A New American Dream
Photographs by COLL.EO
Essay by Alexandra Fine
Interview by The Famous Curator
Release date: December 18, 2014
Features: Dust jacket, 128 pages, illustrations, full color.
Format: 10 x 8 inches = 25 x 20 cm
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1320329484
Price: $99.99
LIMITED EDITION: 99 copies
PURCHASE HERE
DESCRIPTION
Coll.eo's A New American Dream offers a startling and fresh perspective on American street photography. Although at first glance the work looks disturbingly familiar and well within the traditional bounds of an admittedly stale genre, their modus operandi is anything but predictable. All of the images are appropriated from Google Street View; over a period of two years, Coll.eo took advantage of the Google's intrusive tool of mass surveillance to virtually - and, above all, safely - drive the unseen and overlooked roads of San Francisco, bleak places that are forgotten, economically devastated, and completely ignored by the digerati. With an informed, shameless sense of entitlement, Coll.eo selected and decoded these previously photographed scenes of urban decay, documenting the sheer inequality of the so-called technology capital of the world, pointing the finger from a vantage point. Coll.eo grabbed the machine-made images as they appear on the computer screen, framing and liberating them from their technological origins and making a buck or two in the process. After all, this is the New American Dream.
Modeled after a previous, prestigious precedent, A New American Dream documents a recursive gesture of appropriation, one that appropriates the appropriated, foregrounding the sheer contradictions that informed the “original” project. This is “Appropriation squared”, with a dash of institutional criticism that questions the goals, premises, and assumptions of grossly misinformed, “socially aware” post-photographic practices.
Coll.eo is a collaboration between Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti established in 2012. Flaherty is a visual artist trained as a painter and a sculptor. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco in 2002 and her B.F.A. Cum Laude, with emphasis in Painting and Drawing from San Jose State University in 1999. Her work has been presented in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Montevideo, Uruguay, and Pienza, Italy. Co-founder of Random Parts, an artist run space in Oakland, California, Flaherty lives in Northern California. Matteo Bittanti is an interdisciplinary artist born in Milan, Italy. His artworks lie at the intersection between videogames, toys, cinema, and the web. Bittanti's works have been presented in the United States, Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, France, and Italy.
Alexandra Fine received a Bachelor of Arts from Oberlin College in Comparative American Studies with coursework in Classics and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. In 2014, she earned her MA in Critical & Visual Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Alex has worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Exploratorium, Creativity Explored, Intersection for the Arts, and Sins Invalid. Alex is currently working on her Ph.D. in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis.
The Famous Curator works in one of the many Art World big boxes disseminated in the United States. A graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz, she received his PhD in art history from Harvard University. In 2013, her conversation with Coll.eo appeared online to great acclaim. She is currently working on a book about post-photographic practices and wealth inequality. Expect nothing less than an eye opener.
TRAILER
A NEW AMERICAN DREAM Photographs by COLL.EO Essay by Alexandra Fine Interview with The Famous Curator Limited Edition Book published by CONCRETE PRESS, 2014 CONCRETE-PRESS.org COLLEO.org Excerpt from "FRAMED" by Alexadra Fine: "Framed as a comment on American Dream rhetoric and questioning its value for real everyday conditions of living, A New American Dream depicts real San Francisco street scenes – the bearded homeless man pushing a shopping cart, the African American woman begging for money, or the young twenty-something start-up employee rushing to work with coffee in hand. As “documentation” of the “real” framed as artwork, the viewer is forced to confront questions surrounding a politics of visibility in which the maker acts like the camera that shows a veritable and objective reality, rather than one informed by race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, and a privileging of instated social hierarchies. What are the politics of “giving visibility” to another? This project forces one to ask after this tenuous relation, as there may be a problematic tendency in some documentary work and “social art” to privilege the “giver” (i.e. artist or scholar) and their “feeling good” for illuminating an overlooked or invisibilized social ill. I wonder if the question then becomes if acknowledging positionality merely acts as an excuse for artists or scholars to exploit minorities or abject individuals or groups. Can the academy teach “social practice” from within the institution in a way that erases hierarchies of privilege? The use of Google street view technology within this project is crucial to a questioning of the politics of visibility as its pervasiveness, transmits specific cultural meaning that cannot be divorced from the content of the images. The “newness” of this New American Dream project is directly linked to technological advancements in visualization technologies. This newness results from our newfound ability to recreate, while reimagining, social life from within virtual space. Technological artworks provide an interesting point of entry to this conversation as the technological medium itself is intended to be accessible to the “masses,” yet, in actuality, is only readily available to those with certain economic and educational privileges, while also being an industry dominated by the heteronormative white, educated, and financially stable individual."
A NEW AMERICAN DREAM by COLL.EO
A set of digital photographs of San Francisco Streets, grabbed, cropped, and manipulated by the artists from Google Street View, printed as 4 x 6 inches postcards and set on wooden postcard racks and 5 x 1 inches walnut wooden postcard holders. Ongoing project by COLL.EO COLL.EO is Colleen Flaherty and Matteo Bittanti colleo.org