neighbors, records, etc.
May 18 - July 6, 2013
Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition of recent works by Mark Ruwedel, Neighbors, Records, etc. As in his earlier work, the artists continues here to explore the figurative ground fixated between cities and their outskirts –of what is there, of what has been left behind, and what happens to strangely endure- in photographs that quietly evoke progress as a cycle of repeated events: things made to be lost, kept for a while and soon to be forgotten.
Ruwedel’s photographs are indebted to the visual rhetoric of the New Topographers that coalesced into an era-defining theme, of works that situate the landscape as neither about the aesthetic qualities of nature as they are not necessarily only highlighting the structures which inhabit their scenes. Like the New Topographers, Ruwedel’s work portrays a sense of utilizing documentation to outline the reaches of human encroachment on the landscape. In the works on display in Neighbors, what serves to distance our trained understanding of these pictures are what the artist most readily shows: the places and the things that have long lived past its usefulness. The state of disrepair and negligence in the tree houses (Tree House #1, #5, #7) serves to shift the understanding of these objects as it does the images themselves. They are, when left to time to sort out their own functions, structural remnants finding its only remaining use through that of art-making itself.
There is an emphasis on what we find as objects, the detritus, as being equally important as where the image is being taken. Ruwedel’s photographs also can, at times, tell you what you might be already aware of and what you may or may not be seeing. In the diptych Splitting #1, two houses side by side are, for what possibly could be in preparation for a move, sliced down and separated in the middle to the foundation. This work can be what you make of it: an homage to Gordon Matta-Clark or, equally as true, a photographic marker of a certain time and space in Ruwedel’s discovery of a desert landscape, conveniently found. The conceptual inquiry in which he grounds his work, at times, literally is about a certain leap of skepticism of what we just so happen to encounter. These works engage in a simple rule, of grasping the moment for its given set of circumstances. Gaining access to these images, then, is to interpret the materials at their sites of discoveries, which forms the context –and, possibly, the meaning- of their particular situations: their photographic sense of place.