Twentysix Gasoline Stations in Korea
from the series after what or after who?
This artwork it's an echo of one of the most relevant artistic projects in Contemporary Art, made by Edward Ruscha in the early sixties in USA. In California, Ruscha started taking photographs as he was driving from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, to create a book titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations published in 1963, some experts says that this photographs are not specially great compositions or even well printed, but the way he use the medium was a precursor of conceptual art by itself, one of the reasons that Ruscha's work has been one of the most appropriated, copied, mimicked and reinterpreted artist projects.
This iconic book by Ruscha depicts twentysix petrol stations in a black an white photographs with captions of the name and its location. In this work sixty years later the World, Photography and Art are not the same; Twentysix GasolineStations in Korea was made in Mexico, from my computer desktop, without leaving my home studio and most importantly without a camera. The photographs that I made were the result of a virtual trip to Seoul, Korea in the desire to approach to a familiar and at the same time distant culture, that's not different from others, and it's not really far away from wherever we were.
The project emulates from a photographic and omnipresent perspective the experience of a journey, each shoot was taken in early 2023 from google street photographs dated from 2014 to 2018. In 1963 Rusha ́s work challenged the preciousness of highly aestheticized image-making in landscape photography, this project doesn't pretend anything similar; the output is a result of the image making process; the poor image that in words of Hito Steyer by losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it.
from the series after what or after who?
This artwork it's an echo of one of the most relevant artistic projects in Contemporary Art, made by Edward Ruscha in the early sixties in USA. In California, Ruscha started taking photographs as he was driving from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, to create a book titled Twentysix Gasoline Stations published in 1963, some experts says that this photographs are not specially great compositions or even well printed, but the way he use the medium was a precursor of conceptual art by itself, one of the reasons that Ruscha's work has been one of the most appropriated, copied, mimicked and reinterpreted artist projects.
This iconic book by Ruscha depicts twentysix petrol stations in a black an white photographs with captions of the name and its location. In this work sixty years later the World, Photography and Art are not the same; Twentysix GasolineStations in Korea was made in Mexico, from my computer desktop, without leaving my home studio and most importantly without a camera. The photographs that I made were the result of a virtual trip to Seoul, Korea in the desire to approach to a familiar and at the same time distant culture, that's not different from others, and it's not really far away from wherever we were.
The project emulates from a photographic and omnipresent perspective the experience of a journey, each shoot was taken in early 2023 from google street photographs dated from 2014 to 2018. In 1963 Rusha ́s work challenged the preciousness of highly aestheticized image-making in landscape photography, this project doesn't pretend anything similar; the output is a result of the image making process; the poor image that in words of Hito Steyer by losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it.