each other, the workers’ interdependency is precariously scaled against
the visual drama of a fresh perked stimulant.
Sundial, taken recently at the Sundial Bridge in Reading, California, however,
registers at eye-level. The cinematic quality of light in this image,
which pits the speed of the revolution of the sun against a running boy playing
shadow games, renders how fleeting our designs upon nature may seem, when compared
to the permanence of will in attempting to do so.
