The
Uncanny Valley
By Alison Woods
The
enormity of the photo images on the trucks upsets the scale of everything
surrounding them. Core’s Drive-Thru, Kingston, appears to
shows a gigantic, juicy hamburger planted like an alien visitation
among strip-mall buildings, with Thomas Cole-like rock outcroppings
in the foreground and mountains in the distance. Look twice, and
you realize it’s a truck in a parking lot. The image is so
bizarre that you think it must be Photoshopped, but of course the
point is that it’s not. If Sharon Core’s photographs
approach the surreal, then Carlos Loret de Mola’s convey a
sense of déjà vu. You’ve seen these quiet views,
or ones like them, a million times, but just never paid much attention.
His "Pink Bedroom," for example —a photograph of
a small attic room with pink wallpaper that holds some mismatched
furniture and an ironing board piled with white brassieres—could
be the spare bedroom of any house a friend ever brought you to for
the weekend. "Shannon" is a bleak winter tableau: In front
of an asbestos-sided house there is a chain-link fence, and in front
of the fence is an institutional-style bench with the words “Shannon
is a bitch” scrawled in something that looks like red nail
polish. The hardscrabble house, the trees and the snow all tell
you it’s a Hudson Valley scene, but Frederic Church it’s
not.
Ken Landauer’s grids of photographs of decaying resorts have
a matter-of-fact tenor that de€ es nostalgia, but they still made
me wish I had experienced this region as it was back in the days
when the Borscht Belt thrived. Referring to the well-known photo
grids of buildings taken by the German artists Bernd and Hilla Becher,
Landauer’s "Lost Resorts (bungalows)" series documents
a defunct bungalow colony and manages to catalogue pretty much all
of the ways those sweet little structures have of sinking into decrepitude—they
have mossy roofs, leaning or collapsing porches, broken or dangling
doors, gaping window holes....
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