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From May 5 to June
30, 2005, Laurence Miller Gallery will present four large-scale color
photographs by Mark Mann, an elegant riff on his two previous bodies
of work, Wish
You Were Here and
Are We There Yet? The
America
of family vacations--those summer migrations that lead to theme parks
and fast food and exhaustion in motels on the edge of town-- is still
the topic, but here four vignettes encapsulate a day in the life of a
seriously vacationing American family.
Like the movie from which the title of Mann’s show is ironically
derived, these four pieces are nuanced and complex, and layered with a
sense of humor-noir: Rest-Rant
invokes a tension that calls to mind the famous “toast” scene from
Five Easy Pieces: a man sits inside a diner, his female
traveling companion waits in the driver’s seat of the car outside.
One senses that if something has not happened yet, it soon will. This
uneasiness, about what has happened or will happen soon, permeates
every photograph in the show. In Cement Pond an empty row
of lounge chairs at the edge of a swimming pool conveys more a sense
of danger than absence; Frontier Town, where two young tykes make ready for a showdown
(at high noon?), harks back to a time when playing cowboys and Indians
was innocent. In today’s politically correct climate this photograph
takes on an element of horror that would otherwise never have existed.
The fourth piece in the show, Red
Room,
in its quiet, may be the most mysterious of them all, and the most
open to interpretation by individual experience.
Based on our own childhood recollections of vacation moments
gone sour, we revel in trying to answer questions that are raised by
the simple depiction of a single child sitting alone in an empty motel
room.
Mann belongs to the contemporary tradition of picture-making that
includes Alec Soth and Alessandra Sanguinetti, photographers whose
pictures as a group describe a journey, but individually form a
chapter in said journey, a narrative unto themselves.
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