Doug Rickard – A New American Picture @ Yossi Milo Gallery

Doug Rickard: A New American Picture

Yossi Milo Gallery’s presentation of A New American Picture, an exhibition of color photographs by Doug Rickard, will be on view through November 24, coinciding with the release of Rickard’s recent Aperture monograph of the same title.

A New American Picture depicts American street scenes located using the internet platform Google Street View. Over a four-year period, Rickard took advantage of Google’s image archive to virtually explore the roads of America looking for forgotten, economically devastated, and largely abandoned places. After locating and composing scenes of urban and rural decay, Rickard re-photographed the images on his computer screen with a tripod-mounted camera, freeing the images from their technological origins and re-presenting them on a new documentary plane.

The low-resolution images that Rickard favors have a dissolved, painterly effect, and are occasionally populated with figures who acknowledge the camera, but whose faces are blurred, masking their identity. The photographs are thus imbued with an added surrealism and anonymity, which reinforces the isolation of the subjects and emphasizes the effects of an increasingly stratified American social structure.

Doug Rickard: A New American Picture
On View through November 24, 2012
Yossi Milo Gallery
New York

›› Listen to Doug Rickard’s October 16, 2012 artist talk at Aperture Gallery: “A New American Picture.”