The New World 2009-2010

 

The New WorldThe New World begins with a single book — Glimpses of the World, John Stoddard's 1892 illustrated travelogue of a world becoming image. Cut entirely apart and reassembled, it became a continuous twenty-foot panoramic collage.

 

This was the first time I understood that a whole book could become one epic image.What I didn't anticipate was the body. Standing in front of the panorama you have to walk the length of it, the way you walk through a landscape in order to take it in.

 

What Stoddard's images contain, dissassembled and reassembled, is stranger and darker than he intended. Stone lions swept downstream. Church spires turned to stalactites. Businessmen in lynching trees. A Native American, bowed beneath Mormon steeples, posing as Pan.This was the beginning of a practice — cutting into the authoritative image to find what it couldn't show.