Photos by Laurie Halsey Brown
Joshua Band and Cat U-Thasoonthorn used photography and installation to explore the crossover between the desire to maintain static control and stability in parks and the desire to own, preserve, and improve the past in the edited photograph. Contemporary mobile phone-based image applications allow the delivery of fictional views of the world imbued with nostalgia and enhancements. The Presidio park space becomes an editorialized, highly-groomed equivalent of raw nature as filtered and processed photographic subject. The delivery of imagery is immediately accessible to a global audience. This audience demands that our personal narrative become a public one where every moment of experience is shared , reviewed, and mapped. Building on the idea of maps and photographs as representations of curated space, and regulated park landscapes as actual curated space, they transformed a blank space located in the Presidio on the boundary of natural and man-made landscape into a map one can physically traverse.
Piece included a painted map of the surrounding area, with images placed on the map specific to where they were taken. Participants were given hats with the Google pin on them to visualize an immersive interaction with the map and the location.
Cat U-Thasoonthorn works with photography, printmaking, and sculpture mediums. Current projects involve the consideration and use of artificial light, common architectures, and materials of construction.
Joshua Band works with manipulated photography which questions and traverses the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Nomadic Nature In Situ is a seasonal project curated by senseofplace LAB, in/for the landscape. For 2013, each of the four works in this project will focus on and take place in the Presidio, San Francisco. The works do not interfere with the local ecology, and are temporary. Each piece will contribute to the development of a shared ‘language of place’.
Each season, an artist or artist group will be invited to respond to a landscape/situation chosen for them by senseofplace LAB. This project is primarily an invitation for artists/architects/designers/urban planners/writers to work in response to the landscape as an experimental aspect of their practice, not just those with backgrounds working in response to the natural environment.
The work the artists create will respond to the environment, and evolve organically through time. Each new work will include an event, and a half an hour meditational sit. The works will be documented by senseofplace LAB every season, and the resulting documentation of all of the projects as a whole after one year will become it’s own work.