Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows this is Nowhere
Exhibition
April 6 – May 5, 2007
Opening on Friday April 6, 5pm
Project Description
In response to Skol’s invitation to act As If All Were Well, Canadian born media artist Jeremy Drummond presents Everybody Knows this is Nowhere, an exhibition comprising three distinct series of print media and one 2-channel video.
In this exhibition, Drummond presents suburbia as a complex, progress-driven construction of intermingling cultural signifiers. Suburban development, in its predictable sameness and ubiquity, continues to elicit critique by scholars, artists and urbanists. Could these very features also serve to challenge our propensity to generalize and make assumptions about cultural identity and community? Firmly entrenched in our comfortable North-American lifestyle, developpers thrive on our desires for happiness, material wealth and convenience. Delivering on these promises, cleverly manufactured spatial devices such as « circuitous routes, prominent driveways, and omnipresent cul-de-sacs »* provide the false, yet compelling feelings of warmth and safety associated with the «encapsulated life»* which revolves around vehicle (driving culture) and home (designer culture).
The Street Sign and Drive-by series, through their respective modes of production, refer directly to the seductive powers of cars and industy. In Street Sign, photographs of actual street intersections are produced using die-cut decals and auto body paint techniques. The glossy smooth colour coordinated finish of the Street Sign series formally enhances their surreality. Drive-by, a series of seventy-four video stills, cleverly represent how one experiences this low-density environment mostly from within a speeding car.
On an environmental level, the sprawling blur-line between developed and non-developed natural space is represented in the series Intersections. In this piece, two intermixed series of images refer respectively to the process of developing and naming what has yet to be inhabited, but which feels already over-cultured.
In the 2-channel video entitled This Could Be Anywhere, This Could Be Everywhere (2006), the perimeter of developing subdivisions are captured through the window of a moving car while in the other channel, 24 video portraits of residents of the same environment are played back to a soundtrack of street names, accepted and rejected by the developers.
*Text in quotations taken from an essay by Cindy Stockton Moore entitled Jeremy Drummond: Everybody Knows this is Nowhere published on the artist’s website