Artists: Ben Blatt, Angelo Filomeno, Joyce Korotkin, Tim Maxwell, Steve Mumford, Hans Op de Beeck, Fulvio di Piazza, Tony de los Reyes, and Nicola Verlato

White Rooms

Sean McFarland’s hallucinatory photographs are derived from his own images of the urban environment which he reassembles into three dimensional photographic collages that juxtapose geographically and architecturally unrelated aspects (e.g. a foreground image taken in one neighborhood might be combined with a middle ground image shot in another, which might be set against a skyscape from a third, etc.). McFarland subsequently photographs these three-dimensional tableaux to produce disorientating images where the city – invariably San Francisco or New York – becomes an uncanny model-like topography that is at once familiar and unfamiliar.

In 2001 Althea Thauberger placed an advertisement in a Victoria, British Columbia, entertainment weekly seeking young female singer/songwriters for a film project. From the resulting replies Thauberger would eventually collaborate with eight young women, initially recording their original songs in a professional recording studio, and then subsequently filming their individual performances against the backdrop of idyllic West Coast Canadian landscapes. The resultant film ‘Songstress’ – part-screen test, part pop video – is at once sincere and cruel, and explores the performers conflicting desires that are pitched somewhere between innocence and ambition.