Lately, I've been attempting to contact Raimundas Malasauskas from a lucid dream state to ask him if he'd be my virtual bridegroom. Somehow, instead, Guy Debord shows up and says that he'd like me to help him with some guerilla re-arrangement of a grocery store. He hates how the insidious fucks manipulate one's experience of Dérive through the calculated control of product placement that forces you to walk past a bunch of unnecessary expensive shite in order to get to the essential items. We're going to stack things to the ceiling, piling everything on top of the useless, pricey, impulse buys so that if a mesmerized consumer attempts to buybuybuy, they have to pull the item from the bottom of the commodity totem causing everything else to come crashing down on top of them. I suggested a climbing rope to get to the toilet paper at the top of the product sculpture, but he told me that that was an unimportant detail and that I was banished from the SI for at least 3 nights.
The phone woke me at 9am and it was Vito Acconci (I'm sure it was him, who else would do this?) vocally masturbating on the other end of the line. Unfortunately, I was no longer dreaming.
The following images are excerpts from a recent series titled
Time Stills: The Solitude of SImulteneity
(I figured Raimundas Malasauskas wouldn't mind sharing the title of his narrative since we're going to be electronically and cosmically linked if all goes according to plan)
from time stills, Sequence 1, 2008
from Time Stills, sequence 1, 2008
The Center for Photography at Woodstock is exhibiting the provocative work of Toni Pepe. I enjoy this work for its incredible use of light to evoke mystery and the suggestion of narrative. Powderydust concatenates the images while metaphorically suggesting time, memory and absence...
Toni Pepe, Untitled, 2007, from the series, Angle of Repose
Toni Pepe, Untitled, 2007, from the series, Angle of Repose
"Absence and presence is a recurring theme within this series, implying that each image works to reference something beyond the frame. Photography best portrays this thematic approach since by nature; photographs possess a fundamental quality of absence. All of the elements within the frame—the props, costumes and gestures prompt the notion and tangibility of loss and memory. If we had never met could I still have a memory of you? Can we make present something that is absent?"
