Opening Reception: November 24 @ 6 - 9pm Showing November 23 - December 8
WHITE BOX is very pleased to present Juanli Carrión: ATLAS SHRUGGED in WHITE BOX PROJECTS space from November 23rd through December 8th, 2009. This exhibition of the Spanish artist Juanli Carrión, takes its title from the landmark 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, exploring a dystopic America where the world's leading innovators go on strike after feeling exploited by society, refusing to allow the rest of the world to use their ideas and investigations. On the occasion of Juanli Carrión's first solo exhibition in New York at White Box Projects, the title is appropriated in an ironic way, as opposed to the Philosophy of Objectivism advocated by the novelist, in order to speak about dystopia in an alienated landscape of an undefined reality and time.
The representation of the contemporary landscape may be conceived as a reflection of spaces realized almost unconsciously, where the natural environment is perceived through and within the imperceptible process of transformation. In this depiction of ever-changing realities, the inert image loses an essential meaning, interchangeably becoming a subject and/or an object as subject.
Juanli Carrión dissects the landscape to speak about a contemporary dystopia, analyzing the potential beauty in an intermediate terrain between the natural and the artificial. Certain human traces are present in all of the photographs, either subtle or absolutely blatant, but always there, threatening. All of them contain implicit stories that may appear as vacant as the scenario that contains them.
His work references the iconic New Topographics movement, which epitomized a paradigmatic shift in American landscape photography. In concordance with their depiction of the maligned landscape, Carrión suggests a false consciousness of the real spaces that were probably never as pristine or idyllic as they may have once been in the social imaginary conscience. The artist repositions or eliminates the traditional mid-plane horizon; a perspective that throws the picture plane off balance and adds to a certain uneasiness of contemplation. Carrión's photographs stand as a tragic reminder of what has been displaced by human development, blurring the distinction between cultural and natural landscapes.
